Navigating Race, Immigration, and National Identity in Transnational Educational Contexts

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

This proposed presidential session explores the complex relationships between race, immigration, and national identity within formal and informal educational contexts. Drawing on research and praxis among racialized communities in the United States, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, session participants will: explore the affordances and constraints of the leading theories on race and racialization; work to dismantle misleading and reductive compartmentalizations of race, immigration, and nationalism; spotlight the role that P-20 schools play in constructing, reinforcing, and reproducing social divides along racial and nation-state lines; and provide concrete and actionable strategies for educational scholars and practitioners to to dismantle various forms of injustice.

The scholars in this session will engage in a conversation that will push conceptual boundaries, modeling how a racial analysis can enrich our understanding of immigration as well as how theorizations of nationality and immigration can deepen our understanding of racialization both within and beyond a U.S. context.

This presidential panel format will be conversational: panelists will address a set of questions that touch on injustice and imagination, on activism and action, and that situate educators and schools as central to change-making. The moral and ethical stakes of the conversation––––when to speak out and remain silent, the place of educational research in the movement for Black lives, and the place of refusal and desire in willing a just future––cannot be underestimated and will be explicitly broached during the session.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• Marc Lamont Hill, Graduate Center - CUNY

Papers

• Negotiating Race, Citizenship and Anti-Blackness Among Afro-Palestinian Youth - Marc Lamont Hill, Graduate Center - CUNY

• Reckoning With Empire: The Politics of Racial Justice and Inclusion in the United States and SWANA (Southwest Asian/North African) Region - Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Barnard College

• Constructing Notions of Race and Citizenship in Law, Practice, and Testimonio - Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Graduate Center - CUNY

• Abolitionist Sanctuary as Both Lens and North Star. - Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College

Discussant

• Krystal Strong, Rutgers University