Fugitive future making: Empowering voices, amplifying sociopolitical imaginations, and designing transformative futures

Abstract

In U.S. school systems, anti-Blackness and ableism are organizing principles that constitute a system of exclusion through which to dismiss complex intersectional identities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students with and without disabilities. Racialized outcome disparities in the identification of disability and school disciplinary actions are material consequences of the historically sedimented White and ableist legacy that pathologizes and criminalizes BIPOC students. To dismantle the current schooling system that perpetuates racial stratification and injustice, educational scholars and practitioners have collectively dreamed of learning as fugitive action in which they restore human dignity of BIPOC students and communities and envision alternative futures with them. Learning as fugitive action is a subversive approach that not only unveils the oppressive systems of schooling but also restructures them to achieve racial equity and disability justice. As part of the effort to facilitate collective fugitive learning at school, a community-driven systemic design intervention called Learning Lab was developed. Within the Learning Lab, school community members, particularly those from historically marginalized communities, collaborate to imagine possible realities and design a new support system accordingly. Through this collective fugitive learning, they actively address the disproportionality of their BIPOC youth in special education placements and school disciplinary outcomes. The aim of this essay is to explore the potential of Learning Lab as a space for fugitive future-making and to demonstrate how it can be used to dismantle oppressive structures and design transformative school systems.

Keywords:

• Fugitivity
• racial disproportionality in special education
• school discipline
• research-practice partnerships

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This paper will highlight the need for a fugitive learning space to address educational injustice caused by toxic settler colonialism, ableism, anti-Blackness, and other forms of intersectional and structural subjugation. In this essay, we will present a case study of an urban school community’s collective effort to address racial disparities in school discipline that disproportionately affect Black students, both with and without disabilities. We want to be clear that this case displays an application of our theoretical arguments to materialize a concrete, utopian version of schooling through working side-by-side with local stakeholders—beyond abstract criticism. We acknowledge Indigenous students also disproportionately undergo racialized experiences in special education identification and school discipline. Particularly, settler-colonial political, legal, economic, and educational systems interdependently reinforce and perpetuate White settlers’ possession of land and resources by erasing Indigenous people. To demonstrate how a Learning Lab can organize a fugitive learning space to counteract settler-colonial harms, we have also documented and theorized a rural school community’s systemic transformation endeavor to leverage tribal sovereignty, Indigenous community’s histories of survivance (i.e., survival + resistance; Vizenor, 2008), cultural knowledge, and sociopolitical future imaginations to dismantle the settler-colonial penal system used to sort, label, punish, and ultimately erase Indigenous youth in learning spaces (Ko et al., 2022b, Ko et al., 2022c; Ko et al., 2023).

2 The names used for the school, city, and the participants in this study are pseudonyms. As researchers, we are aware that names covey individuals’ intersectional markers of difference, as well as the cultural and historical memories associated with spaces (Heaton, 2022). However, we acknowledge our struggle to navigate between complying with the Institutional Review Board’s (IRB) regulations for anonymization to protect the potential vulnerability of participants, and our ethical concerns about erasing complex local histories, intersectional identities, and the symbolic, sociocultural, and political meanings of spaces. Our use of pseudonyms was not intended to remove historical, political, and spatial contexts of local stakeholders’ collective efforts in fugitive systemic design. Instead, we sought to balance ethical considerations in our research practice.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dosun Ko

Dosun Ko is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at Santa Clara University. His research focuses on the complex interplay of race, class, gender, disability, and language in shaping power dynamics, privilege, and marginalization within special education referral and identification processes, as well as in exclusionary school discipline practices.

Aydin Bal

Aydin Bal is a Professor of education and the faculty director of Global Engagement Office at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Dr. Bal’s research focuses on the interplay between culture, learning, and mental health across local and global education systems. He examines the social justice issues in education, family-school-community-university collaboration, organizational innovation, and future making. As a practitioner and researcher, Dr. Bal has worked with youth from minoritized communities experiencing academic and behavioral problems in schools, hospitals, and prisons from the United States, South Sudan, Syria, Iraq, the Russian Federation, Turkey, the Anishinaabe Nation, and Malawi.

Sumin Lim

Sumin Lim is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. As an immigrant mother scholar, she is dedicated to fostering civic engagement among school stakeholders, with a focus on establishing equity-oriented partnerships with ethnolinguistic minorities, including im/migrant or refugee families. Dr. Lim also actively contributes to the expansion of bilingual special education through teacher education reforms, promoting plurilingual and pluricultural competence while preparing educators for the multilingual future of the United States.

Linda Orie

Linda Orie is a Doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at UW-Madison. Her research interests include culturally responsive curriculum development and decreasing racial disproportionality of behavioral and academic outcomes through systemic change. Prior to joining UW, Linda taught middle school science and served as summer school principal at Menominee Tribal School. Linda earned degrees from Stanford University (B.A. Psychology) and UW-Oshkosh (B.S. Education) prior to completing her M.S. in Curriculum & Instruction at UW-Madison. Linda is an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.