We, faculty members in the Department of Dance at UCR, stand with our graduate students – and with graduate students and postdoctoral researchers across the University of California system – and their demands for fair and livable conditions.

Graduate students play an essential role in the workings of the university. We partner with them to deliver undergraduate instruction and to produce cutting-edge research. Faculty would not be able to carry out our jobs without them. Declining wages and benefits also undermine our ability to recruit a diverse and excellent cohort of graduate students to continue the research and teaching missions of our public university. We all benefit when graduate students are paid a living wage for their work.

In the Department of Dance in particular, graduate students are absolutely integral to our ability to serve the UCR undergraduate population, several hundred of whom take Dance classes each quarter to fulfill their arts breadth requirements. The exposure and connections Dance TA’s make with students across campus directly and appreciably benefits our department, including by sparking students’ interests in dance, increasing enrollments in other Dance courses, and growing our majors. Graduate students in Dance are teaching faculty and should be recognized and compensated accordingly.

Further, we understand that the labor of our graduate TAs exceeds the more conspicuous work of classroom exchanges; graduate labor extends into the more-than-contractual, relational networks that are necessary for learning. In this way, infringements on graduate labor as university employees directly and negatively affect their non-employed research, as well as the department and university ecosystems to which they contribute so vitally.

Dance faculty are dismayed at the situation unfolding in contract negotiations with Academic Student Employees, Student Researchers, Postdocs, and Academic Researchers. The University’s unlawful conduct is stymying the resolution of contract negotiations and preventing these academic workers from focusing on the research and teaching they are here to do.

We call on the University of California to negotiate in good faith to honor the demands of teaching assistants, tutors, readers, student researchers, postdocs, and academic researchers represented by three unions–UAW 2865, UAW 5810, and SRU-UAW–for livable wages, affordable housing, child care subsidies, and other basic necessities. We also firmly recommit to our policy of non-retaliation for any of our students, including our international students, who engage in union activities.

Miyaxwe (mee-yahh-weh, hello) — In the spirit of Rupert and Jeanette Costo’s founding relationship to our campus, we would like to respectfully acknowledge and recognize our responsibility to the original and current caretakers of this land, water and air: the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples and all of their ancestors and descendants, past, present and future. Today this meeting place is home to many Indigenous peoples from all over the world, including UCR faculty, students, and staff, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to live and work on these homelands.

Here in the Department of Dance, we extend this to acknowledge the multiply fraught histories of this land. We recognize what was taken for this University to be built, including the enslaved labor and ongoing exploitations that have contributed significantly to the wealth in the U.S. that helped found the University of California, and the migrations and immigrant labor that have contributed significantly to this area. We register that members of our community have benefitted, and continue to benefit, from the use and occupation of this land since the institution’s founding in 1907. We also acknowledge the ancient relations of friendship, kinship and alliance between various local Native communities, and visitors to this region.

This acknowledgment is part of our Department’s commitments: to confront exclusions and attempted erasures of Indigenous, Black, and Brown peoples, and others; to accept/embrace/acknowledge peoples’ bodies in their wide range of capacities, abilities, forms, and qualities; to be radically inclusive of queer peoples and bodies in the world and in our field; to support peaceful human mobility across land and waters for all; to being good guests as we travel; to being in respectful relationship to the land wherever we are; and to building relationship with one another–including, for those of us who are not Native to these lands—becoming good allies, and accomplices. We continue to work creatively towards enacting practices and policies that register these histories and strengthen these layers of knowledge and ways of being.

–Achama (aw-chem-ahh, thank you)