Fashioning New Grammars: Black Posterity, Interdisciplinarity and Critical Educative Spaces

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

Abstract

This paper is an examination of a graduate program that nurtured spaces where intervention sites for Black scholars and scholarship flourished and created pathways for the forging of new grammars. With a focus on mentorship and pedagogy, it employs oral histories and archival records in a “future-oriented historiography” (Kelley, 2018) as methods to highlight how scholars of education within the program enacted distinctive practices of interdisciplinarity and intersectionality prior to their broader adoption in U.S. higher education. Specifically, authors examine how scholars in the program extend and craft new grammars through research questions seeking to make sense of the role of education and schooling in Black life and in teaching mentoring practices rooted in the Black radical tradition. These new grammars expand the textures of critical Black education studies when scholarship and students, steeped in the program’s pedagogical and epistemological ethos leave the program. We contend that these grammars, rooted in the rich history of Black radical educators, serve as interventions within academia that expand our understanding of the ideological and sociopolitical forces ordering Black lives, what constitutes education, and how we perceive academically robust sites of learning. We argue that historical and contemporary Black survival (thriving and success on its own terms) requires radical responses to systemic injustice, oppressive realities, and mundane mistreatment rooted in an expansive Black intellectual tradition. Fashioning New Grammars examines the reach of these grammars scattered across and beyond academe, embedded in scholarship and scholars, as refusals of the claimed-neutral, habitual, systems-complicit, or actively Black-hostile traditions, epistemologies, discourses, and habits that prevail currently for Black scholars occupying educational spaces. To prevent the need to “unforget,” the larger project that this paper presents is an archival project to document a history of critical Black education easily erasable in a predominantly white educational context.

Authors

• Brenda Nyandiko Sanya, Colgate University

• Durell M. Callier, University of Delaware

• Dominique C. Hill, Colgate University