Navigating a Fine Line Between Change and Multicultural Incorporation: Student Activism From Within the Neoliberal University

• In Event: Activating Disruptive Power: Transformative Possibilities for Eco-Justice in Postsecondary Education

Abstract

The Palouse region in Washington state is a rural space that wears the histories of empire and its failures for all to see. This region was imperative to global empire-building processes, and today bleeds the histories of colonial dispossession and displacement. Yet, histories of inequality in rural spaces are often ignored as social justice education and activism are framed within an urban landscape, thereby severing the dynamic tie between the rural, the national, and the global. As efforts to combat social, environmental, and economic inequality take to the urban streets of San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, New York, and other large cities, the harsh realities of poverty and injustice that plague rural geographies are made invisible.

Responding to the EE SIG’s call “to actively work against the invisibilizing of people” on the frontlines of environmental and social injustices, this paper explores how a social justice peer-educator program at a public university infuses social justice education (Belle, 2007; Landreman & MacDonald-Dennis, 2013) with a place-based approach, locating theories of inequality and structures of power in the rural Pacific Northwest. This university program challenges the urban bias and rural invisibility within social justice discourses, which too often disavow the need for movement building in rural spaces by ignoring rurality altogether or painting rural spaces as so backwards and inherently oppressive that they are beyond recuperation.

Yet, given how neoliberalism is dismantling and restructuring public education, the effectiveness of university programs like this to authentically work against the invisiblizing of communities is unclear. This paper takes up AERA’s call “to confront the struggles for public education, considering the times in which we are living… and the roles we can play in the fight for justice.” It examines how such student activism within institutions might inadvertently coalesce with neoliberalism. That is, activism itself may operate as a manifestation of multicultural incorporation – “a stripped down, non-redistributive form of ‘equality’” (Duggan, 2004, p. 11) whereby strategies to foster social change are absorbed and then used “as a testament to the progress of the university,” (Ferguson, 2008, p. 163) while the institution politics and policies remain unchanged.

Using interviews conducted with current and past student activists employed in the program, this paper considers the limitations, possibilities, and complexities of student activism within institutions, particularly in consideration of Piven’s (2006) notion of disruptive power. Specifically, students’ reflections demonstrate how activism can be disruptive, but still come from within the institution. Student interviews illuminate how the “interdependent relations” (ibid, p. 22) that enable agency might encompass more flexible, shifting, and dynamic exertions of disruption than a singular “withdrawal” (p. 23). However, students’ narratives also reveal that some of the swiftest and most radical change on campus resulted from student protests and walkouts, arguably manifestations of “disruptive power.” Overall, this project demonstrates how social justice place-based education can make visible and re-center marginalized and disavowed peoples within social and environmental justice, while also troubling the current neoliberal public university as the site for social justice education and activism.

Author

• Jenne Schmidt, Colorado State University