Disrupting the “Blueprint”: Public Commentary as Collective Resistance

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Protecting, Protesting, and Amplifying Academic Freedom

Proposal

“Community is not built on absolute agreement; but instead a commitment–sometimes discreet or narrow–to justice in the moment. That moment may be one week, several years, or a lifetime. But it’s the commitment to work towards a shared vision of justice that binds the community.” [Author 2, July 11, 2023]

HB999 and SB266 - recognized internationally as the “Don’t Say Gay'' and “Stop W.O.K.E.” acts - were signed into law by Florida (USA) Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022, making direct classroom instruction concerning race, sexuality, and gender illegal in Florida’s public schools and universities. Florida’s state-level policies have inspired copycat reforms across the United States and around the world following what Human Rights Campaign (2023) describes as “DeSantis’ Blueprint for Bigotry”. The “Blueprint” is a strategic attack on civil rights and liberties with a targeted focus on Black and LGBTQ+ communities, as well as for women and girls through a coordinated policy assault. Through attacks on public education and the deterioration of conditions such as, but not limited to, precarious housing, exponential inflation, undermining of public health, and attacks on workers' rights, the DeSantis administration continues to threaten the human rights of all Florida residents. Aligned with Sub-Theme 4: Pedagogies and Protest, this paper situates the “Blueprint” as an international policy problem by considering the ways in which “we learn to take civil actions collectively” through the Authors’ participation at two meetings of the Florida International University Board of Trustees held on February 23 and June 15, 2023 in Miami, Florida, USA. Aligned with the conference’s guiding question, “[H]ow might we engage with, and think generatively about the histories, curriculum, theories and methodologies, and pedagogies that guide acts of protest?”, this paper interrogates public commentary as a process of learning to work collectively to disrupt the “Blueprint” through what Patricia Hill Collins (2020) discusses as the “considerable variability” that “exists from one matrix of domination to the next'' that organizes both oppression and activism (2000, p. 228).

“My experience in The Collective with crafting and delivering the statement, as well as our ongoing efforts, has compelled me to think critically about consensus, individual politics, and the difficult negotiations inherent in a commitment to collective survival.” [Author 2, July 11, 2023]

The Authors’ engagement in public commentary as a resistance practice was seeded and strengthened by The Collective - an interdisciplinary group of higher education faculty and staff working across South Florida. The Collective was born from the 2023 Symposium, “Making Sense of ‘The State’: Power, Control and Distraction” (February 15, 2023) convened by Kirsten T. Edwards and Maria K. Lovett (Educational Policy Studies, Florida International University). Using evidence from the Authors’ written reflections, informal correspondence, personal photographs, and archived public proceedings, this collaborative autoethnography (Chang, Ngunjir, and Hernandez, 2021) interrogates the contours of public commentary as collective resistance through the experiences of two women faculty working at Florida’s “international” university.

Rather than summarizing the Authors’ public commentaries and impressionist tales through this proposal, the presentation aims to “disturb the order of things” expected for academic conference proposals and proceedings. Dennis and colleagues’ (2021) practice of ethnography on home ground is applied as a conceptual and methodological organizer for this collective autoethnography and, “builds on the work of the many researchers who, also, focused on their own families and communities and who were not afraid to include their affective selves in their narratives (like DuBois, 2007; Barbara Myerhoff, 1978; Zora Neale Hurston, 1978; Kirin Narayan, 2012).” Public commentaries are shared as they were delivered to the Board and as context for the authors’ reflection and analysis. As excerpted from the public commentary delivered by [Author 1] in June 2023:

“FIU has been ranked by the Times/Journal as “among the top 100 universities in the world and No. 7 in the United States for impact” in research innovation towards the Sustainable Development Goals – the United Nations’ international compact to address global inequality. Quality Education is a stand-alone Sustainable Development Goal, and like our FIU’s founding commitments, champions inclusive education access as a catalyst for social change. FIU was founded with three commitments that predate the SDGs, but our goals are well aligned: to provide quality education, serve the economic and social needs of our community, and by becoming a “major international education center”, create “greater mutual understanding among the Americas and throughout the world” (“Goals of Florida International University”) - and, these commitments are the reasons that I am proud to celebrate earning tenure and promotion to Associate Professor of International and Intercultural Education through your proceedings today. The weaponization of public education policy in Florida has and will continue to undermine my ability to sustain these commitments in the ways that having tenure expects and my field’s professional standards require. If FIU is to be counted among the top 100 universities around the world working to address the most pressing problems of our time – which is what the SDGs aim to do – then we also have a duty to protect the freedoms that enable faculty to produce high-impact research that reflects real-world problems by using evidence - not political rhetoric - to inform policy and practice.” [Author 1, June 15, 2023]

The authors’ public commentaries and impressionist tales are woven together as a conversation on working collectively in effort to “create dissonance around what passes as ‘normal’ and ‘normative,’ appropriating and assembling languages, texts, beliefs and ways of living and loving in radical and liberating ways” (Holman Jones & Harris, 2019, p. 4); and, disrupt the “primed and prepped" (Anderson, Vanner, Wotipka & Kelly, 2021, p. 545) conditions that are often imposed on academic conference activities. Following these examples, we “hope through our work” that our “lives will migrate into imaginations and into the global mind” (Dennis et. al, 2021 p. 254) and foster critical dialogue on collective resistance in and through comparative and international education research and practice.

Authors

• Emily W. Anderson, Florida International University

• Kirsten T. Edwards, Florida International University