The Joy of Struggling Together for Freedom in Education—A Discussion with the Coalition for Action in Higher Education

Today I am excited and honored to be talking with Dr. Shamell Bell and Sherena Razek, two activist scholars who join us to talk about their work on the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, which will be convening its Third Annual National Day of Action on April 17th.  We talk about  the unique and central position CAHE occupies on the activist landscape.  The Coalition brings together labor, anti-fascist and anti-racist activists, and those working for Palestinian freedom.   CAHE energizes the educational sphere by refusing to shy away from taking radical positions, by embracing boundary-crossing and close affiliations with diverse communities, by defending the most vulnerable, and insisting on free education in every sense of the word. CAHE aims to both hold university administrators and trustees accountable, but also to recognize and grow our own strength with imagination, creativity, and mutual care.

Dr. Shamell Bell is a global movement artist, scholar, and visionary cultural strategist whose work lives at the intersection of radical imagination, embodied activism, and unconditional love. She earned her Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from UCLA and recently completed a teaching appointment in Theater, Dance & Media at Harvard University.  As an interdisciplinary scholar and documentary filmmaker, Dr. Bell explores the power of embodiment, collective freedom dreaming, and multimedia storytelling to disrupt oppressive systems and ignite transformation. Her social impact work in the entertainment industry includes collaborations with artists such as Common, Dominique Fishback, Lalah Hathaway, and Esperanza Spalding. She also served as Supervising Producer on the Emmy-nominated series Lessons in Chemistry. Dr. Bell is co-social impact director—alongside Ms. Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner—for Ritual of Breath is the Rite to Resist, a performance project responding to state-sanctioned violence. She organizes for economic justice with the Debt Collective as its Visionary Escalator, advocating for student debt abolition and debt-free college for all. She also serves on the steering committee for the Coalition for Action in Higher Education and co-chairs their Antifascism caucus.

Sherena Razek is a diasporic Palestinian feminist educator, scholar, activist, and labor organizer. Currently, she is a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. She holds a PhD from the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University where she was the President of the Graduate Labor Organization and co-founder of the Palestine Solidarity Caucus. Her research focuses on Palestinian visual culture, anti-imperialist struggle, and decolonial feminist ecologies.