On hauntings and hierarchies: bridging between elite universities and communities

ABSTRACT

This essay uses Paulo Freire as inspiration of thinking about the limits and possibilities of building bridges between elite universities in the Global North and communities around the world given the historic and present-day entanglements between these universities and empire, colonisation, and epistemic violence. It sheds lights on how racialised and gendered capitalism distorts our collective possibilities for shared thriving, freedom, and bridging relations of difference. The essay reflects what is at stake in our current world and puts forward ideas for how we might begin to the process of transforming the modern-colonial structures of elite universities to create conditions of solidarity between universities and communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• elite universities
• colonial
• decolonial; race; community

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Correction

For the opening panel of the II Freire Conference on 17 October 2023, I was asked to speak about building bridges between communities and universities. The essay below was my response.

I begin by situating where I am speaking from; I then discuss how racialised and gendered capitalism distorts the relationships between elite universities and communities. I end with a reflection regarding what is at stake, and how we might begin to transform the modern-colonial structures of elite universities to create conditions of solidarity between universities and communities.

From where I speak

When we speak, we speak from a place on the map, a place in history, a place in the geo-political and socio-cultural order of things. We also speak from our embodied, situated positions within these relations of forces.

I am joining you this evening from Cambridge University in the UK, an institution that has been, and continues to be, at the heart of empire, colonization, and epistemic violence around the world. Cambridge is what scholars Chatterjee and Maira (2014) call an Imperial University, like so many universities in the UK, the US, and other Global North countries. It is here where the children of the British empire, mostly young white men, were educated into their place in the world and learned to divide the world, in the language of John Willinsky (1998), over many centuries. While there are ongoing efforts to democratise a Cambridge education – the result of demands by UK social movements like the Black Power movement, the Movement for Black Lives, and Asian youth movements – the university continues to be an institution where the children of the UK and global elite come to secure their futures in an ever-globalising, more precarious and radically unequal world.

Thus, in many ways, it is problematic to speak from Cambridge about bridging the relationship between the university and communities (whether they are communities in the geographic, political, or cultural sense), and particularly from my positionality within it as a white scholar from the U.S. It is problematic since the physical, virtual, and metaphoric chasm between this medieval-colonial-modern university and communities in the UK and around the world seems insurmountably wide.

How capitalism structures university-community relations

As a feminist scholar who studies the relationships between capitalism and education, I am concerned with how capitalism distorts our collective possibilities for shared thriving and freedom. Interwoven into the uneven colonial relationships between universities and communities are, of course, the historical and present-day forces of racial and gendered capitalism, and the inequalities that capitalism produces and relies on. As geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2020) explains, ‘capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it.’ And, as we know, racism is deeply entangled or co-formed with relations of power like heteropatriarchy, ableism, Islamophobia, and anthropocentricism, among other forms of power.

The history of racial capitalism at Cambridge begins with the now officially acknowledged profits made through African chattel slavery by the Royal African Company, the South Sea Company, and the East India Company, some of the world’s first transnational corporations.¹ So the historical foundation of the university's relationship with Black communities in the UK, on the African and Asian continents, and throughout the Caribbean and the Americas, begins with the ontology of anti-Blackness, which fundamentally denies Black humanity and continues to be, building on the ideas of Wilderson (2020) and other Afro-pessimist theorists, the structural antagonist the world turns on. These are not just ghosts haunting the university’s past. The financial profits of these legacies remain physically intact in our buildings and our faculties. We also see the ways in which the structures of anti-Blackness and white supremacy persist in the racial-academic hierarchies of this university and universities across the UK where there are few Black professors, and even fewer Black women professors, and a disproportionality low number of Black students despite equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts at the university and national level.

To turn to another element of universities’ relationships to capitalist structures, in our current historic moment, technological, financial, petro, and philanthropic capital are deeply entangled with universities and their relationships with diverse communities around the world.

For example, universities’ endowments, many of which in wealthy, Global North universities, are multi-billion-dollar funds that are heavily invested in transnational capital markets. Yet, these investment funds are normally not transparent, so members of communities and universities are limited in their ability to understand the extent to which the profits from these investments are predicated on labour, environmental, and financial exploitation. If accountability without transparency is almost impossible, how might we collectively demand that these investment practices are aligned with the well-being and thriving of communities?

There are also extractive relations within education itself, which are predicated on what my colleagues and I call, ‘educational capitalization’, or the uneven social-material relations and processes through which education is valued in terms of an expected monetary return from investment (Moeller et al. manuscript submitted for publication). Here education itself is for sale – whether that is through the educational technologies we all depend on in a pandemic world, the for-profit textbook and academic publishing industry, the enterprise arms of universities or forms of corporate-funded research. This can be particularly acute in contexts of steep budget cuts to public education and the need to compensate for lost revenue and resources. Through the goal of monetising university knowledge production, communities and universities can be particularly at odds with each other due to the extractive nature of these relationships, where profit, data extraction, and experimentation, not to mention the career development of academics, become primary reasons for community ‘engagement.’ This makes communities laboratories, rather than co-constructors, of the future. Given the unceasing demands of capital, is it possible to create spaces where we can co-construct mutual relationships of solidarity between universities and communities, whether they are adjacent or spatially distant?

Virtual interconnectedness as a means for forging this solidarity is incredibly seductive. Yet, technology is a master at hiding its own production. The materiality of our virtual interconnectedness – the time–space compression that brings us all together to share this moment – is built upon often invisible chains of interdependence. Beyond the important questions of access, our ability to virtually connect depends on the extraction of minerals, like copper, lithium and rare-earth metals, that power the technologies that bring us together, with the environmental devastation that creates, often in already marginalised localities like the Atacama desert in Chile; the mass amounts of global electricity and greenhouse gas emissions that it takes to cool the data centres that magically disappear our work into the cloud; and the often-hidden forms of labour exploitation that accompany technological production and machine learning, where refugees in Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp power machine learning for companies like Microsoft and Facebook (Jones 2021), which we rely on daily to work and connect with one another. As we work towards bridging, how might we connect in solidarity through different spatial arrangements and means of interconnection that mitigate these human and environmental liabilities and harms?

Where do we go from here?

So where do we go from here? Echoing Ananya Roy (2010), is it possible to carefully move within our historical and present-day reality, without getting snared in the hubris of imperial knowledge production and exploitation, on one hand, or paralysed by the fear of reproducing this imperialism through our scholarship and activist practice, on the other?

Is it possible then, from these institutional sites like Cambridge, to contribute to transforming our universities and their relationships to communities across the UK, Brazil, and around the world, in light of these histories of domination that continue to structure, but never determine, our political, economic, cultural, and epistemic or intellectual present?

Could it be that from the interstices, the cracks that are not determined, that we have openings to listen and respond to feminist, indigenous, queer, decolonial ways of knowing and being together as humans and other species in an ever more precarious existence together? Where our interrelations on the planet demand, and will ultimately and inevitably insist, that we radically rethink hegemonic ways of knowing, being and relating to each other and the earth in order that we might create a future of solidarity and shared thriving and freedom.

So in the spirit of Freire, and to echo the words of the late bell hooks (1994), from these spaces, how do we speak, how do we teach and how do we learn to transgress together?

From my own position, I suggest over this week that we contemplate how we can work towards the following: rethinking, repairing, redistributing, and resisting.

1. First, rethink – as Freire insists, we have to be able to read the word and the world, but we cannot do that using white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, anthropocentric, colonising ways of knowing.

   These forms of hegemonic knowledge are fundamentally violent and erase people, traditions, and possibilities from existing.

2. Second, repair – the violences of the past and the present have often not been acknowledged within and by our universities, and where they have been, the breaches of trust and the inequalities of the present have not been repaired. Building on Freire’s idea of democratisation, universities need to address the harms of the past and the present in order to democratise future relationships with communities. These are necessary preconditions for bridging between universities and communities.

3. Third, redistribute – bridges between universities and communities must involve material redistribution, and perhaps more transformative, acts of rematriation to not only repair cumulative, intergenerational harms to people, cultures, and land, but to transform our collective futures. In other words, universities need to think about how to redistribute historic and contemporary profits to Black communities and to communities in former colonies.

4. Fourth, resist – universities are terrains of struggle and places where we can prefigure in the current moment the pluriversal futures we want to create. We should be inspired by decades of student struggles around the world – from the creation of Black and ethnic studies programmes in the US that emerged from liberation movements to the role of students in broader revolutionary politics in places like South Africa, and most powerfully today, in the feminist struggles of university women in Iran. This resistance can happen through and within universities, but cannot be led by the university, as Freire would advocate. The resistance has to emerge from communities that have been historically marginalised from these elite institutions. In this way, universities need to engage in the humbling role of deep listening rather than leading.

As we move forward this week, I imagine there will be much attention paid to how to address our current historical moment of interrelated crises – a climate catastrophe, the pandemic, unceasing wars, rising fascism and authoritarianism, and the unprecedented inequality of the racist, heteropatriarchal capitalist system that governs the global economy.

As Robin D. G Kelley (2002) asks us, ‘What shall we build on the ashes of a nightmare’ (196)? May the bridges we develop this week move us further towards the futures we seek to create.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2024.2295135)

Notes

1 Accessed 29 September 2022. https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/legacies-of-enslavement-inquiry.