On Stolen Land, By Stolen Hands: Engaging with legacies of land dispossession and enslavement at the University of North Carolina

Keywords: landgrab university, landback, abolition, reparation
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

As faculty, staff, and students at a flagship public university in the US South, we inhabit land, infrastructure, and institutions that are foundationally entangled in Native dispossession, enslavement, and other complex processes of disenfranchisement. This article traces the experimental work of the Landback Abolition Project in asking how, through a land-as-pedagogy approach, we might enact more ethical relations to land and life, even within an educational framework shaped by racial capitalism. At the heart of our work is the question: how do faculty, students, staff, and community of a 234-year-old colonial institution create the conditions for a structural shift in our relations toward land and education. We build on recent scholarship on landgrab universities and reparations and begin from a framework understanding the university through theories of land as pedagogy and racial capitalism. We share our approach to this work at our university, and how place-based research requires and educates us on the intersections of Black and Indigenous geographies.