“Seditious Acts: Collectivity and Resistance Within and Against the Violences.”

American Studies Association. San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 2025

How do we write, teach, and build community within an academy shaped by austerity, corporatization, and ongoing colonial violence? This roundtable seeks to gather graduate students, postdocs, independent scholars and early career scholars committed to collective writing and knowledge-making as modes of resistance against the isolating forces of the neoliberal university. As former members of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Graduate Writing Group (CRES) at the University of Minnesota, we reflect on how our practices of communal study, writing, and care have shaped our intellectual and political commitments—then as graduate students and now as early-career scholars to open up conversations about violence, collectivity and resistance. 

Through our interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work (within black studies, Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies and American Studies) as scholars, organizers, and educators, we consider the possibilities and tensions of writing within and against institutional structures that seek to individualize labor and extract knowledge. What does it mean to sustain intellectual and political projects that refuse the logics of competition, productivity and erasure? How do we continue to hold space for each other and for forms of writing that disrupt dominant grammars of power? We explore the necessity of writing in and with community as a practice of survival and as a method for reimagining scholarship beyond the academy’s constraints. At a moment when the university feels increasingly inhospitable to liberatory thought, we invite participants into a conversation on collective study, writing as a social practice, and the creation of alternative intellectual spaces. If you are seeking ways to write, think, and organize otherwise, we welcome you to join us.

Mining the landscapes and gravitational centers of our disciplines, this roundtable offers a sensuous, lively, orientation beyond Late-Stage American Empire. We gather to collectively re-remember all the tools, maps, and intimacies we’ve inherited from our scholarly, activist, and artistic lineages. If you are feeling undone and ungrounded at this moment, we invite you to be in conversation with us.