DK Summer Institute Alumni Writing Symposium: (Un) Just Spaces

This gathering convened alumni of the Democratizing Knowledge Summer Institute for a two-day writing symposium. The three-year series of Summer Institutes (2016-18) brought together scholar and community activists collaborating to build new kinds of communities in the borderlands between critical academic scholarship and community-based knowledges and organizations. An underlying principle at the heart of the success of the Institute is the inherent resistance and challenges these academic and non-academic collaborations pose to institutional epistemic frameworks. As such, barriers of class and elitism were checked as the institute generated cross campus collaborations throughout the nation, not just within the three host Institutions, thus strengthening their relations with the communities of which they are a part. The writing symposium will result in collaborative publication(s): one special issue for journal publication and also a edited anthology. These special issues and edited volume will address the following questions: What does it look like to have and create just academic spaces? What are the models (i.e., the DK institute) that are needed to facilitate just institutional spaces? What are the challenges to making this work in and beyond the academy?