IAS Thursdays: What to Do When They Tell You It Can’t Be Done: Innovative Approaches to Navigating Administrative Injustice

The last few years have seen a surge in community engagement at universities, galvanized in part by a desire to respond to the uprisings of the summer of 2020. Foundations, faculty, staff, and community members across the country have come together to forward innovative collaborations that center racial, anti-colonial, and decolonial justice. These collaborations have far-reaching reverberations in terms of knowledge production and shifting university resources. 

In this conversation, we will highlight the hidden but necessary effect these initiatives have by changing seemingly mundane and far-removed university processes and procedures. This roundtable will take up inventive approaches to navigating administrative injustice at universities. We hold that the everyday work of financial systems, hiring, billing, etc. have been central to the distrust, inequity, marginalization, and exclusion that universities can engender and that rethinking these processes is necessary to addressing and undoing these. Bringing together university-embedded faculty and staff, we will discuss bureaucratic challenges we have encountered and share the solutions and ideas that have emerged. Together, we will reflect on how prioritizing racial and Indigenous justice in community engagement projects—getting universities into the “right relationship” with BIPOC communities—can also change basic systems at universities themselves. These outward-facing projects demonstrate that change also has to come from within.

Presented by the Institute for Advanced Study and Minnesota Transform, a Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative.

This event is part of the Minnesota Transform Just Futures Showcase Series from Apr 17-21, 2023, a kaleidoscope of events demonstrating how community partnerships help build a future where racial justice is sustained and embedded in the University. Stay tuned for more details.

Part of IAS Thursdays