Theorizing Higher Education as an Essential Site for the Design of Knowledge Production

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This interdisciplinary session will provide papers addressing the relationship, potentials, and dangers of higher education and places they occupy. Formal education has long been theorized as an apparatus of the state (Althusser, 2006). Universities are, in the United States, part of the settler colonial structure that is focused on property acquisition. The university’s growing influence has also made campuses critical spaces in social movements for liberation. In this session, we offer nuance higher education as an essential vehicle of racial capitalism and also has always been a site of resistance and fugitive study.

Sub Unit

• Division J - Postsecondary Education / Division J - Section 6: Society, Culture, and Change

Chair

• Leigh Patel, University of Pittsburgh

Papers

• Abolition as the Guiding Theory for Higher Education's "Crisis" - Leigh Patel, University of Pittsburgh

• Sanctuary as a Praxis of Freedom - Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College

• Campus-Community Organizing and Reckoning With Higher Education's Town and Gown Divide - Charles H.F. Davis, University of Michigan

• Beyond the "Ceremony of Acknowledgment": Toward a Political Economy of Reparations in Higher Education - Davarian Baldwin, Trinity College