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As the participants in Curnow's (this volume) study suggest, people are reluctant or resistant to seeing themselves as activists, but start to assume an activist identity as they evolve their participation in political work within and beyond the university. In the fall of 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the heightened demands for justice following the murder of George Floyd, Swarthmore College (where Edwin holds a faculty position) joined the wave of political protests happening across university campuses through a strike led by the Black Affinity Coalition (BAC). Along similar lines, the scholar activist must also engage in inward and public-facing work as we navigate the imperial university and broader academy. While the costs of living as a fugitive are untenable if not impossible for many, and especially for people of color and other marginalized groups, long traditions of fugitivity that we continue to see in today's activists provide a vital set of tools and practices, or fugitive praxis, that researchers and activists can use in enlivening another world. [Extracted from the article]

In a recent review of 182 peer-reviewed articles on US-based college and university student activism published between 2000 and 2020, Quaye et al. ([84]) identified (in addition to the history of student activism and pedagogy) three key topics articles in this themed issue address: student experiences, methods and tactics of activists, and institutional responses and contexts. Some of these studies have focused on particular groups of students: Muslim students (Ahmadi et al., [1]), Black student-athletes (Ferguson & Davis, [36]), undocumented students (Chen & Rhoads, [17]; Mendes & Chang, [72]; Muñoz, [79]), and transgender students (Goldberg et al., [43]). Hoffman and Mitchell ([49]) offer a recent case of student activists demanding equity and access for racially minoritized student populations amid a bureaucratic effort to justify space allocated to student-run cultural centers; they found that institutional responses to student activism actually "countered espoused institutional and departmental values" (p. 283). The devastating impacts of COVID-19, global climate catastrophes, economic precarity faced by the most vulnerable, and the enduring state violence Black, Latinx, Asian, and Native communities face have continued to reverberate throughout higher education, affecting students, faculty, and staff in disparate and interlocking ways. [Extracted from the article]

This paper's focus is on the "middle" of partnerships for equity in science education. Middle is used in a temporal sense, meaning the time after the general purposes and terms of working together have been set and before outcomes have been achieved. The middle of the partnership also represents people interacting, bounded around the edges, by their institutional roles, norms, resources, and priorities. As co‐authors who had not previously collaborated (or even met in person), we approached the construction of this manuscript as a dialogue where we learn by sharing narrations of experiences and values and principles. We were inspired by the conversational book between Horton and Freire (1990) and specifically their discussion of "Is it possible to just teach biology?" (p. 102). In our conversation, we illustrate the ways in which partnerships may make justice‐oriented science education possible. Our focus is on complementary and contradictory knowledges, and ways of knowing, institutional resources and constraints, and strategies for making transformative change. We explore the middle of partnerships as a series of opportunities for learning and growing, caring for one another, and building solidarity spaces together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]