Critical Fabulation as Educational Methodology: Refusing Black Schoolgirls’ Erasure in Racialized/Ableist Educational Contexts

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Erased, Buried, and Precarious Accountings of U.S. Students' Racialized Experiences

Abstract

Saidiya Hartman (2008), in “Venus in Two Acts” describes “critical fabulation” as a methodology with the intent “not to give voice… but rather to imagine what cannot be verified….to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance” (p. 12). Reflecting on Hartman’s conceptualization we draw on two narratives – one historical and one contemporary – of Black disabled schoolgirls situated between two zones of death - social and corporeal – as they are erased from the everyday life of school. Centering their erasure within the landscape of historical memory and contemporary educational praxis, we write to disrupt normalized racial, gendered, and ableist violence so that Black disabled schoolgirls’ lives—past and present—can be acknowledged, theorized, and imagined anew.

Authors

• JaiOnna Terry, The University of Alabama

• Nirmala Erevelles, University of Alabama