Faith as Fugitivity: Space/Sense Making in the Academy

• In Event: In Spirit and in Truth: Liberatory Christianity in the Struggle for Racial Justice in Education

Abstract

Scholarship across various fields from history, sociology, and religion often emphasize the role of Christianity in shaping dominant ideological currents, destructive political decision-making, and exclusionary institutional practices and policies. It has also been the grounding force influencing the professional and personal identities of social actors, including those of us in the field of education (Burke & Segall, 2016). Scholarship examining Christianity’s influence on education offers a critical account of at least two core themes: (a) Christianity’s long standing relationship to whiteness in the United States, which reinforced Christianity as a state-sponsored political force of oppression, and (b) the countercultural imagination often used to re-read Christianity in service of racial and social justice. While research tends to privilege the former, we instead wade in the possibilities of the latter.

Necessarily, as Black and Brown scholars we (re)member (Dillard, 2012) our ancestors and the ways that their Christian faith often impelled their radical acts toward freedom and justice (Neal, 2022). As fugitives of the state, they did more than run away as a method of escaping the terrors of oppression, dehumanization and enslavement. Rather they ran toward sites of radical freedom, striving for something more liberatory and expansive. Thus, Christianity or living out our faith, as we describe, becomes an opportunity to be within as well as without the academy.

Through critical collaborative autoethnography (Blalock & Akehi, 2018; Boylorn & Orbe, 2014), this paper explores fugitivity as a way of bringing the substance of unseen things into the light. Fugitivity serves as a call for all Black and Brown educators and researchers seeking wholeness in the academy, amidst frequently fragmented personal, professional and spiritual identities. As Stovall (2020) notes, fugitivity is a point of departure:

As soon as this point is actualized, they create a different path. A path that we dare say is fugitive, or immersed in the process of realizing that there has to be a detour from the order and compliance of the school. It is not running from something as much as it is running to a destination that is created and determined by those who are experiencing injustice. (p. 4)

In this paper, we argue that our faith serves as fugitivity, a mechanism through which we make space and sense of our histories, identities as Black and Brown scholars, the undercurrents of anti-darkness (Love, 2019) in education, and in society, and the ways in which we struggle toward racial justice in education. Across each of our expressed experiences as Christians in the academy, we describe our existence in this particular sociopolitical moment as akin to being in a state of fugitivity, attempting to find refuge in our faith. We argue that our faith affords a kind of “loophole of retreat” (Jacobs, 2001) within the academy, operating both inside and outside. We share our individual testimonies and collective narratives through critical collaborative autoethnographic analysis (Chang et al. (2016) in order to build from this point of departure toward liberatory practices in education and beyond.

Authors

• Jamila Lyiscott, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Limarys Caraballo, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Phillip A Smith, Fordham University

• Keisha L. Green, University of Massachusetts - Amherst