Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Andrew Curley, University of Arizona

; ,

Description:

In 2020, High Country News released the “Land Grab University Report,” detailing the ways that US land grant universities were founded in and continue to profit from the theft of Native land. The same year, universities grappled once more with how to take up (or subdue) demands for police abolition that connect contemporary policing to the history of slavery and the plantation. Universities have been and continue to be mechanisms of colonization, extraction, gentrification, policing, and empire, even as they are spaces that foster young people’s activism and where people work for the creation of the knowledge that can dismantle these power structures. In this session we seek to bring together scholars working to understand how their institutions have profited from the land grab, how their institutions were founded in and continue to thrive on Black labor, and how their institutions drive gentrification, policing, and plantation politics (or others). That is, how can we understand the land grab university as a plantation university, without letting one framework of analysis overwhelm or exclude the other? Too often, the struggles and challenges of Black, Native, and other excluded communities are collapsed into vague language about “diversity,” without attending to how the relationship of universities to Black and Native people is historically structured by specific and distinct but intertwined processes. At the same time, even in scholarly analysis we find Black presence reduced to labor and Native struggles reduced to land, replicating an already problematic dualism between land and life. In the university context, Black and Native faculty and students likewise face distinct kinds of challenges, from erasure to tokenization, while diversity and inclusion initiatives do not allow for more specific and political analyses that might be fostered by understanding these questions through the lenses provided by land back/decolonization or abolition/reparations frameworks. These oversimplifications imply an implicit whiteness to academic spaces that disallows more productive analysis and movement.

In this session, we seek to build community with people working to take action toward decolonization and abolition simultaneously. We invite those working practically or through research on interrelated topics such as land back/land grab, reparations, dismantling white supremacy, and abolition to share strategy and analysis and to learn how we might bring these struggles together.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda