Freedom-Making in the Now: A Fireside Chat on Critical Challenges to Carcerality in K–16 Education

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

This fireside chat gathers scholar-organizers challenging carceral logics, from zero-tolerance policies to faculty surveillance and the policing of student protest, in K–16 education. Rooted in abolitionist, decolonial, and community-based praxis, participants will share work on prison-to-college programs, anti-surveillance organizing, and insurgent mutual aid networks. Together, they will explore tensions, cooptation, and coalition-building amid escalating backlash against racial and gender justice in schools and universities. Engaging the theme “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures,” this session confronts how education reproduces carceral logics and systems and reimagines what becomes possible when we refuse. Attendees are invited into a visionary dialogue on transforming institutions into spaces of care, liberation, and resistance.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chairs

• Keisha L. Green, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University

Participants

• Julissa Muniz, University of California - Los Angeles

• Bryonn Bain, University of California - Los Angeles

• Roger Chung, Laney College

• Jose Adam Murillo, University of California - Berkeley

• William C. Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Miguel Casar, University of Alabama

• Romarilyn Ralston, The Claremont College

• Tuere Jones, Bar None

• Erin L. Castro, University of Utah

Discussant

• Robin D. G. Kelley, University of California - Los Angeles