Futuring Education Through Archival Praxis

• In Event: Knowing Otherwise: Methods, Archives and Educational Research Reimagined through Black Radical Traditions

Abstract

This paper explores how archival research—grounded in Black feminist theory and speculative methodologies—can be mobilized to address enduring racial, gendered, and sociopolitical inequities in education. Framing education beyond formal institutions, I approach archives as dynamic spaces where knowledge, memory, and power converge, and where future oriented inquiry becomes possible.

The project draws from multiple methods, including archival research, narrative analysis, and autoethnography. My reflections emerge from a range of experiences: conducting research in the archives of Octavia E. Butler at the Huntington Library; participating in a Special Collections Pedagogy course through an informal consortium; and beginning to build an archive for the Black Feminist Eco Lab at my home institution, a collaborative project documenting Black feminist ecological thought and praxis.

Rather than treating archives as neutral repositories, I approach them as political and affective texts. Materials like Butler’s unpublished writings, community ephemera, and experimental collections are read as provocations—raising questions about who is remembered, who is erased, and how might we imagine education otherwise. Through autoethnographic reflection, I explore how archival engagement is shaped by embodiment, institutional power, and positionality.

Findings suggest that speculative readings of archival fragments allow us to treat historical absences as sites of possibility. Black feminist and decolonial approaches to archival work challenge dominant educational narratives and expand what counts as knowledge and pedagogy. Autoethnography reveals how archival spaces can be sites of both disruption and deep learning.

This discussion contributes to broader conversations about educational research as a practice of futuring—an intentional, interdisciplinary process that engages the past to reimagine more just and liberatory futures, while expanding the methodological and theoretical frameworks education research heavily leans.

Author

• Chelsea Bouldin, Syracuse University