Looking Back & Fetching: Unforgetting histories & birthing futures with quilting performances

• In Event: Diasporic Sankofán desires: Looking back to Africa to unforget Black histories and (re)imagine Black futures

Abstract

We are griots-quilters, gathered in a circle that spans continents and generations. The narratives of African diasporic colleagues are our raw materials, stitched into a vision of Sankofà bird. We embody Sankofà—excavating stories, fetching what was left, weaving echoes into an evolving quilt. Our purpose is the shared story: the dark abundance of who we are together and how that knowing transforms research, deepens pedagogy, and fuels cultural reclamation—a reknitting of the realms Black bodies imagine and belong.

Our theoretical framework of Sankofà, uses ancestral practices of quilting and storytelling to reclaim and recreate possibilities. We (re)member how quilting during enslavement functioned as coded storytelling, protection, and a path towards liberation. We use Sankofà to preserve and sustain the lives and embodied histories of Black faculty in higher education.

This presentation uses quilting performance methodology (Author & Author, 2025) as a liberatory praxis for sharing African diasporic narratives. Rooted in Black ontologies and oral traditions such as call and response, quilting functions as both metaphor and method—foregrounding nonlinear, relational, and embodied knowledge-making. Through the textured, layered assembly of stories, this methodology affirms Black scholars as theorists and visionaries, reclaiming narrative authority and marking presence in the scholarly archive.

Our data sources include personal narratives, reflective field notes, policy documents by African diaspora scholars, our intergenerational stories, and audience input. During the session, participants will be invited to respond to the prompt, “What does educational teaching and research that births Black futures look, feel, and sound like?” or share a resonant word, phrase, or question.

These contributions, alongside our quilting poem, will be woven into a collective visual tapestry representing emerging visions, ideas, and memory as seeds for Black futures. We share just a portion of our still-evolving quilted story below ….

Inbetween this barren land
I revisit home often–
Traveling to and fro, peeking inside to see
How fruitful the garden has grown

I revisit home often—
Traveling to and fro, peeking inside to feel the
Warmth of earth between my toes
family and community

I revisit home often–
Traveling to and fro, laughing with elders
yet still

Still in the laugh–
Absorbing the knowledge
The wrinkles of labor
The workers of perseverity

I revisit home often—
Traveling to and fro, peeking inside to smell the
Sweet fragrance of freedom
It exists.
I know this place-and it knows me.

I gather my belongings for another days journey
choosing to hold the sensibilities of home in my heart

How beautiful does this garden grow

Safe

Sankofà, quilting, storying, and poetry-making reflect a return to Black ontologies in research. Our quilting performance—rooted in dialogue and call-and-response—honors Black imagination and artistry, opening paths for research by and about the Black diaspora (Luckett, 2020). Through collective expression, we unforget, carry it forward, and create liberatory openings for research. Poetry serves as bridge and shield, carrying cultural memory and radical re(remembering). Through Sankofà desiring, we honor Black foundations, practice unforgetting, and vision Black futures—relearning how to sit, work, story, and dream together.

Authors

• Julia Lynch, University of North Carolina - Wilmington

• Candace M. Thompson, University of North Carolina - Wilmington