Solidarity as subversion: Attempting climate justice practice within the Neoliberal University

Introduction

Today, we can see that neoliberal higher education is co-opting efforts to disrupt and dismantle attempts to resist and refuse its complicity in the ‘Plantationocene’ and the systems of exploitation that have led to simultaneous climate crises. ¹ In the face of such crises, so many universities across the world have maintained an intergenerational tradition of an extractive education and research system, one that dehumanises, extracts, and divides through its numerous everyday research, teaching, and administrative processes. The bastions of the much proliferated Western higher education model in Europe and North America are, after all, financially and ideologically connected to colonial histories of exploitation. ² Given this history, and ongoing legacy, it isn’t surprising that transformative-based movements, such as that of climate justice, become disarmed and made to work for the reputations of the very institutions they seek to expose and dismantle. ³

Justice-oriented movements, and those that seek the radical transformation of historically imperialist and white supremacist spaces, are continuously challenged, appropriated, and eroded by the corporate practices of the neoliberal university model. For example, the current model of education often encourages reflexivity and romanticises radical transformation, but then denies and refuses our conditions as human beings. This ranges from our need to grieve (Skitolsky, 2018), to rest (Hersey, 2022), or to care (Mutch and Tatebe, 2017). On the need to care in the university, Dean Spade (2020a: 8) notes that ‘[n]eoliberalism. . . has neither an effective practice of, nor a vocabulary for, care’. As many have pointed out, care in the eyes of the university is often translated into ‘pastoral care’, a vague and unwritten expectation that staff will tend to the emotional and mental health needs of students, but only up to a certain point before making referrals to other corners of the university structure. This current assumption of care and its meaning at the university level reflects more of a ‘consumer-provider’ relationship between student and academic (Laws and Fielder 2012) than one characterised by care pedagogical work, which Motta and Bennett (2018: 636) note as being ‘nurtured and nurture attentiveness to creating time-spaces which foster dialogical co-creation of knowledges’. As Watson (2012) has written previously, the fostering of these type of environments that subvert the neoliberal and nurture environments of pedagogical care can also simultaneously create sites of resistance.

In this article, we put forward, and critically examine, an attempt of our own to create such a space of resistance, and of climate justice, in the form of a vertically integrated programme (VIP). ⁴ This programme was largely born out of our work on climate justice, in scholarship and in practice, over the past decade, and out of witnessing its co-option within spaces of higher education. The neoliberal silo-ing of ‘climate justice’ into a concept that focuses on the human impact of climate change excludes and negates much of its radical history and articulations from the ‘Global South’, as well as Indigenous, Black, and Brown communities in the West. Seldom, if ever, do universities recognise such articulations like the 1996 Jemez Principles, the 2010 People’s Agreement of Cochabamba, or the 1990 National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit.

While there is no set definition of climate justice, we understand its basic tenets to be grounded in a collective response to historical injustices caused by systems that have led to, and profited from, the Plantationocene. ⁵ As a result, it is logical that those who have borne the cost of neoliberal modernity and its ongoing disintegration should be at the forefront in deciding the various participatory, distributive, and restorative paths toward transitions out of this system. Upholding this principle is something we see in the practice of solidarity. But of course, such notions of solidarity are not new. As educators, Mayorga and Picower (2018: 2020) note, in their own practice of solidarity with Black Lives Matter, that

active and race radical solidarity is a practice of holding up a recognition of how people’s liberation is bound up in one another’s, while the conditions, needs and notions of liberation remain distinct. Solidarity is an active practice of recognizing and working through difference to achieve liberation for ourselves and for others.

Solidarity for climate justice is the path toward global and collective transformation and liberation. When contrasted with the application of climate justice in neoliberal settings – which ranges from labelling development programmes that have either tokenised or no participation from beneficiary communities in their design to titling modules that look at the ‘human costs’ of climate change with no inclusion of resources or discussion around liberatory thought and praxis – it becomes evident that the concept has often become reimagined into a non-threatening and complementary framework for the very system causing the Plantationocene.

This article seeks to articulate and reflect on a specific approach to the VIP model – one that we have found helps us, in some ways, to subvert co-options of climate justice in the current neoliberal higher education system. The VIP model was originally developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology and was designed such that

teams of undergraduate students – from various years, disciplines and backgrounds – work with faculty and graduate students in their areas of scholarship and exploration. Undergraduate students earn academic credit for their work and have direct experience with the innovation process, while faculty and graduate students benefit from the extended efforts of their teams. ⁶

At its heart, the VIP programme, while offered under a ‘teaching’ portfolio as a module like any other, is inherently an opportunity for undergraduate students especially to undertake research under the guidance of a module leader. Within the context of the VIP we founded at St Andrews, we have attempted to create an environment that encourages both inter-collegial solidarity and solidarity beyond the academy with communities experiencing everyday violence from systems and institutions that have led to ongoing climate crises. To explain this approach further and to offer our reflections, we split this article into three sections. First, we outline how solidarity as a promise – often highlighted in University policies of diversity and inclusion – can end up being derailed as a practice within the academy because of the corporatisation, and over-commodification, of the classroom. We argue that by instead taking a subversive approach within a neoliberal classroom we can reveal our humanity through an exchange of knowledge, care, and assistance. This then leads into an examination of the potential of bringing solidarity into the classroom, and the ways that this may potentially manifest. For example, in constructing a VIP, we specifically asked that students see themselves beyond the academic institution and recognise their worth beyond the daily asks of the neoliberal higher education model. To work with community-based partner organisations, with whom we collaborate and exchange, students must therefore recognise how their own identities, experiences, and skills can be helpful in solidarity work. We also see this work as very much in keeping with Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogical approach which stresses the importance of praxis - a dialectical cycle of action and reflection - as the means through which students develop critical consciousness (Freire, 1970). We then turn to a section reflecting upon the practice of solidarity in the neoliberal university, and the ways in which we have made attempts – some more successful than others – to subvert standard practice in the academy. This section is very much a reflection upon our own practice, including our attempts to, in some ways, co-opt our own privilege, and the ways in which this has worked and the ways in which it hasn’t. The final section concludes.

De-railing solidarity within the academy

Today, one of the greatest challenges facing higher education is its transformation into a corporate framework. In commenting on the limits that neoliberalism places on decolonisation of, and within, higher education, Joseph Mbembe (2016: 38) remarks

to put it somewhat crudely – the university is being refounded and is being rescaled with the purpose of better turning it into a springboard for global markets in an economy that is knowledge based, innovation based.

As the over-commodification of higher education continues to become more commonplace, so too do appropriations of justice-based movements within the University. Smith (1991: xii) notes in her Introduction to Decolonizing Methodologies, ‘potentially radical gestures of recognition when implemented can end up as mealy-mouthed watered-down liberal devices that end up reinforcing the status quo’. Vazquez wrote tellingly in 1988 about the appropriation of the field of ethnic studies in the US academic system, noting at that time that the university had effectively managed to co-opt ‘some of the more socially and politically palatable aspects of the ethnic studies movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s’ and asking ‘[a]re we now beginning to witness a gradual intellectual and political de-railing or erosion of a curriculum which once constituted a significant threat to the academy?’ (Vazquez, 1988: 23–24). The same could currently be said of movements to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ with roots in the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement at the University of Cape Town and the rise of Black Lives Matter after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmermann for the murder of Trayvon Martin. Keval (2019) talks about how the point of decolonising the university/decolonising the curriculum campaigns should be ‘to co-produce an academic and intellectual endeavour that embodies inclusivity and re-positions who and what gets to occupy the centre and the margins of ideas and society, and re-balance power’. ‘Decolonising the curriculum’, however, is often used now by university administrations as a way of maintaining an appearance of inclusion while ticking the boxes of ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity’, and diluting the diversion from Euro-centric and supremacist pedagogies, epistemologies, and ontologies.

In a similar fashion, while UK universities continue spearheading ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ solutions in the midst of the Plantationocene, there is little consideration of how such initiatives might participate in radical transformation. Movement-builders, such as the US-based Climate Justice Alliance, have been astute in addressing this continued co-option at the expense of frontline-based organisations. They state:

while frontline groups are realizing this vision of a fairer, greener future, their organizations receive a stunningly small share of climate funding. At the same time, and with increasing frequency, we hear movement language – ‘environmental justice,’ ‘climate justice,’ ‘just transition’ – appropriated without proper context or true understanding in many spaces, from philanthropy and finance to media, academia, and government. These are more than words for frontline communities whose lived experience is the foundation of the frameworks and principles that back up these concepts. . .

A primary issue at hand is how the neoliberalised university understands social justice at-large: a binarism of what social justice is and what it is not, thus complicating its ability to be reflexive on its own perpetuation of injustice. There are, after all, roadmaps of how Universities can operate in solidarity. For example, the outcome document of the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba (2010) outlines:

Knowledge is universal, and should for no reason be the object of private property or private use, nor should its application in the form of technology. Developed countries have a responsibility to share their technology with developing countries, to build research centers in developing countries for the creation of technologies and innovations, and defend and promote their development and application for ‘living well.’ The world must recover and re-learn ancestral principles and approaches from native peoples to stop the destruction of the planet, as well as promote ancestral practices, knowledge and spirituality to recuperate the capacity for ‘living well’ in harmony with Mother Earth.

That there is a lack of collective acknowledgement and integration of decolonial articulations of and challenges to higher education, like the People’s Agreement, is self-evident. This is not so much that individuals from within institutions of higher education do not agree with the principles set out in the People’s Agreement. Rather, it appears that they are more devoted to maintaining behaviours and operational outcomes while simply ‘re-writing institutional narratives’ (Spade 2020b: 132).

It remains that white, Western, and capitalist conceptualisations of social justice continue to be prioritised as opposed to those that centre transformative change for peoples that have been excluded from power and that challenge the legitimacy of the liberal response. As Mananzala et al. (2010) note, transformative change can be problematised:

[S]ome may say ‘revolutionary change’, ‘progressive change’, whatever your beliefs or ideologies are. It creates opportunities and space for [a]. . . consciousness-building process. To say ‘here are the limits of the system and here is an alternative’ creates that space for . . . building revolutionary consciousness, a transformation of the system, as well as the possibility for building alternatives to the system.

The principles of social justice that are necessary should be at heart liberatory - acknowledging histories of colonialism and structures of oppression, and recognising the need for an intersectional approach that dismantles the latter without repeating the former (Mikulewicz et al. 2023). This is crucial in articulating a critical lens that attempts to step away from the neoliberal research and pedagogical paradigms within which, as employees of Western, Scottish institutions, we remain embedded. The focus should then be on creating a pedagogical process – where ‘learners can become aware of their own understandings and positions, engage with other perspectives and worldviews, challenge their assumptions, and construct new possibilities’ (McCowan 2023) – that reinforces solidarity rather than de-railing it. Our aim then in our wider work is to try to sit within the methodological and theoretical gaps that exist within the social justice literature, as well as those that do not already exist. Existing theoretical and methodological lenses in the social sciences are built on forms of supremacy: one knowledge over others; one people over others; one class over others; one gender over others; one ability over others. This results in a system where some people are valued more highly while others are cast aside. A critical approach aims to overturn this and to recognise that ‘marginal’ spaces are not peripheral to social justice and its pedagogical approaches, but are actually central to them, and a key element of transformative change. As Julia Watts Belser (2020) notes, for example, ‘disability is a state of vitality, a way of being that matters in the world, a position from which critical knowledge unfolds.’ In the end, recognising and responding to these contrived hierarchies and binaries with solidarity practice is one way to disrupt and subvert them.

Bringing solidarity into the classroom

The VIP was founded, with student input, in autumn 2022. Together we decided that the VIP would work, collectively, with only one community organisation at a time, and ideally one that would originate from communities experiencing historical, societal and structural marginalisation. Since its inception and up until the time of the publication of this article, the VIP has been collaborating with an organisation, founded by Scottish Gypsy/Traveller activists, whose mission is centred on platforming the voices and concerns of Scottish Gypsy/Traveller communities, and those of other Indigenous and historically oppressed peoples. In Scotland, Gypsy/Traveller communities remain one of the most, if not the most, historically marginalised and oppressed groups in Scotland. As a team we thus have provided the organisation with academic (e.g. research, copy-editing) and non-academic (e.g. technological assistance, advocacy work, communication and networking) skills and resources that could then be used as part of their ongoing fight for social justice. To date, such examples of this – which we are comfortable sharing publicly - have included:

In maintaining a culture of solidarity, which for us also implies accountability, we have felt that the communities that the VIP works with should, in whatever sense, be geographically local. We do this largely because our vulnerabilities are more known and exposed and, as a result, we have been able to find a more equal footing with our community partners that does not platform us as ‘problem-solvers’. This is important especially for subjects like International Relations and International Development, since the neoliberal system conditions us to believe that we have a right to intervene, to give advice, and to bring our ‘skills’ to communities that are far distant, while retaining the ability to withdraw or retreat from vulnerability and discomfort. Within the School of International Relations, the VIP thus disrupts the concept of the international, recognising that the subject of the international is a contingent one, conditioned by a view of who is inside, and who is outside; who is ‘them’ and who is ‘us’; and who is similar and who is other. Within this framing, we also disrupt how climate change is framed as a problem of the ‘undeveloped’ or the ‘Global South’, and place its local challenges, historical roots, and global futures in the centre of the classroom.

The practicalities of maintaining a culture of solidarity with our partner organisation first begin with individual and collective work within the VIP. Our aim, like that of many others within the radical teaching space, is to shift away from the neoliberal in having to emphasise market-based solutions, instead acting with our partner organisation and following their corrective solutions to the marginalisation of Scottish Gypsy/Travellers. In terms of how the VIP goes about this work, before engaging in the work assigned by our partners, we have problematised the concept of community with students, underlining its contested and fluid nature (see Buggy and McNamara 2016; Mulligan 2015). We have also highlighted the ability of research expediently labelled as ‘community’ or ‘participatory’ to co-opt the voices of those it purports to represent. To counter this, we emphasise the work of Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies (1999) and the need to be reflexive in our positionalities as academics, and to acknowledge the role research has played in colonisation and the oppression of peoples near and beyond St Andrews. As Smith (1999: 1) notes ‘[f]rom the vantage point of the colonised, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term “research” is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism.’ Indeed, as we have emphasised within the VIP, recognising that research has been a means of colonisation – in first extracting knowledge from thinkers in the majority world and then twisting and moulding it to the desires of the Western academy – is a necessity in making any attempt to re-centre research practice away from the purely Western gaze.

We also teach that the work of the VIP is part of an intersectional approach to climate justice, whereby ecological concerns are set aside, and local needs are prioritised in any fight for a wider justice in the context of the Plantationocene. In shifting climate justice from appearing as a seemingly institutionalised, finite framework to being an endless path on which we must walk with one another with compassion and solidarity, we break out of a cycle that transforms justice from a lifeway to practice to a box to tick. Neoliberal institutions often differentiate between various forms of justice, whether climate justice, racial justice, gender justice, disability justice, or queer justice, silo-ing them as issues divorced from one another and their common origin. To be cognizant of what Gottlieb (2015: 38) has described as ‘conceptual gatekeeping’ is to be aware of the ways in which the neoliberal education system, and the neoliberal policy framework, seeks to divide, co-opt, and silence movements for justice. Conducting education and policy in silos seems to offer a simpler handling of the facts, but it also means that the places where change so often takes place – at the margins rather than at the centre – are easily ignored.

In keeping with this aim of addressing extractive research practice, since 2013 the authors have been developing a means and a method of research practice that effectively runs alongside their pedagogic practice and that aims to ‘do academia differently’. This could be framed as an essentially ‘care-based’ research approach, but we would argue that its aims go further – moving from care to engaging in solidarity where we work with and for our partners, as opposed to our partners being either those we ‘help’ or those from whom we ‘extract’. In line with a practice of ethical research ‘care’ this work is designed to de-prioritise our own voices in the everyday procedural tasks of academia and to de-centre our own knowledge in an attempt to re-draw and reframe our relationship with those who are actually dealing with the issues that our discipline concerns itself with. It is also, however, designed to be practical, and to step away from what may be perceived as more ‘academic’ tasks into an overall praxis that works with the priorities of those we work with. Indeed, the ‘banking’ model of learning manifests in the dynamics of power within the classroom as an example of authoritarianism (Kreisberg, 1993, 221):

Power in the authoritarian classroom is power over – a relationship of inequality in which an individual or group (i.e. Teachers and administrators) has the ability to control the behavior, thoughts, and values of others (i.e. students). . .. Power over manifests itself in the lives of students in two central ways: in students’ relationships with teachers and administrators and in their relationship to the knowledge they are asked to consume. The result is an educational system that preaches democracy but models and teaches the opposite.

These hierarchies that inhabit the neoliberal model are at the core of calls for a transformative pedagogy – one that is more student-centred and participatory (Shor, 1992), and that aims to transgress and disrupt neoliberal norms.

Reflections on practicing solidarity in the neoliberal university

Everyone working from within the neoliberal university to subvert it must surely find themselves at times pulled both ways, and that their work to subvert hits up against the standard requirements of academia: to assess students, to meet deadlines dictated by a university timetable, even to invite students into teaching spaces that they – students – have no control over. Through our work, we have attempted to push against these as much as possible. While our co-conspiratorial team still have their work assessed, much of this work is co-designed with the intention of assisting the research, educational, and advocacy needs of our community partners. Deadlines are moved around to accommodate the wider work of the VIP, such that if something is needed at short notice by our community partners, the assignment deadline is changed. It is an individual academic office (Watson’s) that is used as a research space, as a study space, and as a meeting space, with students having access to their own keys which they pick up from a central departmental point.

The authors recognise that not everyone would be able to do this, and that it is part of the academic privilege of one of the authors (Watson) – as both a Professor, and as one of the longest-serving members of staff in their School – that allows there to be leeway given for what may appear to be non-standard practices because there is a trust that even if, for example, marks come late, or assignments take unusual forms, the ‘learning outcomes’ will still be achieved. Sometimes too it is easier to decentre and to de-hierarchise when an academic is sitting at the top of the hierarchy – there is less to lose because they are no longer part of the promotion process or have achieved tenure. Meanwhile, Collins, despite being a PhD student at the time with the financially precarity that entailed, was still able to devote time and resources to the VIP thanks to both his own class privileges and the career status of Watson within the university, too. Moreover, there are wider issues of privilege inherent in the ability of the VIP to do its work – our whiteness and our place in elite institutions we recognise frames us as less ‘risky’. The latter word is specifically informed by the work of the late anthropologist Sharon Stephens whose work on children and their childhoods used the word ‘risky’ to describe those ‘who need to be controlled in ways that will not threaten the existing social order, or indeed will not cause too much upheaval in the rapidly changing global one’ (Watson, 2006).

Placing ourselves, as educators and authors, within the VIP praxis and how it has evolved also raises the question of how we, ourselves, have reflected upon our roles. We also take on board, as Queer scholars, West’s (2013: 540) work on ‘queer generosities’ and that ‘[w]e should want something more from our work to help us create the worlds we want to live in as opposed to reinscribing at every turn the dominant order of things’. Our aim in bringing solidarity practice and the ethos of mutual aid into the classroom was not only to extend a research practice that we have been developing over the last decade (see Collins and Watson, 2016, 2023) but also to bring those same principles that have guided that practice more explicitly into critical classroom pedagogy. For Collins, there is constant discomfort in making any claim to be radical or decolonial in the confines of academia, particularly from the positionality of a white Queer man. Tuck and Yang (2014) famously note that ‘decolonization is not a metaphor’. In keeping true to the ethos of decolonisation as a process that can refuse, de-centre, and dismantle the colonial and the oppressive, there is a need for educators to critically reflect on whether their intentions to decolonise are lined up with their outcomes. This concern looms over the very work presented in this article. For Watson, there also remains the constant need to reflect upon whether the work that they are doing remains true to the stated objectives, such that ‘neoliberal habit’ is continually subverted. Reflecting on the self in the classroom is an important part of this and also of the practice of developing a critical, and engaged, pedagogy. It is also a reason why the first session of the VIP every semester focuses on positionality and reflexivity within our work, with each member of the VIP being urged to consider their ‘wholeness’ as human beings in the classroom as well as outside of it, albeit recognising too, as Gani and Khan (2024: 2) powerfully note ‘positionality’s entanglements with power’. We believe that the importance of considering ‘wholeness’ is a necessary in this work and a reflection of bell hooks’ idea that ‘[t]hose of us who have been intimately engaged as students or teachers with feminist thinking have always recognized the legitimacy of a pedagogy that dares to subvert the mind/body split and allows us to be whole in the classroom’; or as Ken Robinson more bluntly stated it in his now famous TED Talk ‘Do schools kill creativity?’: ⁷

And I like university professors, but you know we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of human achievement. They’re just a form of life. Another form of life. But they’re rather curious. . .In my experience, not all of them, but typically – they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, but in a kind of literal way. They look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads. Don’t they? It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.

In recent years literature on the affective turn has arguably led the way in considering ‘wholeness’ in academia, encouraging a wider unpacking of vulnerability in research and teaching practice and of the ways in which we as academics reflect upon our own work. While such self-reflection is vital we should also guard against a process of ‘decentring in order to recentre’ ⁸ whereby the practice of self-reflection – albeit cognizant of oppressive practice – may end up once again centring the Western academic voice.

Conclusion

Proposed as a response to a world in crisis, Mosley et al. (2020: 4) conceptualise a framework of radical hope that includes

understanding the history of oppression and resistance (being oriented toward the collective past); embracing ancestral pride (being oriented toward the individual past); envisioning possibilities (being oriented toward the collective future); and creating meaning and purpose (being oriented toward the individual future).

Through the vertically integrated programme model, we found a way to inject such a radical hope in a system that perpetuates the Plantationocene and co-opts justice-based movements into un-reflexive praxis. Rather we propose that the practice of solidarity from academia to communities outwith can be brought into pedagogical practice, and help to subvert systems that are lacking in care, solidarity, and compassion. Certainly within the context of climate crisis, the ethos and practice of solidarity then offers a potential solution. It has the means to foster radical care, and solidarity in the classroom while also showing students that this practice can be used to break down the walls of higher education, practice solidarity with those excluded outside, and remind us all of our humanity. As we continue learning, and unlearning, our own hope as educators and as researchers is to be able to try to continue to create spaces of interruption and disruption that will facilitate this.