Freedom and Insurgence: Recalling Fanon
Organized on the occasion of the centennial of the decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon, Freedom and Insurgence brings together Dylan Rodríguez and Ezekiel Dixon-Román for a conversation about capacious and generative approaches to mass intellectuality. The speakers approach the global legacies of Fanon’s thought on ‘archives of the possible,’ which illuminate approaches to the problem of democratic education and the crisis of the university in our times.
The event features:
- A talk by Dylan Rodríguez (Distinguished Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies and the Department of Black Study at UC Riverside and winner of the 2022 Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought).
- A response by Ezekiel Dixon-Román (Professor of Critical Race, Media, and Educational Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University).
- A Q&A with the audience.
Freedom and Insurgence launches a new faculty working group on the university and/in crisis directed by C. Riley Snorton (Columbia) and Anupama Rao (Barnard), and spearheaded by the Center for the Study of Social Difference, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and the Edmund Gordon Institute for Advanced Study. Focused on four conceptual figures and sites, “the archive,” “the experiment,” “the student,” and “the lexicon,” the group engages with critical university studies scholarship to think through education’s entanglements with wider inequitable structures and forces.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
Speakers
Dylan Rodríguez is a parent, teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator. He is employed as a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside where he has worked since 2001. Dylan was elected President of the American Studies Association in 2020-2021 and in 2020 was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars. Since 2021, he has served as Co- Director of the Center for Ideas and Society, where he created the Decolonizing Humanism programming stream. Since the late-1990s, Dylan has participated as a founding member of organizations like Critical Resistance, Abolition Collective, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Cops Off Campus, Scholars for Social Justice, and the UCR Department of Black Study, among others. His most recent book is White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
Ezekiel Dixon-Román is Professor of Critical Race, Media, & Educational Studies and Director of the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Urban and Minority Education. He is also co-founder and Director of the Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, & Mixed Methodologies and the Critical Computation Bureau. He joined the Teachers College faculty on January 1 2023 from the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice.
His research program makes critical interventions towards re-theorizing the technologies and practices of quantification that he understands as mediums and agencies of sociopolitical systems, whereby race and other assemblages of difference are byproducts. He is particularly interested in how power generates difference, especially in bodily capacities to change and be changed. His research question addresses how sociotechnical systems of quantification work on, with, and in the body to produce racialized demarcations, which decide which bodily capacities to regenerate and which to debilitate. Dixon-Román argues that, in the ‘computational turn’ of global neoliberal racial capitalism, the biopolitics of statistical demarcations of bodies forms and shapes the movement and flow of power and sociopolitical relations. As such, his research is invested in speculative questions of futurity that rethink technologies of quantification toward onto-epistemologies other-wise. He engages with philosophical and methodological interventions toward developing alternative modes of inquiry and practices of quantification that might enable critical space for reconstituting sociopolitical relations and the movement and flow of social life.
Dr. Dixon-Román is the author of Inheriting Possibility: Social Reproduction & Quantification in Education (2017, University of Minnesota Press). He also co-edited Thinking Comprehensively About Education: Spaces of Educative Possibility and Their Implications for Public Policy (2012, Routledge) and more recently Black Radical Love: A New Black Reconstruction through the Thought & Activism of Edmund W. Gordon (2023, Third World Press). In addition, he co-guest edited “Alternative Ontologies of Number: Rethinking the Quantitative in Computational Culture” (2016, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies), “The computational turn in education research: Critical and creative perspectives on the digital data deluge” (2017, Research in Education), “Control Societies @30: Technopolitical Forces and Ontologies of Difference” (2020, Social Text Online), and “Dialogues on Recursive Colonialism, Speculative Computation, and the Techno-Social” (2021, eflux journal). He is currently working on two book projects: (1) a co-edited collection, Recursive Colonialisms: Technology, Culture, Politics and (2) an authored book project, Haunting Algorithms: Algorithmic Governance and Logics of Colonialism, that examines the haunting formations of the transparent subject in algorithmic governance and the potential transformative technopolitical systems open to ontoepistemologies other-wise.
He is also a co-editor of the Duke University Press book series, “Anima: Critical Race Studies Otherwise”, and associate editor of the 2023 and 2025 volumes of the Review of Research in Education, one of the flagship journals for the American Educational Research Association. He is co-founder and co-Director of the Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, & Mixed Methodologies as well as The Critical Computation Bureau.