Student of Color Activisms and Critical Interdisciplinarity in the Neoliberal University

• In Event: 63.033 - Reimagining the Modern/Colonial University: Toward Alternative Horizons of Higher Education Otherwise

Abstract

Contemporary critical scholarship on the university firmly places new discursive and curricular formations within a global context of neoliberal, neoimperial, and neocolonial processes (e.g., Chatterjee & Maira, 2014, Tuchman, 2009, Wilder, 2013, among many others). For example, Ferguson (2012) situates the institutionalization of what they term the interdisciplines (e.g. Educational Studies, Black Studies, Women’s Studies) within a historical context of containment, legibility and re-territorialization of radical possibility (see also Harney & Moten, 2013). Marking a particular moment of liberal inclusion, the university welcomes the interdisciplines to assert its moral structure, without which it is unable to justify its place as a democratic community of progressive thought. Despite their original impetus of student revolt, the interdisciplines are often framed as something that the university wanted—something for which it had strived. Their historical memory and memorialization has shifted to allow the university to name itself triumphant in the absorption of radical politics. With universities flooded with discourses of “diversity and inclusion,” this absorption is yet another investment of a reformist agenda that recapitulates the logics of white supremacy (DuBois, 1920/2004), perpetuating the exploitation of Black and Brown bodies and using their existence and labour as marker of the university’s liberalism.

In a resurgence of student activism in the United States, students are calling for universities’ address of institutionalized racism, masking of sexual violence, and collusion with global capitalism—I am interested in the ways privileged universities (i.e., Ivies, liberal arts colleges, flagship state schools) are responding. On one hand, there are ways that these universities are making small, but not insignificant investments in violence reducing programs: Sexual Assault centres opening, funding towards resources for students of colour, jobs opening in the interdisciplines. On the other hand, students of colour and their movements are intensely regulated, placed within a moral economy with distinctions of what it means to engage in these discussions in “good” and “bad” ways. With their critical training often arising from the interdisciplines, students and faculty are then the subjects by which institutions may conceal their complicity within violence through manufacturing a morality principle regarding good/bad ways of critical engagement. In this paper, I will use a case study to think through and name these simultaneous movements of both regulation and performance of increasing self-awareness, and moreover, ask at what and whose cost this takes place.

Author

• Kristi Carey, The University of British Columbia