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

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 5: Inquiry, Transformation, and Communities

Chair

• Esther O. Ohito, Rutgers University

Papers

• Chisme/Gossip as Dialogic Knowledge Production and Literacies for Woman and Girls of Color - Monica Gonzalez Ybarra, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut - Storrs

• "La Burra no era Arisca*": Survival Fugitivity Practices in Research/Teaching/Leadership for Latina Women - Blanca Gabriela Caldas Chumbes, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• "What Am I Without Being Black?" Black Urban Youth Literacies and Centering Blackness as Fugitive Method/ology - Justin Avery Coles, UMass Amherst College of Education

• It's the Fugitivity for Me! Forging Freedom in the Methodologies of Youth-Led Research - Jamila Lyiscott, University of Massachusetts – Amherst

• La Caridad Empieza en la Casa: Toward Methodological Freedom for Community-Engaged Latina Scholars - Laura Gonzales, University of Florida

Discussant

• Tamara Butler, College of Charleston