Political Activism in Colleges and Universities

Tina Cheuk is Assistant Professor of Elementary Science Education at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, USA. She is a mother scholar, educator, and advocate focused on empowering and imagining futures that sustain and cultivate the learning, growth, and success of minoritized student groups in postsecondary education. Rand Quinn is Associate Professor of Education Policy and Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He studies the origins and consequences of education organizing and activism, the politics of race and class in urban school reform, and the impact of private and voluntary sector engagement in public education. Jerusha Conner is Professor of Education in the Department of Education and Counseling at Villanova University, USA and directs the Graduate Programs in Education. As a parent-educator-scholar-activist, she focuses on understanding how young people develop agency and collective power, and how adults can support them in envisioning and bringing about more just and liberatory institutions and communities.

1. Introduction 2. “I don’t like to put labels on it”: Activism, Political Identity Development, and the Cultivation of Student Political Fluency 3. Radical Shifts: Prefiguring Activist Politicization through Legitimate Peripheral Participation 4. “Regardless, my students and I pressed on”: How Early-Career Teachers Develop Activist Identities 5. Using Strategies Elites Understand: Divestment as an Approach to Social Change 6. In Defense of Dignitary Safety: A Phenomenological Study of Student Resistance to Hate Speech on Campus 7. Relationships Between Institutional Agents and Student Activists 8. Afterword: Fugitive Praxis and the Unsettling of the Imperial University