Freedom School 2024

In summer 2024, the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy convened a global group of movement and university-based scholars actively engaged in insurgent research and critical theorization as a part of, or as accompaniment to, freedom movements. Freedom School 2024 was organized as part of the project, Housing the Third Reconstruction, which is supported by a Mellon Foundation Higher Learning grant.

Intended as inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of emancipatory land and housing, Freedom School 2024 took up the following issues and questions:

• What is the present historical conjuncture of global racial capitalism and the attendant political economy and ideology of land and real estate?
• How are movements undertaking land struggle, dismantling police-property relations, and enacting housing and spatial justice?
• How do we learn from “beautiful experiments” (Hartman 2019) of reconstruction, rematriation, reparation, and decolonization that are or have been underway? In the wake of mass protest movements that reveal possible futures while failing to materialize their aspirations, how can collective liberatory work learn from its recent and distant pasts to realize the world we imagine?
• What are the ontologies of radical relationality, including kinship, presence, solidarity, and community, that are being created to counter social death and state-organized abandonment?

In pursuing such inquiry, Freedom School 2024 was guided by the following principles:

• To take up and learn from the knowledge produced by freedom movements, not as case study, but as foundational epistemology.
• To commit to critical theorization and historical reflection, including clear-eyed auto-critique of struggle in which participants have directly engaged.
• To demonstrate accountability to communities and movements on the frontlines of displacement and dispossession.
• To understand and mobilize the power of research and scholarship while understanding knowledge-producing institutions, including the elite university, as sites of struggle.
• To learn and think from Los Angeles as a (post)colony, situating the U.S. as an empire-state within a world of landless and poor people’s movements.