Liberated Zones: Making the University in the Time of Fascism

Over the past ten years, we have endeavored to build a liberated zone within our university. The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy is a tiny (but we think mighty) center that undertakes research and scholarship for the purpose of dismantling structures of inequality and creating reparative public goods. We do so by accompanying social movements and communities on the frontlines of dispossession and displacement through practices of research justice. In May 2025, we invited Naomi Klein to deliver the Institute’s Distinguished Lecture in Ideas and Organizing because she embodies the ethos of the Institute. Klein’s magisterial text, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, published in 2007 and translated into scores of languages, has given us all unprecedented insight into how world-ending activities are made profitable. It demands that we take seriously the crises wrought by the unending emergency that is racial capitalism and the capitalization of such crises in the form of disaster capitalism. But equally important, the long arc of Klein’s scholarship demands that we create new narratives and understandings of each crisis and mobilize to ensure that such shocks serve as openings for progressive change. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein calls this the people’s reconstruction and it goes to the very heart of the work we do as an Institute here in Los Angeles. In the closing lines of the book, Klein (2007: 466) writes: “These are movements that do not seek to start from scratch but rather from scrap, from the rubble that is all around.” Indeed it is from amidst the rubble of evictions and encampment sweeps, from Echo Park Lake to El Sereno, that poor people’s movements create insurgent ground in the city of angels. They teach us how to struggle for liberated zones and thereby how to strive to make the public university.