An Autoethnographic Afrofuturist Experience of Dance Education

• In Event: Anti-Racism in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This study explores how dance functions as a form of cultural transmission, resistance, and healing within the African Diaspora. It examines the role of embodied learning in reclaiming African Indigenous knowledge systems and investigates how storytelling through dance can foster educational empowerment and community connection. Grounded in Afrofuturism, Black feminist theory, and critical ethnography, this work draws on scholars such as Cynthia Dillard, Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, and Thomas DeFrantz to challenge Eurocentric narratives and center African Diasporic ways of knowing. Ethnographic fiction is used as a methodological and theoretical tool to blur boundaries between empirical research and creative storytelling. Using critical autoethnography, apprenticeship, embodied learning, and ethnographic fiction, the study positions the researcher’s lived experience and narrative creation as core methods of inquiry. The crafting of a speculative short story featuring characters Zuri and Nina serves as both data generation and analytic process, capturing complex social realities through imaginative engagement.

Primary data sources include the researcher’s own embodied experiences as a Black woman and dancer in early childhood education, alongside the narrative construction of Zuri and Nina. These materials serve as a creative ethnographic lens into intergenerational exchanges and collective memory within dance spaces. Findings suggest that dance, framed through Afrofuturist and ethnographic fiction methodologies, functions as a radical site of healing, cultural continuity, and Black intellectualism. The narrative reclaims embodied expression as a legitimate source of knowledge production, challenging the erasure of African Diasporic epistemologies in education and dance. This study contributes to qualitative research methodologies by advancing ethnographic fiction and Afrofuturism as valid scholarly tools. It repositions Black bodies and stories at the center of knowledge creation, offering new pedagogical insights for early childhood education, teacher training, and dance studies. By doing so, it reimagines educational spaces as sites of collective healing and resistance.

Author

• Quiana M. Jackson, Bermuda Ministry of Education