Presentation short abstract:

Building on 5 months of ethnographic field work at UC Berkeley, and document analysis, I argue that local negotiations over curricula in higher education offer insights into how student engagement can cultivate a reflecting space and develop anti-racist teaching and learning spaces.

Presentation long abstract:

Current debates about critical race theory (CRT) in the United States present a bleak picture for anti-racism, academic freedom and civil rights. Several states have banned CRT in elementary schools, books have been burned or removed from library shelves, and in the mainstream media commentators would have us believe that CRT is harmful even for students in higher education (Morgan 2022).

Meanwhile, at UC Berkeley, a student group has been fighting for the creation of a critical race theory (CRT) course within their department for more than 10 years. After succeeding at offering the course as student-led, students finally swayed the administration to hire lecturers to teach the course after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 created a national call to reckon with the colonial (past).

In this presentation I unpack the term of CRT and discuss how the meaning has changed as it has travelled from legal studies within higher education to a wider debate on a national level in the US (Crenshaw 1989, Collins 2000, 2004, Mowatt & French 2013). I argue that the local negotiations at UC Berkeley offers important insights into how anti-racist student engagement and teaching can shape the university of tomorrow and that it might cultivate a room for questioning existing power imbalances.