I'm building a Resistance Studies Series

Take Race, Media and International Affairs 101 and 102 with me this fall.

My Rogue Radical Professor Era continues. Photo by Ethan Wong at MLK Library, DC.

Hello everyone!

My Rogue Radical Professor era continues. The horrors persist, but so do I!

After Columbia canceled my class on Race and Western Media, I decided to launch my own damn school— and teach the material myself. Last week was the conclusion of the Resistance Summer School summer pilot— I taught Race, Media and International Affairs 101 to more than 500 of you from the Martin Luther King Memorial Library in Washington D.C. I decided to make it a hybrid course— online students by Zoom, in-person and MLK. The course was priced to make it as accessible as possible— with students paying just as little as $100, $200, $300 and $500 up, depending on people’s budgets.

So! While Summer School is officially over, the learning doesn’t stop. Resistance Summer School will return in— you guessed it, Summer 2026.

Beginning October 6th, I will be teaching Race, Media and International Affairs 101, and 102 only one more time this year. If you are interested, you can enroll here! Deadline is Sept. 19th.

With summer coming to an end make the title of this work a little more—evergreen.

I’ve decided to continue doing my resistance work under a new name, Resistance Studies Series.

The Summer Pilot was an experiment in what it takes to build and organize around institutional constraints and political repression, with modern tools. I also have learned how hard it is to build infrastructure, including a tech apparatus to manage materials, communications, legal and financial scaffolding— all the things that normal educators don’t have to think about.

When things got tough and complex this summer, I come back to the simple essence of it all— which is creating spaces where we can connect the past to the present— and mold our minds to imagine better futures. And right now, education are under attack.

The way I see it, we are in a state of emergency.

With Resistance Studies Series, not only will I continue to teach on race, media, and history, but to be able to design models of high level mass rapid response education and learning. Emergency education, really.

What does it look like to be able to respond quickly to attacks on people who educate about race? How do we support and help those who are being canceled and pushed out of education and research for political reasons? As funding for science and research collapses, what could it look like to try to get the knowledge to the people anyway? What does it look like to be able to instruct people on how to help stop their neighbors from being disappeared?

I’m hoping to bring more history, journalism and discussion about resistance efforts throughout history and the present, so we get through these times.

I tend to be a big dreamer. I’m also thinking salons, lectures, a podcast/newsletter, and in-person, hands-on workshops. I am also thinking specific trainings for journalists, for archivists and knowledge workers.

In a future post, I’ll have more thoughts and reflections from the Summer Pilot, and how I think we need to learn and teach differently right now. It is natural —- even righteous to want to burn down the institutions that are cooperating with the oppressors that want to destroy them. The shock and anger is justified. But this does not mean that the way these institutions have conditioned us will go away anytime soon.

The true, and most fundamental resistance, is to undo this conditioning within ourselves. Bruce Lee once said, self- knowledge is finding the source of your ignorance. I say this to my very smart, well-educated students many times— I am teaching you all remedial history.

I don’t care how many degrees or years of school one has— we have all been fed distorted, incomplete, and manufactured versions of our histories, our peoples and how we got here. We have been conditioned to be ignorant, to not question power.

<*hops on soapboax, grabs megaphone* >

For Resistance Studies Series— I’ll again be teaching Race, Media and International Affairs 101, with a new Fall pilot course, Race, Media and International Affairs 102.

You can enroll here— Hard deadline is September 19th.

Classes begin October 6th.

< *puts down megaphone*>

I tried to price this to make the class as accessible to people as possible. After this Fall, I will likely not teach this material again until Spring / Summer, 2026, while I focus on writing during the winter.

So don’t miss your chance to learn some remedial history with me. The beginning of resistance means learning how to unlearn.

We move!

Karen

Photo by Ethan Wong, MLK Jr. Library, DC.