Conference Agenda

In 2021, we, a group of then early-career literacy scholars of color collectively known as the Literacy Futurisms Collective-In-the-Making, put forth a conceptual framework, literacy futurisms, consisting of a constellation of five interrelated concepts: the ancestral/collectivist, playful/imaginative, intersectional, translingual, and decolonial (The Literacy Futurisms Collective-in-the-Making, 2021). Through our work, we sought to invite scholars to metaphorically dialogue with us around a series of provocations aimed at re-envisioning and re-claiming the future(s) of literacy and educational research.

Our goal now is to re-gather, with some of us joining in person and others virtually, 1) to invite an international community of scholars to engage with us around the original provocations we set in motion in 2021; and 2) to reflect on if and how our own praxis has shifted in the current sociopolitical climate we are encountering as scholars of color in the U.S. To that end, we frame this session presentation around the following overarching questions, which we will invite the larger community to reflect on alongside us: 1) How can we reimage literacy and educational research for the future in a world where white supremacist domestic terrorism is normalized? and 2) What stories, counter-narratives, and testimonios do we and our communities share surrounding experiences of increased and unwarranted violence, surveillance, and criminalization? The goals and the questions we seek to explore in community with other ECQU attendees are grounded in our firm belief that knowledge production through collectivity disrupts the coloniality (Smith, 2012; Patel, 2016) and neoliberal precepts of the academy (DeRocher, 2018), and it is in the dislocation of “the academy” that we might start to unravel and learn from the decolonial ways of being and doing that have sustained us to this present moment.

We draw inspiration from the work of collectives that have come before us such as the Black Girls' Literacies Collective (Haddix, McArthur, Muhammad, Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2016) and the Fugitive Literacies Collective (Player, Coles, Ybarra, 2020) that are reclaiming literacy and literacy education for BIPOC communities. For us, transforming traditional literacy and educational research spaces into those that center and celebrate BIPOC practices and knowledge(s) is a form of reclamation and of resistance to coloniality; it is about creating space where we can lift our histories, identities, and each other. As such, we continue building our conceptualization of literacy into one that refutes narrow, traditional, and prescriptive literacies for the privileged, and is deeply-rooted in an ancestral/collectivist, playful/imaginative, intersectional, translingual, and decolonial collective vision of literacy for and by BIPOC–Literacy Futurisms (The Literacy Futurisms Collective-in-the-Making, 2021). We ground this shared vision in notions of authentic cariño (Abril-Gonzalez, 2020; Bartolomé, 2008; Curry, 2016) and radical love (Freire, 1998; hooks, 2000) for one another, and embrace the nature of interdependence (Campano et al, 2020) and communal being (Rusoja, 2017) extending beyond the goals of the individual into a collective well-being.

In this session, we seek collective uplifting by engaging in critical praxis (Freire, 1970) in accordance with our coloniality- and neoliberalism-resisting vision. We will begin by highlighting and celebrating the scholarship of BIPOC scholars whose work embodies, shapes and materializes the meaning of Literacy Futurisms since even before our collective theorization. Then, we will facilitate shared dialogue and co-creation among “presenters,” “discussants,” and “audience members” to collectively envision and “illuminate on the future” (Toliver et al., 2019, p. 68) by inviting others to be in community with our collective, grappling with what literacy could be across time and space and to join us in a revisiting of our Literacy Futurisms provocations. The session will include various multilingual and multimodal points of entry (e.g., art, poetry, writing, drawing) to invite everyone in the session to play, dream, and theorize alongside us as co-conspirators (Love, 2019) as we imagine the “different tomorrows [that] are possible” (Freire, 1998/2007, p. 55) for literacy and educational research.

As we wrote in 2021, “we are everything we hope academia to be: collective, not competitive, and drawn together from a place of love, joy, hope, and humanity” (p. 5). Now, as more advanced scholars, we welcome the opportunity to invite the ICQE community “to open your minds, hearts, and spirits” and to join us in “collectively reclaim[ing] potential futures of [educational] research” (p. 5) alongside us.