Sanctuary as a Praxis of Freedom

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

Abstract

Historically understood as “a site of refuge where the authority of God prevails over the authority of the government” (Paik, 2017 p. 6), the contemporary sanctuary movement began with religious institutions offering protection to migrant populations from deportations and other forms of state sanctioned violence. Over the last fifteen years, and especially during the Trump U.S. Presidency, the sanctuary movement gained renewed attention and was extended to include demands for educational institutions, communities and cities to serve as sanctuary spaces to protect undocumented students and those who are elligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Gaining traction in a conjuctural moment that has also been defined by Black-led liberatory and abolitionist movements and indigenous-led, decolonial, climate justice movements, raises questions about the possibilities and limits of sanctuary not only a site of refuge, but as something more. Inspired by the late-bell hooks’ (1994) notion of education as a practice of freedom, and A. Naomi Paik (2020, 2017) and other’s linking of sanctuary and abolition (Buff, 2019; Paik et al., 2019; Ridgley, 2008) as two related but distinct political projects within and beyond the settler universitas, this paper is a contemplation of the possibilities and limits of “sanctuary as a praxis of freedom.” The author conceptualized sanctuary as a practice of freedom, conceptualizing this as a lens of analysis, politics and pedagogy of resistance, healing and transformation. Drawing on efforts occurring at their own place of work, the author asks, how might using sanctuary as our analytical and poltiical “north star” (Love, 2019), facilitate an interrogation of the purposes and practices of higher education to render transparent who or what institutions are accountable to and how these relations of accountability in fact lead to consequences that produce and perpetuate harm rather than ameliorate it? Second, how might sanctuary move all of us to disentangle ourselves from the neoconservative and neoliberal racist foundations of higher education, and propel us toward the creation of sites of sanctuary education that nourish our relationships to the land and to each other in ways that go far beyond the physical walls of the university?

Author

• Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College
  Presenting Author