University Ecologies and the Question of the Commons

Many important environment justice studies are emerging from universities, conducted with communities most impacted by the transformations of state and capitalist projects. Less critical attention is paid to the university institution itself as a historical and ongoing generator of unequal ecologies. From chemically saturated lawns to confined animal feeding operations, the American university has often led the development of labor-intensive ecological monocultures that fence out biological diversity while fencing in a select few fragile species and marginalized human communities. This three-year project explores, questions, and complicates what it might mean to re-common these university ecologies. Developing modes of collaboration across inherited divisions of class, labor and geography, this project models a vision of education and knowledge production for a collective agriculture that centers those dispossessed of land, and those now made to work within these terrains.