Seeking New Suns: Murmurations on the Visual, Affective, Geographic, and Sonic Possibilities of Collaborative Liberatory Methodologies

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium takes up the imperative issued by Octavia Butler to resist what is and collectively “seek new suns” within qualitative educational research. Following this imperative, the scholars in this symposium reimagine anti-racist, anti-colonial, feminist, and abolitionist educational inquiry through diverse qualitative methodologies: visual sociology, affect studies, sound studies, and critical geography. Taking its cue from Black feminist speculative fiction (Butler, 1993; Ohman, 2021) and movement scholarship (Brown, 2017, 2019), this symposium asks: what can collective ontological and methodological innovation contribute to creating fundamentally different liberatory educational spaces? The symposium will serve as an incubator, a collective murmuration on this query, drawing on the inter-, intra-, and trans-continental perspectives of the participants, and the methodological possibilities such an assemblage affords.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Qualitative Research

Chair

• Laura Krystal Porterfield, Rutgers University - Newark

Papers

• Chaotic Compositions: Destabilizing the Colonial Eye - Maria-Carolina Cambre, Concordia University - Montreal

• Imagining Where We’re Going As We Fly: Unshackling Methodological Chains Through Photovoice - Lynnette Mawhinney, Rutgers University - Newark; Laura Krystal Porterfield, Rutgers University - Newark; Deborah Bartley-Carter, Montclair State University; Carol Rinke, Marist College; Christina Wright Fields, Marist College

• Participatory Visual Methodology as Transnational Feminist Decolonial Praxis and Collective Care and Healing - Relebohile Moletsane, University of KwaZulu-Natal

• With Reverence: Ritual, Performance, and Sonics in Collective Formation - Ruth Nicole Brown, Michigan State University; Emery Marc Petchauer, Teachers College, Columbia University

• From Pedagogies to Ecologies: School Abolition and Education for Liberation - Kermit O, Independent Scholar

Discussant

• Laura Krystal Porterfield, Rutgers University - Newark