Overview
Wynter’s Queer Revolution: Community Organizing and the Future of the Humanities answers the question, What’s the point of teaching humanities in the interregnum? The book emerges from the wisdom of colleagues teaching Community Change Studies at public colleges with Black, Brown, immigrant, and low-income students across the U.S.—framing praxis with a vision for a Community Organizing Humanities. Grounded in practices of collective struggle, the pedagogies that nourish them, the decolonial thought of Sylvia Wynter, and generative insights of queer theory, this book licenses a new project for the humanities: cultivating “revolutionary collective subjects”. What if education itself, as Wynter suggests, were reimagined as an initiation into “queerer” collective subjectivities for the human species? Hannah Ashley makes the case that just as the humanities can enrich organizing, organizing can reinvigorate the humanities—bridging theory and practice to shape a more just and as yet unimagined world. This rigorous yet accessible volume is essential reading for teacher-scholars working in public humanities, community change studies, or sustainability; and is practical and applied enough for organizers and anyone invested in reshaping the human story in this urgent time between the polycrisis and the world yet to come.
Full Product Details
Author: Hannah Ashley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
ISBN: 9781041172048
ISBN 10: 1041172044
Pages: 218
Publication Date: 17 March 2026
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Availability: Not yet available
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Reviews
Wynter’s Queer Revolution is a passion project responding to the crises of our time. Written with the urgency that the current state of the world demands, Hannah Ashley is thoroughly engaged with the most pressing question we face today: how do we change this world? Drawing on debates and controversies within the humanities, WQR brings together political insights and arguments intended to equip organizers to intervene in the current political debates about how to move forward in the quest for changes. An important and timely contribution. --Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation In a moment when liberal academia is struggling to defend its worth to the American public, Wynter's Queer Revolution invites us to imagine how the humanities can foster radical subjectivity and community action. This book brings together the best of two worlds that have been forced apart by capital: organizing and academia. It is timely and necessary!— Eman Abdelhadi, co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 Hannah Ashley’s Wynter’s Queer Revolution is a courageous intervention, insisting that collapse can also mean possibility. Blending Black, queer, and decolonial thought with on-the-ground pedagogical experiments, this bold manifesto for a “Community Organizing Humanities” resists the accommodation and paralysis so common in the university. It speaks directly to scholars, educators, organizers, and practitioners who refuse to linger in critique alone and instead want to transform our realities by cultivating new, collective, revolutionary subjectivities. --Nara Roberta Silva, Core Faculty & Praxis Program Head, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Author, Contradições da Horizontalidade Against cynics and pessimists, this exciting book gives us a much-needed guide to building and fixing things for a better but as yet unknowable future. Ashley draws on scholarship in queer, Black, feminist, and Marxist studies to show how excluded and oppressed perspectives can actively forge the tools and the know-how to create new subjectivities that can care for each other rather than tearing us apart. --Caroline Levine, Author, The Activist Humanist
Author Information
Hannah Ashley is a community-engaged teacher-scholar at West Chester University, USA and proudly publicly educated, elementary school though PhD. She is also a mother, partner, friend, and jujitsu fanatic. William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA (retired), has written extensively about social justice and democracy, education and the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. His latest book is When Freedom is the Question Abolition is the Answer (2024). Michael Sterling Burns is an Associate Professor of English at West Chester University, USA. His teaching and scholarship evidence a continued interest in the connections between language practices and liberation, especially in relation to African heritage people in the Americas. Michael serves as the English Department Chair and teaches courses in Black American Rhetorics, Literatures, and Critical Theory.
