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Enacting Educational Fugitivity with Youth of Color: A Statement/Love Letter from the Fugitive Literacies Collective

2020; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hsj.2020.0009

1534-5157

Grace D. Player, Justin A. Coles, Mónica González Ybarra, The Fugitive Literacies Collective,

Service-Learning and Community Engagement

Enacting Educational Fugitivity with Youth of Color: A Statement/Love Letter from the Fugitive Literacies Collective Grace D. Player, Justin A. Coles, Mónica González Ybarra, and The Fugitive Literacies Collective Authors’ Note: The contributions of Player, Coles, and González Ybarra were equal and the writing of this piece was entirely collaborative. The other members of the Fugitive Literacies Collective are Esther O. Ohito, University of North Carolina; Laura Gonzalez, University of Florida; Blanca Caldas, University of Minnesota; Jamila Lyiscott, University of Massachusetts Amherst; and Brooke Harris Garad, Indiana University. Introduction The morning is quiet as a few roll out of bed, begin the coffee maker, and bring some snacks to the coffee table. The rest of the Collective make their way to the living room for a morning meeting. Still in pajamas, some sprawl out on the floor while others lay on the couch, laptops open, and a blanket covering their feet. This is the morning after our last Cultivating New Voices (CNV) retreat together, the closing of our fellowship years as a cohort in a program for junior scholars of color. The conversation goes something like this: This doesn’t have to be the end of our work together. How can we capture and demonstrate how to work in collectivity? Let’s think about how we continue to support each other. Let’s consider how we do this work with and alongside youth and communities. How can we bring together our respective partnerships to build coalitions with youth and like-minded researchers and educators across the country? As we sit in community with one another discussing these questions, we hear the voices of CNV mentors uplifting and encouraging us to lean into our desires to build such a community. Among them, we share memories from conversations with Carol Lee as she connected the threads of our individual projects, sparking our creative vision to create something larger. We think back to the time when a group of us sat down with Leigh Patel in a hotel lobby, where she supported our theorizing fugitivity and emphasized the necessity of such personal and scholarly coalition building. We take up these ideas in the midst of sharing memories and making plans to move [End Page 140] forward to co-create. After the meeting, we make our way to the kitchen, connect to the Bluetooth speaker and fill the space with the sounds of everything from Cardi B to Celia Cruz; Bun B to Billy Ocean to Burna Boy; Nas to Nina Simone. We dance and laugh while we set the table and the delicious smells of breakfast fill the room, all before we clean up, pack our bags, and head back to each of our homes. Later, we will call ourselves The Fugitive Literacies Collective (FLC). We are a constellation of critical scholar-friends of color assembled from the 2016–2018 National Council of Teachers of English Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color (CNV) cohort. Building on experiences as classroom and community educators devoted to the thriving of youth of color, we are committed to resisting hegemonic academic norms and mores within and beyond our fields of study, including language and literacies (youth, family, and community), linguistics, teacher education, urban education, and youth studies. Our members think, study, write, and publish together in an intentional effort to irradiate the knowledges, complexities, and tensions that percolate when possibilities for the liberation of historically marginalized persons and communities are embraced as desirable and worthwhile purposes for educational research(ers). The Collective seeks to embody and animate humanizing approaches to the intellectual labor of this scholarship by enacting collaborations that honor a horizontal (holding all of our contributions as equally valuable) rather than a hierarchical approach (holding some contributions as more valuable than others) to the co-construction of knowledge while also highlighting literacies that break from educational practices that are inextricably rooted in anti-Black, racist, and colonialist ideologies. Overview This paper serves as a call to scholars, educators, and youth of color who have found, are continually finding, continually inventing and reinventing fugitive practices with their own learning communities. We start this work by putting forth a call to our...