Summer Institute
POLITICAL EDUCATION AND LIBERATORY KNOWLEDGE
The Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) at UC Santa Cruz will host its inaugural Summer Institute, “Political Education and Liberatory Knowledge,” from August 10-12, 2022.
Reflecting CRJ’s core commitment to political education–namely, study aimed at fostering not just learning but, more critically, collective liberation–the CRJ Summer Institute brings together community-based activists and organizers, ethnic studies practitioners, and students in a three-day thematically organized series of presentations, workshops, and reading seminars around the role of political education in racial justice struggles, past and present.
By centering political education within the space of the university, the CRJ Summer Institute foregrounds modes of liberatory study developed in settings outside formal sites of education, such as activist groups, racial justice organizations, and worker collectives. In so doing, the CRJ Summer Institute aims to raise consciousness about, and develop critical approaches to, inequality and exploitation from the perspectives of those who have organized in the service of a more just world. By highlighting the linkages between racism and imperialism, the CRJ Summer Institute aims to foster a critical space of study from which solidarity can be imagined and enacted.
Each day of the CRJ Summer Institute features 2-4 hours of teaching sessions, shared dialogue, and workshops framed by a particular political educational approach to racial justice.
Practicing Solidarity Against Anti-Blackness in an Age of Reproduced Illusions
Wednesday, AUGUST 10, 2022 | 10am - 12pm
This session will explore community-based responses to harm, and the ways dominant ideologies and counter-hegemonic memory work can impact these efforts. This day will feature Yusef Omowale, staff at the Southern California Library, a community library and archive located in south central L.A. Participants will engage with case studies of real-world events to analyze practices of solidarity against anti-Blackness, as well as other forms of collective resistance to state violence.
Revisiting the Writings and Legacy of Harry Chang, A Forgotten Theoretician of Race
thursday, AUGUST 11, 2022 | 10am - 3pm
The second day will be organized around the writings and legacies of Harry Chang, whose theorizations of race shaped critical race theory, critical race studies, and anti-imperialist community-based organizing, including the Venceremos Brigade. The speakers are community organizers and scholars who took part in Harry Chang’s workshops and political education study groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Reverberations of Unending War: Enacting Anti-Imperialist Solidarity in the Korean Diaspora
friday, AUGUST 12, 2022 | 10am - 3pm
The last day of the CRJ Summer Institute foregrounds political education as an anti-imperialist tool against permanent war through a focus on the online, open-access Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective syllabus and a discussion among antiwar activists and scholars about the role of critical study in addressing the reverberations of the Korean War, a devastating war of imperial U.S. intervention that has yet to come to an end.
