About the Abolition & the University Teach-in Series
The unprecedented protests and grassroots organizing against anti-Black police and white vigilante violence has generated demands to end systemic racism endemic across US political, economic, legal, cultural and educational institutions. This series aims to expand an understanding of abolition and its ongoing practices and potential to radically transform college campuses and universities as sites of struggle. This three-part teach-in series aims to support, deepen and proliferate abolitionist organizing on post-secondary educational campuses. While we don’t have all the answers, we call on students, faculty, staff and organizers who are engaging abolition at the site of the university and beyond to join us in this discussion.
CO-SPONSORED BY SCHOLARS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE, AMERICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION, RIVERSIDE FACULTY ASSOCIATION AND THE UCFTP COLLECTIVE
We will have simultaneous ASL/captioning and the sessions will be recorded and captions fixed and uploaded to the ASA Freedom Course YouTube Channel
Campus after Cops: Building Abolitionist Communities
October 29: 1-2:30pm (PST) | 3-4:30pm (CST) | 4-6:00pm (EST)
Beth Richie (University of Illinois – Chicago)
Paula Rojas (Communities of Color United)
Eric Stanley (UC Berkeley)
Azadeh Zohrabi (Director of Underground Scholars)
Register: https://bit.ly/3ol5CW6
This teach-in addresses calls from campuses across the US to cut ties with local and state police, defund and abolish campus police. What must be done to create a campus that is safe for all people — especially for Black, Indigenous, undocumented and gender non-conforming people — those targeted by police harassment and terror. How can we create campuses that are free from policing, including local, state, federal, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). How do the multiple levels of administrators (from student conduct officers to Provosts and Chancellors) act as police to target, punish and harm students and faculty? How do we build and organize with communities beyond the campus to defund and dismantle policing and build abolitionist communities?
This teach in will offer examples of organizing – at the campus, local, city or regional level – to remove police from campuses. Participants will share tactics, resources and strategies developed by their networks and organizations and also offer pathways to engage restorative justice and transformative justice (TJ) practices. This panel features organizers and scholar-activists who are building abolition.
Abolitionist University: Education for Liberation?
November 12: 1-2:30pm (PST) | 3-4:30pm (CST) | 4-6:00pm (EST)
The third teach-in elaborates our collective vision of an abolitionist university. In a settler-colonial society, how can we establish an abolitionist university and how would its purpose be radically different from how the neoliberal university functions to reproduce a carceral society, racial capitalism and US imperial hegemony? How can we take collective action to transform the university into a gathering place for decolonization and collective liberation?
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Check out:
- UC Cops off Campus:
@ucftp (Twitter)
uc_ftp ( Instagram)
& on Facebook! - The Riverside Faculty Association statement on policing
- The Blackness Unbound (BU) statement
October 1, 2020 ~ Day of Action/Strike/Teach-in for Police Abolition
Faculty, instructors, students and staff, please consider striking and joining these teach-ins in solidarity with the larger statewide call to take action to protest anti-Black police violence.
PAST WEBINARS
Organized by the Abolitionist Educators Network of Critical Resistance and UC Riverside Cops off Campus!
Anti-Blackness, the University and Policing
October 1, 2020
1-2:30pm (PST) | 3-4:30pm (CST) | 4-6:00pm (EST)
Moderator: Dylan Rodriguez (UC Riverside)
Lester Spence (Johns Hopkins University)
Cathy Cohen (University of Chicago)
João Costa Vargas (UC Riverside)
Savannah Shange (UC Santa Cruz)
This first teach-in addresses how the university has historically functioned to reproduce and sanction anti-Blackness and policing. This panel of scholar-activists discusses how anti-Blackness has been foundational to the structure, organization and policies of the university and has operated to police bodies, disciplines, knowledges, movements and activism, often under the cover of rhetorics that promote liberal multicultural inclusion and diversity.