Vision-Driven Justice: Fugitive Literacies and the Inscription of Freedom

• In Event: 51.032 - Finding Freedom and Fugitivity in Literacies: Multimodal Narratives as Lived Resistance in Educational Spaces

Abstract

During the 2018 graduation season, a viral warning sign of one South Carolina high school read," Since graduation is a dignified and solemn occasion, graduating seniors and their guests should behave appropriately (Hyde, 2018)." Juxtaposed with this viral story were countless videos of Black students across the nation very deliberately engaging in culturally saturated explosive expressions of joy and celebration during their graduation ceremonies in predominantly white spaces. Reflected in the framing of commencement as “dignified and solemn,” is a pervasive and familiar racial tension around what ideologies and epistemologies come to bear on what is defined as “appropriate” versus delinquent conduct across K-16 educational contexts. Indeed, the very inception of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-billings, 2006) was bred out of an urgent demand to view the cultural identities of students of color as valuable for teaching and learning in a society where our cultures continue to be viewed as inferior to Eurocentric ways of knowing. Even beyond the scope of such pedagogical innovations, powerful acts of teaching, learning, and survival can be found in the everyday fugitive spaces of teachers and students of color who continue to refuse this framing.
According to Patel (2016), “learning as fugitivity exists as dialectic to the stratifying cultures of formal education that insist on contingent possibilities for well-being for some and unmitigated safety for others” (p. 397). Drawing on theories of fugitivity, multiple literacies, and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Campt, 2014, Patel, 2016, Paris, 2012), this critical ethnographic study examines the fugitive literacies of youth activists in one afterschool program that apprentices youth of color as critical social researchers alongside the cultivation of hip-hop literacies, Critical Media Literacy, spoken word poetry. These literacy practices are conceptualized as fugitive literacy practices that function centrally to how multiple modalities are engaged and cultivated as youth researchers become equipped with tools to analyze, craft, and advocate for social change across their city (Akom, Cammarota, & Ginwright, 2008). Data sources include student artifacts and field notes to examine the question “what do the fugitive literacy practices of youth researchers reveal about their vision for educational equity and justice?” Initial findings reveal that when engaged in literacy practices that are not traditionally valued by school spaces (i.e. fugitive literacies), students more readily layer their personal social identities into their analyses of social injustice. By exploring how these youth researchers construct and employ their ideologically interwoven literate, social, and civic identities, this study offers implications for leveraging education research to actualize a youth-led vision of educational justice.

Author

• Jamila Lyiscott, University of Massachusetts – Amherst