CULTURE, POWER, SOCIAL CHANGE PRESENTS…
Charlie Hale, Dean of Social Sciences,
UC Santa Barbara
Our Universities on the Brink: The Institution and the Commons
Thursday 4.23.26
Haines Hall 352
12:15 PM
This paper builds from the premise that, to confront the multiple forces of disruption, all who inhabit universities are called upon to engage critical university studies. This is especially crucial for those who belong to the imagined “we” that Dean Hale invokes at the outset, since “our” efforts to advance and defend an alternative social purpose of the public university are most vulnerable to these forces. His analysis explores the general contours and contradictions of this work, and more specifically, what happens when the efforts are supported by the dean’s office.
Both the analysis, and his ideas for possible ways forward, rest on a distinction between the institution and the commons. This notion of the commons offers a means to fortify our defenses and inspire a collective sense of purpose as we engage in a necessary, and hopefully short-lived, strategic retreat.
Charlie Hale is the author of Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894-1987 (1994); and “Más que un indio…” Racial Ambivalence and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala (2006); editor of Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics and Methods of Activist Scholarship (2008); co-editor (with Lynn Stephen) of Otros Saberes: Collaborative Research with Black and Indigenous Peoples in Latin America (2014); author of articles on activist scholarship, identity politics, racism, land rights and territorial autonomy, resistance to neoliberalism among Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples of Latin America. Director of LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections (UT Austin, 2009-16) and President of the Latin American Studies Association (2006-7).
