Campuses & Colonialism

group photoA joint symposium held in 2021-22 co-sponsored by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at ÃÛÌÒ½´and Emory University, co-organized by Stephen Kantrowitz (Wisconsin), Malinda Maynor Lowery (Emory), and Alyssa Mt. Pleasant (Buffalo). 

The symposium and the resulting volume mark an opportunity to initiate a dialogue about universities and settler colonialism that centers contemporary Indigenous communities as long-standing stakeholders within universities, rather than objects of remembrance for scholars to study.

The symposium and the resulting volume mark an opportunity to initiate a dialogue about universities and settler colonialism that centers contemporary Indigenous communities as long-standing stakeholders within universities, rather than objects of remembrance for scholars to study.

Participants include: 

  • Kevin Bruyneel (Babson College), “Where is the Story of Land in Higher Education?”
  • Wendy Cheng (Scripps College), “David Prescott Barros, Ideas of Indianness, and the Settler-Colonial Foundations of Pomona College.”
  • Lisa Conathan and Christine DeLucia (Williams College), “Reckoning with Colonial Dispossession at Williams College.”
  • Maurice Crandall (Dartmouth College), “Dartmouth, We have a Problem: Mascots, Murals, and Memorialization at an 'Indian College.'"
  • Khalil A. Johnson, Jr. (Wesleyan), "What's in  Name: A Meditation on Lewis and Clark College and the Colonial History of Higher Education."
  • Heather Menefee (Northwestern University), "Student Organizing at Northwestern around John Evans."
  • Jean M. O’Brien (Minnesota), "Institutional Reckoning with Settler Colonialism at the University of Minnesota."
  • Virginia Scharff (University of New Mexico), “What's in a Seal? Confronting Colonialism at the University of New Mexico, 2013-2017.”

The symposium occured in two stages. The scholars first met virtually in the fall of 2021to discuss their papers. They then gathered to workshop again at SMU’s campus in Taos, NM, in the spring of 2022. Each Clements Center symposium follows a similar model and each has resulted in a book published by a prominent academic press.