Student Media and Anti-Colonial Praxis in the University under “Late-stage American Empire”

• In Event: (Re)Engaging Ethnic Studies in American Studies: The Possibilities of Creation, Solidarity, and Student Organizing

Abstract

In this presentation, I plan to highlight how young people and allied organizers on contemporary US college campuses have been harnessing sonic and digital media to unveil the higher education system’s complicity in colonial violence (la paperson; Chatterjee and Maira; Wind; Salaita) and to envision new ways of enacting community and solidarity. To explicate this idea, I plan to trace a couple case studies across discrete institutional/geographic settings related to the 2024 (and ongoing) US campus-based movements around the genocide in Gaza that, together, speak to radical students’ rhetorical insurgency in the context of colonial dispossession and mass death. More specifically, I will zoom in on how students at a couple different public universities are utilizing public-facing multimedia—-namely, digital writing via social media and college radio programming—-as platforms by which to intervene in the campus suppression that emerged in response to pro-Palestine organizing for their university to sever their financial linkages to the genocide in Gaza. I am particularly interested in the ways that, in their mixed-media work, these students articulate throughlines between the longstanding hyperpolicing of Black students endemic to the university’s “carceral continuum” (Shedd; see also Meiners and Maldonado) and colonial Zionist technologies of containment particular to this political moment under “late-stage American empire” (CFP), advocating praxes of material and epistemological divestment to dismantle both. Taken together, I see students’ insurgent rhetorical work as exemplifying what Simone Browne calls dark souveilance: a practice of utilizing insurgent technologies (in this case, social and sonic media) “to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance"--and concomitant systems of global imperialism and “organized abandonment” (Gilmore)--from the bottom up. These students are thus building on ongoing work in American Studies engaging in a direct interrogation and critique of the politics of university (Boggs et al.; Ferguson; Dolmage). I would contend that perhaps even more so than renowned academics, today’s anti-colonial student writer-activists are in fact the intellectual backbone of the project of critical university studies, though often acknowledged as such, especially as this area of study has become increasingly institutionalized. Ultimately, the kind of public media exemplified by contemporary students is dynamic and innovative in moving toward a liberatory university and a free Palestine.

Biographical Information

Anna (she/they) is a teacher-scholar of composition-rhetoric, American studies, education studies, and queer feminisms and Assistant Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY Buffalo State. Broadly, Anna's research interrogates the politics of literacy across educational institutions and urban geographies, highlighting the pedagogical, intellectual, and rhetorical work of students and activists plugged into abolitionist and anti-colonial movements. Her work has been published in Community Literacy, Kairos, Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, and elsewhere. Anna's monograph in progress, “The Act of the Paper”: Literacy, Racial Capitalism, and Student Protest in the 1990s, is an archival project tracing visionary, radical, university student literacies produced on and off campus—-zines, early blogs, newspapers, and more—-within the late 20ᵗʰ century’s shifting educational, disciplinary, and geopolitical contexts. Her scholarly and pedagogical work has been supported by fellowships/awards from the Rhetoric Society of America, the New York Public Library, and more.
Anna has worked as an educator across a number of settings: university classrooms, writing centers, faculty development, nonprofits, secondary schooling, and more. She is deeply passionate about critical, student-centered, justice-oriented, and multimodal approaches to teaching and learning. She earned her PhD in English with a Certificate in American Studies from the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and her BA in English and Biology from Oberlin College.

Author

• Anna Zeemont, Suny Buffalo State