our Program

The Du Bois Movement School trains aspiring and current movement organizers in how to understand the world and how to change it. We do so through a combination of history, political economy, strategy, and skills. Through concise readings and seminar-style discussion, students study the historical emergence of the world we inhabit and the forces shaping it today. In the process, they develop an understanding of the mutual constitution, past and present, of economic exploitation (capitalism), racial domination (slavery and colonization), and sexual and gendered oppressions (patriarchy)—which, understood together, provide a roadmap for the sorts of movements and strategies that will be their undoing.

Our students are aspiring revolutionaries and abolitionists of all ages and backgrounds who want to acquire the analytical tools and practical skills necessary to set political change into motion and sustain it through struggle. But we seek above all to help build the leadership capacity of organic intellectuals, those most directly impacted by oppressive structures—policing, mass incarceration, environmental racism, and poverty—and those closest to the struggles to dismantle them.

To do so entails teaching aspiring organizers young and old about their own power and encouraging them to see the world as shaped by human forces—forces that can be undone through the work of organized movements. This means that our pedagogical approach is above all critical: we seek not to deposit preexisting knowledge in the minds of students, but to empower them to shape and reshape theory through their own experiences of the world and encounters with injustice.

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