Note from the Editors

"Activism in the 'Woke' Academy: Scholars Review the Last Half-Century"

1968. The year evokes a range of significant historical events. Across the country, marches, sit-ins, and teach-ins were staged about the Vietnam War, the free speech movement, the Black Panther Party, indigenous sovereignty, women's rights, gay rights, migrant workers' rights, and immigration. The spring would witness the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee before a march for workers' rights. That summer would witness the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, California cutting off his campaign to win the Democratic nomination for president. In May, Parisian university students staged a revolt that would come to be known as "Bloody Monday" and spark further protests all across the country. Czechoslovakian revolt against Communist rule led to the "Prague Spring" but would be ended that August by the Soviet Union's invasion. Student-led protests in Mexico City that fall would be violently put down by local police and the military. Also that October, nearly three dozen African nations—newly unleashed from their colonial shackles—would boycott the Summer Olympics in Mexico City over the participation of South Africa, which was under militant apartheid rule. Those Olympics would also see Black U.S. athletes and college students, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raise the Black power salute on the Olympics medal stage during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner.

In the fifty years since, our nation and world continue to roil with conflicts over many of the same issues: the role and right of free speech on campus and in the public discourse; militarism and its effects both nationally and abroad; immigration crises wrought by neocolonial and imperialist policies; and, the responsibility of governments for the public welfare of their citizens. Additionally, in the last half-century, doubts about the effectiveness of civil disobedience and generational conflicts have continued to divide movements whose goals seem otherwise compatible. What has higher education learned in the last fifty years? In what ways have college and university administrators, faculty, and students responded to the contemporary iterations of these conflicts and challenges noted above? Most importantly, what can higher education scholars offer to the current conversation as we reach back to our history to learn about the present and inform the future?

As editors of this special issue we assert that higher education researchers can and should have a central role in these discussions by reflecting on the past, examining present-day contexts, and contributing interpretations and analyses that are not only critical, but also seek to intentionally disrupt "master" narratives and frameworks that have heretofore held sway in higher education scholarship (Patton, 2016). From this posture, we aspire to see the academy as "woke" to the demands—cultural, economic, and structural—of this current moment and issue a challenge to others to join and embrace this call.

This special issue is an effort to respond to the ASHE 2018 Conference Theme: Envisioning the Woke Academy. The theme was situated in ideas that prompt the envisioning and revisioning of processes that challenge, critique, and move higher education forward, several of which are pertinent to this special issue. The Woke Academy is activist, situates history as a process of remembering, is critically conscious, and acknowledges the importance of representation that is intersectional and transdisciplinary. In this special issue, each featured manuscript in some way touches upon the aforementioned ideas.

Wheatle and Commodore present a historiography of collegiate activism and students' influence on policy at the institutional, state, and federal levels. Linder et al. explore the emotional labor minoritized students experience as a result of their involvement in activist movements. Using the Ferguson uprising as a launch point, Dache studies the emergent possibilities of resistance when student activists and community activists work in solidarity to conjure a Black radical imagination. In their scholarly article, Davis et al. offer interpretive criteria for scholarship in higher education, lending focused attention to interpreting, evaluating, and producing activist research. Squire et al.'s queer phenomenological study reminds...