This module looks at how U.S. universities have both profited from and served the settler-colonialist project. The first reading describes how universities have been built on expropriated Indigenous lands and how this land continues to enrich universities. The second reading by la paperson explores the possibilities of subverting, within universities, settler-colonialism and its technologies of oppression.
The supplemental materials explore: (1) how processes of decolonization must reckon with the material elements of settler-colonialism (the dispossession of peoples and expropriation of lands) (Tuck and Yang), (2) how universities have been gentrifying forces in urban areas in the US (Baldwin), and (3) how the humanities subjects taught at universities offer an understanding of “the human” that is geared for exclusion of certain people, thereby reproducing the settler-colonialist ideology on which the US was founded (Lipsitz).