Making a Case for Afrofuturism as a Critical Qualitative Inquiry Method for Liberation

Abstract

Afrofuturism as “both an artistic aesthetic and a framework for critical theory” is concerned with racial equity and technological agency to create emergent liberatory [social] systems. Using Afrofuturism as a research method encourages the imagination of new possibilities for Black liberation in a world where racial inequalities persist. Through Afrofuturism, researchers and public administrators can enter empirical and imaginary evidence required for Black liberation into the public sphere. This article provides thick descriptions of a pilot project, the Three Cities project, to demonstrate how Afrofuturism can be used as a research method for gathering empirical and imaginary evidence, particularly for public service design. This article provides an illustrative example of experiences of racism in schools and corresponding solutions with a key finding that Afrofuturism centres Black communities’ knowledge, subjectivities and experiences. The article concludes that Afrofuturism as a critical qualitative inquiry method for liberation can challenge the range of traditions and histories that have shaped public administration in ways that subjugated and marginalised Black communities, but importantly, academic researchers would need to be embedded with Black communities for an extended period in service of their Black liberation agenda.

Keywords:

• Afrofuturism
• service design
• Black liberation
• critical qualitative inquiry

Gooden and Berry-James (2018) assert that research methods matter in defining the extent of inequalities, why these inequalities persist, and how public administrators can use research to make decisions in service provision that take steps forward to addressing inequalities. However, more researchers are rejecting research methods that historically viewed marginalised communities as objects of research with nothing to contribute (McDonald et al., 2022). Research methods are progressively placing value on the knowledge produced by these communities (Durose et al., 2021), opening up creative and innovative methods of accessing such knowledge. This article posits that Afrofuturism is a creative method for producing knowledge that can articulate the impact of racial inequalities and propose service design solutions to address racial inequalities.

Racial inequalities persist in the United Kingdom, with racially minoritised populations fairing worse than White people in domains such as education, housing, job opportunities and income (Byrne et al., 2020). The UK government’s racial disparity audit identified the public services where disparities exist between racially minoritised groups and White groups (Cabinet Office, 2017). The COVID-19 pandemic has also called into question the belief that the UK is a post-race society (Lentin, 2011), given the disproportionate impact on racially minoritised communities. With increasing calls for public administrators to implement racially equitable policies, racial equity remains a nervous area of government (Gooden, 2014). Rather than being nervous, Blessett and Gaynor (2021) argue for race-conscious public administrators who are aware of the histories of oppression, value lived experience and take action to achieve racial equity.

While there has been a much-needed emphasis on equity as a guide to public administration research, education, and practice (e.g., Meyer et al., 2022), this article seeks to introduce Black liberation into the public administration research lexicon. The struggle for Black liberation is about transforming systems of oppression (such as Western Imperialism, capitalism and white supremacy) inherently biased against Black people so they can enjoy freedom, justice and equality (Andrews, 2018) “without the constant threat of the social, economic, and political woes of a society that places almost no value on the vast majority of Black lives” (Taylor, 2016, p. 194).

A fundamental premise of this article is that academia and the state can contribute to achieving Black liberation. The resources, space, and time provided by academic research can mobilise scholarly inquiry for intellectual and community-based work as part of the struggle for Black liberation (Khasnabish & Haiven, 2012). Given that public services have been culpable in (re)producing racial inequalities (McCandless & Blessett, 2022), there is potential for the state to contribute to Black liberation through the redistribution of economic resources and removal of other barriers in public services provision (Le Grand, 1991; Rawls, 1971). This article acknowledges that neither the state nor academia can always be or should be counted upon to transform the systems they are built upon because “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde, 1984). However, with the authors’ commitment to the Black communities they are part of, accountable to and work with, there is a refusal to continue to use research methods that further minoritise, marginalise, and dehumanise Black people (Green, 2020).

Consequently, this article calls for qualitative researchers to use liberatory methods when working with Black communities. In calling qualitative researchers to use liberatory methods, this article offers Afrofuturism as a qualitative method of critical inquiry for public administration research and praxis that empowers and humanises Black people. In particular, how Afrofuturism supports the development of Black liberation vision(s), making it clear how public service design can assist in the struggle for Black liberation. The next section situates Afrofuturism as a critical qualitative inquiry method. Critical qualitative inquiry prioritises different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing, and it especially prioritises knowledge from the lived experiences of those under systems of oppression about what problems exist and how they could be solved (Jones, 2023). Then, a case for Afrofuturism to facilitate public service design is presented. Thick descriptions are provided of how the authors used Afrofuturism in a pilot project called Three Cities with Black young people in Birmingham, London and Manchester as a knowledge production process. Next, a reflection on the potentials and pitfalls of using this method as a liberatory tool in developing visions for Black communities. The article concludes with final thoughts on why Afrofuturism has utility as a research method and future directions for research.

Introducing Afrofuturism as a critical qualitative inquiry method for liberation

Although the term originated in the 1990s as a response to postmodernity (Anderson in Morris, 2019, p. 79), Afrofuturism is part of a broader epistemic project that has been running for over a Century (Anderson & Jones, 2015). To paraphrase the artist Alisha B. Wormsley, it starts from the position that “There will be Black people in the future,” a radical contention in a global context of anti-Black racist hegemonies. This positionality and the work that Afrofuturism does as aesthetic and practice is highlighted by Kodwo Eshun, who describes Afrofuturism as:

…characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afro-diasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken. (2003, p. 288)

Examples of this abound. From projects like Remixing Wakanda, which “explicitly moves towards an epistemological reconceptualization of STEM spaces away from Eurocentric understandings” (Holbert et al., 2020), to Black Quantum Futurism’s “Community Futurisms 001” the “manufacturing” of aforementioned appropriate tools are evidenced on a global scale.

The potential for Afrofuturism as a critical methodology is possible due to its positionality as an “interdisciplinary approach to understanding themes and concerns of techno-culture and science fiction … with a shared interest in exploring how people of colour negotiate life and envision particularly Black futures that stem from Afrodiasporic lifeways” (Holbert et al., 2020, p. 4), and “[a]n aesthetic that includes … values actively rejected and oppressed in a society that centres white supremacy.” It “addresses systems of oppression by redefining these systems—and race itself—as technologies developed to divide and enslave communities of colour,” aligning with modes of critical enquiry that seek to understand racialised hegemonies and power structures in everyday society. Similarly, as a “counter-hegemonic[,] not concerned with representing the mainstream or the canon of Western art” (Ba, 2019, p. 109), it aligns with the goals of critical enquiry to deconstruct and reconstruct accepted canons of Western thought and methodology. In this way, it is sympathetic to the wider goals of critical research, which has explicitly transformative goals for research participants, researchers, and society, thereby unsettling traditional research methods (Denzin, 2017). Thus, the outputs that explore Afrodiasporic futurities regardless of genre, academic discipline and so on, are themselves corpus that reifies critique of hegemonic (in this case, particularly white supremacist) structures and envisions new relations, whether between racialised communities or humanity and the natural environment.

Concerning design and design methodology specifically, the Afrofuturist framework provides a useful counter to “mainstream” critical and speculative design for two reasons. First, Afrofuturism eschews creativity that does not recognise racism as an inherent contingency to our current social system. This trap has certainly afflicted techno-centric speculative design (Nelson, 2002, p. 1). Second, it is biased towards criticality, which can be made real using design to produce outcomes that impact Black communities.

Research methods that seek to transform oppressive systems in pursuit of liberation recognise that “the agency for change rests in the persons in the community working side by side with the researcher toward the goal of social transformation” (Mertens, 2009, p. 8). The researcher, therefore, needs to centre experiential knowledge from Black communities through research methods that will address issues that impact these communities at an individual and collective level.

Yet, academic research methods do not always consider how to centre Black subjectivities and experiential knowledge required to achieve Black liberation. The perceived inferiority, deviance and divergence of Black people in society are often replicated in how Black people are researched (Green, 2020). Research that is critical of and seeks to disrupt these hegemonic perceptions in research will “move toward or invite alternative ways of being and knowing that recognise plurality, multimodality, nonlinearity, and interdisciplinarity” (Green, 2020, p. 117). Consequently, Afrofuturism as a method rests firmly within critical qualitative inquiry in prefigurative research because it “is concerned with the possibilities for intervention within the dimension of the predictive, the projected, the proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the future conditional” for Black liberation (Eshun, 2003, p. 293).

As a critical qualitative inquiry, Afrofuturism ensures that prominence is given to Black people’s knowledge and uses research to reveal sites for change and activism, ensuring that these groups’ visions are shared with and acted on by policymakers (Denzin, 2017). In understanding the present to imagine possibilities for the future, Afrofuturism prefers to consult with and take direction from various bodies of information before taking action or forming conclusions on futures (Rockeymoore, 2000). The knowledge generated becomes lived theory as a form of empirical evidence. Lived theory emerges from seeking to answer problems on the ground through a contextualisation of a problem in the larger scheme of things; the answers are immersed in the facts on the ground (Sivanandan in Gordon, 2014, pp. 4–5). Therefore, Afrofuturism, as a method in critical qualitative inquiry for public service design, considers the individual experience and the “structural contexts, power arrangements, and collective ideologies” that impact Black communities (Charmaz, 2017, p. 35).

Creating evidence through Afrofuturism for public service design

Public service design in this article refers to the public sector’s intentional use of design in its processes for creating societal change (Bason & Austin, 2022). Design provides a space to combine knowledge production, applied creativity and the public to address racial inequalities (Kaszynska et al., 2022). A public service design process typically begins with an inquiry into how users navigate and experience services, focusing on the manifestation of key tangible components of service delivery (Trippe, 2021). These tangible components include whether services are universal or targeted to populations with particular needs; how users interact with services, if there are barriers such as eligibility criteria that serve as gatekeeping; the primary channels used to access a service; and what benefits users gain from services, e.g., funds, advice and information (Trippe, 2021).

One of the author’s increasing discomfort with using existing qualitative research methods with racially minoritised groups for public service design led to her thinking about Afrofuturism as a research method. Pillow (2017) articulated this discomfort by suggesting that policymakers and public service providers imagine liberatory futures for Black people in problematic ways due to temporal and structural constraints and sometimes cannot imagine such futures. In particular, explicit stereotypes and implicit assumptions of Black people’s inferiority can influence public service design (Phillips, 2011; Pillow, 2017). Inspired by Pillow (2017, p. 135), this article uses Afrofuturism “as a radical interruption of how subjects are theorised, felt and imagined” in public service design. Afrofuturism rejects Black people being viewed as just data and centres them as human subjects by researchers and public administrators. Afrofuturism helps with “a collective politics of the possible,” and using it as a research method provides a vehicle through which empirical and imaginary evidence enters into the public sphere and the public debate of Black liberation (Walcott in van Veen & Anderson, 2018, p. 9). Afrofuturism uses Black aesthetics and politics to counter histories of oppressive systems and seeks to “resist silencing, to resist being co-opted for other agendas” that are not connected to Black liberation (van Veen & Anderson, 2018, p. 16).

Afrofuturism is a creative method because Black aesthetic outputs, such as designs, music, digital media, performances and exhibitions, are created as part of a knowledge production process (Kaszynska et al., 2022). Afrofuturism in service design acts as a dialectical space for shaping solutions through material and immaterial interventions (Pollastri et al., 2018). Afrofuturism as a research method provides a blueprint for understanding how service providers and policymakers can transform service delivery to support Black people’s struggle for liberation. Bason and Austin (2022) categorise three routes through which these transformations can be included in public service design; exploring the problem space (exploring the public problem on which they focused), generating alternative scenarios (identifying possible actions to take through collaborative ideation) and enacting new practices (concrete proposals like prototypes to be potentially implemented in service delivery).

This article uses a pilot project, Three Cities, to demonstrate how Afrofuturism facilitates the articulation of desired transformations for Black liberation through aesthetics that can feed into public service design. The following section describes the steps and activities taken to help Black young people articulate desired transformations, in this case, futures without the injustice of racism.

Three Cities project: Piloting Afrofuturism as a research method

The Three Cities project ran from November 2021 to February 2022 in three cities, Birmingham, London and Manchester, with over 50 young Black people aged between 6 and 17. The authors designed, organised and facilitated the project. The Three Cities project focused on young people who are at the nexus of social change and continuity (Furlong & Cartmel, 2007). Young people disproportionately bear the brunt of continued inequalities (Franceschelli & Keating, 2018). Still, they are also increasingly at the forefront of liberatory global social movements such as Black Lives Matter fighting for change. One could attribute the striving for change to a deep-seated faith in the power of hard work to transform oppressive systems (Franceschelli & Keating, 2018). Although this faith is rooted in neo-liberal beliefs (Franceschelli & Keating, 2018), the authors recognise that it is necessary to persevere in pursuing Black liberation even if this goal is not achieved (Meer, 2022). The authors primarily recruited young people through Black supplementary schools and Black-led youth organisations by offering participants a free racial literacy programme. Below is an excerpt from the recruitment advert:

This programme will build students’ sense of self and self-worth while simultaneously striving to create an antiracist world together. We believe each person has a unique perspective that they can bring to solving the everyday challenges they see around them. We want to work with students to enhance their learning and confidence in addressing social issues of race and racial justice in their day-to-day lives. We want to encourage students to dream big, to have big ideas and not be limited by the realities of the present.

The young people and organisations received vouchers and payments, respectively, for participating in this project (Bell & Pahl, 2018). The programme consisted of two consecutive half-day workshops. The workshops served as spaces for young Black people to discuss contemporary racial inequalities they experience and design corresponding solutions to these inequalities they wanted to see. The authors cultivated and curated the imaginations of young people. The young people who participated in the programme had the opportunity to discuss key challenges they face in their everyday lives without removing the racist structural contexts in which they live. The workshops utilised visualisation, problem-solving and creativity to collectively co-produce knowledge with Black young people to address racism and racial inequalities (Sanders in Bason & Austin, 2022, p. 3). Through these workshops, young people could provide insight into the various social problems they encounter and highlight the racialised aspects of their experiences.

Each workshop started with fun icebreakers, such as constructing a structure with marshmallows and spaghetti. After the icebreakers, workshop 1 focused on problems the young people encountered, and workshop 2 focused on desired transformations. In the first workshop, the discussions used a world café exercise, which enabled the young people to focus on three aspects of the problems they were discussing in small groups: what are the issues they see?; what do they think causes them?; what could be done about it? These group discussions about problems encountered by young people allowed the topic of racism to come up organically. After the world café exercise, one of the authors invited the young people to individually create short narratives based on their experience with the issue they had encountered. These acted as examples for their eventual intervention and an opportunity to share and learn from each other. Between sessions, one of the authors turned these short narratives into simple comics using a storyboard template. In the second workshop, the authors handed out printed versions of the storyboards after icebreakers and a recap of the issues discussed in the previous workshop. Young people were encouraged to add more details to their storyboards by adding questions or ideas about the desired transformation at various steps of the story. Once transformations had been identified, the young people worked to create a physical prototype or, in the case of young participants, a piece of art that tells the story of their solution. The authors used storytelling and prototyping to introduce the speculative liberatory lens, where young people are encouraged to centre how they would want to change the harmful systems they encounter and design accordingly. Across both workshops, young people, with support from the authors, were able to define potential solutions to the problems identified. The collective discussions of structural issues underpinning the identified problems helped young people move away from individualising the issues and solutions. The authors used a “call and response” format to enable critical and honest perspectives from the young people about current issues and solutions they would like to see. For example, the framing around “what would you like to have seen/done?” ensured that as much as possible, the discussion would move into ideation of the futures they would like to see, or at least reveal what the young people thought could be done.

In designing and running the workshops, the authors took note of the suggestions by Bowen et al. (2013). The authors motivated and empowered young people to consider themselves visioners in their own right with capabilities for critical thinking, emphasising that everyone has ideas (Bowen et al., 2013). The workshops utilised a variety of activities, from open activities emphasising free discussion and collective decision-making to using concrete examples and familiar situations, having short activities with clear outputs, and fun activities (Bowen et al., 2013). Sometimes, we used youth leaders and supplementary school teachers as “authority figures” to keep young people engaged. However, this was not needed often, as there was some affinity with the authors. While the authors did not occupy formal positions of authority, the young people regarded them as “older cousins or young aunties,” which comes with a level of respect that helped to keep young people on task. The authors were familiar strangers (Hall & Schwarz, 2017) due to being Black women. This similarity and clarity on the purpose of the work with authors as researchers could have helped to minimise power differentials so that trust and rapport were built to ensure they talked freely and openly (Campbell et al., 2018).

An illustrative example is presented next to describe the use of Afrofuturism as a method for knowledge production. The example reflects the authors’ use of Afrofuturism rather than the substantive content of what young people told us.

An illustrative example: Afrofuturism in practice

The authors conducted two workshops with young people aged 6 and 16 in Manchester. There were about 15 children and young people in each workshop. The authors split the participants into two groups, with six and seven-year-olds completing different activities to the older participants. This example is based on the work done with the older age group. With this group, the authors were particularly interested in how young people see how racism affects them or others around them. The authors were interested in knowing whether there was a recognition of the oppressive systems that affected Black people—was it something they could name, or could they speak to the evidence of how these systems operate in their or their family’s lives?

In workshop 1, the young people were quick to name racist abuse, such as the racist abuse suffered by English players at the Euro 2021 football finals and the backlash against Marcus Rashford with his campaign for schools to provide free meals to children during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Some young people did not label interactions as racism, but they alluded to everyday examples in their lives, such as rudeness and bullying because of their race. Yet, they receive no or inadequate support and protection from incidences of racism at school. Young people reported getting advice from their schools on how to deal with racism. Advice included “ignore it,” “keep calm and don’t say mean things when you’re angry/don’t reply back.”

Given the authors’ interest in the struggle for liberation, discussions turned to what schools can do to provide conducive learning environments for Black young people that are free from racism and how they can provide adequate support for young people who experience racism. With probing questions from the authors, it became clear that young people’s exposure to racism/racial injustices in their school curriculums was focused on America rather than the British context. In their roles as facilitators, the authors pointed to histories of oppression and resistance in the UK using the case of the Bristol Bus Boycott. By exploring these questions and histories with the young people, the potential solutions to solving these issues were by improving Black history education in school and providing better ways for people to tackle the racism they experience.

Following workshop 1, one of the authors created two simple stories that served as the basis for discussion at the second workshop. Workshop 2 allowed participants to flesh out the details of their solutions. Particular interventions included an emotional support robot that would also report instances of racism and a Black history curriculum to ensure Black history was included outside of Black history month and was embedded in other historical topics such as World War Two. Black aesthetics created in this workshop included a paper prototype of the emotional support robot, comics and artwork depicting their experiences of racism at school, and ideas to make their learning environments more inclusive.

By detailing the Three Cities project, this article puts forward principles that ought to guide Afrofuturism as a research method. Researchers will seek to incorporate personal narratives of Black people discarded by current hegemony and create a Black dialectic space with processes that are communally rooted to produce Black aesthetic outputs. Table 1 below provides examples of how to operationalise these principles. This list is derived from the project, but is not intended to be exhaustive.

Table 1. Afrofuturism as a research method.

Principles for Afrofuturism as a research method	Tools	Output
Incorporating personal narratives discarded by current hegemony	Storytelling through shared narratives	Simple comics and short stories about young people’s experiences
	Paired discussions	Notes and sketches
Creating a Black dialectic space	“Call and response” method for eliciting and digging deeper into experiences	Rich group discussions
	Using imagery of Afrofuturist settings and characters for inspiration, design fiction
Communally rooted processes	Paired design activities	Exploration of other perspectives by including the partners’ questions and comments in the storytelling
	Group discussion about racism and how young people see it around them	“Whiteboards” covered with post-it notes and labels created by the young people
	World-café exercise	Posters with a variety of views from the groups
Production of Black aesthetic outputs	Prototypes rooted in the lived experience of young people	Emotional support robot; comics and artwork depicting their experiences of racism at school; ideas to make their learning environments more inclusive
	Multimedia narratives e.g., comics and collages, posters

Potentials, pitfalls and limitation of Afrofuturism as a liberatory method

The authors use this article to make a case for Afrofuturism as a liberatory method because of its potential for the ethical creation of knowledge and minimising power differentials. However, there are pitfalls to using this method, including the risk of creating knowledge that has no utility for Black liberation and the harm that could be caused to participants. The limitations of using this method in the research and praxis of public service design are the time-intensive nature of this type of research and the likelihood of the outputs from this process influencing public service design.

The Three Cities project has shown that Afrofuturism has the potential to ethically create knowledge with young people for liberation because it centres on the subjectivities of participants and does not rely on explicit stereotypes and implicit assumptions of Black people’s inferiority. The aesthetics produced at the end of the programme, art, prose in the form of short narratives, paper prototypes and comics, were used to express the complex realities discussed during the workshops. The aesthetics showed the young people’s visions of living free from and transforming the systems that marginalise and exclude Black young people in education. Therefore, the critical qualitative inquiry could access different perspectives on various issues affecting young Black people, from gang violence to misogynoir to labour market inequalities. The inquiry empowered participants to think critically about how they can enact change to address racism and racial inequalities.

On the other hand, it may not always be possible to do this critical thinking process. Some youth groups, such as the illustrative example, focused on interpersonal relations rather than oppressive systems. Young people did not always recognise how laws, policies, practices and social institutions (Golash-Boza, 2016) negatively impacted their lives. Although young people are aware of racism, without education about where it began and how it works in society, knowledge production on tackling oppressive systems is difficult. For example, young people often showed awareness to an extent of the British slave trade and colonialism but were unaware of how embedded these histories are in contemporary race relations. However, with support from the authors, the young people were beginning to understand the oppressive systems that should be tackled for their liberatory futures.

Using knowledge from lived experiences has historically not been seen as appropriate for academia and policymaking’s understanding of what “counts” as knowledge (Beebeejaun et al., 2015; Durose & Richardson, 2016). Returning to the illustrative example, lived theory suggests that schools which are seeking to address racism in schools should (re)distribute resources to improve the curriculum to help all young people have the language to speak about racism and invest in support for Black young people to minimise the impact of racial trauma. Combining the lived theory from the young people with the authors’ knowledge of service design, the discussions led to tangible components in providing education in schools that could be designed better. For example, diversifying the curriculum and targeted support services for minimising racial trauma. These suggested improvements to service can facilitate the removal of barriers that Black young people experience. Where these are implemented effectively by school authorities, there is, therefore, a possibility that young Black people can experience an education that is not marred by experiences of racism. Throughout this example, Afrofuturism provided a space for combining lived experience as knowledge with Black-centred design ethos to support public service design (Durose & Richardson, 2016).

Afrofuturism as a research method can minimise power differentials between researchers and participants, particularly in setting the agenda for the focus of the research. The authors conducted the programme in each city without preconceived ideas of what each group should discuss. The young people led the agenda and direction of the conversations in the workshops. The authors supported the discussions through interjections, enriching the discussions by connecting lived experiences to oppressive systems. In this way, the authors’ skills and prior knowledge were applied in service to what the young people wanted to discuss. A lack of a preset agenda in research runs contrary to expectations of what constitutes research in academia, where researchers “know best” and set the direction for research processes (Bell & Pahl, 2018) but, in this case, ensured that participants were able to share their knowledge with the researchers.

One pitfall is that discussions can fail to unearth experiences of racism and racial inequalities; therefore, knowledge to support Black liberation is not accessible. Therefore, when using Afrofuturism, it is key to discuss lived experiences in a way that speaks to and reveals structural realities of the interpersonal. Revealing the structural realities is important even if the structural realities are not explicitly referred to; the facilitator can support the learning process and disclose the structural realities moving away from the neoliberal individualisation of racial inequalities. It is also possible that before engaging with a project like Three Cities, young people cannot recognise and name interpersonal racism, including microaggressions. This inability to label encounters happened in one of the groups, and by the end of the session, the young person felt better equipped to name and navigate through such experiences. Another pitfall to avoid is negatively impacting young people’s mental health and wellbeing, and although cathartic, asking young people to share their experiences of racism and racial inequalities could negatively impact their mental health and wellbeing (Pound & Sims-Schouten, 2022). Consequently, rules of engagement need to protect participants, such as stating that people share only what they are comfortable with and having information on support available to participants.

A key limitation of this research is the length of time, which prevented more in-depth explorations of policy problems and solutions. With more time, the project could have better educated young people on the histories of oppression and resistance within the British context and the contemporary realities of racial inequalities. There would also have been more time to deepen their imaginations of hopeful futures free from oppressive systems. With time being a critical factor for liberatory work, researchers ought not to be concerned with the temporalities of typical research projects and remain committed to working with the groups in the struggle for Black liberation as defined by them (Mason, 2023). This type of research rejects discrete, one-off extractive engagement with Black communities and understands that the relationships and practices in an Afrofuturism collaboration will still produce positive academic and non-academic outcomes (Mason, 2023). Consequently, Afrofuturism, as a critical qualitative inquiry method, will have radical ethical commitments to reciprocity (Bussu et al., 2021). Reciprocity would look like being present, engaged and consistent in collaboration with Black groups and spanning the boundaries of academia, government and communities (Carey et al., 2018).

Concluding thoughts: Afrofuturism’s contribution to qualitative public administration research

Multiple norms and traditions drive public administration and can be studied through a heterogeneity of epistemic and ontological lenses ranging from empiricism to critical theory (Riccucci, 2010). This article has shown that Afrofuturism rests firmly within the critical theory as its epistemological standpoint because it engages with the critical analysis and discussion of how knowledge in public administration research, particularly for public service design, is created (Riccucci, 2010). Afrofuturism adds to the methodological pluralism in a field with a long history of preferring the positivist philosophy of science and quantitative methods as the standard of good research (Schwartz-Shea, 2021). The Three Cities project demonstrates that Afrofuturism can be particularly useful for public service design. While this article cannot categorically say that using Afrofuturism leads to liberation, the transformation of oppressive systems, it does point to possible ways in which liberation could be achieved through the knowledge produced by using Afrofuturism as a research method. For race-conscious public administrators, the knowledge produced allows for action to address racial inequalities and support Black liberation. By reifying Black lived experience in aesthetic outputs, Afrofuturism contributes to the burgeoning range of inclusive frameworks in public administration research, which seek to recalibrate power and reclaim the agency of marginalised communities in research (McDonald et al., 2022). This project recalibrated power dynamics between researchers and young people by privileging their knowledge. The project also supported the young people to reclaim their agency in terms of practical steps they could take as they sought to transform the systems they are part of.

This article extends the conversation on inclusive research approaches by centring the production of knowledge by Black communities. It has developed a qualitative method in ways that orient the lived experience of living under oppressive systems as potential sources of method advancement. This article has challenged and critiqued the normative assumptions of doing qualitative research. To conclude, this article seeks to start a conversation about Afrofuturism as a research method for Black Liberation in general and how knowledge production for public service design can contribute to this agenda. Seeing Afrofuturism as a research method opens up vast avenues for future research that could support Black liberation. Future research questions could include: how is knowledge from Afrofuturism utilised in public service design, and to what outcomes does the knowledge produced lead?

Ethics statement

As an independent researcher at the time the project was carried out, ethics guidelines from the Economic and Social Research Council were followed and informed consent was sought from participants and their parent/guardian.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Lankelly Chase for funding the pilot project.

Disclosure statement

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