Part front matter for Part II Up Against the Ivy to Decolonize Our Minds

In order to wipe out illiteracy among great masses … the education movement should be a mass movement. We should stand close to the masses, discuss with them, apply forms and methods suitable to their life, and rely upon them to promote the movement …. While teaching others, the teachers also learned for themselves.

—Ho Chi Minh, Conference on Mass Education in Vietnam, 1956

Ideally, education should give people knowledge about the world in which they live: how the world shapes them and how they shape the world. Education should transmit a culture that inculcates in the people a consciousness that man through his labour power is the creator of his social environment and that in the same way that man acts on nature and changes it, he can also act on his social environment and change it and in the process change himself …. Education should give people the confidence that they can in fact create a new heaven on this earth.

—Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Education for a National Culture, 1983

We are living in a political age where everything is based on exchange—solidarity is somehow supposed to be like a market economy. What it means to be a revolutionary is to fight for those who may not fight for you. It’s about learning to fight for others. And I know that’s a hard thing to do in this age of pessimism, but we have a long history of fighting for others—even people we’ve never seen before. If we could learn to do that, then we could actually learn to love.

—Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 2022

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it—that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!

—Mario Savio, Speech at UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement Sit-In, 1964

Corey Dolgon

The last two decades of rising anticolonial critique not only produced by professional scholars but also focused on the institutions that employ them in higher education has gained ascendancy in scholarly and pedagogical communities. While anticolonial and imperial activists have long recognized how Western colleges and universities spread an exploitative and oppressive conception of knowledge and science, the increasing recognition of how entrenched US institutions have been in the process and practice of slavery, genocide, and so forth, is a more recent affair. Still, dozens of universities have now conducted research on their own institutional histories linked to slave labor and land theft (McPherson 2023; Fuentes and White 2016; Beckert and Stevens 2011; Allen et al. 2006). Craig Wilder’s (2013) research made the complexity and depth of America’s elite universities’ complicity with and commitment to slavery and genocide crystal clear.

The founding, financing, and development of higher education in the colonies were thoroughly intertwined with the economic and social forces that transformed West and Central Africa through the slave trade and devastated indigenous nations in the Americas. The academy was a beneficiary and defender of these processes. College graduates had exploited these links for centuries. They apprenticed under the slave traders of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and Europe. They migrated to the South and to the West Indies for careers as teachers, ministers, lawyers, doctors, politicians, merchants, and planters. The end of the slave trade and the decline of slavery in the North did not break these ties. The antebellum South represented a field of opportunity, where the wealth of the cotton planters was funding the expansion of the educational infrastructure.

Not only were college buildings and campuses erected and maintained by slave labor and on stolen land; not only did their operating expenses and endowments emanate from slave-based economies North and South; not only did elite knowledge production fuel colonial slavery and imperial exploitation at home and abroad but also elite cultural production reinforced the racist ideology necessary to legitimize and reproduce systems of oppression. Wilder explains that Harvard students were armed “with theories of racial difference and scientific claims about the superiority of white people. The academy refined these ideas and popularized the language of race, providing intellectual cover for the social and political subjugation of nonwhite peoples.” According to Harvard faculty, “in physical development, cultural accomplishment, and intellectual potential, black people sat at the bottom of humanity” and this perspective came with scientific certainty.

Scholars will undoubtedly continue to delve into the history and contours of colonial and imperial oppression, and such work will undoubtedly inform current understandings and future policies as people consider what “decolonization” might mean. While other parts of the book focus specifically on education and pedagogy, we are more interested here in the kinds of praxis-oriented engaged, applied, and activist efforts (the programs, projects, and approaches) radical scholars and activists are creating to carry out this work. Rost-Banik and Mitchell frame two cutting-edge community engagement projects (one with California domestic workers and one with hotel laborers in Hawai‘i) with the complicated web of national historical and sociopolitical forces that challenge educators, students, and community partners to untangle the complicated and interlocking threads of civic engagement projects. Using Tuck and Yang’s (2012) conception of an “ethic of incommensurabilities” (p. 28), Rost-Banik and Mitchell argue that “the aporetic and interconnected web of social, political, and environmental conditions” inevitably frame collective struggles to “resist immigrant and worker exploitation.” Despite colleges’ settler colonial histories and the structural and ideological persistence of such hegemony, the authors conclude that university-community projects can provide a “crucial space for revealing and wrestling with the contradictory aims of social justice and decolonization.” When such projects are done collaboratively and are sensitive to historical and institutional politics, they possess the

possibilities for building different material realities, wherein all people are provided the basic necessities for survival (e.g., food, clean water, shelter, and healthcare) regardless of how their work and their very being is positioned in the world. They also present possibilities for creating different social relations, ones wherein being, knowing, and learning are not based on property or hierarchy but rather on mutual interdependence between people and the planet.

To promote civic engagement, hundreds of colleges and universities have created centers for such pedagogical practices. Following Rost-Banik and Mitchell’s critique, the majority of these formations provide a transactional partnership at best, where the elite, expert knowledge and institutional power of higher education is actually reinforced, not significantly challenged—let alone dismantled (Kliewer 2013; Raddon and Harrison 2015; Stoecker 2016; Dolgon 2018). But Carrie Hutnick and her colleagues claim another type of work can be carried out by decentering academic institutions and placing a focus on relationship building. They explain:

This practice challenges the ways those that represent, enforce, or uphold systems and institutions seek to constrain those relationships by valuing people and the knowledge they produce based on categories of identity they belong to and credentials they hold. Centering relationships comes with a shared process of decentering any one identity, social location, or form of knowledge as a singular way to define who we are or what we do. While we acknowledge the possibilities held within each of our identities, experiences, and varied forms of knowledge to enhance our work together, we resist systems and norms that determine the value of individuals based on limited interpretations of their identities and knowledge.

Echoing Robin D. G. Kelley’s comment about the role of love in struggle, Hutnick’s colleague, Vern Robinson, suggests that social change represents an “evolution of ourselves and our communities.” He concludes, “We have to know what makes it harder for each of us to redeem our full humanity through compassion, interrogation, listening, and deserving love …. Staying in relationship—for accountability, transparency, requires resources and support—giving, receiving, supporting and learning—commitment to each other, the commitment to care, is how we make it sustainable.”

Katz-Fishman and Jackson build on such integrated visions of emotional and political engagement, arguing that love remains central to the core of revolutionary work and what they call a “woke education.” As an antidote to the American right wing’s weaponized caricature of this term, Jackson gives us an extensive reflection on his own radical education—a combination of learning from politically engaged faculty and participating in campus-based, antiracist, and prodemocracy movements. He offers:

I believe revolutionaries are vessels of love. Although our beginnings may not be the same, our experiences may be different, our journeys interconnect. We converge at points of crisis and with revolutionary education, we emerge from it changed, woke, thirsty for love and righteousness. Through revolutionary education, collectives, and active engagement in struggles we mature as revolutionary intellectuals with a woke consciousness. I come from an intellectual lineage of revolutionary educators. This is the story of how I’ve come to understand, and be, woke.

Together, he and Katz-Fishman make a power call to “explore how our individual struggles with exploitation and oppression all converge to yield a collective reality of capitalist class domination and our subsequent working-class subjugation.” For them, wokeism represents a philosophical worldview linking social life and struggle, and inspiring the development of a critical and liberatory consciousness. The interlocking nature of critically studying and directly engaging in activities for social change “must acknowledge each other’s differences, stand in solidarity with one another’s individual struggle, recognize our collective reality of exploitation and oppression, and develop a consciousness, vision, and strategy to save humanity and the planet.”

The chapter from Jose Calderon gives us a historical overview about his own development as both an activist and educator. Long celebrated as one of the United States’ foremost scholars and practitioners of a radical civic engagement, Calderon portrays the Chicano power movements of the 1960s and 1970s as crucial for his own evolving ideas about critical consciousness and liberations struggles. After being involved in students’ struggles on campus and graduating with a degree, Calderon returned home to his working-class, immigrant neighborhood in Colorado. He writes:

I took an old garage in my parents’ backyard, painted it red with a huelga eagle, and started popular education efforts to work with young children, teaching them English. The effort was so successful that the parents organized and went to the school board to ask for bilingual education. The school board told them to go back to Mexico. In response, our young students and parents marched from Ault to Denver (the state capital) and built a movement. Some of these same parents also took up a struggle to close a local feed lot operation in the barrio. As part of the organizing, young people, their parents, and I conducted research that showed how the feedlot was improperly located inside the city limits and should be closed. This type of research was not based on publishing but on creating a better living environment for our barrio residents.

Like so many of the authors in this collection, Calderon demonstrates not only that educational work can link students and faculty with communities to develop the kind of critical consciousness that Rost-Banik and Mitchell and Katz-Fishman and Jackson propose but also that the process for such work can feature the kind of relationship-building that Hutnick et al. espouse. Calderon encapsulates his work, explaining, “By working from, and being embedded in, the everyday grassroots lives of people, knowledge produced in these struggles is not elite and exclusive, but instead forms a powerful model of ‘the people’s knowledge.’ ” Here Calderon resonates with Arribas Lozano (collectively “rewriting knowledge”) or Bialakowski and Montelongo (knowledge justice). This approach results in data and analysis that serves political struggle itself. We developed knowledge in the course of struggle as both analysis and weapon of struggle. This approach connects theory to practice through transformative collective action, not only as a way of acting in struggle but also as a collective method of creating new visions of, and experiences with, alternative systems of human relationship and human life.”

The remaining chapters of Part II move outside of the classroom and off campus into community-based work and social movements on local, regional, and international levels. Lawrence Cox provides a practical guide on the production and power of social movement learning. He reminds us that successful fights against major structures and cultures of oppression were struggles. He continues, “People had to work out for themselves how to do something that had not yet been done, see their way past the answers they had been brought up with, and work through trials and errors at the cost of police violence, executions, torture chambers, exile, damaged lives, and more, until they worked out how to do what they needed to.” Knowledge forged in the struggles of social movements provides both a theoretical and practical knowledge that helps people envision and create a better world. The analyses and strategies, the tactics and tools, do not “come from the world we are trying to overthrow …. [This] includes the challenge of working out what our questions and learning needs are …. We have to create the institutions and languages to answer those questions and meet those needs; and this is easier said than done.”

The next two chapters describe exciting, youth-based educational efforts from South Africa and Brazil. Alude Mahali and Thobeka Ntini argue that a struggling democracy in South Africa “poses great challenges, especially for youth who do not perceive much power from a civil sector that marginalizes them and discriminates against gender and sexuality identities, and whose culture of patronage, impunity and shortcuts … have led to a disinterest in participation, ineffective partnerships with civil society, and a loss of public trust in government.” The authors engaged in a popular education effort that brought the process of dialoguing to young people and gave them a way to identify and analyze their conditions and develop tools to challenge and solve them. To create such an opportunity, the authors explain, “meant creating a context-specific, accessible intervention that took into account the population group for which it was intended.” They continue:

one important element of the program addressed participants’ lack of critical engagement with media. To improve their accessibility to information and critical skills to access that information, the curriculum used multiple media: radio, television, weblogs, social media, music, poetry, social commentary, and thought leadership and documentary not only to educate but also for practice in engaging thoughtfully and reflectively with media.

The myriad voices the authors include testify to the increased participation of young people in local and national elections. But more importantly, the project enhanced the notion of everyday democracy and empowered youth to participate in the systems, practices, and culture of community governance. A representative comment from one student showed this development:

“Coming here has given me the courage to participate and talk in community meetings that are about community development. Before this, I would just attend and sit quietly. There was an event that was held in KwaMashu, it was about xenophobia, I voiced out my suggestion of getting people from Umlazi to participate at the event.”

In the Brazilian countryside, Camila Macedo Ponte also facilitated a youth research project—one that not only used participatory action research (PAR) as one method of engagement but also helped train youth to conduct PAR as part of their democratic engagement training and practice. Like Mahali and Ntini, Ponte’s work finds powerful democratic processes are possible when youth are given both tools and power to run their own popular education programs. In fact, some of the immediate and most impactful changes occurred among social movement organizations (Youth Consortium) and the activist strategies they already employed. Ponte claims such groups can be effective, but their transformative potential must welcome and encourage more popular movements—especially those driven by youth. She writes that such NGOs “need to undertake structural reforms so that they can accommodate new ways of thinking and acting, but our imagination needs to consider the power of popular movements in this transformation as well.” Ponte concludes:

Millions of young people are prepared to mobilize, but they do not always find space and visibility …. The dialogue among organizations and the bridge that the Consortium builds with institutions is still a challenge for all parties, but from now on, the visibility youth have achieved expands their power and visibility inside the NGO network and their capacity to effect change beyond the Consortium. The more critical and engaged young people are in the struggle for social justice, the greater will be the contribution of territories to the expansion of democracy and to the liberation of historically excluded peoples …. The Youth Consortium of Bahia points the way to a form of development that starts from the valorization of a way of life but mobilizes with a commitment to intergenerational coexistence and dignity.

Francisco Longa’s exemplary work from Buenos Aires wraps up this part of the Handbook in the way only a multiyear, embedded PAR project can. In this case, Longa has been living and participating in what began as an unemployed people’s movement but evolved over time to include a wide variety of social movement organizing and activity. While hundreds of thousands filled public spaces demanding greater democracy, “groups of unemployed people organized in the poorest neighborhoods to help the population with food; factory workers occupied and self-managed the factories that the bosses had abandoned in the face of the acute economic crisis. In middle-class neighborhoods, hundreds of ‘neighborhood assemblies’ emerged, where neighbors met weekly to decide on different aspects of life in their neighborhoods.” The Italian Marxist Antonio Negri, called Argentina a “laboratory of social movements.” Longa’s piece examines how the prolonged social movements not only created new knowledge for struggle as they evolved into both politically active and self-help, alternative economy groups, but eventually pursued incorporation into government structures and official positions. Longa refers to these multiple strategies, tactics, and identities as “all-terrain” movements, and suggests they form a new landscape for radical popular education. He concludes:

For those of us who are committed to a democracy in which the most disadvantaged sectors can actively participate, the “all-terrain” presence of social movements is a positive sign. This “all-terrain” participation of movements has an important effect on social justice: it widens the boundaries of democracy. Moreover, the all-terrain character of these movements broadens the subject of democratic representation: it is the poor who participate directly in politics, occupying places in the executive branch and in parliament, and taking the public voice through their own means. In this way, the Argentine experience shows how growth and learning take place in the movements, which at the same time broadens and makes democracy more vigorous, contributing to the processes of social justice.

What began as unemployed workers’ protest for greater democratic participation in economic policymaking became a place where activists and sympathizers developed self-activity that not only maintained direct action tactics but also created collective shared services and resources to buttress daily health, education, and welfare systems. New possibilities and political conditions have allowed these groups to expand their knowledge and experience. All these efforts share in this process of knowledge production and the possibility of radical political action, representing powerful models of sociology for social justice.