Students' Committee: Uncop My Campus, Part I: Students Revolt! (Co-sponsored by Formerly Incarcerated Students Caucus and Critical Prison Studies Caucus)

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

This panel centers the voices of student organizers in the struggle for abolition and their organizing frames our discussion today. From the University of Hawaii to Yale to CUNY, students, particularly Black, Brown, and Indigenous activists, are targeted by campus police as threats to colonial regimes of order. Rather than a benign part of a campus community, campus police are police and therefore militarized, violent enforcers of racial capitalism. This session brings together student activists in movements against policing on and off their campuses and students, including students who are part of the Fees Must Fall movement for free, decolonized education in South Africa, students involved in protests against the telescope on Mauna Kea, and anti-austerity and abolitionist movements in New York. As we have learned from social movement history, young people have been at the forefront of movements for change from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to the Black Panther Party to the South African Students Organization, and their “freedom dreams” energize radical struggle. The struggle against policing is no exception, and we are excited to kick off our double session on campus policing with a dialogue between student activists.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association 2020

Chair

• Roderick Ferguson, Yale University

Comment

• Kathleen Brown, University of Michigan