Community Fault-lines: Teaching and Learning about Power, Institutions, and Change

In July 2016, to capture a snapshot of the scope of justice-centered teaching and learning at colleges and universities, and to build shared analysis, Therese Quinn and Erica R. Meiners spoke with four organizers about their participation in movements on their public university campuses:¹

• • Karma Chavez, who, after leaving a position teaching rhetoric at University of Wisconsin–Madison, started as an associate professor in Mexican American and Latino Studies at the University of Texas in fall 2016.

• • Julia Gutierrez, a third-year doctoral student in Feminist Studies at Arizona State University, which has four campuses in the Phoenix/Tempe area.

• • Charles Preston, an undergraduate in African American Studies at Chicago State University, a historically Black institution of higher education.

• • Craig Willse, an assistant professor in the Cultural Studies program at George Mason University in Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC.

At this political moment, like many others before, campuses across the United States and beyond are rising up. From Mizzou (University of Missouri), Eastern Michigan University, and East Tennessee State, to West Point and the universities of Puerto Rico, campus mobilizations mirror struggles in our streets and offer insights into the ways communities coalesce, identify their contours, debate, and dissent.

While these movements are often constructed as outside of “real” classroom learning, and sometimes even as “disruptive” and distractions to the actual work of higher education, we argue that these mobilizations are sites of generative and transformative learning and teaching for campus participants—faculty, staff, and students—and, increasingly, for those outside the university. And these uprisings often illuminate key tensions and fault-lines in the prevailing narratives about community that circulate on campuses and beyond.

The on-the-ground manifestations of these mobilizations and their affiliated social movements, sometimes chronicled in newspapers, tweets, and blogs, are often ephemeral. Archived, but rarely analyzed as moments of critical learning about how futures are imagined and made possible, these records can offer useful, powerful insights. We know that the struggles are both of the moment and that they unfold over years, heightening the importance of documentation. With that context, we offer this conversation.

We invited these participants from diverse and geographically dispersed public schools to grapple with the same questions. The group is not meant to represent the wide range of US campus mobilizations or all the constituencies activated in their struggles. Our framing questions included:

• • What are the struggles in your campus community?

• • What tactics are you engaging?

• • How has the institution responded?

• • What coalitions or connections have emerged as useful?

• • What practices of community emerge from these mobilizations? Why? What is at stake?

• • What hasn’t worked? What goals (and histories) shape your work?

These questions come from our own struggles at our worksites. As faculty members at public universities, we have experienced how our institutions continue to “restructure,” reflecting global trends in higher education, including austerity budgeting, precarious employment, erosions to organized labor, and more. The punitive costs of this endless restructuring are borne by those most marginal, or those who occupy and produce what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have called the “undercommons” of the university:

Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers. And what will the university say of them? It will say they are unprofessional.

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In the fault-lines, often marked and plumbed by those who, in Harney and Moten’s view, have exceeded and escaped professionalism, struggles over power and knowledge emerge, distinctions between university and community are problematized, and, sometimes, possibilities for coalition and action are sparked.

In our contexts, every semester, if not every week, we participate in and/or learn about small and large uprisings connected to “community” on campus. For example, on one campus, graduate employees who have organized for decades finally get their first contract, while on another campus, faculty refuse to support...