Reflecting CRJ’s core commitment to political education as a tool of collective liberation, each day of the Summer Institute features teaching sessions, conversations, and workshops aimed at reimagining ethnic studies not in state-sanctioned, top-down terms but from the perspective of local community knowledge.

Doing so is imperative in a historic juncture in which California stands to be the first state in the nation to implement ethnic studies in K-12 education. Yet this moment of transformative possibility is fraught with danger. Caving to repressive interests, the state has sought to impose ideological “guardrails” around ethnic studies, a field of study that emerged from grassroots anti-imperialist struggle. Motivated by an undemocratic agenda, anti-ethnic studies groups funded by rightwing donors have rushed to offer their own versions of “ethnic studies” curricula, while ethnic studies practitioners who have long fought for the realization of the field have found themselves in the crosshairs of deeply racist, defamatory, and harassing campaigns.

Given what is at stake, The 2024 CRJ Summer Institute seeks to clarify the power potential of ethnic studies by returning to the grassroots. Rather than approach the field as a set of histories, struggles, and theories exterior to our region, this year’s institute instead focuses on the local as the necessary grounds for the building of ethnic studies as a community-responsive field. Reimagining the greater Santa Cruz region against the implied whiteness of its “surf, sun, sustainable farming, and redwoods” image and self-advertised lure as a Central Coast getaway, the Summer Institute will approach the local as the basis for an ethnic studies curriculum through a focus on place-based histories of not only race and racism, but also, community resistance, people power, and transformative social change.