Summer 2024
AGITATE! Special Volume: Seditious Acts
Introduction
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.
Editorial by the AGITATE! Editorial Collective reflects on the journey of co-creating this volume with CRES.
Artwork and Artist's Statement
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.
Joy Mazahreh writes about what it mean to be Palestinian and Brown, and bear witness to the death and devastation of her homeland.
Translations of three poems by acclaimed Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz written in solidarity with Palestine.
Section One: Infractions
[Keywords: Erasure, (In)visibility & Embodiment]
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.
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.
This essay proposes alternate frameworks for engaging in sedition in the neoliberal university.
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.
Section Two: Transgressions
[Keywords: Subjectivities, Narratives, Racialization, Neoliberalism & Epistemology]
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.
This essay proposes transitional pedagogy as a methodology for scholars of color in neoliberal academia.
This piece offers a series of joined meditations on violences of the neoliberal university through conceptions of object-being, romance, imagination, and newness.
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.
Section Three: Insurgencies
[Keywords: Praxis, Defiance, Resistance & Decolonization]
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.
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.
This essay rejects the notion that for negatively-racialized students learning, laboring, and living in the anti-ebony tower is a privilege.
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.