Campuses & Colonialism

group photoA joint symposium held in 2021-22 co-sponsored by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at 51²è¹Ý 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 51²è¹Ý’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.