#Bordersmustfall: Towards a Transnational Understanding of Black Student Organizing in the Undercommons

Using Walter Rodney’s praxis of groundings and important body of anti-colonial historical writing as a starting point, the research I will be presenting in this poster will think through some of the possibilities and limitations of the university and its epistemologies as a foundation for radical transformation. Using the case study of South African students in the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements of 2015 and 2016 who struggled to decolonize the neoliberal university, I will explore how activists theorized about the role of education, their relationship to the institution, and the potential of historical knowledge.

Can history, as a discipline located in and central to the project of the university (itself a conservative project of knowledge hoarding and the maintenance of the status quo), be a liberatory tool? Under what circumstances? How can the historical study of radical social movements, particularly those within the university, strengthen contemporary movements? What was the potential of historical knowledge of a Black Radical Tradition that is both long and transnational to inform contemporary activism? How do spaces outside of the university, the undercommons, provide alternative models for radical educational projects like the Freirean schools in Guinea Bissau, Azania House in South Africa and the Black Panther Party's liberation schools in the United States?

This poster will include brief written sections on some of the historical examples of student organizing and liberatory education from my research, as well as definitions of key theoretical concepts such as decolonization, neoliberalism, racial capitalism, the Undercommons, and the Black Radical Tradition. To enrich the presentation, I will include photographs from student struggles across the diaspora, as well as a computer playing a number of videos of students singing protest songs.