Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Nicole Nguyen, University of Illinois Chicago

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Description:

In our call for papers this year, the Critical Geographies of Education specialty group takes seriously Bettina Love's provocation that abolitionist teaching "is the practice of working in solidarity with communities of color while drawing on the imagination, creativity, refusal, (re)membering, visionary thinking, healing, rebellious spirit, boldness, determination, and subversiveness of abolitionists to eradicate injustice in and outside of schools" (p. 2). The specialty group also hears the vibrant, exhausted, calls to "defund police, fund schools," while understanding schools themselves often serve as carceral sites of dehumanization. These calls require that the critical geographies of education center the values of, and struggles for, educational justice by documenting the dynamics of hegemonic power enacted through education, challenging traditional narratives of socio-spatial transformation, and uplifting community resistance that might alter oppressive power structures. Such educational dynamics are not fixed but instead spatially contingent as places are created and experienced along lines of race, gender, class, disability, and other axes of difference.

We seek papers that engage with spatiality and spatial thinking in assessing issues of educational justice in the context of K-12 schools, institutions of higher education, and in the educational sites and practices that happen outside of formal schooling. This orientation disrupts conventional understandings of schools and other educational sites as containers of social practices. It takes seriously the ways in which education is shaped by, contributes to, and challenges broader social processes. In this call we seek papers that denaturalize neoliberal trends in education by interrogating the decisions, economic pressures, and racial ideologies that produce state disinvestment and punishment on the one hand; and which build alternative educational futures oriented towards justice and abolition on the other.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda