Summer Institute 2022: Political Education and Liberatory Knowledge

The Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) at UC Santa Cruz hosts 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 2022 CRJ Summer Institute features 2-4 hours of teaching sessions, shared dialogue, and workshops framed by a particular political educational approach to racial justice.