Reviewed by: No Study Without Struggle by Leigh Patel Charles H. F. Davis III No Study Without Struggle Leigh Patel Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2021, 192 pages, $24.95 (cloth) Broadly speaking, No Study Without Struggle rigorously engages the systemic and structural entanglements of oppression and organized resistance within education and its social contexts. Bringing together historical records, oral histories, and contemporary case examples, Patel beautifully illustrates relationships of power through the analytical lens of settler colonialism. Moreover, the expressed intention of the text is to provide a sense of grounding for the reader about the longstanding symbiosis of study and struggle. As such, Patel provides compelling evidence to demonstrate the connections between higher education as a settler colonial project and the always already confrontations with settler colonial violence. This is noteworthy in that, until recently, the higher education literature has been largely deficient in its engagement with (de)colonization and (de)colonial studies. Yet, as Patel notes, many of the endemic and intractable problems confronting contemporary higher education find their roots in the stolen land and stolen labor and the exploitative and extractive nature of colleges and universities, which continue with their modern function as neoliberal enterprises. The book includes six chapters, each with a conceptual focus that altogether renders a comprehensive yet succinct analysis of higher and postsecondary education as a settler colonial project. Building from the offering of historian Robin D. G. Kelley's seminal essay "Black Study, Black Struggle," Chapter 1 provides Patel's argumentative basis for focusing specifically on settler colonialism as a framework. Whereas "naming the problem of racism in higher education is necessary but insufficient," Patel argues settler colonialism offers a more complete framework for understanding the relationships and distinctions between how marginalized and minoritized people experience various forms of what Mustaffa (2017) has described as educational violence. As a faculty member whose research and teaching broadly focus on systemic oppression in higher education and its social context, I find this particular critique to be as accurate as it is timely. Although the rhetorics of antiracism and decolonization have permeated postsecondary and institutional discourse in recent years, they have not necessarily been understood as complementary endeavors. Patel, however, reconciles these otherwise discrete categories of analysis in education research and practice by putting racism and settler colonialism in conversation as co-determinants that continue to shape endemic inequities in higher education and society. For contemporary students and emerging professionals in the field of higher education, this book provides an important primer for understanding postsecondary institutions as contested terrains in the advancement and retrenchment of social and political inequity. In Chapter 2, Patel describes settler colonialism as an ongoing process of three mutually dependent practices: (a) the theft of land/ resources, (b) Indigenous erasure, and (c) the theft of labor. In the context of postsecondary education, this is established by stating the accomplished fact that all US colleges and universities occupy stolen land, many of which were also built through stolen labor and [End Page 117] the profits therein. Further, Patel recasts the racialized experiences of minoritized students as concurrent transactions of cultural taxation and indebtedness. These transactions are presented as evidence of gift economies, a colonial structure in which the worthiness of the oppressed is determined by the benevolence of "gifting" opportunity or reprieve from their oppressors. Such framing is deeply instructive given how often postsecondary institutions and their agents purport to be solutions to otherwise inescapable problems, a point that has been widely challenged by critical scholars for decades (la paperson, 2017; Mustaffa, 2017). Chapter 3 interrogates the symbiosis of profit and debt, broadly conceived, in which the accumulation-dispossession paradox of resources (i.e., environmental, financial, and social) has shaped higher education since its inception. Noting sharp increases in tuition and the rising cost-share of attending college for students and families, Patel enumerates the consequences of steep declines in federal subsidies following the 2008 recession. Examples such as the racialized student debt crisis and the re-opening of campuses just months after the COVID-19 pandemic are used to thoroughly illustrate a "racial trade-off" between white beneficiaries (i.e., property, institutions, and people) and the proximal Black (and brown) communities...
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Apr 8, 2024
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