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Origins of political consciousness in suburbs of Boston; early reaction to civil rights struggle and conflict in Vietnam; reactions to social milieu of New York in general and Columbia University in particular; involvement with Congress of Racial Equality, Students for a Democratic Society and other student groups while at Columbia; extended discussion of experiences leading to transition from pacifist to agent of violent revolution; evolution, interaction, and critique of various student activist organizations; 1968 strike at Columbia; experience as member of Weather Underground revolutionary group; lengthy analysis of revolutionary theory

Over the past years, particularly during 2018, Chilean society has experienced a robust feminist movement led by high school students. At the same time, mainstream society and researchers claim that Chile is experiencing a youth civic and citizenship education crisis, particularly among young women. I address this apparent contradiction by challenging the futuristic approach in citizenship education taken in the country and exploring how young women are currently politically engaged and challenge gender oppression within their high schools and their activist spaces. I have used a post-human and post-colonial feminist theoretical framework to answer the following research question, How do female public high school students in Chile who identify as feminist or politically active produce their gender/political subjectivities in the 2018 context of contentious feminist politics? And, sub questions; How do they do this while engaging with feminist discourses and practices in and outside of school? How do they do this while engaging with historical narratives? Finally, how do they do this while engaging with formal political education in school? A context of contentious feminist politics will be understood as a context where feminism is prevalent in public discourse, which forces people -in this case students- to take a stance concerning this subject. To answer the research questions, I conducted a critical ethnography, observing classes and other activities at Edelbina González High School, a Chilean all-female public high school with an active group of high school feminists. During my fieldwork, I invited six 12th-grade participants to be my focal group of observation and to take part in individual testimonios interviews and collective art-based testimonios workshops. Through these methods, I produced fieldnotes of observations, transcriptions and audio-recordings of the interviews and workshops, and photographs of the school space and students’ art pieces. I analyzed the data through a three-layer process using thematic coding analysis, narrative structural and content analysis, visual analysis, and “plugging in with theory” analysis (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). This study engages with lengthy discussion regarding education and reproduction of gender regimes; it explores how oppressive systems transform but remain, particularly in regards to citizenship and formal political education through neoliberal discourses of girl empowerment. It also shows how feminist female high school students communally and creatively respond, theorize, and re-imagine political engagement within these frames, providing insights into what is, and what can be education for democratic citizenship and gender justice. The Feminist students in this study produced themselves as nomadic mestiza bodies engaging with pre-existing political frameworks but at the same time built something more. The students assembled themselves within an antagonistic us/them framework within the Chilean Student Movement, which considers the state and school as adversaries attempting to oppress them. Their high school attempted to reproduce them as feminine, successful, conflict-free neoliberal girls. Regardless, the feminist students displaced both the antagonistic and neoliberal model producing their gender/political subjectivities as nomadic, ever-shifting, vulnerable and strong, and connecting themselves with collective memories and historical narratives. The production of the feminist students’ gender/political subjectivities through “affectivism,” resistance, and political caring rendered the participants as nomadic mestiza bodies, always becoming, collectively connected and empowered by one another to produce political change.

When a black student threw feces against a bronze statue of British imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes, located at the University of Cape Town (UCT), it sparked the formation of the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) student movement in March 2015. The Black-led #RMF movement sought to decolonize the university by confronting institutional racism and patriarchy at UCT through a series of disruptive and creative tactics including occupying university buildings and erecting a shack on campus. As part of their decolonization process, black students tried to make sense of their experiences in a predominantly white university by de-linking from UCT’s dominant model of Euro-American knowledge to construct their own decolonial framework comprised of Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness and Black radical feminism. A few weeks later in May 2015, students at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom who were inspired by the student movement at UCT, created the #RhodesMustFall Oxford movement, using the Rhodes statue at Oriel College as a focal point in their call to decolonize the university. This dissertation explores the formation of the radical #RMF student movements at UCT and Oxford—referred to as the Fallist movements. I first consider what led the #RMF movement at UCT to adopt a decolonial framework centered on Black radical feminism, Black Consciousness, and Pan-Africanism, and then examine how the #RMF’s decolonial framework generated the emergent idea of “Fallism” that extended beyond the students’ demand for the Rhodes statue to fall. Finally, I assess the ways in which the formation of #RMF Oxford was influenced by the #RMF movement in Cape Town. The #RMF mission statement characterized the black experience at UCT as “black pain” or as “the dehumanization of black people” informed by the “violence exacted only against black people by a system that privileges whiteness”. In order to better understand their experiences of black pain, student activists de-linked from the university's dominant knowledge production systems that privileged whiteness through its epistemic architecture. The #RMF UCT movement’s de-linking or “epistemic disobedience”, was also employed by students at Oxford who wanted to integrate “subjugated and local epistemologies” into the Eurocentric university curriculum. Based on this empirical analysis of the #RMF’s engagement in epistemic disobedience at both UCT and Oxford, I argue that the university occupies a paradoxical position for Black and other marginalized bodies: it is simultaneously empowering and dehumanizing; it offers the possibility of acquiring knowledge that could serve as a liberatory tool from the violence of socio-economic marginality (Black liberation), while at the same time, the physical and epistemic architecture of the university can create an oppressive, alienating space for Black, queer and disabled bodies among others (Black pain). This assertion leads me to experiment with developing Fallism into an emergent decolonial option that emanates from acts of epistemic disobedience to unveil the hegemonic intellectual architecture of the university. Through a combination of 98 interviews, one year of observations, and document analysis, this study offers insights into the formation and evolution of the #RMF student movements at UCT and Oxford, while contributing to a critical understanding of the university’s paradoxical epistemic architecture.

Role in campus crisis of 1968: chairman of Students for Columbia University, Majority Coalition.

A day-by-day description of events on the Columbia campus, April 22-30, 1968 by the Associate Director of Student Activities in Columbia College.

The president of Columbia College's Board of Managers discusses the conduct of student leaders and the use of Ferris Booth Hall during the last week of April and the first two weeks of May 1968.

Negotiations with students on the Columbia campus, April 23, 1968 through April 29, 1968; background on demonstrations during 1967-1968; question of conspiracy in occupation of buildings.

General discussion of student dissatisfaction and the events at Columbia during April and May 1968.

An administrator's observation of and participation in events on the Columbia University campus, April 22-30, 1968.

WKCR staff member's discussion of events of the Columbia campus, April 23-30, 1968, especially the night of the bust.

Observations of events on campus from April 26, 1968 to April 29, 1968; coverage for Life magazine; reactions of Journalism School to the events.

Violent events involving female students symbolized the rise and fall of the New Left in Japan, from the death of Kanba Michiko in a mass demonstration of 1960 to the 1972 deaths ordered by Nagata Hiroko in a sectarian purge. This study traces how shifting definitions of violence associated with the student movement map onto changes in popular representations of the female student activist, with broad implications for the role women could play in postwar politics and society. In considering how gender and violence figured in the formation and dissolution of the New Left in Japan, I trace three phases of the postwar Japanese student movement. The first (1957-1960), which I treat in chapters one and two, was one of idealism, witnessing the emergence of the New Left in 1957 and, within only a few years, some of its largest public demonstrations. Young women became new political actors in the postwar period, their enfranchisement commonly represented as a break from and a bulwark against "male" wartime violence. Chapter two traces the processes by which Kanba Michiko became an icon of New Left sacrifice and the fragility of postwar democracy. It introduces Kanba's own writings to underscore the ironic discrepancy between her public significance as a "maiden sacrifice" and her personal relationship to radical politics. A phase of backlash (1960-1967) followed the explosive rise of Japan's New Left. Chapter three introduces some key tabloid debates that suggested female presence in social institutions such as universities held the potential to "ruin the nation." The powerful influence of these frequently sarcastic but damaging debates, echoed in government policies re-linking young women to domestic labor, confirmed mass media's importance in interpreting the social role of the female student. Although the student movement imagined itself as immune to the logic of the state and the mass media, the practices of the late-1960s campus-based student movement, examined in chapter four, illustrate how larger societal assumptions about gender roles undergirded the gendered hierarchy of labor that emerged in the barricades. The final phase (1969-1972) of the student New Left was dominated by two imaginary rather than real female figures, and is best emblematized by the notion of "Gewalt." I use the German term for violence, Gewalt, because of its peculiar resonances within the student movement of the late 1960s. Japanese students employed a transliteration--gebaruto--to distinguish their "counter-violence" from the violence employed by the state. However, the mass media soon picked up on the term and reversed its polarities in order to disparage the students' actions. It was in this late-1960s moment that women, once considered particularly vulnerable to violence, became deeply associated with active incitement to violence. I explore this dynamic, and the New Left's culture of masculinity, in chapters five and six.

The contributions that Black Americans made towards advancing their own educational institutions have often been overlooked. These men and women were quite instrumental in developing, organizing and determining the future direction of their own schools. From 1920 to 1950, a shift in attitudes and culture began to take shape at Black colleges and universities concerning more student autonomy and more alumni involvement. This shift in attitude was primarily due to Black students and alumni who rebelled against the paternalistic White power structure that existed at their schools. At the core of this conflict, stood frustrated students and alumni petitioning their predominately White Boards of Trustees/administration to recognize their status as institutional stakeholders. This dissertation focuses on alumni and student activism at three HBCUs, Lincoln University, Fisk University, and Hampton Institute, between 1920 and 1950. What will be examined in this study is the role that Black alumni and Black students played in waging a campaign against White administrators to bring about institutional change at these three schools. Additional points of inquiry are 1) Who were the institutional stakeholders and what were their goals, 2) How did alumni and student activism influence administrative change, and 3) What compromises were made at these three schools to address students and alumni concerns? There are no in-depth historical studies regarding student and alumni activism at HBCUs during this period in Black higher education. The absence in the literature is particularly unfortunate because the period between 1920 and 1950 was an important time in the development of historically Black colleges and universities. An examination of the protests on Lincoln's, Fisk's, and Hampton's campuses can help to illuminate some of the issues that HBCUs were wrestling with during the wave of campus unrest that swept the country between1920 and 1950.