No Study Without Struggle
Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Publisher Description
Examines how student protest against structural inequalities on campus pushes academic institutions to reckon with their legacy built on slavery and stolen Indigenous lands
Using campus social justice movements as an entry point, Leigh Patel shows how the struggles in higher education often directly challenged the tension between narratives of education as a pathway to improvement and the structural reality of settler colonialism that creates and protects wealth for a select few. Through original research and interviews with activists and organizers from Black Lives Matter, The Black Panther party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Combahee River Collective, and the Young Lords, Patel argues that the struggle on campuses reflect a starting point for higher education to confront settler strategies. She reveals how blurring the histories of slavery and Indigenous removal only traps us in history and perpetuates race, class, and gender inequalities. By acknowledging and challenging settler colonialism, Patel outlines the importance of understanding the relationship between the struggle and study and how this understanding is vital for societal improvement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of Pittsburgh education professor Patel (Youth Held at the Border) alleges in this impassioned if uneven polemic that U.S. colleges and universities have played a key role in maintaining the nation's "colonialist structure." Patel details how Eurocentric curricula leave Black and Indigenous students feeling as if "their histories don't count," and castigates universities for focusing on the "optics of diversity" (such as featuring minority students and faculty in marketing materials) rather than responding to student protests with real structural change. Highlighting the "intertwined nature of study and struggle" for marginalized groups, Patel discusses organizing strategies with civil rights activists including Ruby Sales, but her analysis of how contemporary student protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, or calling for the removal of Confederate monuments, can be informed by the tradition of "fugitive learning" among Black Americans is less clear. Though her call for decolonizing the classroom is timely, and her admiring portraits of activist scholars provide useful points of reference, Patel offers few solid guidelines for how teachers, students, and administrators can begin to do "the hard and largely unprecedented work of dismantling racism." Readers will appreciate the expert diagnosis but wish for a clearer prescription.
