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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session theorizes Black expressive traditions; music, poetry, art, and love, as epistemological frameworks and pedagogical technologies that unsettle hegemonic models of cognition, space, and subjectivity. Drawing from Black feminist theory, Afrofuturism, critical neuroeducation, and hip-hop based education, the presenters examine how multisensory literacies and embodied pedagogies catalyze new ontologies of learning, memory, and civic presence. These works advance education as a domain of sensory sovereignty, where Black cultural production becomes central to neurodevelopment, community healing, and world-making. By reclaiming the aesthetic and affective dimensions of Black educational experience, this session offers a radical departure from normative models toward one that affirms the full complexity and futurity of Black life.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Research Focus on Black Education

Chair

• Asif Wilson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Papers

• Bands Can Make Them Dance: A Neurological Lens on the Impact of Urban High School Band Programs on Black Students - Kevin L. Jones, Stephen F. Austin State University

• Liberation through Literacy: A Critical Ethnography of Black Youth Poetics Through Hip-Hop Based Education - Imani J. Wallace, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Restorying Black Place Relations through Afrofuturist Art - Maya Revell, University of Oregon

• Exploring the Radical Love Pedagogies of Black Women Early Childhood Educators Through Endarkened Poetic Inquiry - Meghan L. Green, Erikson Institute

• (Earth)Seeds of Liberation: Using Parable Praxis to Dream of New Worlds with Black Girls - Alexis Morgan Young, Michigan State University

Session Organizer

• Shelton K. Johnson, SUNY New Paltz

Discussants

• Shelton K. Johnson, SUNY New Paltz

• Neisha Terry Young, Stony Brook University - SUNY