"It's Just Home": Honoring the Relational Nature of Place in Black Families' Educational Strivings

• In Event: Collaborative Inquiry as a Rehearsal of Educational Transformation: Issues of Race, Justice, and Community in Detroit

Abstract

The places where Black children and families live and school are consequential to their access to educational resources and more important, socio-spatial networks of familial and communal care. While social sciences literature has thoroughly documented long existing acts of racialized and place-based structural violence, this approach often obscures the consequential ways Black people have transformed the places they live and school into sites of connection and joy (Ewing, 2018; Hunter et al., 2016: Morris, 2004). As such, this paper reflects on a subset of data from a critical phenomenological study (Salamon, 2018) of Black families’ school and community choices across city and suburban municipalities in metropolitan Detroit. I particularly examine the importance of Black families’ socio-spatial connections to highlight the relational nature of place and its significance to Black families’ choices and desires for the holistic wellbeing of their children.

Places are not simply geographic locations, but are sites shaped by history, power dynamics, and social and multi-species relations in ways that impact our identities and daily lives (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). Furthermore, places have practices that are influenced by collective and local knowledges (Gilmore, 2022; hooks, 1990; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). As explained by Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie (2015), “individual and collective histories and memories of place…contribute in powerful ways to what is possible or not” (p. 38). Hence, place is relational, meaning it is formed through multifaceted flows of collective activity, sensemaking, and efforts to not only subsist and survive, but to do so with connection and purpose.

Informed by critical theories of place and placemaking, I highlight findings that show families’ emotional affect towards Detroit and continued connections within the city. Detroit, a city steeped in Black culture and placemaking (Boyd, 2018), was integral to families’ meaning making of their community and school choices so much so that even as families moved in pursuit of educational opportunity, the places where families had lived and created community in Detroit informed how they navigated schools and communities in suburban contexts. This reflects the continued importance of Black urban placemaking and community life, where in the face of structural neglect Black people have created enduring sites of mutual aid, respite, and joy (Lipsitz, 2007; Hunter et al., 2016).

I celebrate families’ acts of educational agency and socio-spatial connection, while also discussing generative tensions in geographic movement and Black people’s demands for access. I question how I, as a Black woman reared in the suburbs and a researcher in relationships with others, can work collaboratively to shed light on possibilities that lie beyond access and movement, and are part and parcel of traditions of close communal ties and activism in Detroit (Boggs & Kurashige, 2012; Author2, 2021). I consider how community-based inquiry approaches that operationalize place as a source of identity, deep relationality, and learning can contribute to honoring Detroiters' connections to the city and already-existing efforts towards more just educational and communal futures.

Author

• Dana Gabrielle Nickson, University of Washington
  Presenting Author