This roundtable engages with the conference theme "Protest, Prohibition, and Pugilism: Louisville and the World" by examining how immersive educational experiences function as forms of witness and protest against racial injustice. Just as Louisville became a focal point for global demonstrations against racialized state violence following Breonna Taylor's killing, our immersive programs place students at sites where historical traumas and resistance occurred.

Our proposed discussion brings together four educators who lead immersive travel programs that engage students with histories of racial injustice and resistance. Specifically, we will discuss how immersive travel programs enable students to engage with contested histories and ongoing legacies of racial capitalism, colonialism, and resistance. Through the Parker Dailey Seminar for Racial Reconciliation in Charleston and the service-immersion program at St. Labre Catholic Indian School in Montana, students confront the physical landscapes where slavery, Indigenous displacement, and resistance occurred while complicating students' understanding of memory, protest, and their own positionality. Drawing connections to Louisville's own history of racial protest and the global dimensions of resistance to racialized state violence, we seek to start conversations about the possibility—and, we would argue, necessity—of using in-situ education about history to confront the violent inheritances that still structure our present politics. By physically placing students in these contested spaces, immersive education helps them understand protest not as an isolated phenomenon but as part of global historical patterns of resistance to racial oppression.

Contributors will examine how immersion experiences reveal connections between historical injustices and contemporary inequities, how place-based education creates encounters with memory that challenge simplistic narratives, the tensions between students' expectations of "protest-worthy" histories and the complexities they encounter, and the pedagogical approaches that position students as witnesses rather than saviors.