Only We Can Protect Us: Labor and Anti-Harassment Organizing within the Neoliberal University

Abstract

This special issue has called for scholars to critically evaluate how we can better connect with community activists to address gender-based violence (GBV). We seek to complicate this by instead positing the following: scholars and community activists should be one in the same. The authors reflect on their experiences combining their anti-GBV and labor organizing to take on the neoliberal university. We detail our experiences organizing graduate workers around anti-harassment and discrimination, what we have learned, and make recommendations to other scholar-activists working in their communities. We end with a toolkit that is meant to be widely produced and shared within the community for a helpful guide to work towards direct actions to address gender-based violence.

Keywords

• sexual harassment
• labor organizing
• toolkit
• scholar-activist