The City University of New York’s graduate school includes a course called “Global Antifa” that promotes the actions of “racialized and colonized peoples” dedicated to “fighting fascism.”
The CUNY Graduate Center website shows that Global Antifa was offered during the spring semester on Fridays between 11:45 a.m.to 1:45 p.m. A person named Ashley Dawson taught the course.
“This seminar begins from the premise that racialized and colonized peoples have been at the forefront of theorizing, challenging, and dismantling fascism, white supremacy, and other modes of authoritarian rule over the last century,” the course description begins.
“The seminar surveys and draws on these antifascist traditions, linking them to a deep engagement with racial justice, anti-imperialist movements, intersectional feminism, and an analysis of the changing character and contradictions of capitalism.”
The description then continues by saying “[a]uthoritarian populist regimes have taken power in many countries around the world in recent years, including not just wealthy nations like the US and Italy but also formerly colonized countries like India, the Philippines, and El Salvador.”
The key question the course tries to answer is: “How can these regimes be resisted and how can futures of collective liberation be won?”
The Federalist reported the course “oriented towards militant co-research,” which “prioritizes political struggle over the academic pursuit of knowledge” where the “researcher must become an active participant in a political movement, while still doing research — it essentially means devoting lots of time to working as an activist …”
According to The Federalist, that method would have students be active members of antifa, “not just embedding with them, but potentially participating in violence and destruction with them.”
The readings include works from “feminist and queer critics of racial capitalism like Angela Davis and Audre Lorde.”
Dawson, whose CUNY bio says he co-edited five books with a strong scholar-activist slant, is the founder of the city university’s Climate Action Lab and a member of the Occupy Climate Change! research project headquartered at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Sweden.
Dawson in 2024 was named a Social Practice Fellow for the Peaker Project, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, known for supporting far-left activism on college campuses, according to The Federalist.
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