This last week, I have been largely preoccupied with organising solidarity for a beloved colleague, a woman of colour from the Global South, a vocal critic of the corrupt power grab by misogynist structures in universities, who is being targeted, surveilled, and harassed for carrying out this work. One of the key emergent lessons from this organising work and from similar such organising, including in working through struggles when I have been targeted by the corrupt surveilling structures of authoritarianism, is the vital role of legal infrastructures of solidarity.
Infrastructures of surveillance that hold up power and control target justice-based scholarship through narrative anchors that communicatively invert calls for justice into threats.
The traditional forms of power and control in society that uphold colonial, patriarchal, cisnormative, racist, ableist, capitalist interests are threatened by academic voices that speak truth to power, rendering visible through explanatory frameworks the workings of power.
The very act of speaking truth to power threatens power. Power surveils and targets those of us that look it in the eye, unpack it, and seek to dismantle it.
Power disproportionately targets indigenous academics, migrant academics, Black academics, other academics of colour, women academics, queer and transgender academics, diversely abled academics, academics writing against and in resistance to power. Power targets academic voices writing against the extractive practices of neoliberalism.
Power targets academics writing against the hate politics mobilised by power.
Voices from the intersectional margins questioning power are framed as uncivil and/or unprofessional by those in power. Gender diverse scholars questioning patriarchy are framed as uncivil. Anti-racist scholars writing about the pernicious effects of colonization are framed as racist. Decolonizing scholars writing against the workings of the repressive practices of the settler-colonial state are framed as extremist.
In instances where the authoritarian state is invested in safeguarding power, voices advocating for justice in the academe are paradoxically framed as producing hate. In other instances, where the state turns to repression to silence dissent, academic voices raising calls for justice are communicatively inverted into threats to security, security; even, positioned as extremists or terrorists.
The uses of communicative inversion by power are inherently corrupt. A politician picking up the phone to call university administrators to complain about an academic doing justice-based work, deploying communicative inversions, is corrupt. A donor writing an email to the university deploying one of the communicative inversions outlined above, threatening to withdraw donations until the university stops the academic, is corrupt. A trustee writing directly to the academic deploying one of the communicative inversions outlined above, threatening action, is corrupt.
Our academic solidarity work is vital to making these communicative inversions visible, in explaining the communicative tropes through which materiality is turned on its head.
This work, however, must be complemented with a legal infrastructure of solidarity that holds to account corrupt university administrators, trustees, bureaucrats, capitalist donors, and politicians that draw on their power to target academics carrying out justice-based work. That the uses of communicative inversions as instruments of surveillance and bullying are fundamentally corrupt, as abuse of power, ought to be rendered visible through articulations made within the legal structures.
These legal infrastructures of solidarity on one hand, offer safeguards, by holding the abuse of processes to account. They send letters, file cases, fight cases, outlining the violation of the law by those in power. On the other hand, they take a pro-active approach to holding those in power to account when they abuse power. Corrupt politicians, for instance, using their influence to pressure universities must be held legally accountable. Similarly, corrupt capitalist interests placing pressures on universities to silence academic voices must be held accountable. Corrupt hate groups targeting academics must be rendered visible and held to account through legal structures.
In summary, speaking truth to power must be legally protected. For those of us working at the intersectional margins, it is vital to ask, "How are we going to organise ourselves to co-create those legal infrastructures that enable our work of speaking truth to power?"
In a climate where politics and economics are organised around majoritarian and populist infrastructures of hate and consolidation of power, it is not enough for us to simply focus on our academic work, hoping and praying that the work by itself will speak truth to power. We must be equally invested in holding power accountable when it targets us.