Communal Possibilities: Critical Reflections in Three Breaths

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

As a result of a civil rights era policy initiative created to support students from economically challenged backgrounds, eligible undergraduates are granted admission to our large urban public university and provided services that make college completion a possibility. Drawing from the historical and theoretical scholarship of fugitive pedagogy as articulated by Jarvis Givens (2021), the members of our department established educational spaces outside of the punitive, eurocentric, and narrowly defined discipline lines of our institution. We push for intellectual, spiritual, and socioemotional spaces where faculty, students, and staff can re-engage worlds of possibility both within and beyond the institution. Over the course of two years, we created three fugitive spaces: Engaging Emergent Strategies, Creating Beloved Community, and Seeking Legacy.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 6: De/Colonization and Transformative Curriculum Studies

Chair

• Virginia Diaz-Mendoza, John Jay College - CUNY

Papers

• Dreaming Beyond Fear: Engaging Emergent Strategy as a Practice of Liberation - Virginia Diaz-Mendoza, John Jay College - CUNY

• Emergent Strategy: Social Action as Result of Collective Reading and Critical Reflection - Gabrielle Cuesta, John Jay College - CUNY

• Imagining the Beloved Community - Robert P. Robinson, CUNY - John Jay College of Criminal Justice

• Seeking Legacy in Co-Created Brave Spaces - Shari Simon, John Jay College - CUNY; Troy A. Lambert, John Jay College - CUNY

• The Education Underground Railroad - Erica King-Toler, John Jay College - CUNY

Discussant

• Lenwood Hayman, Morgan State University