Teaching Against Empire: Black Educational Resistance and Repurposed Spaces Across the British Empire

• In Event: Learning from Educators who have used the Profession as an Act of Resistance

Abstract

This paper examines how Black students and teachers in mid-twentieth-century Britain and British Guiana transformed everyday spaces into sites of political education and anticolonial critique. Grounded in spatial theory, and drawing on archival sources and oral histories, we ask: How did Black educational actors repurpose space for resistance? And what does this reveal about the role of education in the pursuit of liberation? Findings indicate spatial practices were central to cultivating political consciousness and challenging imperial authority across both the colony and the metropole. Despite this, such resistance remains underexamined in the historiography of Black education. Thus, by centering spatial repurposing as educational praxis, this paper reinterprets the role of space in historical analysis and in constructing liberatory educational futures.

Authors

• Esther Anfo-Whyte, Harvard University

• Darien Dey, Harvard University