Highlighted Session: Global Perspectives on African/Black Social Movements and Education

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

African/Black social movements have played a critical role in Black liberation struggles globally and have created synergies across multiple intersectional struggles including feminism, eco-feminism, anti-imperialism and workers struggles. The police murder of George Floyd in June 2020 sparked global protests and what Black activists coin ‘rebellion summer’, where some of the largest global protests in history rocked cities from Los Angeles to Capetown, from Accra to Hong Kong and from London to Buenos Aires. The Movement for Black Lives, once relatively isolated to North America, gave rise to a new sense of Black solidarity and opened new possibilities for Pan-Africanism and Black internationalism. The #BlackLivesMatter movement, while centering the struggles of Black Americans, also brought to the fore other struggles against police brutality and state sanctioned violence across the African continent.
This period of rebellion builds on long standing legacies and foundations of Black social and political movements, as vehicles for global solidarity with Black struggles throughout the African Diaspora, andalso the amplification of local struggles, which suffer from lack of attention by local, national and global actors. Lessons from recent and emerging movements are crucial to developing effective strategies and tactics to fighting back against anti-Black state repression and discrimination, as well as understanding how local organizing is connected to and supported by movements with similar objectives regionally and internationally.
The 2022 CIES Conference is located at a site of Black struggle which in many ways is part of the recent turning point in Black movement building; Minneapolis. This panel: Global perspectives on African/Black Social Movements and Education, pays homage to local Black struggle in the United States, while drawing attention to the international dimensions and waves of protests that have been strengthened by the US Movement for Black Lives and summer of rebellion. The panel with diverse activist scholars from Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, Canada and the United States highlights the interconnectivity of Black struggle and its implications for education. The panel seeks to answer the following questions: How do Black social movements view political education and what are their pedagogical approaches to training, mentoring and supporting members? How do Black movements cope with the intersectional traumas faced daily by their members and create healing spaces and spaces of joy in order both to cope and to be engaged in the process of collective emancipation, even within the context of the permanence of racism?
This panel highlights the internal practices of Black social movements with an aim to increase the dialogue on the nexus of public education and Black liberation. Black resistance and struggles are essential to understanding Black existence in contemporary society and wider issues of society, given the position of anti-Blackness as a global phenomenon.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Socialism and Education: Global Alternatives to Patriarchy, Racial Capitalism, Militarism, and Climate Change

Chair

• Krystal Strong, University of Pennsylvania

Individual Presentations

• Amilcar Pereira: The Black Social Movement in Brazil and the struggles in Education: between History and contemporary challenges - Amilcar Araujo Pereira, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)

• Workshopping Water Justice from the Cape Flats to the Continent - Adrian Murray, University of Johannesburg

• Calling back our ancestors: The role of historical consciousness in Black Social Movements - R. Nanre Nafziger, McGill University

• “You Write Because You Have To”: Mobilizing Spoken Word Poetry As A Method Of Community Education And Organizing - Emmanuel Tabi, McGill University