K-16 Collaboration Committee: Education in the Time of Trump: Race, Class, Gender, & Redefining Safety, Sanctuary, and the Public

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States has re-ignited important political debates and challenges to the U.S. nation-state, its agencies, and institutions – namely public education and schools – their purposes, functions, and potential. For instance, we have witnessed increased organizing about the need to build sanctuary campuses to protect documented and undocumented immigrant students as well as protect public schools against aggressive privatization and attacks against social justice/ethnic studies classes. In the wake of the alt-right, neo-conservative political climate, this panel considers the following questions: First, how do efforts to protect or preserve state institutions such as schools understand themselves in relationship to the U.S. nation-state, structures of rights and citizenship, and concepts of American exceptionalism?  Second, how do these contemporary efforts envision or push against the limits of reformist reforms and potentially expand horizons in their work to engage, claim, and transform these institutions of the state which, as Robin D.G. Kelley (2016) reminds us, were not constructed to love the lives of Black youth or other poor and working class non-Black communities color? Third, how do these contemporary efforts locate themselves in relationship to oppositional politics that has defined past liberatory struggles or what Jodi Melamed has termed race radicalism (2011)? Drawing from their expertise as Black and non-Black women of color educator/scholars/organizers inside and outside of public schools, panelists will consider the historical context of radical political education and community organizing against state violence pre and post-Trump and potentially consider the difference between education/learning and schooling as well as reformist reform and radical reform and the role of collectively-generated knowledge and vision therein; and the role of feminist and queer of color theories within a political and social climate that is at the precipice of social reform, social transformation or perhaps destruction.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Ujju Aggarwal, The New School

Panelists

• Isaura Pulido, Northeastern Illinois University

• Deana G. Lewis, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Rhoda Rae Gutierrez, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Mathilda Minerva de Dios, Free Write Arts and Literacy

• Connie Wun, Mills College