Critical University Studies and Academic Abolitionism

Dennis Childs
Literature
UC San Diego

June Yuen Ting
Literature
UC San Diego

“Critical University Studies and Academic Abolitionism” explores critical practices and knowledges that query and unsettle the university’s historical conditions of emergence and operation in racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and, in doing so, risk the institution itself. How do the material ways in which academic knowledge and the university are reproduced re-inscribe the social production of “group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death,” as Ruth Gilmore defines racism? How do the university’s historical ties to chattel slavery and native land dispossession, as Craig Steven Wilder has shown, continue to haunt contemporary discourses that seek to reform or reclaim the institution from privatization, corporatization, neoliberalism, and/or racism? To reckon with a politics of abolitionism while heeding Saidiya Hartman’s insistence in the context of slavery on abolition’s “nonevent,” its ambiguity and elusiveness, we ask: what system or practice is to be put to an end? What would those “ends” look like, and how to work toward them?