Adorning Futures: Embodied Aesthetics as Lived Curricula for Unforgetting and Futuring Education

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

The central premise of this session is that BIPOC aesthetic practices are foundational to sustaining and regenerating the lives and spirits of those impacted by racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and violent empires. Thinking alongside youth, we root our theorizations in visual studies, arts-based research, feminisms of Color, afrofuturism, queer and trans studies, Black Study, and aesthetic theory . Driven by youth-informed past-future visions, we look to how learning/learning space shifts when we attend to youth’s aesthetics, adornment, and ritual, thereby alivening, imaging, and enacting educational practices toward liberation. We do so by taking on collaborative arts-based methods that invite our and our youth collaborators’ full selves and creative knowledges to the work.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Arts-Based Educational Research

Chair

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut

Papers

• Offering 1: Curating a Feminist of Color Pedagogy of Adornment - Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut

• Offering 2: Metaphysical Blackness and the Ontological Futuring of Black Youth Aesthetics - Justin A. Coles, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Offering 3: A Grammar of Black Livingness: Black Queer and Trans Youths’ Everyday Adornments as Literacy Performance - monét cooper, University of Michigan

• Offering 4: Inventing New Worlds: Channeling Black Girl Aesthetic & Imagination - Courtney Mauldin-Jones, Syracuse University

Session Organizer

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut

Discussant

• Ruth Nicole Brown, Michigan State University