1968: A Year of Student Driven Change

Marking the 40th anniversary of the Black Student takeover of North Hall, the Department of Black Studies is organizing a conference entitled, 1968: A Global Year of Student Driven Change, to take place, November 20-22, 2008. While recognizing the courage and insight of the 1968 student awakening, this conference places that Black activism in a comparative context and examines it in relation to at least two other movements, the Mexican student revolt on the eve of the ’68 Olympics and the Paris student uprising of May ’68.
The conference (website, program) will raise a series of questions about the process by which youth movements brought about fundamental change in the archaeology of power and knowledge in the West and transformed the calculus of hegemony and identity that dominated the United States, Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe in the 1960s.

(The photograph shows students occupying UCSB’s North Hall on Oct. 15, 1968.)

Students in 1968 aimed at nothing less than a democratic goal-the demand that those being educated be allowed to shape their educations and the quality of everyday life in the societies into which they were being educated. This conference maps the “new education” of the future by looking back to look forward, by recovering what is useful and dispensing with what is not, and fashioning a new pedagogy from the innovative ways of thinking, doing, and creating culture that students advanced on three continents in 1968.

Speakers and presenters include Drs. Haki R. Madhubuti, Nikhil Singh, and Monifa Love, plus Chuck D and the legendary Mars 22 leader, Jean-Pierre Duteuil, who will be flying in especially for this conference linking French, Mexican, and African American activism and struggle. A key feature of the conference will be student participation, as many of the presenters will be graduate students in Chicana/o, Black, Asian American Studies, who will share with us cutting-edge research on the history and efficacy of student initiated change in the educational and political situation. All are welcome, especially students interested in offering answers to the question: “Where do we go from here?”

hm 9/22, 11/6/08