(Earth)Seeds of Liberation: Using Parable Praxis to Dream of New Worlds with Black Girls

• In Event: Rhythms of Resistance: Black Aesthetics, Sensorial Literacies, and the Architecture of Educational Liberation

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: Rooted in a six-week after-school program, The Astronomy Club, this study focuses on how six middle school Black girls use storytelling, map-making, and multimodal composition to imagine educational spaces shaped by care, justice, and collective possibility. Rather than treating imagination as enrichment or escape, this study positions speculation as a method and a mandate, and asks: How do Black girls, in an afterschool learning space guided by a pedagogical framework inspired by Parable of the Sower (Butler, 1993), theorize, resist, and create educations and futures beyond the reach of antiblack systems?

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework: This project is guided by Black feminist futurity and Parable Praxis. Drawing from the work of Campt (2017), Black feminist futurity centers the imaginative, embodied, and speculative practices that emerge from Black life and Black time. Parable Praxis builds from Octavia Butler’s (1993) Parable of the Sower to offer a critical, creative, and relational approach to working with Black girls in the afterlife of systemic collapse. Together, these frameworks foreground Black girls as theorists and builders of liberated worlds.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry: This qualitative study employs Black Girl Cartography (Butler, 2018) and speculative method as central approaches. Black Girl Cartography traces how Black girls navigate and remake the ideological and material terrains of school. Speculation opens up the space for not-yet and otherwise. The project is informed by ethnographic techniques, including field notes, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and artifact analysis, within a co-constructed learning space.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials: Data were gathered from six Black middle school girls who participated in The Astronomy Club at an all-girls public charter school. Sources include journals, vision boards, maps, collages, poems, dialogue transcripts, and drawings. These materials form a constellation of Black girl knowledge production, offering insight into how the girls named harm, imagined freedom, and practiced world-building across forms.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view: Three themes emerged: liberatory literacies and restorying, reimagined belonging and citizenship, and futurity as justice and survival. The girls used multimodal storytelling to critique curriculum, reframe Black girlhood, and imagine education as a site of affirmation rather than erasure. They asserted belonging on their own terms, engaging national symbols, metaphors, and dialogue to claim space within and beyond dominant civic narratives. Their speculative work envisioned worlds rooted in care, clean water, housing, and racial justice, revealing education not as preparation for inclusion but as a practice of freedom. These themes reflect Black girls’ refusal to inherit constraint and their commitment to designing otherwise.

Scientific or scholarly significance: This study contributes to Black girlhood studies, literacy education, and speculative methods in qualitative research. It introduces Parable Praxis as a framework for educational design and analysis grounded in Black girls’ visions. It affirms that their intellectual and creative offerings are foundational, not supplemental. This work challenges educators and researchers to treat Black girls' practices not as data to interpret but as direction to follow.

Author

• Alexis Morgan Young, Michigan State University