Composing otherwise: Black Studies and the future of arts-based education research

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium brings together four arts-based educational research projects that center Black Studies as a critical framework and intervention for art education. Each presentation foregrounds Black life, aesthetics, and epistemologies to reimagine the field’s questions, methods, and pedagogies. Topics include: Black women art educators navigating opacity and ambivalence in historically white institutions; othermothering and intergenerational care as fugitive pedagogy; love as method through participatory performance and testimony; and matriarchal photo archives as countervisual curriculum. Together, these projects model pedagogies of quiet, care, and unknowing—refusing dominant educational logics. The session includes four presentations followed by a moderated dialogue and Q&A, inviting deeper engagement with how Black Studies reshapes curriculum, research methods, and aesthetic practice in art education.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 1: Education and Place, Space, Time

Chair

• gloria j. wilson, The Ohio State University

Papers

• Pedagogies of unsettling: Black feminist aesthetics and art education’s hidden curricula - gloria j. wilson, The Ohio State University

• Black othermothering, the arts, education, and a study designed by them for them - K. Lynn Robinson, The Ohio State University

• Engaging the quiet: Black Matriarchal Archives and pedagogies of listening - Sydney Summey, The Ohio State University

• Love’s testimony: Critical arts-based inquiry as a third space and pedagogical concern - Iyana Shanel Hill, The Ohio State University

Session Organizer

• gloria j. wilson, The Ohio State University

Discussant

• K. Lynn Robinson, The Ohio State University