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

José Manuel Santillana Blanco:

To start, can you speak about your personal academic journey in higher education and your overall experience as a graduate student of color? How did you develop your interests with regard to student activism and the neoliberal university?

Roderick Ferguson:

I was an activist in high school. I went to Manchester High School in Manchester, Georgia, which is about one hour and fifteen minutes southwest of Atlanta. The big issue that the NAACP and parents, Black parents in particular, were facing at the time was inequalities within the schools in my county. The northern end of the county contained the predominantly Black schools that received very little resources. At the southern end, where I grew up in Manchester, were the schools that received the most resources. Those schools were about sixty percent white and forty percent Black. The effort at the time was to try and consolidate the school system so that there is one county high school in which everyone would receive the same resources no matter what town you lived in. I was the president of the junior NAACP at one point. My friends, cousins, and I were trained by civil rights veterans who were active in the NAACP. They trained us how to canvas from door to door and how to stage a protest. I later attended Howard University as an undergraduate. 

At Howard, in addition to the activism on the campus, I discovered histories of what we might call the Black radical tradition. Howard was also the place where I was introduced to French post-structuralism, Marxism, and feminism, particularly Black feminism. All of these experiences and discoveries transformed me into the scholar that I am today. Then I attended the University of California–San Diego (UCSD) for graduate school. It was during a period that the historian and theorist George Lipsitz dubbed “California as the Mississippi of the 1990s.” During my first year at UCSD in 1994, the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 had passed. That was the first election that I voted in and I had assumed that the proposition was so ridiculous that the government could not deny people social services because they were immigrants. The idea of it was absurd. So I went and voted. Then the next day, it was announced that Proposition 187 had passed overwhelmingly. The anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 followed two years later. At that time, there was also Governor Pete Wilson’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” campaign, which sends a person to life in prison if they are convicted of three felonies. That campaign expanded California’s prisons. I was also involved in the movement to save affirmative action and the teaching assistant unionization efforts at UCSD. I was a sociology major focusing on sociological theory at Howard, and then I went on to graduate school to study intellectuals and literature. I ended up studying African American intellectuals. This was the Department of Sociology at UCSD in 1994. It was also the moment in which there were exciting developments in the Literature and Ethnic Studies Departments at UCSD. In Ethnic Studies, George Lipsitz, who became one of my mentors, was working on popular culture, music, and race. In the Literature Department, Lisa Lowe, was about to release her second book Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Jack Halberstam was working on female masculinity as well. Through the efforts mounted by George Lipsitz and Lisa Lowe in particular, there was an explicit investment in making UCSD, at least through the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Literature, the place that was revising the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, particularly the work of Stuart Hall. For example, how do we rethink issues of culture in relation to political economy, migration, the state, and media institutions? 

At that time at UCSD, there was also a happy convergence of various scholars who went on to produce queer of color and queer diasporic scholarship. Gayatri Gopinath was a postdoctoral fellow during that time working with Lisa Lowe. Chandan Reddy had returned to UCSD, which was his alma mater, on a dissertation fellowship as a graduate student at Columbia University. Grace Hong was also a graduate student in the Literature Department. Ruby Tapia in Ethnic Studies was part of the first Department of Ethnic Studies cohort, who now teaches at the University of Michigan. Anyway, we formed a writing group in which we were all trying to work out a materialist engagement with culture from multiple interdisciplinary locations, from ethnic studies, African American studies, Asian American studies, women of color feminism, to what would eventually be queer of color critique. And then I wrote the dissertation that became my first book, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. At this point, I am now a faculty member in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. After I completed Aberrations in Black, the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at Minnesota hosted a symposium, so I decided to write a piece about what we might now think of as the regulation and the co-optation of intersectionality. I showed it to David Noble, my dear colleague and friend in the American Studies Department, who after reading it, stated that my next book ought to be about the university. And so that was really the impetus to start thinking about doing work within critical university studies, and that was how The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference emerged.

Kong Pheng Pha:

That history is very insightful and inspiring. I am also interested in some of the ideas that you wrote about in We Demand: The University and Student Protests and The Reorder of Things, the latter which we were fortunate to read in Bianet Castellanos’ graduate seminar at the University of Minnesota. In these works, you make clear connections between the civil rights movements of the sixties and seventies and the university’s use of administrative power to mitigate, discipline, co-opt, and absorb student protests. In We Demand, you wrote a list of soft rules that are meant to provide student activists with some guidance on how to move forward. One rule that really stood out to me was that we should assume that we do not belong in the university or in the institution. Could you elaborate on that? How does assuming non-belonging empower or benefit graduate students of color and/or faculty of color? 

Roderick Ferguson:

I was receiving signals from the sociology faculty, both subtle and unsubtle, that I did not belong in sociology. During my second year, after having accumulated these signals, I was in the writing program office with one of my best friends and graduate student mentor, Alexandra Halkias, who now teaches at Panteion University in Athens, Greece. We were both grading, but I was worrying about the feedback that I had received from my professors during the annual evaluation. Alex was just trying to finish her grading. I kept lamenting, “Maybe I do not belong in Sociology. Maybe I belong in Literature. Maybe I am really a literary scholar. I do not need to be in Sociology.” At the time, Ethnic Studies did not yet have a graduate program. Then Alex responded, “Rob, just assume you do not belong!” And what happened next was instructive because I immediately realized at that moment, “Oh, I can do this.” So, it was not that Alex said to me, “Assume you do not belong,” and I took that to mean I should leave graduate school or that I should do my work in a corner. I thought of that moment as “Oh, I can get this done because I do not have to live according to somebody else’s terms.” The way I heard it, which was also the way Alex meant it, was that if I assumed I did not belong, it would be a way for me to intervene in knowledge production. I could intervene assuming my own sovereignty and autonomy. Not belonging would be a way of situating myself as a critical, and not a disciplinary, agent. It was a way for me to be the alternative to the docile subject, if we think back to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish from 1975. 

Kong Pheng Pha:

I was also really struck by that in We Demand because I kept thinking about how non-belonging can be a point of reference for us to enter the academy so that we can produce scholarship that does not adhere to any one particular discipline. I am now training my own undergraduate students who want to pursue graduate school and who are questioning whether they belong. We can utilize non-belonging as a form of critical pedagogy for them to imagine a place in the academy.

Roderick Ferguson:

Right, and we can think of belonging as an economy. Part of the economy of belonging is that we crave recognition and authorization from the powers that be. And whether or not we feel we can successfully do something depends on whether or not they will provide us with that recognition and authorization. But a standpoint, if you will, of non-belonging, is that we are saying, “No, we do not need your authorization or your recognition to act and to be an agent. We can come up with this on our own, or with others who are like-minded. We do not need your authorization or license to move about in this world.”

José Manuel Santillana Blanco:

That is something that I learned from reading your work in critical university studies. It also reminds me of the work of Fred Moten. For some of us who are first-generation scholars of color, there is still an impulse to seek recognition from dominant structures of power, even though we are simultaneously critical of recognition. And for me, it was important to move away from that because it often manifests in ways that are not emotionally healthy. We self-discipline according to our desires for recognition. That is why this conversation about non-belonging, about being in and not of the institution, is so important. 

Roderick Ferguson:

Right, and we can also think about it in terms of the psychoanalytic language, as in the oedipal relation, with Oedipus being the patriarchal father whom the kids are trying to get his attention. The kids’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction is contingent on whether or not daddy will recognize them. So not belonging is a way of saying “you are not my daddy” to the institution.

José Manuel Santillana Blanco:

So, we organized a symposium in 2017 when we were graduate students at the University of Minnesota to discuss our experiences as graduate students of color in the neoliberal university. We named the symposium “Seditious Acts: Graduate Students of Color Interrogating the Neoliberal University.” Additionally, some of us, like myself, were a part of Whose Diversity? on campus. Whose Diversity? was an activist group at the University of Minnesota that demanded administrators engage more substantially with the diversity of student experiences, backgrounds, and needs at the institution. We staged protests and even got arrested on some occasions. Many of us had experienced violence that occurred in the classroom. We were being disciplined through our education in very particular ways. A big part of this special issue is naming the way institutional violence functions and the ways we can respond to them. How can our responses be used as methods to navigate the university? As a critical university studies and Black studies scholar studying student activism in higher education, what is your assessment of the state of student organizing today? How does it look similar to or different from previous decades? What roles could graduate students of color, or any students, who believe in social, political, and economic transformation play in organizing against the neoliberal university in order to democratize education?

Roderick Ferguson:

I feel very encouraged by student activism at this moment. In particular, the activism taking place among K-12 students especially around gun violence and the right to stay alive. Students are demanding the right to go to schools that have resources for their education. They want the right to vote. They want the right to love the person of the same gender. They want the right to not be killed by police. They want the right to have a gender embodiment that reflects who they are. They want the right to determine what happens with their bodies reproductively. In the context of Republican state legislatures and governors banning books and banning certain academic subjects, students are saying they want the right to read. These are very basic rights. These are basic because there is nothing extravagant about them. People are not demanding for access. They are asking for very basic entitlements. The activism that we are seeing at this moment is inspiring. For example, the school walkout protesting gun violence in Nashville, Tennessee among middle and high school students was in the thousands. The walkout was organized by folks in the K-12 school system. Organizing events happening today demanding freedom for trans youth across all fifty states are also being led by K-12 students. I feel very encouraged by that. It used to be that much of the activism was led by the college students, but now we are seeing very young kids, eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-olds, becoming informed, taking up issues, and learning how to mobilize. We must do everything we can to produce the conditions whereby people can mobilize. Additionally, pictures from the civil rights movement to the feminist movement, from the Black Panther Party to the Young Lords, reveals the array of embodiments in protests present in today’s activism. People are suggesting in myriad ways that our prodigious embodiments matter for these issues. Thus, it also makes sense as to why all the repressive state responses are attacking both people’s politics and their embodiments. The two go hand-in-hand. One of the things that young activists have said, whether we are referring to queer and trans folks, Black Lives Matter activists, people of color and Indigenous people in the environmental justice movement, or kids leading the gun control movement, is that their embodiment as people of color and as queer, trans, and non-binary folks is central to the political questions on the table.

Kong Pheng Pha:

This point reminds me of the article that you wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Fear of a Black-Studies Planet.” In the article, you argue that the banning of African American studies is an attack on a particular embodiment partly because that embodiment is often a catalyst for social action. For example, our visible bodies as students of color in the classroom also matters for the transformation of the institution. And part of what I have witnessed is that the university also hopes to tire out our bodies as student activists as a tactic for maintaining hegemonic education. That is, when our bodies are healthy, then our minds also become healthy, and we will in turn produce scholarship or teach courses that challenge traditional knowledge and heteronormative white supremacist history. In the same vein, we are witnessing state violence on bodies, including the killing of Black bodies by the police or banning people from dressing up in drag as ways to prevent people from using their embodied experiences for collective action. You yourself was one of the authors who was being banned, along with scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Davis, and bell hooks, partly because you all consciously show through your scholarship and activism that embodiment is central to social transformation. 

Roderick Ferguson:

Right, the attack on embodiment is also meant to erase the collective action and the creativity of the person. Their aesthetics of existence are erased when the person is erased.

Kong Pheng Pha:

That also reminds me about the banning of critical race theory. In the case of Florida, specifically with the banning of an AP African American history course, Governor Ron DeSantis stated that a lesson on queer theory was the most egregious part of the whole African American history curriculum. He questioned whether and why black history needed queer theory. In a way, I see this pivoting from attacking African American studies to shifting the focus on the evils of queer studies as a way to divide minoritized communities and destroy intersectional solidarities. It reminds me of one argument that you make in your book One-dimensional Queer which reveals how social movements have been de-intersectionalized to become one-dimensional. Thus, the state de-intersectionalizes social movements as a way to actually commit intersectional violence on multiply marginalized and minoritized populations. I am wondering what you think about this strategy that Governor DeSantis is deploying? How is this positioning, or repositioning, of African American studies and queer studies crucial to understanding contemporary politics, particularly the ways the state has responded to our endeavors to enact intersectional solidarities?

Roderick Ferguson:

It is interesting because there is a video of the conservative, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter making an anti-intersectional argument for Black people. She stated that we need to support the Black position, but also that the Black position has nothing to do with women or queer and trans folks. In other words, the strategy of de-intersectionalizing issues becomes a way to foment a nationalist separatism, which is already there, in Black people’s neighborhoods. It is a way to subtly and unsubtly denigrate feminist, queer, and trans histories that are constitutive of Black struggles. It becomes a way of appearing to affirm Blackness by promoting an anti-intersectional and anti-relational argument that encourages homophobia, patriarchy, and transphobia within and outside those communities. The right is mobilizing an anti-intersectional and anti-relational argument to produce and foment divisions among many communities of color, not just Black communities. For example, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee has passed legislation to outlaw the “Latinx” category as a tactic to erase non-binary and genderqueer Latinx people. It is also a way of encouraging and mobilizing conservatism among Latinx communities for the purposes of the right.

Kong Pheng Pha:

 In a way, even if these policies do not pass, there seems to be a constant inundating of anti-intersectionality and anti-relationality that even if they are not cemented in policy, actually reinforces strong conservative ideologies. So, the rhetoric normalizes these narratives. It is accomplishing the goal of mobilizing conservatism despite the fact that some of these ridiculous policies might not pass. Or, perhaps they might actually pass?

José Manuel Santillana Blanco:

Right, and back in 2010, there was Arizona’s SB 1070 that was passed to prohibit Mexican American studies. The language with SB 1070 was that it promoted the overthrow of the U.S. government and promoted resentment toward race and class, particularly white people. Fast forward to Florida. Similar rhetoric exists with regards to critical race theory, including shielding our children from these fields of study and distorting history by demonizing African American studies. Can you talk a little bit more about the language that these states have used to push through these bills, especially contextualizing the discourse of “protecting the children” or the language of “overthrowing the government”?

Roderick Ferguson:

There are several genealogies here. The anti-communist discourse of the McCarthy period meant that the government could go after people on the grounds that they were advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. That rhetoric is evident in former President Donald Trump’s speech, indicating that he was going to bar communists and Marxists from entering the country. “Communists” and “Marxists,” we can argue, are racialized and minoritized categories. The “communists” and the “Marxists” who are regarded as the potential overthrowers of the government are the queers and trans people of color, and their intellectual and cultural productions. For example, drag queen story hour becomes a boogie man that is contaminating young people and Western and American civilization. That is one genealogy. There is also the homophobic discourse that the queers will corrupt, deflower, and indoctrinate our children. The queers are going to recruit innocent children to become a part of the gay lifestyle. Lastly, an anti-feminist discourse around reproduction is also present in this rhetoric. Feminism is seen as destroying the traditional family. Thus, when someone decides what to do with their own body, that act is imagined as civilizational destruction. So, there are several genealogies at play here to de-intersectionalize social movements, ban ethnic studies, and delegitimize queer and trans knowledges and embodiments. 

José Manuel Santillana Blanco:

Thinking about these issues through multiple genealogies is very helpful. It also reveals to me that even though the state is targeting Mexican American studies or African American studies, they are also simultaneously targeting queer studies, including banning the works of Gloria Anzaldúa.

Kong Pheng Pha:

So, we recently established a Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in 2022 at a comprehensive regional Wisconsin university that I used to teach at. This occurred at a moment when legislators in the state of Wisconsin are also seeking to ban critical race theory and defund the University of Wisconsin System. I am wondering what you make of this moment? What are some strategies that we can use to create and build new critical race and ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies, and African American studies programs and departments? Are universities still building them and investing in them today? How are we to survive in this moment as scholars?

Roderick Ferguson:

I believe that banning critical race theory is a moment of confirmation for progressive forces. Some might ask “Why do you say that when this is a moment in which progressive forces are under assault?” But, let us ponder about it for a moment. When does the law come in to prohibit speech and literature? The state uses the law to prohibit creativity when they have actually lost control of the ideological advance. They use the law when they realize that they have no resort other than repression. This is confirmation that the work occurring in the academy, in fields such as Black studies, queer studies, trans studies, ethnic studies, Asian American studies, Chicano studies, disability studies, Indigenous studies, and gender and women’s studies, have reached vast audiences. In many ways, we can view the banning of critical race theory and repression as the desperate response of a state who has lost the ideological war. That is important to keep in mind. What does this all mean? It means that we need to advance the ideological work and cultural productions. Regarding whether or not universities are still producing these interdisciplinary programs and departments, it depends on which universities we are talking about. It is always going to vary from case to case and place to place. In general, interdisciplinary units are less funded than their disciplinary counterparts. At the same time, interest from the students in interdisciplinary units are also oftentimes greater than interest in the disciplinary units. Thus, we see reduced funding on the one hand, but overwhelming ideological support and interest on the other. Now, why is that? Because the questions that live in the interdisciplinary units are the questions of the day. For example, how do we establish connections between environmental devastation, race, and legacies of colonialism? We see this happening with the #NoDAPL movement. Greta Thunberg has also made these connections as well. Few people assume a one-dimensional world anymore. Most young people today assume a multi-dimensional world. The departments and programs that have developed a critical language to explain the multi-dimensional world that we currently inhibit are the interdisciplinary units.

Kong Pheng Pha:

That really does provide some hope because that is our goal in building this interdisciplinary department. Our goal is to facilitate a multi-dimensional approach to studying social problems, which our students really love. 

Roderick Ferguson:

They are craving it. They want it. There is a reason why Governors DeSantis, Abbot, Youngkin, and other Republican leaders are going after teaching and reading. They are fearful of what young people have done and are doing in terms of their thinking and activism around all these issues, especially when young people are addressing all of these issues simultaneously.

José Manuel Santillana Blanco:

Returning to We Demand and the soft rules that you wrote about in the conclusion, with all the student activism happening today, what is one other rule you would add to those existing rules if you could?

Roderick Ferguson:

I would say our primary intervention lies in social relations. Building social relations with everyday people is extremely important today. There is a way in which one can become beguiled by the idea that our activism and our interventions can only be legitimated by garnering the attention of wealthy celebrities or powerful people. We are tricked to think that our primary work is to court donors, appear on the mainstream networks, or publish an op-ed in this or that newspaper or magazine. This is not to say that those things are not important, but the most important thing is to build relationships with everyday folks. One of the reasons that the right has been successful in their mobilizations is that they are doing what progressives used to do. That is, they are building, meeting with, and talking to everyday people. Many progressives have lost sight of this strategy. Our power lies in the mobilization of everyday folks because that is where the numbers are. If I could add another rule to We Demand, it would be that our primary intervention lies in producing and impacting social relations. Having a media appearance is not building social relations. It does something, but it does not necessarily do that. Building social relations means developing a relationship with students over ten to fifteen weeks in a classroom. It means showing up in a community over and over again. It means getting to know this or that person or organization over a long period of time. It means talking to people about what is happening in the world and strategizing about what can be done. For example, we can think back to Mississippi Freedom Summer of the 1960s. That project was not about media appearances. It was about Black and white progressive young people going to Mississippi and building relationships with Black communities in that state. Volunteers implemented courses that were never seen in Mississippi schools before, such as a Black history course. They taught people how to be journalists and how to start newspapers. The young and the old learned to read together. They registered people to vote, taught people the importance of voting, and the values of civil disobedience. That is building and impacting social relations. That is the part that we have got to get back to.

Kong Pheng Pha:

Thank you so much for providing us with a rich history of your journey to critical university studies, and for affording us insight into student activism today. It is crucial that we highlight the links between the emergence of the interdisciplines, the increasing state repression of critical race and ethnic studies and radical social movements at large, and the youth-led resistance to that repression. As former graduate students of color who have become faculty members in the neoliberal university, we intend to improve relationship building with our students to transform our unbelonging into forms of resistance and community. With gratitude!