2025 ARIS Study Circle for Scholar-Activists Interest Form
The ARIS Study Circle will impart organizing skills and strategies for nurturing emergent communities of intellectual workers dedicated to making meaningful change within university settings.
Abolition Reparations Investment Safety
A new paradigm for scholar-activism
Universities are on the frontlines of the struggle in this time of white supremacist backlash marked by fascist coups, the dismantling of Affirmative Action, attacks on Black Studies and Africana Curricula, and assaults on bodily rights and on the rights of LGBTQIA+ people.
ARIS envisions the university campus as a key site for strategy and organizing, where intellectual workers directly engage in local liberation struggle to serve broader social justice movements. Drawing on Black Radical Traditions and Black Feminist Praxis, and the teaching that critical thought must be closely intertwined with the work of organizing and community-building, we reimagine the purpose and ends of academia under the prevailing conditions of social emergency, racial oppression, and terror.
Timeline
The ARIS Study Circle will meet four times over the academic year, beginning in Fall 2023. Participants will join virtual study seminars with members of the SSJ Coordinating Committee and invited guests. The meetings will culminate in an optional fully-funded in-person summit at the University of Chicago in April 2024.
Issues
Labor, land, policing, policy, student debt, community engagement, curriculum, and the limits and ends of intellectual production.
DEI
ARIS intervenes in and exceeds the contradictions of “DEI” as it has swept across colleges and universities. Although facing coordinated attack by regressive forces, DEI, as a minimalist approach to diversify the academy, is in fact largely designed to deter lasting transformative change.
Applicants
Open to all types of scholars involved in university education.