This is searing and necessary. It lays bare what many of us who come from movements and then worked to navigate movement and academic spaces have long known—the university is not a site of liberation but a site of colonial capture and part and parcel of the carceral regime.
The academe disciplines and punishes dissent, commodifies resistance, and rewards those who turn insurgent histories into citations rather than solidarity. Rodriguez’s critique is not just about hypocrisy; it is about infrastructure—specifically, the role of the university in materially reproducing colonial, racial-capitalist, and imperial violence.
Moreover, social movement scholars often use extractive and colonial research methods to research movements and their actors.
The post forces everyone to reckon with the politics of complicity masked as critique. It raises many questions, one of the most crucial being: What happens when the people who theorize liberation are invested in the very systems that make it impossible?
Academics rarely, if ever, take risks. They do not collaborate with movements, build with them, or divest from the institutional violence they critique for careerist goals. This means they are not neutral—they are counterinsurgents themselves.
Keep publishing these posts! This is phenomenal. I’m happy to have upgraded to a paid subscriber today to support your efforts to raise money for Gaza.
This is searing and necessary. It lays bare what many of us who come from movements and then worked to navigate movement and academic spaces have long known—the university is not a site of liberation but a site of colonial capture and part and parcel of the carceral regime.
The academe disciplines and punishes dissent, commodifies resistance, and rewards those who turn insurgent histories into citations rather than solidarity. Rodriguez’s critique is not just about hypocrisy; it is about infrastructure—specifically, the role of the university in materially reproducing colonial, racial-capitalist, and imperial violence.
Moreover, social movement scholars often use extractive and colonial research methods to research movements and their actors.
The post forces everyone to reckon with the politics of complicity masked as critique. It raises many questions, one of the most crucial being: What happens when the people who theorize liberation are invested in the very systems that make it impossible?
Academics rarely, if ever, take risks. They do not collaborate with movements, build with them, or divest from the institutional violence they critique for careerist goals. This means they are not neutral—they are counterinsurgents themselves.
Keep publishing these posts! This is phenomenal. I’m happy to have upgraded to a paid subscriber today to support your efforts to raise money for Gaza.