"I am obligated to contribute my scholarly energy to the advancement of revolts, insurgencies, and abolitionist and liberation struggles that are continuously unfolding nearby and around the world. This is a time to cultivate radical collective genius, and I am committed to challenging all forms of reaction to this genius - including liberal reformism - that threaten to undermine its transformative potential."
Dylan Rodríguez is a Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) and the 2020-21 President of the American Studies Association. He was previously Chair of the UCR Academic Senate, as well as Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies.
Rodríguez’s thinking, writing, teaching, and scholarly activism confront the historical regimes of anti-Black and racial-colonial violence that are normalized in everyday state, cultural, and social formations, including policing, incarceration, and domestic war. His work raises the question of how insurgent communities of people inhabit oppressive circumstances in ways that enable the collective genius of rebellion, survival, abolition, and radical futurity. Rodríguez is a founding member of the abolitionist organization Critical Resistance and co-founder of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association. He is the author of White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide.
Throughout White Reconstruction, Rodríguez considers how the creative, imaginative, speculative collective labor of abolitionist praxis can displace and potentially destroy the ascendancy of White Being and Civilization in order to create possibilities for insurgent thriving.
Building on the intellectual and political momentum that established the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, this Reader inaugurates a radical response to the appropriations of liberal multiculturalism while building on the possibilities enlivened by the historical work of Ethnic Studies.
What to learn more about the Freedom Scholars?
Questions about the Freedom Scholar awards can be sent to freedomscholars@caseygrants.org.
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR THE FREEDOM SCHOLAR AWARDS HAS BEEN PROVIDED BY THE INATAI FOUNDATION.
