Conceptualizing Campus Abolition and the Movement to Resist University Expansion and Urban Renewal
04.25.2023 | 4:00 - 5:30 PM | 554 SSB
with Charles H.F. Davis III (Assistant Professor in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education; Director of the Campus Abolition Research Lab, University of Michigan).
In the wake of the ongoing state and state-sanctioned violence disproportionately impacting racially and other minoritized communities, municipalities as well as colleges and universities have begun considering the reformation of how police departments are allocated public resources, trained, and perform their everyday duties. However, and despite the demands of campus and community organizers and grassroots collectives, many have simply continued the longstanding pattern by postsecondary institutions of performative and non-performative gestures that fall short of meaningful divestment from the institution of policing. Further, despite their history of extraction and exploitation, universities have continued to refuse redistributing their resources in service of building strong communities that improve the material conditions in which made marginal people live, work, and learn.
In Conceptualizing Campus Abolition, Dr. Davis will explore how the university’s entanglement with and perpetuation of the carceral state creates the conditions that render always already vulnerable communities subject to state and state-sanctioned violence. More specifically, Dr. Davis will draw upon theories from the Black radical tradition, decolonization and settler colonialism, and ethnographic study of the Carceral University to consider the otherwise possibilities for higher education to reimagine itself as a life-affirming institution. Rather than reinforcing the notion that universities and prisons sit in opposition to one another, whereas the former is presumed to be a domain of solutions while the other is seen as a consequence of society as the domain of problems, Dr. Davis invites us to consider the ways carceral society is a product of the university’s negligence and betrayal of its promise to serve the public good.
Hosted by Critical University Studies, a CRG Research Working Group. Co-sponsored by the Chancellor’s Independent Advisory Board on Police Accountability and Community Safety (IAB), Berkeley School of Education, Center for Race & Gender, Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies, ESPM Graduate Diversity Council, and the Black Studies Collaboratory at UC Berkeley.
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