A Conceptual and Historical Overview of Fugitive Third Spaces amid Increasing Authoritarianism

• In Event: Creating and Sustaining Fugitive, “Third Spaces” of Learning With/in/Against an Increasingly Authoritarian State

Abstract

In 1954, Septima Clark and Esau Jenkins founded the Citizenship Schools: nonformal, community-rooted spaces of teaching and learning that expanded Black literacy and voting access as one means of using education to change society (Isaac et al., 2019). Despite the rigorous learning and leadership building gains of the Citizenship Schools, critics framed these third spaces as “communist training centers” that sought to destroy the U.S. (Adams, 1975, p. 129). To sustain this essential political and educational work, Citizenship Schools retreated to the back corridors of old buildings, churches, barber shops, and grocery stores (Payne, 1995; Russell, 2011).

Citizenship Schools represent one example of fugitive third-spaces, or contingent spaces of liberatory learning, being, and prefiguring more humanizing ways of being amid intensifying authoritarian attempts to surveil and undermine such spaces. The need for fugitive third-spaces rings as loudly today as it did in the 1950s. Authoritarian rollbacks on basic voting rights have coincided with conservative populist attempts to censor learning in public schools such as the teaching of Ethnic Studies (Lachica Buenavista et al., 2019; Valenzuela & Epstein, 2023). This paper traces the theoretical and historical-material legacies of fugitive third spaces to situate our panel discussion.

We turn to scholarship on fugitivity to elevate attention to how educators have created and sustained third spaces both before and amid oppressive projects of anti-Black slavery and anti-Native genocide (Deloria & Wildcat, 2001; Fujino et al., 2019; Shange, 2019; Sojoyner, 2016; Wynter, 2003). Fugitivity historicizes scholarship on third-spaces by calling attention to the creative agency of Black and Native educators, who used education to free themselves and others from subordination (Givens, 2021; King, 2019). These fugitive third spaces live on through other radical experiments in self-determined teaching and learning such as the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Montgomery, AL), Kokua Hawaiʻi (Kalama Valley, HI), People’s High Schools (Bachilleratos Populares), or Students at the Center (New Orleans, LA). We will sketch actually existing third spaces as one way to place our dialogue and link theoretical discussions with historical-material land-based contexts.

This paper establishes an important backdrop for our panel discussion, which will invite audience members to laugh, cry, listen, learn, and dream liberatory possibilities for creating and sustaining fugitive third spaces (Estes, 2019). In alignment with this year’s AERA theme, we call attention to those community-based spaces of learning that education researchers “inadvertently or intentionally neglected,” namely, those spaces that perpetuate the “wisdom rooted in communities and the traditions of learning and care from which education research might have otherwise learned” (Scott et al., 2024, p. 2).

Authors

• Ethan Chang, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

• Chrissy Hernandez, California State University - Monterey Bay

• Sydney Westerterp, California State University - Monterey Bay

• Alo Wilson, California State University - Monterey Bay