Complicating Black Fatherhood as a Site of Educational Theorizing and Practice

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session will consider what perspectives on racial and educational justice become possible through more nuanced engagements with Black fatherhood. Drawing on their onto-epistemologies as Black men who study Black masculinity in education, and with a particular focus on the intellectually generative nature of their own relationships to Black fatherhood, the four panelists in this session will explore the hybrid ways that Black fatherhood as a site of racial, gender, and sexual politics and pedagogies gets complicated in their work. By disrupting cursory understandings of Black fatherhood within academic and public discourses, this session will address the 2024 Annual Meeting theme by presenting new approaches to Black fatherhood as a site for theorizing and pursuing racial and educational justice.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Cosponsor

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 4: Policies, Mattering, and Praxis

Chair

• Shaun R. Harper, University of Southern California

Papers

• On the Imagined Black Male Father: The Case of My Father’s Subjectivity - Anthony L. Brown, University of Texas at Austin

• Fugitive Slave Narrative: “Escaping” Black Fatherhood in Educational Contexts - Ed Brockenbrough, University of Pennsylvania

• Protect, Provide, and Prepare: Illuminating the Ways Schooling Norms Subvert and Support Black Fatherhood Values - Michael D. Hannon, Montclair State University

• Freedom Dreaming Through the Fathers of Ft. Washington: Troubling the Invisibility of Overabundance - Daniel J. Thomas, Texas A&M University

Discussant

• Tyrone C. Howard, University of California - Los Angeles