Seeking Routes to Freedom: Fugitive Methodologies for Rethinking Community Research, Literacies, and Engagement

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Fugitivity alludes to freedom. What methodological form(s) might freedom assume? How might researchers, participants, community partners, and/or organizational stakeholders (sensorially) experience methodological freedom? How are power and possibility entangled in methodologically systematized quests for freedom? These questions cohere this symposium, which highlights the endeavors of the Fugitive Literacies Collective, a constellation of critical scholar-friends of color who seek routes to freedom vis-à-vis research engagements with/in writing, literacies, and communities of color. Members detail fugitive pursuits of methodological freedom in research about writing and literacies, irradiating knowledges, complexities, and tensions that percolate when possibilities for the real or fictive liberation of historically marginalized and dehumanized persons and communities are welcomed as desirable and worthwhile purposes for educational research.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chair

• Laura Gonzales, The University of Texas - El Paso

Papers

• Fugitive Methodologies: Small Stories and Community Spaces - Brooke Harris Garad, Indiana University - Bloomington

• A "Celebration of African American Life and Freedom": Researching Free-Writing as a Fugitive Literacy Practice - Esther O Ohito, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Chisme/Gossip as a Fugitive Methodology of Woman and Girl of Color Literacies - Monica Gonzalez Ybarra, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut - Storrs

• "Transas, movidas, jugadas y travesuras": Fugitive Practices in Research for an Indigenous/Latina Non Grata - Blanca Gabriela Caldas Chumbes, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Leaning Into Blackness: The Literacy Lives of Multiethnic Black Urban Youth as Fugitive Method/ology and Praxis - Justin Avery Coles, UMass Amherst College of Education

• Finding Freedom in Youth Research and Artivism: Spoken Word Poetry as a Fugitive Methodology - Jamila Lyiscott, University of Massachusetts – Amherst

Discussant

• Tamara Butler, College of Charleston