• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

The Material Collective

A collaborative of art historians and students of visual culture

  • Home
  • About
    • Mission Statement
    • Manifesto
    • Organizational Structure
    • Links
    • Contact Us
  • Blog
  • Activism
  • Tiny Collections
  • Store
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Activism and Advocacy

One of the Material Collective’s foundational principles is to advocate for real progressive change in academia and beyond. Just as we pursue a variety of scholarly interests, we support a range of different causes and movements. But we all agree with what Eileen Joy had to say in her introduction to L.O. Aranye Fradenburg’s book, Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts (NY: Punctum Books, 2013):

…those of us who work within the humanities must commit some of our most valuable resources (primarily, our always-encroached-upon time, and some part of our inner emotional lives) to academic activism, whether through letter writing, blog polemics, organized protests and strikes, collectivist agitation and intervention, mutual aid initiatives, and books such as these. (p. xxv)

We also appreciate that an activist mode-of-being is not the natural state for many academics, and so we hope to use this platform to communicate more broadly about issues that affect us all. As Fradenburg herself puts it in Staying Alive, “No academic today, in whatever field, can afford to be ignorant of the historical, economic and political circumstances of his or her work.” (p. 30)

We offer a set of links to some resources and readings on academic activism, and we invite you to lend an ear to the blog and our twitter feed (@materialcoll) for specific issues and calls-to-action as they come to the fore.

General Organizations (Directing Donations)

  • Resist

Civil Rights

  • ACLU
  • Southern Poverty Law Center

Racial Justice

  • Black Lives Matter
  • The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond
  • Showing Up for Racial Justice
  • Amend the 13th
  • Black Youth Project 100
  • White Nonsense Roundup

Reproductive Rights and Preventing Sexual Violence

  • Planned Parenthood
  • NARAL Pro-Choice America
  • RAINN

Disability Rights

  • The Seeing Eye
  • ADAPT

LGBTQ and Trans Rights

  • Lambda Legal
  • The Trevor Project

Immigrant Rights

  • United We Dream
  • Moviemento Cosecha

Against Islamophobia and Pro Palestine

  • MPower Change
  • Jewish Voice for Peace
  • If Not Now

Parent Activism

  • MomsRising

Getting Money out of Politics

  • Every Voice

Gun Control

  • Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America
  • March For Our Lives

The Environment

  • Environmental Defense Fund
    The Sierra Club
  • Greenpeace

Labor and Workers’ Rights

  • Fight for 15
    Jobs with Justice
  • Higher Ed Labor United
    UAW Local 2110

Broad Community Organizing

  • Center for Community Change 

Primary Sidebar

Connect with Us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

Latest Posts

  • CFP: Ecological Seeing I & II (Kalamazoo, May 2023)
  • Keep Fighting!
  • “One Amazing Ball of Learning” —-Faith Rush, University of Akron, class of 2022
  • CFP: Medievalism, Orientalism, Capitalism.
  • An open letter to the College Art Association Board of Directors on layoffs and closures in Art History

Contact Us

Copyright © 2023 · The Material Collective · Log in