Station 2

• In Event: The Art of Queer and Trans Educational Research Methodology: A Workshop on Community-Engaged Scholarship

Abstract

The second station will engage the political art making practices of Black trans abolitionist organizers as a form of abolitionist education. Participants both will learn about the genealogy of political art, as well as make art that reflects their own political values. This engagement draws from a phenomenological study exploring pedagogies of abolitionist praxis in the lived experience of Black trans community organizers. This study specifically explores the questions:
How do pedagogies of abolition (the process of teaching/learning an abolitionist praxis) manifest in the everyday lives of Black trans folks?
How do those manifestations teach us how to study in abolitionist ways?
Abolitionist praxis serves as a Black radical mode of study (Meyerhoff, 2019) working to transform our reliance on carceral state power and the logic that perpetuates it. This research uses this mode of study to explore where and how these pedagogical moments of resisting the carceral state manifests in the lives of Black trans folks. This station will be co-led by the researcher, as well as one of the study participants whose organizing work is grounded in political art making practices with youth and adults.

Theoretical Framework: Abolitionist Education
Education is often positioned as a solution to incarceration while simultaneously using police to enforce discipline; or metal detectors and cameras for surveillance within school buildings as a measure of “safety” (Meiners, 2011). Sojoyner (2016) argues that both schools and prisons function as enclosures of Black life. Carceral progressivism positions education as a solution to societal oppression by “emancipating” students from enclosures, rather than actually abolishing the conditions that create said enclosures (Shange 2019). This is an example of how traditional education-based modes of study (Meyerhoff, 2019) enforce the carceral logics this work seeks to resist. By studying what how abolitionist praxis (Author, 2022; Dyke et al., 2018; Love, 2019; Meiners, 2011; Rodriguez, 2019) manifests in the everyday lives of Black trans people, This research explores the ways that Black trans life as inherently pedagogical, teaching new ways of being and knowing that do not rely on carcerality, anti-Blackness, and gender based violence.
Author, 2022

Dyke, E., Meyerhoff, E., & Evol, K. (2018). Radical imagination as pedagogy. Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, 28(2), 160. https://doi.org/10.5325/trajincschped.28.2.0160

Love, B. L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon Press.

Meiners, E. R. (2011). Ending the school-to-prison pipeline/building abolition futures. The Urban Review, 43(4), 547–565. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9

Meyerhoff, E. (2019). Beyond education: Radical studying for another world. University of Minnesota Press.

Rodriguez, D. (2019). Abolition as praxis of human being: A foreword. Harvard Law Review, 132(6), 1575–1613.
Shange, S. (2019). Progressive dystopia: Abolition, antiblackness, and schooling in San Francisco. Duke University Press.
Sojoyner, D. M. (2016). First strike: Educational enclosures in black los angeles. University of Minnesota Press.

Author

• Qui Alexander, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author