When Harvard denied tenure to Lorgia García Peña we were struck by a collective pathos. Not only did they deny tenure to a leading scholar and intellectual of Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, Latinx Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Caribbean Studies, but that denial antagonized the multidisciplinary framework of knowledge production that her work offers. García Peña's case is not at all singular, but considering the enormity of her work and how much we and so many others admire her as a scholar, intellectual, and activist, that decision struck a chord that reverberated broadly, as attested to by the thousands of signatures on petitions and letters on her behalf. Student protests broke out at Harvard almost immediately as well. The students demanded both an investigation into their extraordinary professor’s tenure case and a long-overdue Ethnic Studies program at their school. These students became our beacon.

Our response—#Lorgiafest and the Ethnic Studies Rise roundtable—has been an exercise of solidarity with García Peña, with every scholar in Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Studies denied tenure, with every scholar in Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Studies without stable employment, with every scholar who quit the academy, with every graduate student who has quit or is on the verge of quitting, with every undergraduate who is aggrieved by the racism encoded in the U.S. academy, with every person far from the walls of academia whose role as a potential or actual producer of knowledge is refused by the “bordering” agents of disciplinarity, to borrow from García Peña.

#Lorgiafest and the roundtable have taken on a life of their own. From the start, we wanted to organize a public action in solidarity with García Peña and her protesting students—an intervention explicitly conceived not to re-center the university that denied her tenure, but to highlight instead the impact of her wide-ranging scholarship and public writing. Once our plan to organize a collective reading exercise on academic Twitter took shape—what became #Lorgiafest—the roundtable emerged as its guiding companion. The latter was to provide a space to reflect on the impact of García Peña’s work alongside the current state of Ethnic Studies in the U.S. academy; a space for scholarly guidance in a difficult moment; a space to foment solidarity, concrete action, and avenues of thought.

This work began on December 4, and the first invitations to participate in the roundtable went out on December 14. Less than two months after laying out our initial plans, we are wrapping up Ethnic Studies Rise. We organized what may be one of the largest book clubs in academic Twitter's history and curated eight thoughtful and provocative discussions featuring eighteen scholars who reflect on Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, Latinx Studies, Indigenous Studies, Women & Gender Studies, and, in many cases, on García Peña’s work. The force and speed of this turnout is a testament to what we can build and bridge in solidarity with each other.

The result of this roundtable far exceeded our expectations. As the roundtable entries developed, later pieces explicitly and implicitly built upon earlier ones. Although we asked each participant to be in conversation with 1-2 other scholars, the conversations productively transgressed the borders between each discreetly organized entry. What we witnessed as curators and editors was a centrifugal force extending well beyond our initial intent. We know this centrifugal force is extending even farther, as people are using Ethnic Studies Rise as a teaching tool, as a resource to think with and through García Peña’s scholarship and the relationship between Ethnic Studies and the U.S. academy today.

Far from investing in the transformative potential of Ethnic Studies, most institutions of higher education, like corporations more broadly, have tapped into a discourse of diversity, inclusion, and equity while simultaneously undermining the scholarship—and the scholars—challenging the long history of Eurocentrism, anti-Black racism, imperial capitalist extraction, patriarchy, settler colonialism, hetero- and cis-normativity, classist elitism, and ableism that structure the university to this day. The institutional rhetoric of managing difference that stultifies institutional discussions is refreshingly and necessarily absent from this roundtable. We did not need to make this point an editorial or curatorial decree. Our contributors simply speak a different language.

To our great delight, this roundtable exemplifies the multidisciplinary practice of critique through which Ethnic Studies thrives in its dynamic locations, both within and outside academia. The roundtable attests further to the originality and impact of Lorgia García Peña’s work and offers multiple ways of imagining a different future inside and outside of the university.

In its inception and at its end, this project ultimately is that very call we borrowed from Harvard student protesters and extended in solidarity: Ethnic Studies Rise!