Abolition as the Guiding Theory for Higher Education's "Crisis"

• In Event: Theorizing Higher Education as an Essential Site for the Design of Knowledge Production

Abstract

There has been a noticeable uptick in the references to abolition in educational research over the past decade. Relatedly, critical university studies has become a field of study in which the territories of power in higher education are traced and analyzed. Rather than positioning these two genealogies of thought against each other, or asking if the university can be abolished, I focus on asking how people who are in proximity to higher education understand and engage in abolition praxes that involve study. Proximity to higher education includes staff, students, faculty, administration, and boards of trustees, people living near or displaced by higher education and the lands that higher education occupies and benefits from. This theoretical paper is grounded in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s framing of abolition as theory (2022). To contend with societal structures and patterns of population level dispossession, I use conjunctural analysis with two publicly available resources to examine praxes of abolition in proximity to the academy. Conjunctural analysis offers a way to historicize the present, and lift up ways to examine the narratives that are created, especially during crises (Hall, 2006). While the COVID-19 pandemic has inarguably been and will continue to be a crisis, higher education itself is a crisis as key manifestation of settler colonialism (author, 2021). As a consequence of its origins and structure in racial settler colonial theft of labor and life, higher education presents a crisis for humanity and the planet. In this paper, I will offer conjunctural analysis as an essential lens for interrogating higher education’s narrative of its crises.

Author

• Leigh Patel, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author