Please note: This event is in-person and virtual. As we expect to be at full capacity, advance registration is required.
Abolish the University?
A Conversation with Abigail Boggs, Sophie Lewis, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Sterling Johnson—and other special guests
Friday, April 14, 2023, 6-8pm
Making Worlds Bookstore and Social Center
210 S. 45th St, Philadelphia
Presented by the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College
In offering a possibility for the “object of abolition,” Stefano Harney and Fred Moten suggest “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.” This event examines how the abolition of the university fits within the practice of imagining the world otherwise and how university abolition connects with other abolitionist projects, including that of police and prison abolition, as well as family abolition. How are the aims and tactics of university abolition distinct, if at all, from other forms of abolitionism? The conversation thus hopes to connect struggles in and around higher education–labor, debt, gentrification, policing, and others–to broader political horizons.
The event is part of the Aydelotte Foundation’s project on “Race, Racism, and the Liberal Arts.” This project assembles work on underrepresented histories of how people, institutions, and ideas have existed outside of, pushed against, or reshaped from within the ideas and institutions of the liberal arts. It also investigates and recounts curricular, epistemological, and institutional genealogies that challenge how or whether the term liberal arts has silenced histories and ways of knowing developed by Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color.
Featured Speakers
Abigail Boggs is a scholar of feminist and queer studies with a focus on the transnational dimensions of the contemporary United States university. She is currently revising her first book manuscript, “Noncitizen Futures and the U.S. University: A Genealogy," which provides a critical genealogy of the figure of the noncitizen student in university policy, federal immigration law, and U.S. popular culture. She is also working with Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein on a project developing a framework for abolitionist university studies. She is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University.
Sophie Lewis is an ex-academic, critical utopianist, and the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019) as well as Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso, 2022), with a new book coming out soon on “enemy feminisms.” Sophie teaches online courses for BISR (Brooklyn Institute for Social Research) and sometimes describes herself as an “independent scholar” visiting at UPenn, or simply a freelance writer.
Eli Meyerhoff works as a staff member in the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. His research focuses on abolitionist, decolonial approaches to education institutions and alternative modes of studying. He is the author of Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (Minnesota, 2019).
Nick Mitchell explores the social arrangements of knowledge and the ways that knowledge and its institutional practices arrange social worlds. She is working on two books, Discipline and Surplus: Black Studies, Women's Studies, and the Dawn of Neoliberalism (under contract, Duke) and The University, in Theory: Essays on Institutional Knowledge. He is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Zach Schwartz-Weinstein is an independent scholar who writes about universities and labor.
Sterling Johnson researches in the areas of Black geographies, anti-colonialism, feminist geography, carceral and abolition geographies. Their research is concerned with laws and morality and issues of social justice and liberation.