Conference Agenda

What does a white male rock-and-roll star born in Freehold NJ have in common with a female Chicana scholar and mystic living along the Mexican American border? Everything. It sounds unlikely but there are connections to consider and reasons why considering these connections should matter to us. This proposed paper intersects the visionary shamanic and aesthetic ideas of the scholar Gloria Anzaldúa (2015; 1987) with the visionary language of Bruce Springsteen’s album Born to Run (1975) and how interweaving their work addresses the “... synergies, creativities, transformative practices, hopes and possibilities ... “ of our collective futures (ECQI Call for Proposals). The presenter explores sites of resistance and hope shared between a disenfranchised working class riding down the broken highways like the characters in Springsteen's album Born to Run and the communities living in the liminal shamanic borderlands of Anzaldúa’s praxis. Both Anzaldua and Springsteen highlight a need for spiritually-adjacent aesthetic experiences that bridge divides between individuals/groups and foster belonging in our shared “interconnectedness, our shared vulnerability, and our interdependency with human and other worlds“ (ECQI Call for Proposals).

How can we shift (or disrupt) the binaries that limit our individual and collective realities without losing what matters? This presentation emphasizes how liminal spaces of fiction, storytelling and metaphor as qualitative modes of inquiry are necessary elements of resistance. Anzaldua refers to this spiritual inquiry through artmaking as conocimiento (2015, p. 142). Session participants will discuss song lyrics and scholarly passages alongside each other and consider how metaphoric, artistic, and literal border-crossing ‘conjures’ communal acts of shared futures that enable us to shape-shift and reconnect with human and nonhuman worlds.

References

Anzaldúa, G. (2015). Light in the dark. Duke University Press.

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderland/La Frontera. Aunt Lute Books.

Springsteen, B. (1975). Born to run [Album]. Columbia Records.

This paper presents findings from Growing Up in the Market (GUIM), a three-year qualitative longitudinal study conducted as part of a research partnership between Queen’s Communities and Place (QCAP) and the Market community in inner-city Belfast. GUIM followed 61 participants across four generational cohorts—children, young people, young adults, and parents—through three waves of interviews (2022–2025). Our aim was to explore how community context shapes health, wellbeing, education and employment over time, and to explore the impact of our academic partnership. As such, this is an interdisciplinary project drawing on sociology, community psychology, and educational research. Its multigenerational design offers a relatively rare yet highly valuable lens through which to understand the dynamics of community life and change over time.

We will present narratives collected revealing three overarching themes: tensions of belonging and exclusion, collective action in response to adversity and asserting ambition(s) despite constraints. Across generations, participants emphasised pride, attachment, and solidarity, even as they spoke of stigma, precarious living conditions, and the intergenerational legacy of conflict. Education emerged as an act of resistance through which families sought to assert ambition, dignity, and possibility despite constraints. These findings were interpreted within the life course paradigm, highlighting how individual, family, and community trajectories intersect with wider structural forces across time.

Further we reflect on the approach itself and how, rapport built over repeated interviews developed trust and, at times, blurred the boundaries between researcher and participant impacting the data collected. We also discuss what this data suggests about the powerful potential of community-led interventions—from substance-use evenings to arts-based projects. In attending to the voices of children, young people, and families, the study foregrounds how hope, endures—even in precarious worlds and how communities under pressure resist deficit narratives and cultivate futures with persistence.

In this presentation, the author will present a paper that weaves autobiographical anecdotes with translanguaging theory to illustrate what educators can do, in their classrooms and everyday practice, to counter the deficit-oriented discourses and ideologies circulating about immigrant and/or multilingual learners. The author will begin by reflecting on her own translanguaging identity and life as a translanguager in primarily monoglossic spaces. She will then discuss alternative, heteroglossic understandings of language that seek to disrupt and counteract dominant and damaging monoglossic ideologies and perspectives, acknowledging the difficulty of such a task in the current sociopolitical climate in the United States. Finally, the author will invite attendees to explore their own linguistic and cultural identities and roots and engage in dialogue about the educational practices and policies that facilitated or stifled the development of their multilingualism as well as how the present realities in which they currently operate are similar and/or differ. Together, the author and attendees will discuss how educators can go about creating expansive, heteroglossic, translanguaging spaces that cultivate and nurturing students’ translanguaging instincts by discursively pushing back on larger monoglossic ideologies while also protecting ourselves in the current sociopolitical climate.

In today’s challenging times, resistance to managerialist and marketised education systems (Ball, 2019) remains problematic. Tools to counter fixed and ossified structures are few, whilst time and space for reimagining leadership are hard to find. As global market matters (policy, language, technologies) advance human performativity (Sidebottom, 2019), liberating leadership with embodied methodologies for the unintentional may be useful to subvert dominant operations and advance possibilities elsewhere.

This presentation embraces the transformative practices of art making with education as embodied, material, post-qualitative and post-human becomings (Fairchild, Taylor, Benozzo et al, 2022) for the unintentional and novel. Ways of making methodologies as soft materialisms will showcase the generative possibilities of material intra-inter-actions of bodies-non-bodies (Barad, 2017). These bring into question how hyper feminine objects activating multi-sensory knowledges may reposition commodified management structures. Further, softly visualising hierarchies of patriarchal language are seen to produce the previously unimagined, unknown and unintentional in acts of resistance. These art methods and materials perform a gentle approach to developing critical and self-reflexive leadership and softly contributes to the expanding field of possibilities (Glăveanu, 2023), post-qualitative studies and feminist new materialist inquiry (Braidotti, Coleman and van der Tuin, 2024).

Moreover, a view on the public dissemination of exhibition that invites intentional-unintentional audiences to bring their leadership-non-leadership bodies into art spaces for reimagining education will be shared. These lead us to consider how collective, embodied material acts as assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) perform further disturbances to orient education leadership differently. In the pause until these methodologies for resistance are widely adopted, the transformational inter-intra-play of bodies-making-education matters can be understood to take leaders somewhere else in the hope of a better world.