CFP: Session(s) on the Empire-Self Making of the Land-Grant University

Thank you Dulce Kersting-Lark at University of Idaho for sending this CFP!

Call for Proposals: Session(s) on the Empire-Self Making of the Land-Grant University
Western History Association | Portland, OR | October 21-24, 2026

Considering the Western History Association’s 2026 theme, “Unsettled: New Wests, New Lessons,” we call attention to how federal land-grants, including the universities they enabled, fueled westward expansion toward industrialization. Scholarship on the modus operandi of the land-grant university has emphasized mechanized agriculture and exploited labor on stolen land as outputs of a fraught system, but scattered discourse abounds regarding the ways the wheels of the land-grant university empire-self making apparatus could not turn without the reconstitution of its own image/knowledge. Indeed, much of this conversation resides in Anthropological and Sociological study, and we seek to aggregate Historical-adjacent analysis into interconnected panels focused on the knowledge regime of the land-grant university.

Ethnic studies scholar Sarah E. K. Fong offers racial-settler capitalism as a term to explain the co-constitutive relationship between the violent accumulation of Indigenous lands and racialized labor exploitation on stolen land.i Abolitionist university studies scholars Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell co-locate the university within and between settler colonial and racial capitalist accumulation.ii

The proverbial land-grant university’s three-prong approach (agriculture and mechanical arts education; agriculture experiment stations; cooperative extension service) manifests racial-settler capitalism in three ways: 1) the Morrill Acts of 1867 and 1890, as well as the Equity in Land-Grant Status Act of 1994 redistributed stolen Indigenous land to 2) physically occupy stolen land with machines, domesticated plants, factories, and workers and 3) legitimates the ongoing recreation of its own empire through a knowledge regime that includes university archives, community engagement projects and marketing, and youth programming. It is this self-legitimizing knowledge regime which we highlight in these sessions.

Feminist studies scholars Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell instruct us to short circuit the university to confront its “foundational epistemological and material violences,” and ethnic studies scholar la paperson (aka K. Wayne Yang) urges us to “hot-wire” the university to make it do what we need and want.iii Together, they help us to imagine and repurpose the university’s “resources, capacities, and function of reproducing sociality with and for other ways of being, other ways of living.”iv Preference is given to panels which direct us toward tangible solutions.

Interconnected panels focused on the knowledge regime of the land-grant university might include discussion of:

Critical archives and knowledge production

Decolonization and/or abolition archives, broadly construed

Critical youth instruction and Cooperative Extension programming

Indigenous land theft and occupation

Community-engagement marketing, land-grant lexicon on stolen land

What does it look like to short circuit and hot-wire the university for ends which prioritize our relationships with each other? How do we make the university do the community engagement to which it claims commitment?

Session Organizers and Deadline: Please submit proposals of up to 250 words to both organizers below by 11:59p PST on November 24, 2025. See the second page for special consideration. Shiloh Green Soto, Assistant Professor of History, Washington State University: shiloh.greensoto@wsu.edu. Dulce Kersting-Lark, Head of Special Collections & Archives, University of Idaho: dulce@uidaho.edu.

While all are welcome, we seek intellectual representation from/about the following land-grant universities and colleges in the U.S. West:

Alaska:
University of Alaska
Iḷisaġvik College
Arizona:
University of Arizona
Tohono O’odham Community College
Diné College
California:
University of California
Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University
Colorado:
Colorado State University
Hawaii:
University of Hawaii
Idaho:
University of Idaho
Kansas:
Kansas State University
Haskell Indian Nations University
Montana:
Montana State University
Blackfeet Community College
Salish Kootenai College
Aaniiih Nakoda College
Stone Child College
Little Big Horn College
Chief Dull Knife College
Fort Peck Community College
Nevada:
University of Nevada
New Mexico:
New Mexico State University
Navajo Technical College
Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Culture and Arts Development
Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute
Oregon:
Oregon State University
Texas:
Texas A&M University
Prairie View A&M University
Utah:
Utah State University
Washington:
Washington State University
Northwest Indian College
Wyoming:
University of Wyoming