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In pursuing doctoral studies, joy and emancipation are often overlooked facets of the academic journey. Joy, as a state of being, is intimately connected to the erotic--a force that propels students toward the truest expressions of ourselves. This essay delves into the intertwining threads of joy, the erotic, and emancipation within the context of a doctoral program, exploring how these elements shaped Keitha-Gail Martin-Kerr's personal journey. Embracing the erotic, as suggested by Audre Lorde, becomes a means of attuning to an inner power and fostering black joy, especially in predominantly white institutions.

The article proposes a relational pedagogy centred on "study," to contest the affective condition of the present and how it shapes narratives of young people being disengaged and with a lack of future. In doing so, it draws from affect theory and black radical studies to outline a more complex approach to affect in university experience. It mobilises the concept of "study," advanced by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in their book "The Undercommons," to direct attention to less linear and transparent space-times where study, a practice of affecting and being affected by what others do to you and what you do with it, exceeds the frameworks of the university. Further to this, the article connects study and fugitivity to what Moten calls an "aesthetics of the break" practiced across black studies. In doing so, it links affect to complex spatial-temporal relationalities that emerge from sensuous experimentation and creative speculation, which engage both in university and its escape. These ideas are explored through a participatory study with university students in Manchester, UK called "Sensing the Black Outdoors." I present the findings derived from radical sensory-spatial experiments, which led to: (a) visual encounters centred in not looking away and staying with the material presence of blackness and (b) the development of collective experiments with sensory media for feeling and imagining alternative experiences of space and time in the city.

This article examines how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' remarks contribute to anti-intellectualism and fuel the pushback against critical race theory (CRT) championed by like-minded conservative Republicans who view its instruction as an affront to society and authentic historical narratives. Dismissing educators and scholars who uphold the teaching of CRT as unpatriotic and denigrating to American society, DeSantis, who has presidential aspirations, has effectively used the issue (along with a number of other matters) to solidify his conservative base fearful of social and hegemonic change. Although CRT is not taught in Florida public schools, similar to other conservative-dominated states which have seized on the teaching of CRT as anathema to their civic principles, DeSantis' thinly veiled attempt to appease right-wing voters is yet another example of Republicans stoking cultural wars designed to energize conservative constituents against what many of them perceive as liberal attacks on their beliefs and values.

With the growing interest in the field of instructional design and technology to engage with issues of equity, discrimination, and racism, the field needs to tap into disciplines that have been doing this work to be equipped for this work. This paper discusses the need for the field of instructional design and technology to engage with the emerging field of black digital humanities to successfully address issues of inequity and oppression.

Diversity is an important issue in higher education communication and media programs. This study shows how librarians can use audit data to assess and strive for diversity in their library's print monographic collections. This article explores aspects of diversity within two fields of study, communication and media, and discusses the results of a diversity audit of communication and media monographs published between 2013 and 2022. The author analyzes thirteen diversity-related topics and their coverage within communication and media. A discussion of the current landscape as well as implications for researchers, librarians, and publishers are provided.

The objective of this article is to engage in a critical review of Roberto Esposito's biopolitical account by including a thoroughgoing interrogation of racism and white supremacy through the lens of Black affect studies. It is argued that both white supremacy studies and Esposito's framework could work side-by-side in ways that are productive for affirmative educational biopolitics. In particular, the analysis highlights two insights: first, engagement with white supremacy as a biopolitical category--in particular, white supremacy as an affective embodiment--is essential for the ability of education to interrogate the racialization of Black bodies; and, second, attentiveness to Black affect in biopolitical accounts is crucial for the decentering of white supremacy in education. These insights broaden the conceptual parameters of educational biopolitics by foregrounding the affective biopower of racism and white supremacy as central to affirmative educational biopolitics.

This case study provides an overview as to how two faculty members co-taught an asynchronous online course with a service-learning component during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Within this paper, the authors recount the adjustments that were made in order to accommodate an online teaching modality while maintaining their commitment to service learning.

Throughout this article we argue that collectivity and soul inform the work of the expert teachers who we refer to as Jazz Pedagogues. Jazz's complicated history, like teaching, calls for a consideration of the painful, the messy, the beautiful, and the healing. We, a team of university researchers and classroom teachers, examine the ways jazz can serve as one way to understand how Black-centric, anti-racist English teachers draw on their pedagogical prowess to skillfully engage with students with love, care, and a clear focus on justice. Informed by Black Feminist and Black Studies theories, we analyze a jam session/kitchen table talk between Jazz Pedagogues and theorize towards a framework for Jazz Pedagogy.

In this essay, authors Kihana Miraya Ross and Jarvis R. Givens make their case for a distinct field of education research--Black education studies, which builds on Black studies and education studies. They explore a key analytic in Black education studies, antiblackness, examining its early and more recent uses as an analytic in education research to forward a more holistic understanding of the concept. In doing so, they highlight the relationship between education as a social institution and the sustained manifestation of antiblackness. The authors conclude by considering how and why scholars might employ Black education studies to center Black life and living.

Critical race studies in international higher education remains on the margins. More so are analyses of Black subjects (nations, institutions, people, etc.) and/or knowledge traditions. In particular, there remains a dearth of research centering Black subjects as not only the unit of analysis, but also agents in the internationalization of higher education. These absences shape the way researchers approach the questions and problems of international higher education, perpetuating an archive of research that erases global Black experiences. The purpose of this article is to imagine a study of international higher education guided by Black studies. In conversation with two Black studies analytics--McKittrick's Black Unvisibility and the inquiries shaping Hartman's Critical Fabulation--I narratively and creatively explore the Black subject possibilities therein.

This essay explores the history of activism among students of color at the University of Oregon from 1968 to 2015. These students sought to further democratize and diversify curriculum and student services through various means of reform. Beginning in 1968 with the Black Student Union's demands and proposals for sweeping institutional reform, which included the proposal for a School of Black Studies, this research examines how the Black Student Union created a foundation for future activism among students of color in later decades. Coalitions of affinity groups in the 1990s continued this activist work and pressured the university administration and faculty to adopt a more culturally pluralistic curriculum. This essay also includes a brief historical examination of the state of Oregon and the city of Eugene, Oregon, and their well-documented history of racism and exclusion. This brief examination provides necessary historical context and illuminates how the University of Oregon's sparse policies regarding race reflect the state's historic lack of diversity.

Hip-Hop History exposes inequities within the social studies curriculum and the challenges facing those who seek to change it. In this article, we share the process for creating a new social studies course in a suburban high school in central Ohio, the need for the course, and the resources created to assist in its adoption. The article argues for the theoretical need for change in the social studies curriculum. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Hip-Hop Pedagogies, we use Hip-Hop as a medium to shift the lens through which events are viewed. We use this course as an attempt to deconstruct the white, male, privileged version of American history and provide space for voices previously silenced by the dominant narratives. The article also outlines the many challenges educators and local school boards encounter trying to make such changes in current bureaucratic systems designed to perpetuate those narratives.

In this article, I lean toward the ecological site of ecotone and the act of crossing to think about the pedagogical decisions I made as a scholar and practitioner teaching Black studies and English education classes. Within the classroom, I suggest centering Black and Indigenous women's poetry to help students think about interdependence, ecological precarity, and ethical engagements. Black and Indigenous poets invite us to move beyond our disciplines into a cultivated ecotone, or space where we can unearth anti-Blackness in environmental education and invite intellectual curiosity and self-reflection. What is documented here is how I used my location between two disciplines, and intellectual curiosity in other fields/disciplines, to activate ecotonal crossings with my students that can move us toward more transformative ways of teaching, learning, and knowing.

In recent years, a growing number of scholars have accused Arendt of anti-Black racism. Some of these criticisms can be traced to certain passages in her essay "On Violence" about black radicals making what she believed to be unreasonable curriculum demands, namely the establishment of Black Studies programs. The purpose of this paper is to contextualize these controversial passages within her deeply anti-modern thinking about the role of higher education in society. While her arguments remain troubling, when read along with the critical perspectives of Max Weber and Karl Jaspers, it becomes clear that her essential criticism had mostly to do with the transformation of the university into a capitalist enterprise, where students had become customers essentially seeking glorified vocational degrees. For Arendt, the university should not be a means of employment or another branch of the US military, as it had so become. It was a space where one could escape the public realm and discover a kind of freedom, the life of the mind.

The participation of Black educators in the UK's education system has been a source of much debate in recent years. Research indicates having a teaching force that better represents society is critical because of the character, ubiquity, pervasiveness, duration and importance of teaching as a social activity. However, to date, many of the existing studies have taken place in primary, secondary and higher education contexts. The primary purpose of this paper is to draw upon concepts of identity to make Black educator identity visible in the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) context. Secondly, this paper aims to contribute to recent developments around mobilising Black studies as an academic discipline by seeking to explore how Black ECEC educators construct their identity through their professional practice. This paper draws on Critical Race Theory and narrative analysis methods to illustrate the experiences of Black ECEC educators. While this paper does not generalise to the experience of all Black educators, it does highlight a much under-researched area and advocates the need for counter-narratives to challenge normative unracialised experiences.

The phenomenon known as the "Africana Studies Effect" is gaining growing attention due to its relationship to student engagement on college campuses. The present study includes an examination of twelve empirical studies on the impact of Africana studies on Black students on college campuses. The most prominent features of the impact of Africana studies are identified. Moreover, the results are examined in light of Carter G Woodson's call for a new educational program for Black education.

Higher education in the United States, mainly since Brown v. Board of Education 1954, has lifted a philosophical impetus solidifying integrationist policies, practices, and pedagogy "as not only the most desirable, but most realizable condition of Black (co)existence in America" (Curry, 2008, p. 36). The course of events after Brown has collapsed the education of Black students into "a single ideological goal, namely how to mold Black [folks] into more functional and productive members of American society under the idea of equality" (Curry, 2008, p. 37). Against this backdrop, we examine the outcomes of a racial realist curriculum. Following Bell (1992), racial realism contextualizes the racialized realities of the temporal moment against the longer histories of anti-Black racism. The realist curriculum in this study used self-definition (Okello, 2018) as an organizing principle that centrally asked, how do we exist in the bodies that we hold, in this historical moment? Employing a critical phenomenological approach (Guenther, 2019) to analyze student essays from a Black Studies course, two research questions guided this study: "How do Black folks persist in a world constructed by whiteness?" and "How could a curriculum that centered realism assist in reshaping students' sense of self and dignity?"

Curriculum studies, like nearly all education scholarship, are predicated on Black suffering and death. Inspired by Christina Sharpe's treatise "In the Wake: On Blackness and Being," we will engage with the difficult questions of what it means to be curriculum theorists inculcated into whiteness and settlement. Pivoting Cheryl Harris's renowned assertion that whiteness is property, we consider that whiteness may instead possess us. We draw upon Black and Indigenous brilliance to call for the death of whiteness, proposing that this act is necessary and the only way scholars and educators inscribed in whiteness can possibly imagine playing any positive role in liberation struggles. People are dying, and we either continue being part of the systems that delight in killing, or we take seriously the reordering of our own Being. We do so while being answerable to and in relation with Black studies. To initiate this ontological destruction, we write from the position of the s + cyborg in order to dissociate ourselves from our embodied whiteness. We invite white readers to join us as ghosts in the machine that short-circuit the currents of the wake. To this end, we provoke readers with a prescriptive curriculum towards killing whiteness. While whiteness is under destruction, we call for a turn towards speculative imaginings and futurisms that could envision a curriculum, a way of Being after whiteness.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate multimodal composition as an exercise or tool for teaching students theory building. To illustrate, an analysis of artifacts comprising a student's multimodal composition, which was created in response to a multipart literacy assignment on theorizing Blackness, is analyzed. Design/methodology/approach: Afrocentricity served as both theoretical moor and research methodology. Qualitative case study, focusing on the case of an individual student, was the research method used. Findings: Multimodal composition was an effective exercise for surfacing the multidimensionality of a student's complex knowledge while simultaneously placing the student in the powerful position of theorist. The process of composing multimodally integrated reading, writing and speaking skills while revealing the focal student's need for targeted writing intervention. Practical implications: The study evidences multimodal composition as a useful exercise for capturing students' nuanced interpretations or students' critical theorizing as well as meaningfully incorporating and assessing students' literacy skills. Originality/value: Exposure to preexisting theory alone relegates students to the realm of passive knowledge consumers. This undermines the emancipatory and justice-oriented objectives of critical education, which ideally contributes to social change by challenging dominant power structures and distorted perspectives of marginalized persons. To be empowered agentic learners, students need to be both taught how to theorize and engaged as theorists. This study shows how multimodal composition can be used as a liberatory literacy tool for those intertwined pedagogical purposes.

This article details a self-study dissecting an interracial group of students' theories of Blackness in a postsecondary classroom. I begin by conceptualizing "fugitive literacy practices" as tools with which to awaken and animate education as the practice of liberation from whiteness and anti-Blackness. I then approach multimodal essay composition as one such practice and illuminate its application in a classroom. I show how this practice affirmed students as empowered producers of knowledge. I contend that pedagogues must pivot away from the "disruption" of whiteness and anti-Blackness as a defined target, and turn toward the "destruction" of both as a desirable goal. I conclude by considering further inquiries that this provocation invites vis-à-vis curriculum and pedagogy in English teacher education. [This article was co-authored by the Fugitive Literacies Collective.]

This article explores the function and value of considering Black Studies coursework as part of the general education curriculum. In the current cultural antiracist moment, it is important to consider the role academia plays not only in historicizing its own complicity in institutions of racism but also in offering contemporary solutions to such. Thinking of Black Studies as central to the mission of higher education centers the institution as a method of social justice and an avenue toward increasing the importance of marginalized American communities. General education curricula implies an inherent value of certain specific academic material ubiquitously applied to every student's educational experience. Positioning Black Studies coursework in that existent paradigm acknowledges a current void in systemic higher education and works to equalize previously imbalanced notions of just cultural education.

Why teach Black sexualities? How might Black lived sexualities provide students a more nuanced understanding of geography and place-making practices? The junctions of Blackness, sexuality, and place are understood as active processes that are being shaped and formed by and through power relations. This paper argues for centralizing the mutually constitutive nature of sexualities and Blackness, by troubling the normative notions of sexualities as commonly approached in curriculum and pedagogy. Focusing on Black sexualities is imperative, as Black lives, politics, and locations permeate the social order and can make visible the ways in which colonial legacies imbue global structures of dismissal, displacement, and erasure. Black sexualities are always personal and political, intermediating between systemic axes of oppression grounded in colonialism and imperialism and the agency of Black sex and sexual identities in spite of pathologizing structural components of society and space. As such, this paper considers the opportunities that Black sexualities offer in teaching and learning in the geography classroom. I consider the role of curricular choices, course discussions and assignments, and the pedagogy of embodiment. Embedded in a Black Geographies framework, I argue that centering a Black sense of place is essential to pedagogies of Black sexualities.

The article addresses the concept of Black childhoods through an ontology of fugitivity that operates at the intersection of Black studies and feminist science and technology studies. An ontology of fugitivity thinks of Blackness as a performance of resistance to systems of knowledge that have persistently situated Blackness as placeless and outside sovereign power. The article elaborates this ontology of fugitivity with attention to two concepts, the Black outdoors and a recalibration of the senses. Focusing retrospectively on a series of classroom interactions and art created by one Black girl, Quvenzhané, the article examines how, through processes of artwork, Black childhoods articulate as complex compositions of bodies, images, sound, and non-binary relations of outside-inside. The article concludes with a discussion of how pedagogies that attend to fugitivity can contribute to sensorial and ontological reorientations demanded by the Anthropocene.

In an attempt to contribute to the advancement of Africana Studies as a discipline, it is vital that scholars of the field continue to assess the effectiveness of the various departments under the umbrella of Africana Studies. This research explores and assesses the departmental activities of two Africana Studies departments within the California State University system to identify effective models of student research engagement as a means of carrying out the mission of the discipline. In addition, this research offers recommendations for advancing the disciplinary mission. That authors use an Afrocentric lens to link the historical fight to preserve African peoples' humanity with the constant need to reengage African culture as a source for healing and accurately addressing contemporary challenges. Lastly, this article outlines guidelines for departments and scholars in the field of Africana Studies to continue to transform academic spaces into tools for liberatory research.

Myths are accounts of the origin of societies and institutions not subject to rationalization but often used by historians and philosophers in their quest to study African history; for it is only thus that we can comprehend the various aspects of the continent's history and culture. This paper examines the critical understanding of African worldview, the place of African philosophy and the significance of myths in the reflection of African experience.

This study presents findings from a case study of 18 second- and 1.5-generation West African immigrants. We draw upon notions of elusive culture and indigenous knowledges to highlight participants' complex cultural identities and respond to anti-immigration discourses through positioning West African immigrant students as assets in American classrooms. We extend culturally relevant theory in order to reflect the heterogeneity of Black immigrant experiences in challenging simultaneously invisible and stereotypical views of African values, knowledges, and ideologies. We call for practitioners and researchers to attend to Black immigrant youth's hybrid identities, indigenous knowledges, and enactments of cultural competence and socio-political consciousness within curriculum.

When teaching diversity courses that discuss sensitive issues, such as racial, gender, sexuality, religious, and ethnic discrimination, it is possible to encounter student resistance, which can subsequently prevent students from comprehending the content. While teaching an introductory course on African American history in a Black Studies Department at a predominantly white institution of higher education in Middle America, I experienced such resistance. This article discusses how I initially taught the course, evaluated and then restructured my active learning approach to include reflective learning and Black Studies techniques to address that resistance.

This article focuses on the sense of what an "African" (American) identity could mean when viewed through the processes of migrations and fluid identities of contemporary African immigrant children as they interact with their African (Americans) peers in schools. The purpose of this article is to use data from a study of West African immigrant girls and their process of ethnic identity construction to support the authors' position for new discourses and methodologies that challenge the dominant discourses surrounding the Black educational experience in schools. This purpose can be articulated in two central questions that guide this article. First, how does one develop a new understanding of the variations of the term African and American by placing it in a global context (and the "American" in parentheses to designate those who were born of African people brought to the U.S. during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade)? Secondly, how does one acknowledge the role of temporality in current definitions of who is African (American)? The goal of this article is to examine the issue of appropriate naming of African ascendant people in the U.S. and to examine how asking new questions of who they are might lead to a more global framework for studying identity construction and negotiation for African ascendant people in the U.S. (Contains 3 notes.)

This study investigates the perspectives of African-Canadian educators on critical factors for success in their educational careers. Interviews were conducted and life histories were constructed to analyze the complex and multifaceted nature of the experiences of ten African-Canadian educators. These data indicate that family and community support, rigorous academic qualifications, role modeling, and the establishment of strong interpersonal relationships have been significant influences on the participants' success. The author suggests that an improved understanding about African-Canadian educators' lived experiences hold implications for all educators in their teaching approaches and for student learning. (Contains 5 notes.)

In her scholarship of the past five decades, Sylvia Wynter has woven a critique of education in Caribbean, European, African, and American societies. In addition, her work demonstrates how education globally structures a particular cultural, historical, and onto-epistemic anti-Black/anti-Indigenous worldview. In Wynter's most neglected piece of work "'Do Not Call Us Negros': How Multicultural Textbooks Perpetuate Racism" she weaponizes the second and third wave of her work to unpack and provide a fresh critique to the Black English debates that occurred in California in the 1990s. In this, she reframes debates about history curriculum and culture from a white conservative nativist one of "Man" (the status quo) to the alternative Black Studies Alterity Perspective rooted in the liminal Black socio-historical-cultural experiences. Continuing Wynter's layered excavation of education as the site of EuroAmerican cultural reproduction, I sketch out a different philosophical discourse to those grounded in capital and/or race debates of the social sciences; I present a philosophical European coming of age story of humanism as a distant stage in how the West became self-aware and created a consciousness of itself. In doing so, this Western European humanism, or what Wynter coins "Man" for short, embarked on a 500-year journey of colonialism/coloniality to plunder the gifts and talents of the minds and bodies of non-middle-class, non-European populations through a process/technique of what I coin "Neocolonial Mind Snatching."

This article provides an overview of critical qualitative considerations for Black Liberation Research. The methodological considerations focus on: (a) resistance research as paradigm, (b) researcher positionality, (c) naming Black deprivation as the problem of study, (d) situating Black Liberation as the aim of analysis, and (e) centering emotions as humanizing methods. Taken together, the articles in this special issue provide an example of how Black Liberation Research can support the #BLM movement and simultaneously seek to disrupt Black deprivation in the academy.

In his frequently anthologized short story "The Sky Is Gray," Ernest J. Gaines presents a fictionalized account of a series of events that occurred in 1940s Louisiana when he was a mere boy suffering with a bad toothache. This physical ailment serves as a narrative catalyst, both driving the action and pulling the readers into a world where poverty co-exists with pride, and in which a mother who appears to be cold and unfeeling is revealed to be a loving parent teaching her male child to negotiate the often harsh realities of the segregated South. Gaines's ability to recreate the Louisiana parish that was the backdrop for his initiation into manhood is impeccable. However, in a lesser-known work, "Getting the Facts of Life," Paulette Childress White is equally impressive in her ability to evoke the streets of metropolitan Detroit, the challenges faced by a welfare-assisted Black family in the 1960s, and a young girl's encounter with the various challenges impending womanhood could hold for her. This article explores the pedagogical rationale and strategies for teaching these stories as companion pieces. Placing these two stories in tandem provides an excellent opportunity to underscore differences in male and female literary voices and issues and to explore the contrasts between the concerns of a child in the rural South of the 1940s and a child in the industrial North in the 1960s, while expanding the general notion of what constitutes a coming of age story.

In this article, the author discusses how she uses film and new media to "teach students to comprehend the complex historical, social, political, and cultural dimensions of the African American experience." The author uses D.W. Griffith's 1915 "Birth of a Nation," a number of "Blaxploitation" films, YouTube videos, and cultural tropes common to African America and Hawai'i--such as plantations and rice--to direct her students' attention to the African American experience.

This article explores the concept of "anti-blackness" as a theoretical construct that may offer new openings towards transformative and liberatory projects concerned with race and inequity in STEM education research, policy, and pedagogical reform. The article first unpacks the historic, economic, political, and therefore racialized contexts of the ubiquitous bundle of STEM education reforms known as "inquiry." Then, an overview of key theoretical constructs from Black Studies is provided, along with a more specific overview of how the framing ideas of BlackCrit (Dumas and Ross 2016) allow for more incisive examinations of anti-blackness in school contexts. Through the illustrative example of inquiry, the author shows how a BlackCrit analytic of anti-blackness might reframe inquiry in STEM as an anti-black construct. Implications related to the teaching and learning of STEM are discussed.

This study examined Black students' experiences in culture-centered courses that focused on the historical and contemporary experiences of Blacks in America and across the African diaspora. Using a qualitative approach, the authors investigated the perceptions of how Black Studies courses shaped the psychosocial experiences and identity development of Black students (N = 24) at a predominantly White institution. Data from semistructured focus group interviews revealed several themes, including psychological empowerment, self-determination, counterspaces, and community perpetuity. The authors suggest ways counselors and educators can support Black students' psychosocial development and provide outreach to diverse student populations.