Black Student Organizing on Indigenous Lands

Between Fall 2020 and Winter 2021, I conducted 30 interviews and 3 focus groups with Black student organizers at post-secondary institutions in Canada and the United States about their relationships to place and land, and how this shapes their organizing work. In the first section of this dissertation (chapters 3 and 4), I outline Black students’ theorizations of their post-secondary institutions and the unique challenges that emerge from organizing within and against universities. I theorize the contemporary university through the social relations and logics onset by settler colonialism and slavery and trace the breadth of contributions made by Black student organizing. In the second section (chapters 5 and 6), I illustrate rich and complicated relationships to place and land that my participants described using their chosen photographs, and I outline broad principles for land-centered Black student organizing that emerge from a collaborative concept map. Taken together, in this dissertation I elaborate upon the robustness of Black student organizing, the limitations and frustrations of organizing within and against universities, and the rich theorizations of land Black students embed into their organizing. By bringing land and place to the fore of my study, I de-center the university as the sole focus of Black student activism. Black students have organized in ways that demonstrate they are not invested in fixing the university or seeking repair through institutional solutions (Harney and Moten, 2013; Purnell, 2016; Kelley, 2016). For such Black organizers, their ambivalence towards the university as a site of social transformation does not discount harm-reduction or intermediary solutions to support Black students. However, they believe in a longer, liberatory project that transcends universities. I offer ‘land-centered’ to resist this implicit assumption and to highlight Black students’ abolitionist and decolonial desires. Thinking about their organizing as land-centered, rather than university-centered, honours the expansiveness of Black student organizing.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.