Critical Relational Solidarity: Collectivist and Transformative Knowledge Practices in and beyond the US Academy

What is the potential for higher education projects to develop among diverse students, faculty, and community colleagues, projects and practices of becoming-together, across lines of difference, toward collective world-making? This article offers a framework for thinking about such practices in terms of critical relational solidarity and discusses one programmatic effort to enact and sustain them. The UMass Alliance for Community Transformation (UACT) involves classroom, organizational, and community-engaged knowledge practices. UACT's practices constitute a set of ongoing experiments, engaging students' precarious lives and individualized selves with robust community organizing resources to develop distinctly collectivist ways of becoming.