[cover photo is a creative design not associated with the design of the book project]

The book, Degrees of Liberation: Public History, Campus Activism, and the Fight for Educational Justice, is an edited volume (co-edited by myself and Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd) that is under contract with the State University of New York Press (SUNY)'s "Praxis: Theory in Action" series. We are in the process of revising the manuscript after a positive peer review from multiple experts in the field of education and public history.

What's the book about?

Degrees of Liberation examines college campuses as contested historical spaces where students, faculty, staff, and surrounding communities draw on the past to demand justice in the present. This book shows how campus activism functions as a form of public history. These movements mobilize memory, shared authority, and historical knowledge to challenge institutional narratives, expose university complicity in settler colonialism, racial capitalism and violence, and imperialism, and imagine alternative futures rooted in accountability and collective action.  

Our book brings together scholars, educators, public historians, and activists to explore how Indigenous, African American, Latine, Palestinian, and allied movements have reshaped campuses as sites of resistance and possibility. Through essays that foreground protest, pedagogy, memory work, and community engagement, the book argues that higher education can-and must—be understood as a collective, historical project oriented towards liberation.