Building Relations

Seditious Acts: Being in, But Not of, the Neoliberal University

José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha

This introduction to the volume by the editors trace the racial history of U.S. higher education and the students of color led movements that have led to the current moment of protests against the neoliberal university.

Introducing ‘Seditious Acts’: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES

AGITATE! Editorial Collective

Editorial by the AGITATE! Editorial Collective reflects on the journey of co-creating this volume with CRES.

I Have Been to the Future — We Won

Simi Kang

Artwork and Artist’s Statement

Building Relations, Critical University Studies and Student Activism: A Conversation with Roderick A. Ferguson

Kong Pheng Pha & José Manuel Santillana Blanco, with Roderick A. Ferguson

Kong Pheng Pha and José Manuel Santillana Blanco speak to Roderick A. Ferguson about the backlash against critical race and ethnic studies in higher education and emergent modes of student resistance.

Brownness and Being in the Twenty-First Century

Joy Mazahreh

Joy Mazahreh writes about what it mean to be Palestinian and Brown, and bear witness to the death and devastation of her homeland.

Three Poems for Palestine by Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Gwendolyn S. Kirk

Translations of three poems by acclaimed Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz written in solidarity with Palestine.

Where is the Moral Fortitude of the University’s Leader? Palestinian Rights are Human Rights

Nadia Aruri

This essay highlights the University of Minnesota’s failure to exhibit any sense of fairness and justice on the Palestinian issue.

Introduction to Section One: Infractions

Richa Nagar

 This introduction to section one—Infractions—reflects on how essays in the section ask us to witness violent acts committed by institutions of higher learning in the U.S. and how the authors agitate to reorganize and recast this unjust terrain.

“Did they drag you here?”: Challenges of Existing as an International Student in the United States

Ana Cláudia dos Santos São Bernardo

Drawing on higher education experiences in Brazil and as an international student of color in the U.S. neoliberal university, Santos São Bernardo writes of the expectation of gratitude and thankfulness placed on international students and what it means to reject it.

Seditious Intuition: Functional Containers and Bodies of Engagement

William Amado Syldor-Severino

This essay proposes alternate frameworks for engaging in sedition in the neoliberal university.

Violent Invisibilities: The Battle for Hmong and Southeast Asian American Legibility in Higher Education

Kong Pheng Pha, Kaochi Pha, and Dee Pha

Hmong American scholars reflect on ongoing violent systems of racial inconspicuousness that Hmong and Southeast Asian American students continue to experience in the neoliberal and corporate university.

Introduction to Section Two: Transgressions

Edén Torres

This introduction to section two—Transgressions—reflects on what has changed and what has remained the same in the neoliberal university, especially for students of color, over the past several decades and shows how the essays in this section contend with these histories and politics.

Moving Toward Transitional Pedagogies: The Second Sight of Graduate Students of Color in the Neoliberal University

Ezekiel Joubert III

This essay proposes transitional pedagogy as a methodology for scholars of color in neoliberal academia.

Toward a Marginal Understanding of Object Being in the Neoliberal University

Emily Mitamura

This piece offers a series of joined meditations on violences of the neoliberal university through conceptions of object-being, romance, imagination, and newness.

A Cold Place: Notes on Antiblackness and the Neoliberal University

Kidiocus King-Carroll

A set of notes or jottings that are autobiographical, analytical, historical, and deliberately incomplete, but articulate King-Carroll’s understanding of the University and the world that surrounds it as an antiblack, neoliberal space that Black graduate students must exist in a fugitive relationship to.

Introduction to Section Three: Insurgencies

Rose M. Brewer

This introduction to section three—Insurgencies—locates the essays in this section within the rich history of the Civil Rights Movement, emergence of Black Studies, and students of color-led radical struggles against capitalism, racism, and neoliberalism in higher education.

Unruly Subjects: On Student Activism, the Neoliberal University, and Infiltration

José Manuel Santillana Blanco

This essay explores the (im)possibilities that students of color and indigenous students have in resisting the Neoliberal University that operates as an institution of power and knowledge production predicated on white supremacy, settler colonialism, and global capitalism.

Razing the Anti-Ebony Tower: An Academic ‘Grammar Book’

Rahsaan Mahadeo

This essay rejects the notion that for negatively-racialized students learning, laboring, and living in the anti-ebony tower is a privilege.

Within and Without the Settler University: Reflections on Decolonization, Spirituality and Research as Ceremony

Marcelo Garzo Montalvo

This essay asks us to consider how the neoliberal university is always already a settler university and the ways in which indigenous ways of knowing can help us we reimagine education as a process of unlearning settler modernity.