Yannick Giovanni Marshall

This course is two things.

First, it’s a survival guide for those still on the inside — as education worker, scholar, adjunct professor, TA, junior professor, or outspoken student. Drawing from over 20 years of lived experience, it offers a political and practical account of how to stay intact under institutional pressure, how radical students serve as both your intellectual community and best defense, and how not to seek safety in tenure.

Second, it’s an examination of how institutions co-opt critique, manage defiance, and sell containment as advancement. We’ll study the university as state apparatus, education as ideology, the course-to-disciplinary office pipeline, the administration as ICE deputy, “campus safety,” the college as gentrifying agent, associate of private prisons, and exploiter of immigrant educators.

While the university is the focus, the course speaks just as clearly to those inside law offices, high schools, NGOs, or corporate workplaces — any institution where dissent is punished and compliance is rewarded.

Thinkers we may pass through include Fred Moten, Sylvia Wynter, Paulo Freire, Louis Althusser, Miss Lou, and The Mighty Sparrow. This is a space to strategize about teaching under fascism. It’s about how to endure the crucible without becoming it.

tier

format

• 3 live virtual sessions, 90 minutes each
• August Dates: Tuesdays — August 12, 19, 26
• Time: 5:30 PM ET / 2:30 PM PT

about the professor

Dr. Yannick Giovanni Marshall is a faculty member teaching Contemporary Black Thought in the School of Critical Studies, CalArts (on indefinite leave) and author of The End of Supplication: The Invention of Prostrate Blackness as a Replacement for the Maroon (Bloomsbury, 2025). His essays and interviews have appeared in Al Jazeera (including the influential “Black liberal, Your Time is Up”), Current Affairs, Black Agenda Report, and other international platforms for abolitionist and anti-colonial thought. He holds a PhD in African Studies from Columbia University’s MESAAS department and an MA in African American Studies from the same institution. He brings nearly a decade of university-level teaching experience, with classes that unfold less like lectures and more like literary events—immersive, poetic, and rooted in Black radical tradition.

what former students say

“It’s not often in academia that I feel heard and given a call to action that is both practical and authentic. This course introduced me to marronage as a foundation towards anti-colonialism. Through an analytical lens of the ‘long-movement’, Yannick manages to challenge popularized ideals of liberal thought with sharp criticism, wit and humor. The course is structured around readings, but its essence is serious critique delivered through sharp humor and honest conversation.”

— Reina Akkouche Halabi, The End of Supplication, Graphic Designer, Graduate Student

“Yannick changed everything I thought I knew about radical pedagogy. His courses consistently challenged students to see differently, read differently, and act differently. As both a teaching assistant and student, I found Yannick’s classroom to be a space of generative, provocative, and courageous questioning.”

— Jacob Blumberg, Filmmaker and Graduate Student, Black Crime in Lynch Mob Society, CalArts

“Yannick’s course stands out as one of the most transformative educational experiences I’ve had. Through probing questions and dialogue, he challenged widely accepted constructs that empires use to self-legitimize and that liberal discourses rely on to stifle resistance. 
Yannick creates a uniquely candid space for students to push beyond the rigid boundaries of academia. He expanded my perspective and equipped me with sharper tools to debate and resist.”

— Tara, Educator and Graduate Student, Deconstructing the Police CalArts