Worlding Black freedom: unsettling the predicament of domination through fugitive and abolitionist pedagogies

The rise in scholarship on fugitivity and abolition within educational research has broadened our horizons on the relationship between education, power, and freedom. Coalescing data from two streams of qualitative research on fugitive educational spaces and abolitionist pedagogical stances, we draw on ethnographically informed data to illuminate how fugitive and abolitionist worlding create life-affirming educational counterspaces and build students’ metacognition regarding relations of power, respectively. As elements of a framework we coined Worlding Black Freedom, we argue that enactments of fugitivity and abolition in education are generative disruptions of antiblack spatial, political, and epistemic violence that occur within domineering ecosystems of schooling. These disruptions produce new possibilities for life-sustaining educational worlds that engender conscientious youth political formation, co-constitutive webs of relation, and transformative learning for both teachers and students. Our findings provide empirical, conceptual, and pedagogical interventions for educational practitioners and researchers seeking to reorient their praxis toward liberatory standpoints.