ABOUT US

We’re excited to announce the 2021-2022 CHE-DOPE collaborative research initiative on the past, present and future of land-grant universities in the US. Organized jointly by graduate students from the Center for Culture, History and the Environment (CHE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE) collective at the University of Kentucky, this CHE-DOPE grad student project interrogates the foundations of our respective educational institutions and their “methodological narratives of benevolence” (Lee and Ahtone 2020).

 

We trace the contemporary social and economic implications of the 1862 & 1890 Morrill Acts in order to think critically about the relationship between land-grant universities, settler colonialism, indigenous dispossession and racial capitalism in the US. 

 

Over the 2021-2022 academic year, we will meet over reading group sessions and panel discussions, as well as field and archive trips, to think through these questions in relation to the foundation of UW-M and U Kentucky as agricultural schools. If you’re interested in thinking through the racist premises of your home institution, the relationship between academic knowledge production and the settler colonial state, and decolonial praxes in a land-grant university setting,  join us!

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Want to learn more?