The CSUMB Social Justice Colloquium is training for engaged citizenship.

The annual Social Justice Colloquium at CSU Monterey Bay provides a public forum that bridges the university, the community and the world, bringing people together to chop it up over urgent issues of our times. It was founded in 1997 by Angie Tran and Gerald Shenk, both professors – as well as activists – in the School of Social, Behavioral & Global Studies.

They’ve held the colloquium each year since. The last one was focused on the Vietnam War, with special guest Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (The Sympathizer). 

Each year’s program begins with a spark, according to SBGS administrative coordinator Rachel Fitz John: “Usually one of our faculty members becomes excited about an influential author or speaker, and it builds from there.”

That happened with the next speaker, Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish-born writer, programmer, techno-sociologist, and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She specializes in “big data” and social media in activism and uprisings, and has put her study into practice in the Occupy movement in New York’s ZucoTti Park and the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul.

Shenk says that in her writing and talks, she illuminates the dangers of relying on social media, how global movements translate to local actions, and how digital networks affect society and government (and vice versa).

“She knows what works and what doesn’t,” Shenk says.

Her book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, is currently being read by students in interrelated classes at CSUMB, including George Station’s “Technology and Society” class, and professor and Otter Realm newspaper adviser Estella Porras’ journalism class.

The timing of Tufekci’s visit is serendipitous, as #metoo reverberates across Twitter, as revelations of Russia’s social media influence in last year’s U.S. election, and the machinations of social media corporations and their algorithms detonate in Senate Intelligence Committee hearings.

“If you read her book, none of this is a surprise at all,” Shenk says.

Tufekci sounds prescient when she said in a TED Talk in February 2015, “We need to fear how the people in power will use artificial intelligence to control us, and to manipulate us, in novel, sometimes hidden, subtle and unexpected ways. The way technology [quickly] empowers social movements, paradoxically helps weaken them.”

Movements built on slow, sustained, meaningful, face-to-face relationships could be a more successful way of the social justice warrior, she suggests, citing the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 as a model of togetherness and effectiveness.

The university’s teachers want to equip their students with the most vital information to make them engaged citizens. Especially when the alt right and the right wing, Shenk says, are using social media to combat social justice in two ways. First, confusion.

“That’s to call into question [our] ability to know anything,” he says. “People think there’s no difference between Breitbart and CNN.”

Next, lies: “The series of ads in Facebook that portrayed Black Lives Matter as a violent movement. These are all made-up stories.”

The colloquium usually occurs in the spring, but organizers built up the 22nd iteration around Tufekci’s visit this Thursday because of the urgency of her message, because students are reading her book now, and because this is Gerald Shenk’s swan song.

The founding faculty member – author of two academic books on race and the military, versed in African-American, Southeast Asian and American Indian history and issues, a lifetime member of the NAACP’s Monterey chapter – is retiring in December.

He recalls some of the more memorable colloquiums of the past 22 years.

In its third year, they invited people on opposite sides of the Salinas urban/ag land boundary issue. But despite a moderator from the National Coalition Building Institute, it disintegrated into name-calling and a walk-out.

But then there are moments like 2002. During a colloquium titled “Spiritual Resources for Social Justice Action,” Chan Khong, a Buddhist nun and author ofLearning True Love: Practicing Buddhism in a Time of War, rose to speak before the assembly, pulled out her notes from her robe, and then put them away and told the audience: “You don’t need me to speak. I’m going to teach you a song.”

“It was one of the most moving events [I’ve seen] at CSUMB,” Shenk says. “Three-hundred people in a ballroom, singing, one line at a time, about finding peace within yourself.”

Magic like that seems unlikely to translate through a mobile phone or digital device. One needs to be in the same room with fellow human beings, close enough to touch each other.

ZEYNEP TUFEKCI headlines the 22nd Annual Social Justice Colloquium 6-8:30pm Thursday, Nov. 9, at CSU Monterey Bay, University Center Ballroom, 4314 Sixth Ave., Seaside. Free. 582-3890, csumb.edu/sbgs