Border U

Abstract

In this paper, we take an ontological approach to examining the university as an object of activism. We speculatively theorize a Border University and a Border U. A Border University understands and explains academic policy and policy regimes as a bordering practice expressed through technologies that govern the flow and junctures of social movement. The Border U that we theorize centers the lives and contributions of Latinx (im)migrant communities. Border U emerges through activist opposition to the dominant Border University. In speculating Border University and Border U, we draw heavily upon Thomas Nail’s ontology of motion, theory of the border, and figure of the migrant. Recasting the university within an ontology of motion allows new possibilities for building anew a social institution that can tackle the persistent problems of the past, reconciling them in the present, and preparing for the future, as we try to illustrate in the case of Latinx (im)migrant communities in US higher education.

In this paper, we take an ontological approach to examining the university as an object of activism. We speculatively theorize a Border University and a Border U. A Border University understands and explains academic policy and policy regimes as a bordering practice expressed through technologies that govern the flow and junctures of social movement. The Border U that we theorize centers the lives and contributions of Latinx (im)migrant communities. ¹ Border U emerges through activist opposition to the dominant Border University. In speculating Border University and Border U, we draw heavily upon Thomas Nail’s Ontology of Motion (Nail 2018), Theory of the border (Nail 2016), and Figure of the Migrant (Nail 2015). Recasting the university within an ontology of motion allows new possibilities for building anew a social institution that can tackle the persistent problems of the past, reconciling them in the present, and preparing for the future, as we try to illustrate in the case of Latinx (im)migrant communities in US higher education.

A motion-centered theory of the border helps illustrate how higher education policy acts through bordering technologies used to expand state power and expel historically marginalized groups from participation. A motion-centered theory of the border and figure of the migrant also helps demonstrate the ways by which Latinx activists exercise counterpower to reconfigure such bordering. We draw from our own anthropological engagements with Latinx (im)migrant students’ resistance practices in opposition to the contemporary university’s efforts to expel them (e.g., Gildersleeve and Sifuentez, 2017). In such a schema, the university is remade, ontologically, as an object of activism available to be reconfigured with Latinx (im)migrant communities – and ostensibly inclusive of all marginalized communities – as the referent.

However, our speculative analysis does not promote a dichotomy between higher education policy and migrant student practices. Rather, it examines the entanglement of policy and practice, treating policy as a bordering technology with ontological consequence, and practice (specifically migrant participation in higher education) as a pedetic force in opposition to state-sponsored marginalization.

For example, federal policy from the US Department of Education (2016) affords some universities a special designation as Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), making them eligible for specific federal enhancement funds. This designation has largely been understood in terms of economic development and the demographic increase of Latinx populations across the United States, as evidenced by Smith-Barrow (2018). Latinx (im)migrant students at some HSIs self-organize to promote Latinx culture on campus, re-claiming the sociocultural and spatial relations of the university as a migrant tertiary educational space (Gildersleeve and Sifuentez, 2017). These cultural productions re-position the institution in an activist stance against the expulsion of Latinx migrants from the body politic. The production of a Border U re-claims the knowledge imperative for the University, re-orienting it toward the contemporary condition of a migrant-driven population.

This paper, then, is a first-step in setting out a research agenda for speculatively exploring a university that is movement-centered, and, as such, examines how various border technologies are used to configure the university in ways that perpetuate dominant, status-quo, anti-intellectual, and anti-democratic currents in global politics, as well as the resistance strategies that might help activate a reconfiguring of the university.

Movement and borders

We have more migrants on the planet today than at any other time in human history. We transport more things, longer distances, with a greater multitude of technologies than ever before. The movement of people and things has become so important to our historical reality today that we wage wars – wars over the movement of things (e.g., trade wars) as well as wars over the movement of people (e.g., civil wars). Simultaneously, hundreds of new borders have been erected in the last 20 years: razor-wire fences, concrete walls, offshore detention facilities, biometric passports, and security checkpoints in schools, universities, grocery stores, and airports. Universities themselves are exemplars of these broader social and material conditions. We are part of an historical era where motion, movement, and mobility combined with division, expulsion, confinement, and elasticity increasingly defines human activity. The kinetic nature of contemporary events therefore requires an historical ontology that recognizes the primacy of motion and circuits of division.

Ontology of motion

Movement is not reducible to space and time. The new mobilities turn in the social sciences championed by Sheller and Urry (2006) recognizes that there is nothing that is not or has not been in motion. An ontology of motion shares influences from process ontologies and ontologies of becoming (Connolly, 2011; Coole and Frost, 2010). Each emphasize being in flux and being as becoming, but ontology of motion is strictly interested in the flux of matter, not space, force, or time. In a movement-centered ontology, force, space, and time do not transcend matter in motion – they are dimensions of reality, but irreducibly material kinetic dimensions. Thomas Nail’s (2018) critiques of process ontologies and ontologies of becoming assert that, ultimately, they rely on a static universe that is internally and spatiotemporally dynamic: immobile but creative. Ontology of motion is a complete inversion of becoming, wherein, “all becoming is rendered fully material” (67). Stasis becomes an eddy or vortex of flows. Thought becomes a coordinated rhythm of self-affective matters immanent to the bodies, brains, tools, and so on that compose them. Ontology becomes historical, grounded in the material conditions of its time. The methodological primacy of motion, therefore, is a historical ontological claim about becoming qua history.

Kinopolotics, borders, and bordering technologies

Nail earlier demonstrated his ontology of motion as he was developing it from his thesis of kinopolitics – the politics of movement – through which he examined migration and borders. In his books The Figure of the Migrant (Nail 2015) and Theory of the Border (Nail 2016), Nail details various historical political developments by documenting ways that western societies emerged over time via “expansion by expulsion” regimes. Expansion by expulsion is a process of strengthening political power by expelling those deemed unwanted from the body politic. At different times in history, this expansion was characterized by inward movement, outward movement, tensional movement, and elastic movement. Nail calls these regimes “kinetic forces,” each of which positioned the migrant into a particular figuring – for example, the barbarian; and also was accompanied by a prevailing bordering technology – for example, the Border Wall. Nail’s kinopolitical project maps these movements onto kinetic forces and then along with various migrant figurations, border technologies, and resistance strategies.

Border University

Over the entire system of kinopolitics, Nail (2015, 2016) describes how migrants have been territorially corralled, politically expelled, juridically confined, and economically stretched, in part, by a range of bordering technologies that include fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints. It is important to recognize that within a broader ontology of motion, borders are recognized as always in motion, never static, never fixed, never quite knowable. Borders are process; acts of bordering are used to control movement and constrain human activity toward particular purposes. Substituting the university for the state, we seek to illustrate how Latinx (im)migrant communities in higher education might be explained as one of continuous and contemporaneous migrant configurations and expulsions by expansion of the university’s power. However, these mobile expulsions also render possible mobilities – counterpowers that Nail (2015) says exercise “pedetic force” (the power of the foot) through migrant movements that challenge the status quo. These pedetic forces might help us reconfigure US higher education in more equitable organization.

The expulsion of Latinx (im)migrants in US higher education

The contemporary university extends expansionist state interests by expelling certain subjects from democratic participation in society. In the United States, Latinx (im)migrant students are one such group systematically expelled from the state, via the university (and the broader US higher education system). Evidence of such a claim can be found in the anti-immigration rhetoric and policy actions at federal, state, and local levels, in accordance with a report from the Anti-Defamation League (2018). Further, a look at the educational attainment research literature from Franklin and Medina (2018) makes clear that systemic failures prevent Latinx (im)migrant students from succeeding on a broad scale. While Latinx students generally have made gains in educational attainment over the past 20 years, they remain persistently low as compared to other groups, the national average, and their dominant non-Hispanic white counterparts (Nichols, 2017). Sadly, despite gains in sheer numbers attending college, the pipeline for educational attainment continues to disadvantage Latinx students. These systemic patterns are exacerbated when viewed across different sectors of higher education. The Postsecondary National Policy Institute (2020) in addition to Nichols (2020) have found that Latinx students are generally over-represented in community colleges and their under-representation is strikingly sharp at most elite universities.

From an expansionist perspective, Latinx (im)migrants are seen as expendable objects and undesirable subjects for inclusion in the US democratic project. Expansion, here, indicates the expansion of state power, not necessarily (though not exclusive of) a physically territorial expansion over land, and not necessarily nor exclusive of an ideological expansion either. Rather, it means expanding and strengthening the state’s dominion over (social) movement. The Border University seeks to expand its (administrative) authority over social opportunity and social structures by expelling those deemed undesirable (e.g., historically marginalized groups such as Latinx (im)migrant youth). It is important to note that expulsion does not necessarily mean physical deportation (although it can mean this, too). More likely, in the context of higher education, expulsion means expelled from the full rights, privileges, and advantages of freedom within the regimes of social movement – modes of participation in the university and methods of exclusion or expulsion from it. Expulsion from and within the university might mean Latinx (im)migrant youth cannot access higher education, or it could also mean their participation in it is marked by various policy regimes and subsequent practices that expel them within the institution – configuring them as less than more desirable others and therefore enslaved to the institution for its supposed benefits.

Moreover, freedom in a movement-centered ontology, in part, means freedom of movement as well as freedom from movement. College-educated elites are more likely to move across states strategically, and less likely to be forced to move economically. Moreover, college-educated elites are more likely to travel for leisure (e.g., take an airplane for a family vacation). Also, college-educated elites are less likely to depend on public transportation and more likely to secure employment wherein they can come and go with relative autonomy. For example, a college-educated administrator can leave at leisure to vote on election day without taking time off from work, whereas a non-college-educated service-worker cannot.

In the contemporary condition, access to and success within higher education is one of the most valuable credentials that can secure one’s place within the state’s interests. Trostel (2015) has shown that college-educated elites are less likely to suffer prolonged unemployment, more likely to vote, more likely to accrue financial security more quickly, and less likely to be incarcerated by the justice system. Earning a college/university credential, thus, more strongly secures one’s rights to democratic opportunities. Thus, a college education secures a freedom of movement that is consequential to participation in US democracy. Thus, the university, as a bordering, bordered, and border-filled institution of social movement, becomes an object of activism in relation to its expansion by expulsion regimes. Therefore, re-bordering the university, or the exercise of pedetic force, in kinopolitical terms, becomes activist achievement.

In further illustrating Border University, we will focus our further review of Nail’s system of kinopolitics, highlighting key concepts of centrifugal force, the figure of the barbarian (as migrant), the border technology of the border wall, and suggest a pedetic force (i.e., as counterpower) of revolt for actualizing a Border U.

Centrifugal force and the migrant figure of the barbarian

In Nail’s (2015) analysis, the barbarian is the migrant figure produced through the expansion by expulsion via centrifugal force. When the state expands territorially or ideologically, it captures those migrants within the physical or ideological geographies its seeking to conquer. Yet, rather than incorporating and integrating those migrants into the state, it enslaves them as barbarians unworthy of membership. It treats the barbarians as objects unable to pursue their livelihoods external to the state, and it configures them as indentured to the state’s newly expanded apparatus. The state seizes control of their movement and mobility, perhaps physically, but certainly socially.

In terms of the university, expansion via centrifugal force might very well look like a territorial expansion, such as purchasing property and expanding the physical campus. It can also include exercising centrifugal force in the co-optation of particular ideational effects, and therefore capturing the social flows that such ideation produces. For example, a campus that adopts social justice into its mission and subsequently recruits a more diverse student body and/or faculty might be expanding its intellectual capacity: broadening its curriculum, bringing new relevance to its programmatic offerings; reaching out to historically under-represented communities. If the forces used to expand into (or over) these newly diversified ideational contributions to the academy (e.g., critical race theory) also include trapping those who were responsible for generating them into an indentured subjectivity, then the university enslaves those subjects, just as the state enslaved (and produced) the barbarians.

The border wall and Border University

The border wall is a collection of bordering technologies that are used in both offensive and defensive strategies to secure the strengthened political administration of the state. According to Nail’s (2016) analysis, there are three primary technes of the border wall:

Military wall – an offensive technology that “marches outward to expand social kinetic power at the periphery.” Examples include the soldier wall, geodesy, and siege tower.

Rampart – defensive technology that fortifies and protects the center. Examples include the citadel and territorial wall.

Port – “a regime of recirculation by controlling passage across the border.” Examples include transport and city ports. It operates the in-between space created by the military wall and the rampart.

These bordering technologies can operate in cooperation in building the administrative state that expels the barbarian migrant. That is, these bordering technologies expand the administrative state (i.e., the university) by constricting the social movement (i.e., participation) of migrants (i.e., Latinx (im)migrant students). They are effectively the materializations of expansionist policy regimes built to expel Latinx (im)migrant students from/within Border University.

Pedetic force and the Barbarian’s Revolt

Countering the kinetic powers of the state, the migrant exercises what Nail calls pedetic force – the power of the foot. Migrant movement/s produce/s new possibilities for social organization by using various strategies that have emerged historically. These strategies include the raid, the revolt, the rebellion, and the resistance. Each of these strategies maps onto historically conditioned versions of the migrant as a political figure. However, each continues to operate today. Indeed, contemporary migrants have each of these four strategies at their disposal in enacting their will on/within the contemporary condition. These strategies, however, are not all-powerful. Rather, they are produced in tension with/against the kinetic power of the state’s expansion by expulsion.

Pedetic force, therefore, provides a vehicle for analyzing and making sense of institutional change in relation to migrant participation within higher education. It evokes a dynamic political climate wherein students might become co-constitutive of radical changes to the Border University as they enact strategies of pedetic force in new combinations. As we hope to illustrate toward the end of this paper, contending with such movement might force institutions to reconcile the shortcomings of their traditions in relation to the realities of students’ lives.

The Barbarian’s Revolt, historically, is a pedetic counterforce strategy that involved the seizure and re-claiming of land. It responds to the centrifugal force of the institution seeking to expand its power by expelling migrants from social movement through enslavement, thus building up the state’s administrative center. In essence, as the state strengthens itself administratively – through increased regulations, but also through sponsoring and organizing symbolic ceremonies that reify the state as the ontological center of society – it configures the migrant as the barbarian, expelled by enslavement. In application to the university and Latinx (im)migrant students and families, we can see the documented analysis of “diversity labor” that many students of color, including Latinx (im)migrant students, perform on US college campuses (Ferguson, 2012; Musser, 2015). Diversity labor takes at least three forms: educating others about non-white experiences; providing “diverse” perspectives for the benefit of white students, faculty, and staff; and the corporeal labor of counting oneself as non-white for institutional demographic statistics. These labors are not compensated, often go unrecognized, and are non-negotiable. Students must perform them in order to participate in the university. Thus, Latinx (im)migrant students are, to this extent, configured as the barbarian in the institution – othered, exoticized, and enslaved.

Such enslavement is reified by efforts from the institution to shore up its administrative apparatus in both regulations and rituals and ceremonies that reify regulations as real and determinative. The end-of-year academic commencement ceremony is one such event that reifies state power and the ontological centrality of the administrative apparatus of the university, in as much as the commencement ceremony focuses on the institution itself: its rituals, traditions, faculty, and symbols. While used to commemorate the graduation of students, its actual practices are centered on celebrating the institution and the transformation of students into alumni – tied to the institution. Thus, commencement is an exemplar of state power exercised ritually by the university. Commencement, as a ritual ceremony, is the cultural expression of the culmination of education policy. In relationship to Latinx (im)migrant communities, education policy writ large has been the centrifugal force that has expelled them as the barbarian – the migrant figure enslaved by the institution. The Barbarians’ Revolt is migrants’ exercise of pedetic force by seizing the land – or the events – that the state laid claim to in strengthening its power and through which it expelled migrants as undesirable, enslaving them in the institution and configuring them as barbarians.

Borders, academic activism, and Latinx Graduation Ceremonies

The policy under scrutiny here is the anti-immigrant policy regime of US higher education. In short, this regime is a collection of policies over time that have structured Latinx (im)migrant student participation in higher education as exceptional, rather than normative. It is the regime that has perpetuated the Latinx educational pipeline in which 99/100 Latinx students who begin compulsory schooling in the US will leave education prior to obtaining a bachelor’s degree (Yosso, 2006). It is the same policy regime that tells Latinx (im)migrant students that the university is not theirs. It is the same policy regime that proclaims that mass higher education only extends as far as Latinx (im)migrant communities’ educational achievement is seen as valuable to economic prosperity for ruling (white) elites. This policy regime is witnessed in the effects of multiple, often contradictory, but always expanding policies that structure Latinx (im)migrant participation in US higher education (Nuñez and Gildersleeve, 2016). These policies are enacted as and by the bordering technologies that expand the administrative apparatus of the university in control over the body and movement of the Latinx (im)migrant community. This policy is what Border University exemplifies and reflects. Border University is the product of this anti-immigrant policy regime.

In what follows, we draw from Gildersleeve’s ethnographic engagement around Latinx Graduation Ceremonies (Gildersleeve, 2017) to highlight how the migrant as barbarian exercises pedetic force as a counter-power to transform higher education via the revolt, and how the Latinx Graduation Ceremony reconfigures traditional bordering technologies of academe (i.e., Border University) into a more culturally relevant Border U.

In Gildersleeve’s (2017) ethnographic investigation of ritual culture and Latinx (im)migrants in US higher education, he closely examined Latinx Graduation Ceremonies, in contrast with the institutional commencement with which most people are probably familiar. Institutional commencement generally centers the university, and it seeks to strengthen its power by making students indebted to it for granting them the diplomas they receive. As a border technology, commencement picks up where convocation left off; the ceremonies are connected by the military wall constructed by marching dignitaries, faculty, and graduating students. They each rely on the rampart provided by the dais of the ceremonies, and each acts as a port wall of entry/exit from the life of the university. The traditional ceremonies concentrate power in the institution itself. We see this in the reference to songs of alma mater, imagery of the particular university through its crest, seal, or motto featured on printed programs, wayfinding signs to the event itself, and the traditional uniformed dress of those who process into the setting. From such a reading of the bordering technologies at play in the institutional commencement ceremony, it is very much a militant display of institutional power and control. It further enacts the university’s expansion by expulsion using these border walls.

The Latinx Graduation Ceremony uses the same skeleton of the institutional commencement ceremony, clearly marking it in the genre of graduation, but, unlike institutional ceremonies, student organizers have the power to alter some key pieces: they allow individuation in dress; they provide food for families; they make parents, elders, or broader community members the subject of the ceremony in significant ways; and they recognize the biopolitical aberration that the Latinx graduates represent (Gildersleeve, 2017, 2018). That is to say, they know Latinx graduates are exceptional; they recognize that US education systems would not predict them to be graduating.

But these dimensions to the ceremony, while adoring and powerful in their own right, also need to be read within the history of Chicano student activism – specifically, El Plan de Santa Barbara, which laid out an agenda for Chicano higher education that included, among other things: the increased recruitment and retention of Latinx students and faculty, Chicano studies as a recognized field of study, and significant rituals and traditions to be built into the fabric of the institution, like the Latinx Graduation Ceremony. El Plan calls upon the notion of Aztlan – an imagined unifying recapture of a thriving Latinx community (Chicano Coordinating Council for Higher Education, 1965; Gildersleeve, 2018).

The demand to change institutional policies and practices has typically been the objective of activism within the academy (Biondi, 2012; Wheatle and Commodore, 2019; Williamson, 2012). Institutional policies are used to create campuses that enforce/enhance who is worthy of a college education. Yet activism within the academy seeks to change these exclusionary institutional policies. Campus activism across the nation has taken on various issues from campus racial climate, sexual assaults, and institutional divestment (Grady-Benson and Sarathy 2016; Hope, et al., 2016; Jones and Reddick, 2017; Mangan, 2018). These movements have used a variety of tactics such as social media campaigns, sit-ins/teach ins, demonstrations, and administrative building take-overs. All of these movements seek to remake the institution.

Latinx Graduation Ceremonies can be understood as part of this academic activism via revolt, in how they are remaking the commencement ceremony and reconfiguring its borders. This revolt is aligned with academic activism that uses tactical approaches that promotes familiar administrative policies and practice (Barnhardt, 2014). Unlike activism in the 1960s, that some scholars have identified as combative (Altbach and Cohen, 1990), the revolt in these ceremonies is shaped within the context of the university. These ceremonies counter the institutional practices by centering family, community, and mestiza indigeneity. They claim the protest as place and more than place – as a mobile body, a movement from origin to imagined future. They revolt against the expansion by expulsion regime of the institution by seizing the ritual of the commencement ceremony, recreating it in their own image, and using it to imagine a future-present wherein Latinx ancestors are built into the design of the university.

Creating the Latinx Graduation Ceremonies does not occur without having to resist and refuse institutional policies while creating new bordering and border processes. The administrative arm seeks to protect the institution through various policies that determine what is “allowable” on campus. The extension of these policies dictates who and what belongs in the institution. Latinx organizers have fought with administration against existing policies in order to make graduation ceremonies culturally relevant. For example, events that seek to have cultural food must prove to administration that catering companies such as Sodexo and Aramark cannot make authentic cultural foods. These policies leave students having to discover ways to push against institutional policies that seek to exclude their cultural food and those who make it from the institution. Once students are able to bypass institutional policies, they invite in those who are deemed outsiders. The providing of food at graduation ceremonies goes against administrative policies by inviting Latinx businesses to the institution via food, although these same businesses have to abide by institutional policies regarding liability insurance.

Welcome to Border U

The border-making produced by the Latinx Graduation Ceremony re-creates the military wall, but uses the corpus of the Latinx graduates, marked by their cultural heritage and contributions. The military wall created by Latinx graduates’ revolt occurs in three instances typical of Latinx Graduation Ceremonies. First, the march of nations is a procession of national flags that represent Latin American countries, recognizing the origins of graduates’ families and potentially of graduates themselves. The procession forms a soldier wall of Latin American flags, which demarcate a new kind of border within the university’s social movement. It is a border that opens the university to swaths of backgrounds that generally do not participate in university ceremony. Second, it is common in some Latinx Graduation Ceremonies that graduating students will march into the ceremony alongside their parents. Again, a militant march forms a soldier wall of Latinx bodies, most of whom (i.e., parents) are usually left out of recognition in commencement ceremonies, and all of whom represent a migrant corpus that has persisted through the institution’s expansion-by-expulsion regimes to reach this day of revolt (i.e., Latinx Graduation Ceremony). Third, a port wall is configured in the crossing of the stage from Latinx student to Latinx graduate, which parents and children freely cross back and forth, pausing at times to share individual stories of struggle, survival, and achievement.

These practices are in stark contrast to the institutional commencement that extracts from graduates more than it contributes. The soldier walls – the wall of Latinx (im)migrant graduates and parents and the wall of the march of nations – and the port wall created by the crossing of the stage tradition work in tandem to pedetically reconfigure the ceremony without university dignitaries or institutional symbolism. Rather, these pedetic forces create a new physical and psychological border – drawing on the metaphysical imaginary of Aztlan. In these ways, the Latinx Graduation Ceremony is a revolt against the institution’s expansion by expulsion. In particular, it is a revolt of the institution’s modus operandi that relies on the exploitation of Latinx (im)migrant bodies. The Latinx Graduation Ceremony is academic activism in how it seizes the bordering technologies of the institutional commencement exercises and reconfigures them into pedetic forces of a newly formed Border U.

Border U remakes the university, moving outside its traditional borders. Border U moves temporally beyond its institutional walls like the bordering technes used in the Latinx Graduation Ceremony, persistently transitory and liminal. Such a mapping of kinopolitics into the experiences and contributions of Latinx (im)migrant college-going leads us to three further questions, provoked by the academic activism of Latinx (im)migrant communities and their revolt that seized the commencement ceremony in the making of Border U:

What might a movement-centered (perhaps, pedetic?) university look like? What are implications for curriculum, pedagogy, organization, and governance?

How else can activist efforts re-border the institution? What happens when the university is imagined and organizational change is enacted from a pedetic bordering regime, a regime built by and for the migrant?

How might we consider bordering as on-going organizational change, especially bordering through pedetic force?

How might pedetic forces strengthen the knowledge imperative (research, teaching, public engagement) for the university?

These questions beg for more academic activism to explore, imagine, and enact a new form of remaking the university. These questions advocate a movement-centered regime of organizational change in academe. The bordering that produces the Latinx Graduation Ceremony and created Border U is a first-step analysis to examining and producing new concepts for catapulting the university into its next phases of social life.