Reworking Inquiry in Education with Black Creative Texts

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Black Studies, Black Feminisms, and Black Queer Thought unsettle disciplinary limits and offer alternative ways to conduct inquiry in education. In this session, we center forms of research around histories and cultures within the Black Radical Tradition. We draw from the creative works of Octavia Butler, Ernest Gaines, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Bisa Butler, Maya Angelou, Keguro Macharia, and Dionne Brand to demonstrate how knowledge-making requires expanding concepts across disciplinary boundaries. Black texts and artwork help us theorize in ways that have been devalued, erased, or forgotten in many dominant academic spaces. Aligned with AESA’s theme on dreaming otherwise worlds, the papers in this session co-conspire with black creative texts to unsettle ways of knowing, knowledge production, and inquiry in education.

Sub Track

• AESA

Chair

• Korina Jocson, York University

Discussant

• M. Francyne Huckaby, Texas Christian University

Presenters

• Alisha Smith Jean-Denis, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

• Benjamin Scherrer, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

• Nicole le Roux, UMass Amherst

• Mariam Rashid, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Session Organizer

• Cee Carter, University of Massachusetts-Amherst