14th Annual Kurth-Schai Education & Advocacy Lecture
Schooling & the US war project
Dr. Sabina Vaught
Thursday, October 1, 4:45-6:00 PM
Smail Gallery, Olin-Rice, Macalester College
Please join us for the 14th Annual Kurth-Schai Education and Advocacy Lecture presented by the Educational Studies Department and cosponsored by Institutional Equity, Student Affairs, President’s Office, Provost’s Office, Mahmoud El-Kati Lectureship in American Studies Fund, Program Board, and the Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship.
To understand empire, and therefore disrupt or dismantle its project, we study not only its most vile, violent systems and their institutions. We also study those it promotes as its most progressive, benevolent, and even necessary for life. In US empire, the nation-state formation has long seized upon schooling and its schools as the system and its institutions most effective to leverage as warfare against its domestic colonies and toward the creation of allied citizenries. Schooling is promoted as a benevolent, yet compulsory, instrument of democratic life.
This talk draws on archival traces, forensic architecture, and ethnography to consider new vantage points for the study of schooling as domestic pacification, indoctrination, and warfare. As with all studies of reactive, expansive empire projects, this talk also centers people and peoples whose insurgency, autonomy, and revolution illuminate educational and knowledge practices practiced through pluriversal models of communal and intercommunal study.
About the Lecturer
Prof. Sabina Vaught was the 2025-2026 Humphrey Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Educational Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Macalester College. An ethnographer, her scholarship considers global carceral and liberatory knowledge movements broadly and the race-gender labor and conquest relationships among schools, prisons, and self-determined peoples and communities specifically. Her most recent book, The School-Prison Trust , is a co-authored ethnographic, legal, and cultural studies analysis of Indigenous self-determination and refusal in the face of school-prison state warfare.
A faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, Sabina’s teaching has extended to Feminist Studies groups with people incarcerated in adult and juvenile prisons for state-identified women and girls. She began her teaching career as a high school language arts teacher.