Social-justice oriented student activists at UC Berkeley are concerned with structural inequalities and their connection to past unacknowledged atrocities associated with the campus. In different activist endeavors students seek to raise awareness of UC Berkeley’s settler colonial past and legacy of white supremacy. They unearth, re-activate and relocate past atrocities in the present. The students call forth and are called upon by the past to dismantle structures of inequality on campus and beyond, and they encourage each other to be attentive to these structures. The unaddressed settler colonial past of the university is pulled to the fore by these students, in resonance with broader trans-local calls for justice.

In this talk, Lærke Cecilie Anbert will explore rumors and narratives of past logics that shape the present and future of UC Berkeley. Inspired by the theoretical framework of hauntology (Lincoln and Lincoln 2015), she shows that activist students understand current inequalities as directly connected to past atrocities and that this understanding of history positions the students as implicated. Being implicated both entail discomfort but also opens possibilities for action.

Speaker:

Lærke Cecilie Anbert (PhD Candidate, Aarhus University, Denmark)