Radical Rebuild: Envisioning Structures of Accountability and Well-Being in the Academy

• In Event: From Spirit Lynching to Radical Well-Being: Kinship as Resistance to Violence in Higher Education

Abstract

This final presentation asks: What would higher education look like if it were committed to life, not just survival, but thriving, dreaming, and liberation? Building on the concepts of spirit lynching (Presentation #1) and kinship (Presentation #2), we offer a framework for institutional transformation that centers well-being, accountability, and communal care. In line with the AERA 2025 theme of “imagining futures,” we envision a radical rebuild of academic culture where death-making structures are dismantled and replaced with systems rooted in justice, responsibility, and healing.

Our approach is guided by Afrofuturist principles: centering Black imagination, collective agency, and liberation from colonial timelines and logic. We draw from real-time institutional analysis, critical race theory, and our lived experience to identify key points of intervention. Specifically, we examine how institutional cultures and professional organizations (such as academic conferences and associations) normalize harm through bureaucratic neutrality, absence of accountability mechanisms, and weaponization of “objectivity.”
Using the academic research conference where the spirit lynching occurred as a case study, we name specific structural failures:
1. A peer review system that enables biased gatekeeping under the guise of “rigor”
2. Ethics boards and organizational leadership that fail to act in the face of harm
3. A culture of silence that values institutional preservation over individual safety
4. The absence of guidelines around social media use in professional discourse

In response, we offer a roadmap for radical institutional accountability. Recommendations include:
1. Redesigning peer review to ensure transparency, counteract racialized discourses of “fit,” and decenter whiteness as the default knowledge framework
2. Creating harm accountability protocols in conferences and professional organizations, including third-party mediation and community-based restorative justice circles
3. Establishing community agreements for social media use that discourage call-outs rooted in mob logic and encourage dialogue grounded in consent, respect, and care
4. Mandatory equity audits that assess institutional complicity in spiritual and emotional harm, particularly toward scholars with marginalized identities

We do not propose these interventions as “add-ons” to current structures, but as invitations to dismantle and rebuild. Healing cannot happen inside systems designed to harm; therefore, transformation must be both structural and cultural. As such, we also explore how life-affirming cultures can be seeded through values like slowness, rest, creativity, and reciprocity. These are not luxuries, they are conditions for sustainable academic life.

We end by invoking the Black radical tradition’s call to dream in defiance of systems that deny our humanity. As a collective of scholar-survivors, we do not offer a tidy solution. Instead, we offer possibility, rooted in rage, grief, and love—as a compass for remaking educational futures. Our call is clear: the future of the academy must be accountable, humane, and fiercely committed to life.

Author

• Raquel Wright-Mair, Rowan University