Creating and Sustaining Fugitive, “Third Spaces”: A Panel Discussion

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

Abstract

Following our two brief context-setting papers, four panelists will respond to pre-selected questions noted in our proposal overview. Our first panelist takes a sociocultural view of learning and examines how activists (e.g., youth climate activists) develop new practices, concepts, identities, and ways of knowing in social movement contexts. Our second panelist. examines how Black and Latinx boys and young men of color analyze, resist, and build worlds that defy prevailing carceral logics such as formal school commitments to punishment as a form of accountability. Our third panelist studies how activists with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement created their own schools and appropriated state institutions (e.g., universities for training their teachers) that grew collective organizing power. Our fourth panelist investigates the paradoxical tensions of youth work and youth learning in out-of-school spaces, which offer sites of potential for fostering collective healing even as they are themselves not immune from reproducing systemic harms.

Our co-facilitation finds inspiration form Lipsitz (2014), who dreams of critical dialogues that “invite others into a shared conversation that no one controls but that changes everyone” (p. 54). Following our panel, co-facilitators will invite audience members into the dialogue. We turn to Tuck’s (2019) approach to facilitating Question and Answer activities in academic conferences as one guide for intention-setting and enhancing rigorous, shared dialogue. As one example, we will have audience members engage one another and “peer-review” each other’s questions by asking: (a) Is this a question (or a question hiding as a comment)?; and (b) Is this a question that might help the speaker to go to a new area in their scholarship and/or that might benefit everybody in the room?

Ultimately, our intentions are to create a space that enlivens the values, sensibilities, and pedagogies of fugitive third spaces. We hope to shift our collective consciousness from asking “What should we do next?” to instead, “Who should we become?” (Ginwright, 2019). This is legacy work and long-term dreaming and prefiguring more liberatory educational and social spaces. 

Authors

• Bianca Jontae Baldridge, Harvard University

• Joe Curnow, University of Manitoba

• Uriel Serrano, University of Southern California

• Rebecca Tarlau, Stanford University