One of the questions I often invite students to work through together is the question of how people effect political change when those in power don’t feel accountable to their needs.

This discussion often happens as part of a mini-unit on the AIDS crisis in the United States, in part because I’ve taught texts like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Thom Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats, Danez Smith’s “sometimes i wish i felt the side effects,” Félix González-Torres’s “Untitled (Perfect Lovers),” and Alexander Chee’s “After Peter” in a number of courses, and in part because I find it’s helpful to anchor our conversation with a concrete example. The documentary How to Survive a Plague (dir. David France) has been great for this: it gives everyone in the class a shared orientation to the historical events, and it introduces the work undertaken by ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. 

On the day we’re set to discuss, I start by replaying a clip from the documentary. I usually select the sequence that occurs about an hour and fifteen minutes in, which juxtaposes the dedication of the AIDS memorial quilt with the action in which protestors dumped the ashes of their loved ones on the White House lawn, as these two counterpoints provide a sense of the diversity of tactics and differences of opinion within the movement. I talk about how much this sequence moves me, as a way of reminding us all that the conversation we’re about to have will be personal as well as theoretical for some members of the class.

I then give students time to talk with a partner or small group about things that interested or surprised them in the story the film tells. During this time I have often overheard students express shock about how little they had been taught about this period of history: something I affirm was true in my experience of high school as well. Those students who have not participated in protests themselves (the number of which has often been high at the private, predominantly white institutions where I’ve taught full-time) also express occasional surprise or confusion about the risks involved in direct action. Why put yourself in a position to be arrested or harassed or hit by a car? These can be suggestive questions to bookmark and to offer to the full class: what produces the kind of solidarity that leads people to give up their own security to help others? What inhibits that solidarity?

Next I put categories on the board to anchor our large-group conversation. These categories have varied from class to class. In my general-education class “Unlivable Worlds,” the mini-unit on the AIDS crisis continues a thread about collective action that began during our discussions of Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow: a novel about infrastructure collapse set on an Anishinaabe reservation in Canada. For those students, I return to headings we’ve previously considered in the context of Rice’s novel – individual and/or communal survival; our relationship to the past and the dead; passing on collective knowledge; and the relationship between individual and society – and I invite them to share what new insights and connections the work of ACT UP can add to our earlier conversations. In my “Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies class,” the discussion arrives during our week on law, policy, and the state, and I offer students two questions that we can approach dialectically: “what might be some of the possible benefits of working through/with the state to produce change?” and “what might be some of the limitations of working through/with the state to produce change?” I emphasize that these questions have often provoked fierce debate within movements as well as outside them. Whatever categories I choose, the immediate goals are to help us all broaden our sense of the repertoire of political action and to give us an opportunity to weigh the affordances and risks of different approaches.

There’s a broader goal at work in these discussions as well: one I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few weeks. By looking to past examples of collective action – especially collective action taken during periods when activists would have had very little evidence that their organizing was producing meaningful results – I want to help students see the world around them as malleable and in process, no matter how “over” it feels from our personal vantage points. 

The age cohort to which my students belong, the group we call Gen Z, has seen a retraction of many of the rights and protections I grew up hearing taken for granted, and that’s not even to mention the increases in wealth inequality and the accelerations in climate disaster that can produce unlivability across an overwhelming number of registers. I can understand why students for whom the political landscape of the past ten years has been formative might internalize a sense that a damage trajectory is baked into the world they’ve inherited. But there have been countless moments in the long history of humanity when conditions have felt crushing, and in each of those moments there have been people showing up for each other without any immediate proof that their goals were achievable. I think, to take just a few examples from the American context, of ACT UP organizers in 1994, anti-segregation protestors in 1963, abolition activists in 1850. While the victories those organizers won can feel, in hindsight, like obvious steps toward inevitable progress, for those on the ground, continuing the fight required a daily practice of hope. They couldn’t know which of the many small actions they took would tip the scales, and neither can we; but we know the scales are never static, and that the people who believe they can be moved are the ones with the greatest likelihood of moving them.

On the day I was told, along with the eleven colleagues also fired in a second round of budget cuts, that my position at St. Norbert College was being eliminated, I offered to open up our regular class time to any current students who wanted a place to process the news, which, in a community as tight-knit as ours was, traveled fast and hit hard. Students who came expressed a concern for their professors. They also asked what they could do to share their concerns with the wider community. I told them that was a good question and an old one, and I gave them space to talk about it with each other. In one class, a student stood up and started making a map of their questions and ideas on the board. I can’t imagine more affirming evidence of what powerful places classrooms can be: places that help students understand what power is available to them when they work together to address their community’s needs.

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks writes that “[t]he classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (12). I hope we’ll hold that space as long as we can. Hope is a discipline, as Mariame Kaba says, and we all need practice.