Refusing the University

Abstract

This chapter begins with articulating the particularities of settler colonialism and Native elimination. Next, it examines liberal theories of justice as the underlying structure operating within the politics of recognition. The chapter also discusses the academy as an arm of the settler state, which is distinct from other frameworks that critique the academy as fundamentally neoliberal, Eurocentric, and/or patriarchal. Through the discussion of the academy as an arm of the settler state, it argues that this shift opens up more possibilities for coalition and collusion within and outside the university. The chapter then describes the ways in which it refracts settler logics and the politics of recognition. It further examines emergent scholarship on the politics of refusal as a field of possibility for building co-resistance movements between the Black radical and critical Indigenous traditions as well as others committed to refusing the settler state and its attendant institutions.