Attending Without Presence: The Need for Afro-Futuristic Connectedness

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Voices From the Field: Students' Policy Experiences (Table 33)

Abstract

Researchers and policymakers have highlighted the importance of connectedness within a school culture, and proponents of school connectedness suggest students are more likely to succeed when they feel connected to their school. But what if anti-black policies, practices, discourses, and ideologies have historically and currently aimed to disconnect students' Blackness from the human race? In other words, Black students could physically attend school daily, but their human presence could be absent. Drawing on the interviews of 133 youth who attended Baltimore City Public Schools Systems, we connect BlackCrit and Afrofuturism as a conceptual framework to identify three findings that disconnect Black students' presence from connectedness in schools and three radical possibilities that center students' Black human presence.

Authors

• Richard Lofton, Johns Hopkins University

• Noah Nelson, Johns Hopkins University