Communities Doing Futures: Research-Practice Continuum for Justice and Expansive Learning

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

In response to this year’s conference theme, this symposium brings together scholars who collaborate with local communities to address complex and pervasive systemic contradictions related to racism, settler colonialism, environmental justice, and sustainability. Informed by Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and Freirean Critical Pedagogy, scholars in this symposium share ongoing community-led research-practice partnerships in Brazil, Finland, the Anishinaabe Nation, the United States, and Spain, in which the epistemic and political agency of otherwise marginalized and/or disempowered communities is reaffirmed and made visible in and through the communities’ activist practices. The cases present state-of-the-art work focusing on social justice and allow discussing challenges and opportunities that emerge for theory, and for praxis, as committed educational researchers join forces with communities.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Cultural-Historical Research

Chair

• Mara Welsh Mahmood, University of California - Berkeley

Papers

• The Role of Intergenerational Dialogue in the Struggles for Rights in the Brazilian Amazon - Inny Accioly, Universidade Federal Fluminense

• The Dynamics of Domestication in Utopian Methodological Research in Finnish Upper Secondary Schools - Antti J. Rajala, University of Eastern Finland

• Beyond Wordism: Decolonizing Systemic Transformation in Action - Aydin Bal, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Cartographies of Environmentalist Participation in a Marginalized Neighborhood in Catalonia - Alfredo Jornet Gil, Universitat de Girona

Discussant

• Roseli Fischmann, Universidade de São Paulo