360°: Centering Critical Blackness
This cluster interrogates the ways diasporic bodies navigate change, boundaries, and disrupt systems, particularly through movement and education, from an Afro-feminist and womanist perspective.
This cluster interrogates the ways diasporic bodies navigate change, boundaries, and disrupt systems, particularly through movement and education, from an Afro-feminist and womanist perspective.
The systematic critical exploration of blackness and its impact on citizenship and education is important to consider in the United States’ current social climate. This cluster interrogates the ways diasporic bodies navigate change, boundaries, and disrupt systems, particularly through movement and education, from an Afro-feminist and womanist perspective. Arguing the necessity of Afrofuturist creativity and multi-disciplinary collaboration, we realize postcolonial freedom through a liberated mindset. Our exploration will include an educational speaker series, a dance/movement residency/workshops, and experiential components that investigate creative educational spaces in the mid-Atlantic region. Our goal is to convene a broad range of students and create cross-work among people who don’t always connect to each others' learning and to broader societal implications.
Courses
Take a journey through citizenship, belonging and revolutions, guided by the lived experiences of prominent teachers, choreographers, and performers of traditional and contemporary dances of Black and African descent. Our theory and practice frameworks are grounded in women and LGBTQ+ scholars and dance artists navigating diasporic blackness, citizenship, and nationhood through dance. We will centralize the notion that Black Life is Tied to All Life, investigating the significance of developing philosophies and practices of integrity, as well as boundary-breaking transformations when traversing dance/movement as a nomadic practice in a globalized world. Taught by Lela Aisha Jones.
This course, taught by Chanelle Wilson, will focus on the development of a critical consciousness, utilizing abolitionist teaching pedagogy and culturally responsive pedagogy, as tools for social transformation and resistance. We’ll examine tensions in formal education using Critical Race Theory, Critical Black Feminism, and Post-colonial Theory to understand the impact of white supremacy. Countering this, Afro-centrism and Afro-futurism inform a revolutionized education, which can, and should, support students’ pursuit of a politics of resistance, subversion, and transformation. We will explicitly commit to ideas of emancipation and progress, toward the achievement of education revolution.