Building Solidarity in an Immigration Crisis: The Power of Connecting the Classroom and the Community

• In Event: From Surveillance to Solidarity: Teaching Amid the Immigration Crisis (Co-sponsored by Race, Gender, and Class Section)

Abstract

This paper examines how the classroom becomes a meaningful site for building solidarity in response to increasingly threatening immigration policies and militarized enforcement in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Committed to teaching our students the power of collective action, we designed two courses taught in 2025—Art and Activism and Immigrant Voices in Times of Fear—that required close collaboration with a local organization working with vulnerable immigrant communities. We demonstrate how, through this process, we came to understand the importance of coordinated efforts and shared goals in fostering trust and solidarity. Drawing on bell hooks’s concept of “radical care,” we conceptualize the classroom as a space of active political practice and as a cornerstone for both personal and collective liberation.

Author

• Erika Busse, Macalester College