In Protest: Black, Brown, and Im/migrant Resistance and Enlivening Strategies Within U.S. Higher Education

Abstract

During the 2016 elections and the Trump administration, the fight against interlocking systems of oppression —from white supremacy, to transphobia, misogyny, and xenophobia— occupied dominant and minoritized cultural imaginaries, on the news, in fictional representations, on social media. As some outlets even denied the existence of these violences, many who organized to oppose them grew fatigued in the context of the relentlessly toxic culture the right worked to create. However, only LGBTQ2SAI+ Black, Indigenous, brown, and migrant activists of color knew what it meant to organize non-stop, out of genuine fear that they might face extermination. This autoethnographic dissertation, “In Protest: Black, Brown, and Im/Migrant Resistance and Enlivening Strategies within U.S. Higher Education,” attends to what it ‘feels’ like to practice social justice organizing when it is not just a choice, but a tactic of survival. Bridging Black and Indigenous feminisms, ethnomusicological scholarship, performance, and disability studies, the project analyzes student-activism within institutions of higher education between 2016 and 2018, taking Indiana University-Bloomington as its primary case study. Using Black feminists’ oral histories, published op-eds, and discourse analysis, it considers the U.S. academy’s role in creating and circulating discourses that manage gendered, racialized, and pathologized bodies, and sustain transnational economic networks. It demonstrates how academia controls and retaliates against people who resist the violences that management requires. It argues that, nowadays, evidence of control often takes the form of burnout, which in turn incapacitates student-activists, lessening their ability to resist oppression. Ultimately, its analysis concludes that activist efforts from within universities to decolonize knowledge production and interrupt their dominant culture can and do challenge institutionalized State violence. Most importantly, the project insists that listening to Black feminist thought helps us decode and amplify enlivening strategies that facilitate minoritized folk’s healing from the violence and traumas they endure.