Learning From the Movement for Black Lives: Horizons of Racial Justice for Comparative and International Education

• In Event: Presidential Invited Session: Learning from Black Lives Matter: Pro-Black Educational Practices and Comparative and International Education

Proposal

The panel opens with an introductory presentation by Sharon Walker, co-Editor of the Special Issue on Black Lives Matter and Global Struggles for Racial Justice. In this presentation, Sharon reflects on the importance of reading BLM in its own terms, particularly its amplifications of the specificities of anti-Blackness and abolitionist organising and how these point to futures beyond ‘Black death’. In doing so, the presentation attempts to distil the political, theoretical, and methodological significance of BLM for the field of comparative and international education. The paper argues that the field of CIE must do more to understand and counter anti-Blackness and attend to the global implications of anti-Black racism in education research, policy and practice. It then sets out key concepts for the field to think with to reconstruct itself as a pro-Black space: Black Joy, Black Optimism, and Black Futurity.

Author

• Sharon Walker, University of Bristol