Concerned Student: Institutional Violence and Embodied Abolition in the University of Missouri Protests

Author

Gaurav Jashnani, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

9-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Psychology

Advisor

Brett Stoudt

Committee Members

Michelle Fine

Kandice Chuh

Bianca Williams

Joshua Myers

Subject Categories

Africana Studies | American Studies | Community Psychology | Higher Education | Inequality and Stratification | Race and Ethnicity | Social Justice | Social Psychology | Social Psychology and Interaction

Keywords

Anti-Black racism, Higher education, Student organizing, Social movements, University of Missouri, Affect

Abstract

In the fall of 2015, Black students pulled off an unlikely victory: following months of racial justice protests and organizing efforts, the University of Missouri’s Division I football team went on strike in solidarity with organizers’ demands, and the university administration collapsed within days. Almost immediately, these protests catalyzed student organizing against racism at over 80 U.S. colleges and universities. Using qualitative and archival methods, this study asks: How did this assemblage of actors, affects, and social forces mobilize to highlight and disrupt unjust policies and practices within—and beyond—higher education? What were the embodied experiences and everyday impacts of this process, and of ensuing backlash? How can studying these struggles help make sense of the body as a site of social transformation, and a source of power and wisdom that can shift relations of racial domination?

To address these questions, in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a range of stakeholders, including 12 Black student organizers and 34 additional students, faculty, staff, administrators, and others. Using thematic analyses of interviews and archival data, this research examines a novel and powerful instance of organizing in order to consider how Black students creatively pursue collective liberation amidst ongoing racism. Arguments are developed regarding the ongoing harms of campus racism, underlining the insufficiency of a rubric of exclusion, imposter syndrome, or trauma to address entangled and mutually sustaining systems of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism; the ways that racist violence and backlash, as well as collective action, aided organizers in developing critical consciousness, mobilizing against institutional racism, and gaining enough power to have their demands met; racial justice organizing as often healing and transformative for participants, in part through the production of liberatory and prefigurative Black space; and Black students’ engagement in processes of embodied abolition, using somatic knowledge and affective tactics to dismantle anti-Black structures and ways of being.

This case study, part of a larger moment in which institutionalized anti-Black racism and widespread resistance reentered the spotlight, presaged both the 2020 nationwide uprising following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the constantly mutating white revanchism that has dominated national politics since 2016. By analyzing these events, this study illuminates the course of #BlackLivesMatter and the current national reckoning with race, as they have unfolded in one segment of higher education.

Recommended Citation

Jashnani, Gaurav, "Concerned Student: Institutional Violence and Embodied Abolition in the University of Missouri Protests" (2023). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5562