What opportunities do our present combined crises—of austerity and intensified facism—present us with in considering how we struggle over, or through public schools that have at once been sites of harm and violence; and also infrastructures through which communities forge survivance, solidarity, and a praxis of sanctuary? As it becomes increasingly clear that a return to “normal” is only an affirmation of violence, how can we rework the public as we struggle through it: to widen the terrain and terms of struggle, root spaces of relation where we find each other, expand our political horizons— and grow fierce, loving, and dangerous solidarities towards collective liberation?

Presented by:
Ujju Aggarwal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experiential Learning at The New School and author of Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). She brings a long history of working to build organizing for educational justice, immigrants’ rights, and abolition.