What is education for? What modes of study become possible beyond the frameworks of formal schools and universities? How does radical studying fit into the work of grassroots liberation work?

As we enter the new year, educator, writer, and organizer Eli Meyerhoff brings us back to foundational questions about radical pedagogy. His book Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World rejects narrow, romanticized, disciplinary modes of education. It elaborates the concept of “modes of study” — which cracks open possibilities for how we might learn, teach, transform, and organize together. He is one of the co-collaborators on Abolition University and Cops Off Campus Research Project. Recently Eli has written important critiques of the "Antisemitism 101" trainings held by universities in response to Palestine liberation and anti-Zionist organizers.

Currently, Eli currently works at Duke University at the John Hope Franklin Center Humanities Lab. He has previously worked as an adjunct instructor at the University of Minnesota and at Duke. He earned a PhD in Political Science, with a political theory focus, from the University of Minnesota in 2013. 

Episode Credits:

Co-hosts and co-producers: Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin

Editing and Production Manager: Aliyah Harris

Intro Music: Lance Haugen and the Flying Penguins

Outro Music: Poppy / Aliyah Harris

Beyond/Against/Within Education: Radical Pedagogy as Radical Study

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Lucia: This project, as well as the Connected Cops Off Campus Research Project, confronts the fundamental entanglements of higher education with systematic racist violence, while also generating radical visions of what else. learning and studying could be. More recently, Eli has written on university administration's responses to Palestinian liberation organizing and anti Zionist organizing by their students, faculty, staff, and community members.

Lucia: Welcome Eli to Nothing Never Happens.

Tina: Thank you, Eli, for being on our podcast, for being on Nothing Never Happens. For the first question, we want to keep it broad. What, for you, is education? How do you define it?

Eli: Yeah I don't really have one unified definition of it. I think different people talk about it in different ways.

Eli: Think about how education was a big part of, say, the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany, for example. Like, the Nazi schools were seen as education, but they were a form of ideological subject formation for shaping young German people into Nazis. like with having race science and eugenics as biology in their school curriculum.

Eli: For example, the education system implies a kind of normative romanticizing of education in its very structure: the way we talk about the education system in terms of rising up from kindergarten through first through 12th grade up into higher education. So there's this kind of vertical imaginary about education rising up in contrast with figure of the school dropout, seen as dropping down and out.

Eli: A series of my advisors transferred to go to other schools which made it hard for me to continue my studies and after I took my exams one of my dissertation committee members asked me if I was Thinking of dropping out of grad school. I hadn't really been thinking about it, but when she asked me that it made me wonder what that idea of dropping out meant, what why it seems such a shameful kind of action. That experience made me wonder where that kind of figure of the school dropout came from. That led me into this bigger sort of critical research project on education itself.

Lucia: Thanks for that, Eli.

Lucia: You offer in your book a concept of "modes of study" and I'm curious If you could share a little bit about what this means to you for our listener. And you can do this any way you want, whether that's through more autobiography of how you came to it or through the theoretical or conceptual historical traditions that you're building on.

Eli: This modes of study concept, it's basically kind of conceptual tool that I came up with as a way to destabilize What we understand as education or the normative hegemonic way that we do education in the school system.

Eli: She described snapping as an action that spills a history so that it falls out, so there's a fallout. And this action is often deemed as rash . So this snapping is one way to respond to an impasse or a kind of problematic situation that seems impossible to move past.

Eli: So for Sara Ahmed, she was responding to the university's impasse of systemic sexual violence, patriarchy , heteropatriarchy. And she refused to just move on from that impasse.

Eli: And in, in that strike some of my friends and I helped organize a hunger strike that was in solidarity with the staff worker strike. And it, and we had a encampment in the middle of campus in the, in that encampment held teach ins so it was a space that mixed up studying with organizing and relationship building.

Eli: And I could say more about that but back to your question about modes of study, where this came from. So this experimental college was a very radically alternative kind of studying project, where there were no grades, no exams all the classes were free, no tuition was charged and the students and Anybody really didn't have to be an official student.

Eli: They taught classes on all kinds of things, radical topics like feminists and Marxist anarchist reading groups, but also more basic everyday sorts of topics like bike maintenance or community gardening. And so, thinking about this experimental college as a radical sort of alternative, I came up with this modes of study concept as a way to describe the differences of it, of this experimental college from the normal way of studying research in the university.

Eli: And I was tweaking that a little bit by saying you could think of the normal form of education as itself a mode of study. And modes of study are not necessarily good or bad, but they exist in co constitutive relationship with a wider way of making the world .

Eli: So, so a big part of my project, my research project has been to look at how the normal kind of education based mode of study has been bound up with the dominant world making project of Capitalism, Racial, Colonialism, Heteropatriarchy, Statism, and then to also look at how alternative world making projects like Indigenous Peoples world making projects have been bound up with alternative modes of studying.

Lucia: violence that these institutions inflict and ask folks to endure as part of an educational process. There's this mode of studying to be the kind of docile or self hating or whatever subject. And I am, I was really struck in reading Beyond Education about Or by how in this articulation of a kind of radical hope and possibility in multiple modes of study, a lot, so much of that was forged in this really profound moment of loss and rage snapping.

Lucia: If you have additional reflections that you want to share about this intersection between loss and grief as atmospheric in so many experiences of any kind of Dominance of institutional life and these, this sort of cultivation of radical possibility and relationships. How are you thinking about that now?

Lucia: And what sorts of projects are you seeing or maybe participating in that are inspiring? to you, or even if not inspiring, moving, or energizing in some way?

Eli: Thank you. And to try to change, change the world, or change, at least change the institutions that cause The the harm to our friend and, yeah, to organize together in solidarity with our friend who we lost and solidarity with each other around our kind of shared sense of precarity.

That sense of solidarity and mourning has definitely been a kind of through line by ongoing organizing. I think, yeah, that Experimental College project. Was one project that I, I found really inspiring. Like I, I could speak about another.

Lucia: Yeah, we'd love to hear about it.

Eli: It's a project that appropriates resources, funds from normal universities--- University of Alberta and University of British Columbia uses these resources to put on education projects that are carried out in accord with indigenous modes of studying land based education, which is all about helping Indigenous people rebuild their relationships with the land.

Eli: And that their understanding of land also, I should say, is very different from kind of modernist Colonial understanding of land as something that's separate from people in this than a indigenous understanding of land. It's seen as much more all encompassing for people themselves as well as other living and nonliving entities are part of the land.

Eli: That's one project I found, I find very inspiring as a kind of alternative mode of study and, yeah, I'd say another really inspiring project lately, or, say, movement that involves alternative radical modes of studying is the kind of studying that we see, we've seen happening in the Gaza solidarity encampments on campuses around the world.

Eli: Another day when I came there, I brought two of my, or my two kids. I have a six year old and a six month old. And the it was a very welcoming space for kids with Lots of free food and art and crafts so my six year old got to make, paint a Palestine flag that she stapled onto a stick and made a kind of makeshift flag, used it in a protest.

I thinking about these spaces of studying the protesters themselves have, called them People's Universities. They've set up intentional free libraries sometimes honoring martyrs of the Palestinian Liberation Movement like Rafat al Rir by naming the libraries after them.

Eli: I think they were prefiguring what a radical alternative university could look like.

Eli: Yeah. Can you say and tell us more about how the universities that you've seen at Chapel Hill and other places, I know being in Atlanta, Georgia, how Emory University reacted really terribly with police presence and tasing faculty and student protesters. What was the reaction of other faculty and students and administration and how did the the students in the encampment navigate, negotiate that, those tensions?

Eli: They deployed police they, they brought in police from all over the state And the police in the administration allowed some pro Israel students to harass the encampment. Then the police cleared the encampment and ar arrested I think 17 people.

Eli: And they I think since then, they've fought to have those suspensions reduced. But some people who are associated with Duke University who were arrested were suspended from, or disallowed from coming on to the UNC campus for either a year or two years.

Lucia: Eli, can you say more about the implications of the use of suspension as a disciplinary tactic by universities and how that relates to broader trends in repression of student protestors?

Eli: And so since then I haven't had a teaching position but I've instead worked as a staff member but I could say a little bit about a strategy that I tried for grappling with these kinds of tensions around being within and against and beyond the normal.

Lucia: Yeah, we'd love to hear that. Education exists as you show so well across the spectrum of roles within colleges and universities and outside of them. So in your current role too, I'm sure you're doing pedagogical kinds of work within and against and beyond.

Lucia: That combination of ground rules setting with reflection on broader context in which we make ground rules and norms seems really useful and I will definitely be borrowing it. What about as a staff person? How have you thought about radical studying in that context?

Eli: So, recent experience I had with this related to the Palestine Solidarity Organizing is that our Center for Jewish Life here at Duke has been holding these what they call Anti Semitism 101 trainings. Maybe some listeners might be familiar with these. Recently there's some news that this sort of anti Semitism training would be made mandatory at Columbia University for all students and staff and faculty. At least here at Duke, it's not mandatory yet. They're mostly aimed at staff so far.

Lucia: Why are they aimed at staff, do you think?

Eli: Because in the framing of it, of these trainings, they're presented as politically neutral and yet they're run by Hillel the Hillel Center here, or the Center for Jewish Life is tied with the Hillel, which is affiliated with Hillel International which is a Zionist organization that has rules for its affiliates that prevents them from collaborating with any group that is very critical of Israel.

Lucia: If we had not been there and had not served these alternative perspectives, I think the people there would have taken the information that they got from these trainers as if it were objective, impartial, knowledge yeah and then later on we co wrote a an op- ed about our experiences with this training.

Thanks for that example, Eli. So much of what you're saying here is bringing to mind the deep collusions between the ways that we study in formal universities and the kinds of policing power that shape that study. Think that Tina has a question that gets to some of your work on precisely this intersection.

This is a project that came out of my collaborations with a lot of people and especially three of my co authors. We, we wrote this piece called Abolitionist University Studies and Imitation. My co authors Abby Boggs, Zach Schwartz Weinstein, and Nick Mitchell. And it was really an invitation to a conference workshop around thinking about what an abolitionist perspective on the university could mean.

Eli: That's not what we're saying. Instead, we're thinking of what a more left wing approach to abolitionism in the university looks like.

Eli: We took inspiration from the idea that W. E. B. Du Bois had of abolition democracy what he called quote, the grand unrealized potential of social and economic change initiated during the reconstruction era. And others like Angela Davis have picked up on this idea in the prison abolition movement, thinking about what kinds of social institutions could solve the problems that make prison seem necessary and so, thereby prisons could be rendered obsolete through a transformative justice approach.

Eli: Yeah yeah, the Cops Off Campus Research Project is a project that emerged out of this Abolition University collaboration. It's basically a crowdsourced nationwide study of how universities and policing are bound up with each other. We created a survey that we sent out to people engaged in COPS off campus organizing on different campuses and invited them to share information about their history and present struggles around policing.

Eli: And it's an ongoing project. I don't really have any insights to share from it. But I do invite people to contribute to it at the website's just abolition [dot]. university.

Eli: But yeah, I'm not sure if I have any great insights offer about a hundred how to understand these movements. Except to say that the police repression protestors has made it even more clear how important it is for people involved in movements of Palestine liberation and cops off campus to intersect and collaborate with each other as they have been doing on the ground.

I want to give a shout out to Georgia State University and their GILE program, G I L E, which is a program That is connected with what's called Cop City in Atlanta the training site, you probably heard about the protests there, and they've been around for a while, they bring in Israeli Defense Force members to train with police Atlanta police and others and sharing tactics, and so that's like the most egregious example that I have of a university participating in militarization and war.

Eli: But in that narrative they leave out the fact that some, Somebody had done this direct action to take out the statues nose. So yeah, making it seem as if the administration did this on their own volition.

Lucia: When he was in first grade. And when you're learning to write at that age, usually the teacher writes a prompt on the board. About every other day, there was a prompt that the first graders were required to respond to in three sentences, and the prompts were like, like if I could travel anywhere in the world, I would go to... but in addition to the fun ones, the prompts were, " teachers are important because..."; " rules are important because..."; tests are important because..." and they were having to fill in the blank, and my brother for "teachers are important because..." wrote like terrible misspellings, like very bad handwriting. " They are old. They are boring. They make us work."

Tina: I think it's genetic.

Lucia: It might run in our family a little bit. Well, okay. Now we can really do the last question. Tina, Eli, What are you reading, listening to, consuming, pondering right now that you would like to recommend to our listeners?

Eli: I've been really enjoying learning a lot from the Makdisi Street podcast on Palestine. The hosts are three brothers they're nephews of Edward Said, but they're also academics themselves, different fields, history, international relations, literature, so they bring all these different perspectives, but since they're brothers, they're able to engage in really heated disagreements, but in very respectful ways that I think, open up new questions in in ways that they might not otherwise be able to do if they weren't family.

Tina: And the other thing I'm watching, which probably is related in some way, is a channel in Atlanta. We don't get cable, but there's just this channel that has and it'll have like weekend binges. And the. One of the recent ones was episodes of the old Twilight Zone, and so I've been binging the Twilight Zone, and it's, yeah, very current.

Tina: I expect Rod Sterling to step out sometimes in certain situations. So, Lucia, what are you consuming ?

Tina: Yeah, that sounds like fun. Deep fun.

Lucia: Deep fun. All right, well, thanks Eli for coming on Nothing Never Happens.

Tina: Thank you.

Lucia: For your really good work and your book and your organizing.

Eli: Thank you.

Eli: Thank you for having me.

Tina: Thank you for listening to Nothing Never Happens, the Radical Pedagogy Podcast, and our conversation with Eli Meyerhoff. Our audio engineer is Aaliyah Harris. Our intro music is by Lance Eric Haugen, performed by Lance along with Aviva and the Flying Penguins. Our outro music is by Aaliyah Harris, and it's entitled Poppy. Thank you so much for listening.