Constructing an ArtSpace to Resist BIPOC Fragmentation and to Construct Possibilities for Educational Justice: An Arts Workshop

• In Event: Constructing an ArtSpace to Resist BIPOC Fragmentation and to Construct Possibilities for Educational Justice: An Arts Workshop

Abstract

This workshop, led by three BIPOC educator/researcher/artists, is an invitation to disrupt the rigid and controlled academic conference space. It is an invitation, also, to imagine a fuller, freer, and more colorful version of educational justice work that resists racial violences and that foregrounds the beauty and genius of BIPOC who are already engaged in liberatory thought and action. The proposed session echoes this year’s AERA conference call to “dismantle racial injustice and construct educational possibilities.”
Amidst the marginalizing structures of educational research and practice, too often are BIPOC educators, scholars, and community members asked to fragment themselves for the purposes of achieving educational or scholarly “success.” Consequently, they are made to leave behind the richness of their creative, raced, cultured, gendered selves–and, consequently, to fragment themselves. In turn, educational spaces (e.g., schools, higher education institutions) become white heteromasculinist spaces, where a primacy is put on what we consider “basic” ways of knowing, learning, and producing.
Through this workshop, we turn away from the hegemonic standards governing educational research and praxis and towards the traditions of creative and arts-based praxis amongst BIPOC that have worked against and beyond educational fragmentation (Authors, under review). We consider the diverse and multilayered creative praxis of BIPOC, framing these as critical multimodal literacies of liberation. We invite, in resistance to the fragmentation to enter fully, an opportunity to bring the multilayered embodied, aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual knowing that we and the communities with whom we work carry (Anzaldúa, 2015; Christian, 1987).
The objectives of this session are:
1) To reflect on how racial injustice has impacted the educational lives of BIPOC youth and communities while also foregrounding their creative and critical legacies of resistance;
2) To engage with field-based examples of how facilitators have used arts-based methods to resist educational fragmentation alongside BIPOC communities;
3) To engage in arts-based reflection about their own research/praxis in relation to the theoretical framings of the session;
4) To collectively generate concrete strategies for justice-oriented research and praxis.
This workshop, structured as a critical inquiry-based artspace, will enable attendees the opportunity to reflect on concrete examples of arts-based research and praxis that resist racialized fragmentation in educational research and pedagogy. The session is divided into four parts: co-learning, co-teaching, co-making, and co-reflection. Across these sections, participants and facilitators will engage in theoretical and methodological consideration, imagining how to bring unfragmented knowing and being into their research and praxis.

Authors

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut

• Ankhi Guha Thakurta, Boston College

• Justin A. Coles, University of Massachusetts - Amherst