Re-Visioning Insurgent Memories and Some Work Toward a Revolutionary Vision of the Public University
Abstract
Within this chapter I write as an organizer, and participant in fifty years of publicly engaged teaching and scholarship projects. Here is memory of collaborative effort to realize the emancipatory potential of university environments too often hostile to socially just democracy. This piece is the story of how commitment to social justice, using the public spaces we are given to work in, can form “insurgent” resistance to legacies of unjust exclusion, racism, and bureaucratic elitism. For if not resisted, they distort, even destroy the moral outlines of democratic schooling. It is written for and with, new communities, teachers, professors, activists, and organizers in solidarity, and is just one trajectory with examples of how project collaborations worked to negotiate the bureaucratic terrain of public service in education, with all the ups and downs of such an effort. Here is an autoethnographic writing form as a method of inquiry, that is itself the method of personal and community discovery. It works also to honor student-scholars, and comrade professors and teachers, as we accompanied each other through the years in learning and action.
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