Oct 1: Teach-In on Antiblackness, the University and Policing

Oct 1: Teach-In on Antiblackness, the University and Policing

by Emily Hue Events

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 antiblack police violence.

ABOLITION & THE UNIVERSITY: TEACH-IN SERIES
~ organized by the Abolitionist Educators Network of Critical Resistance

Antiblackness, 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 antiblackness and policing. This panel of scholar-activists discusses how antiblackness 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.

Eventbrite: ucrcopsoffcampus.eventbrite.com

About the Abolition & the University Teach-in Series 
The unprecedented protests and grassroots organizing against antiblack 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.

Campus after Cops: Building Abolitionist Communities
–October 15: 1-2:30pm (PST) | 3-4:30pm (CST)  | 4-6:00pm (EST)

The second teach-in addresses what we mean by genuine campus safety for all and why we demand cops off campus. Participants will elaborate how we can implement and build models of security and care that meet the basic needs of our communities and educate and organize to prevent harm and violence before it happens. This webinar will introduce transformative justice (TJ) practices and how we can invest the resources of the university to begin to repair past harms and build learning communities that hold people accountable rather than punish, penalize and disavow the root problems inherent to the hierarchical and colonial culture of the university.

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?

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
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Ethnic Studies Statement in Solidarity with the UCR Student Demands to Administration Call to Action

Ethnic Studies Statement in Solidarity with the UCR Student Demands to Administration Call to Action

by Emily Hue Announcements

Ethnic Studies, as a field and as a department, was born of struggles against racial violence, settler colonialism and imperialism. It was only institutionalized because of Third-World student-led organizing efforts to hold universities accountable for their histories of exclusion, discrimination, neglect and intellectual erasure. Drawing on generations of radical thinkers, we are committed to centering racial justice in our teaching, research and community engagement. We stand in solidarity with UCR Demands to Administration-Call to Action as well as the international Movement for Black Lives. While the current crisis exposes the violent realities of systemic anti-Black racism in the United States, we recognize that institutions of higher learning have reproduced and legitimized laws, policies and practices of anti-Blackness in society.

We therefore call on UCR administration to not only address the Demands’ specific concerns regarding the current crisis, but also critically confront anti-Black racism in institutional policies, programs, practices, and all aspects of university life. The UCR Ethnic Studies Department has expanded its community engagement focus and is actively working to support existing and new-found grassroots organizations that seek to end anti-Black racism and racist systems of policing, criminalization, and detention. We call on the UCR administration to institute substantive policy changes coupled with sustainable commitments to academic resources to proactively combat systemic racism and support ongoing struggles for a better future for all peoples. This would include defunding UCPD and establishing community-led safety programs.

The Ethnic Studies Department welcomes continued engagement with the student organizations that have created the UCR Demands to Administration in order to build strong collaborative relationships towards eradicating anti-Blackness within our department, university, communities, and in the world, as we amplify Black voices and Black scholarship in all programming. We call on the UCR administration to affirmatively commit greater institutional resources and funds toward these efforts under the guidance of Black students, staff, faculty, and community members. We further call on the UCR administration to adequately fund and support Black Studies by dramatically increasing the number of Ethnic Studies hires in Black Studies with the goal of educating our students and producing knowledge for the world to contribute towards the eradication of anti-Black racism.

*Photo from homepage is a “Black Lives Matter” mural in Palo Alto, CA. Courtesy Benny Villarreal Photography.