Fugitive pedagogies: decolonising Black childhoods in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Black studies
• feminist science-technology studies
• fugitivity
• Anthropocene
• learning outdoors
• art education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In the article, I use the terms Black study and Black studies differently. With Black studies, I refer to the multidisciplinary field concerning Black experience and diaspora. More specifically, in this article I pay attention to geographical, spatial and aesthetic Black studies theory. With Black study, I refer to the concept, often used by Fred Moten, that describes a radical intellectual exercise of both critique and fugitivity that stems from abolitionist thought. I further discuss the practice in different sections of the article, most prominently in the passages that follow this note.