Critical Approaches to Place-Based Inquiries in Black Education

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This panel contributes to the “spatial turn” in education by considering a geographic lens in research on Black education. Papers think alongside critical spatial theories that center Black education, placemaking, and landscapes. Though papers draw upon a variety of conceptual approaches, they build from an assumption that geographies of Blackness are both structured by overarching systems of oppression and sites with alternative spatial practices, worldviews, and knowledge. We explore schools and their landscapes to consider the 2023 theme of pursuit of truth and power dynamics to ask: What possibilities emerge with respect to what we know and what futures we can imagine in education when centering critical approaches to Black geographic perspectives and knowledge?

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 1: Education and Place, Space, Time

Chair

• Khrysta Evans, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Papers

• Black Girls' School-Based Navigational Tools - Khrysta Evans, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• The Spatiality of Black Girlhood and Educational Fugitivity - Ashley L. Smith-Purviance, The Ohio State University

• (Un)Seeing Danger: Examining Anti-Carceral Geographies Through PhotoVoice With Black Youth - DeMarcus A Jenkins, University of Pennsylvania

• Black Families, School Choice, and Gentrification in Washington, D.C.: "Sometimes You Have to Be a Superparent to Get Basic Services for Your Kids" - Alisha Butler, Wesleyan University; Bradley Quarles, WestEd

• Black Education as Place-Making in the 21st Century U.S. South - Rachel E. Williams, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Discussant

• Jerome E. Morris, University of Missouri - St. Louis