Imagining Liberatory Futures: Pedagogical Resistance in the Past, Present, and Future through Abolitionist Place-Based Methods

Session Type: Workshop

Abstract

This interactive workshop engages participants in world-building practices rooted in radical imagination, storytelling, and memory work. Facilitated by a collective of educators, artists, and researchers, the session explores how testimonio, speculative storytelling, community mapping, and art/ifacts can resist erasure and spark liberatory futures in education. Drawing from Black and Indigenous liberatory thought, abolitionist praxis, and diasporic knowledge traditions, we co-create tools that reimagine what justice can look like in schools and communities. In small groups, participants will engage in embodied future-building exercises and will leave with new frameworks, artifacts, and practices to incorporate into their own liberatory work.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Educators for Social Justice

Chair

• Michelle R. Ochoa, Graduate Center - CUNY

Papers

• Is it in your ໃຈ / Jai?: Embodied Knowledge and Participatory Arts-Based Co-Learning and Co-Creation - Sunisa Nuonsy, Graduate Center - CUNY

• What to Do When the Streetlights Go Out: Jet Magazine as Archival Homeplace - Cortnie Belser, Graduate Center - CUNY

• Place Matters: Mapping Stories and Resisting Erasure through Testimonio and Counter-Mapping - Michelle R. Ochoa, Graduate Center - CUNY

• LGBTQIA+ Students and Teachers Co-Creating Oral Histories From the Future That Move People To Action - Natalie Willens, Graduate Center - CUNY

• Interpreting Our Past Freedom Dreams for the Present and Future - Jennifer Queenan

Session Organizer

• Michelle R. Ochoa, Graduate Center - CUNY