College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Abstract This essay lays out the concept of global futurities, which I define as the discursive scales and plural epistemologies by which marginalized identities and groups articulate, construct, imagine, or locate their futures. While global future is usually based on what could happen to all people and the planet, my framework of global futurities maps the differential horizon of being and co-becoming for those who have been historically denied a future due to discriminatory processes such as Black communities, Indigenous peoples, formerly colonized populations, migrants, etc. Such futurities are not simply pluralistic in terms of cultural diversity, but they serve as counter-hegemonic forms of futuring and worlding, shaped by dissident interests and political actors dedicated to promoting (Other)worldly justice. These subaltern viewpoints challenge a singular framing of humanity, as they involve multiple nodes and networks of power/knowledge/desire. These ontological and temporal geographies are centered in queer, feminist, intersectional, anti-racist, multi-species forms of collective agency amid existential threats from colonialism, globalization, the Anthropocene, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article discusses the institutional challenges and opportunities of implementing Asian American Studies (AAS) and Ethnic Studies (ES) college curriculum in the University of California and beyond. These personal observations are built on my involvement in the national, community, and student-led movement for Ethnic Studies in the state and across the nation. While scholars and educational practitioners have already documented the difficult history of implementing these programs—building them into full-fledged departments with faculty lines with a strong number of majors—there is still room to consider other pertinent social issues. Connecting scholar-activism in the UC system with AAS-mobilizing efforts in CSU and in elite private liberal arts schools, I discuss the following issues related to the implementation of ES as a state requirement: (1) academic senate faculty participation in governance, (2) engaging student activism and apathetic faculty, (3) forging inter-institutional collaboration across school systems, (4) fighting for faculty unions and political associations, (5) reducing over-professionalization of the f ield, and (6) challenging administrative surveillance and infringement on academic freedom. As a central theme, I speak to the “academicactivist matrix” to engage differently educational activism within the academic-military-industrial complex, considering the endless possibilities for re-creating the university that we collectively desire and want.

The world is already in climate “crisis” mode. Fossil fuels are the largest driver of climate change, and eliminating their use is an important step toward addressing the future of climate change. Yet, I argue that eliminating fossil fuel use alone is insufficient to address the crises not only of climate change, but the uneven effects of climate change and fossil fuel racial capitalism as they play out across the world. Building on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois in thinking through the establishment of abolition democracy in the post-emancipation project of Black Reconstruction, this article offers a conceptual analysis of why and to what end such a framework is essential to building a radically democratic society rooted in liberation for all. The article looks toward an abolitionist energy democracy, where abolition democracy offers guiding principles for developing theory and organizing praxis. Using a case study of the People Power Solar Cooperative in Oakland, California, USA, the article considers how people are working to dismantle fossil fuel racial capitalism through the simultaneous building up of new institutions and infrastructures in the spirit of abolition democracy. This article thus considers a notion of abolition democracy rooted in not just the elimination of a system of dominance, but the simultaneous remaking of new systems as an important way of thinking about fighting for social and ecological change.

Drawing from Native American Studies, I explore how the LSA Statement on Race (2019) applies to Native Americans, who are unique among racial groups in the United States since ‘Native American’ is also a political status and tribes are nations. Focusing on the fundamental tenet of tribal critical race theory that colonization is endemic to society (Brayboy 2005), I argue that the ways in which Native American languages are represented in linguistic scholarship reflects colonial norms, which also guide the severe underrepresentation of Native Americans in the discipline. Integrating these ideas into antiracist frameworks facilitates social justice in linguistic science.

This article calls on ethnic studies scholars to question how the public university remains intact as an unproblematized social model of advancement by interrogating the necropolitics of the public university—the collateral damage that the academic industrial complex incurs in securing advantages for some. Bui reads Asian American studies and its scholars against neoliberal claims by the University of California to provide a “better life,” in so doing challenging the precarious privilege of Asian Americans and constructions of the “model minority.”