The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (NMPJ) opened in Montgomery, Alabama, on April 26, 2018. The memorial provides a sacred site where people can gather and reflect on America's history of racial injustice and represents an essential milestone in the ongoing process of racial reckoning in the United States. As Alabama has historically been…

Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Te Tiriti) signed in 1840 by the British Crown and a number of indigenous hapu (subtribes) collectively named Maori has been widely positioned as the foundation document for the colonial state of Aotearoa New Zealand. Devastating consequences of breaches of Te Tiriti form an injustice perpetuated through overt and covert…

Student activists continue to challenge institutions of higher education to address instances of oppression and injustice. In this chapter, we discuss recent examples of racial justice activism within higher education. We then offer recommendations for institutional leaders and administrators to consider when engaging with students focused on…

Across the United States, racist, hate-filled rhetoric, attitudes, and behaviors are daily occurrences. Events like officer-involved shootings of unarmed Black men, women, and non-binary individuals, along with the increase in white supremacist and nationalist groups, have cumulatively created a climate of fear and mistrust. This fear and mistrust…

Many Black young adults engage in their communities through critical action, or activism, as they transition into adulthood. However, knowledge about predictors of critical action remain sparse. The present longitudinal study addresses this gap by exploring links between critical action, ethnic-racial identity, and racial discrimination among 143…

Neoliberalism continues to exacerbate systemic racism and restricts efforts to address racial and social justice issues. Consequently, there has not only been an increase of public concern, but students are constantly driven to organize around their experiences. Asian American students are currently and have historically been one of these…

The background and resources presented in this article support teaching about two Tent/Freedom Cities--in Fayette County, Tennessee, and in Lowndes County, Alabama--that were built as a form of civil rights resistance and for housing Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers evicted by oppressive white landlords for marching, attending mass…

The education research community, both within the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and beyond, could and should play a critical role in fundamentally transforming educational institutions and systems. Given its complexity, transformative change in education is best undertaken as a collective endeavor. Yet for researchers to be a…

In this article, we discuss several recent examples of racial justice activism that has taken place within higher education, and what institutional response has looked like to those experiences. We offer recommendations for institutional leaders and administrators to consider when engaging with students focused on racial justice activism.

In predominantly white and affluent communities, it is a common belief that race and racism are irrelevant because there is little to no racial diversity in these communities. Elyse Hambacher and Denise Desrosiers describe how a New Hampshire school district in a mostly white community navigates teaching and leading for social justice despite…

Over the past two decades, we have witnessed an abundance of student protests at colleges and universities in the United States. Many of these protests cluster around the issues of white supremacy and anti-Black racism as they function in higher education settings--issues that have historically and contemporarily plagued United States colleges and…

Recent efforts to opt out of assessments have focused attention on the role that testing plays in accountability reforms in the United States. While opt-out activists often invoke the disproportionate impact of these reforms on communities of color, opting out has been more widespread in mostly White, affluent, and suburban communities. This study…

This paper explores the social media literacies of Dakari, a 16-year-old Black teen reader, writer, and activist, within a broader 3-month multi-case study on diverse teens' online literacies. The focus is on Dakari's multimodal literacy practices related to social justice activism and civic engagement. The study highlights how social media…

Amid debates about CRT in education, this paper critically analyses laws that have reportedly sought to expand 'education on racism, bias, the contributions of specific racial or ethnic groups to U.S. history, or related topics' with the hypothesis that there would be little evidence of anti-racist ideology in policies pertaining to curriculum.…

In the summer of 2020, powerful protests against police brutality took place throughout the United States in response to the unlawful deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the shooting of Jacob Blake. Though the types of protests ranged from local grassroot organizations walking the streets to athletes using their platforms to…