This commentary illuminates the intricate relationship between imagination, systemic oppression, ... more This commentary illuminates the intricate relationship between imagination, systemic oppression, and aesthetic injustice within American educational systems, drawing on the insightful arguments presented by Hardman (2024). The discussion extends to the complex interplay between aesthetic capacities and systemic oppression, as explored by scholars like Dalaqua (2020), Benjamin (2024), and Love (2023). These scholars argue that American democracy often necessitates the exclusion, criminalization, and punishment of imaginative capacities, particularly for racially minoritized students. The paper underscores the historical context provided by Monique Morris (2016) and Bettina Love (2023), who contend that policies from Ronald Reagan’s presidency pathologized and penalized Black children, contributing to systemic injustices. Further, it highlights Ruha Benjamin’s (2024) assertion that "deadly eugenic imaginaries" perpetuate narratives of criminality for Black youth, emphasizing the need to confront these harmful ideologies. Hardman calls for a radical imagination to address systemic aesthetic injustices and recognizes the transformative potential of educators in empowering racially minoritized students. The paper concludes by advocating for an expansive view of whose social imaginations are affirmed and valued, recognizing the historical and ongoing efforts of racially minoritized communities to imagine freedom and fugitivity despite systemic barriers. By dismantling oppressive ideologies and fostering environments that support radical imagination, this paper aims to contribute to a more equitable educational landscape where all students can envision and achieve their self-determination and agency.
A growing and influential cohort of Black scholar–creatives are choosing to think, theorize, aest... more A growing and influential cohort of Black scholar–creatives are choosing to think, theorize, aesthetically practice, and articulate blackness (Black being and living) in excess of a settled Western racial logic (nonbeing) that produced it. I set forth to advance a paradigm of Black study for thinking and theorizing the intersections of Black livingness and its inherent fugitivity within and beyond chattel enslavement. By expanding on the concepts of Black compositional thought and wake work, I illuminate an assembly of metaphors and materialities, working collectively to articulate the overall, ongoing condition and circumstance of Black life as a predictable and constitutive aspect of existing in the shadows of antiblack violence. Juxtaposing Torkwase Dyson’s aesthetic practice in concert with Christina Sharpe’s theorization of reading metaphors of Black life in diaspora (the wake, the ship, the hold, the weather), I expose how creative production and Black consciousness serve as tools for refusing “death” and offer possibilities for living.
Recently, scholars in the field of art education have advanced imperatives concerning complex hum... more Recently, scholars in the field of art education have advanced imperatives concerning complex humanitarian issues using critical frameworks and calling for change in the arts in education. Revealing systemic inequities, and thereby demanding fresh approaches for understanding the lived experience in and through the arts in education, one such framework, intersectionality, has received fresh attention. The authors of this article, two art educators, are inspired by recent call-outs of “endemic complacency” around matters of systemic oppression in the field of art education to address these calls for change through advancement of an intersectiopnal framework–hip hop feminist arts praxis. Responding to the question: how do we, as art educators, understand what change means in relation to communities, bodies, and learning spaces? these authors draw from their racialized/gendered positionalities as mixed-Black women, situated in hip hop culture, to make a case for an activist-based intervention arts framework within the art classroom.
In this paper, I describe an arts-based curricular project taught to ten White-identifying and tw... more In this paper, I describe an arts-based curricular project taught to ten White-identifying and two non-White-identifying pre-service art teachers in Fall of 2018. The curriculum used a cultural studies framework to examine Whiteness as both a hegemonic cultural construction and identity construct. As a means to expand an arts-based pedagogy and curriculum, I utilize film as a pedagogical tool, and the circuit of culture, as a framework to reveal the power inherent within various “moments” or processes of visualization culture. By using this framework, students analyzed, exposed and challenged White supremacist ideologies and were given a contemporary way to examine Whiteness and the power invested in its creation and how this investment impacts every part of their personal and professional lives. Three key cultural analyses of Whiteness are offered in this paper. In sum, I propose the necessity of development of Whiteness art education curricula in support of critical multicultural ...
The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education, 2018
With the goal of uncovering how Black Americans come to understand and situate themselves as part... more With the goal of uncovering how Black Americans come to understand and situate themselves as participators in the Western art world, this chapter uncovers the experiences of three artists whose lives have been influenced by a multitude of factors impacting their decisions in navigating an arts participation identity. Anchored by a commitment to solidify a position within a hegemonic art world, these artists skillfully facilitate their participatory movements alongside the pervasiveness of a legacy of exclusion and misrepresentation. I outline the utility of three artmaking strategies used by these artists as a means of calibrating their aspirational decisions. What is revealed in their narratives is an awareness of a racialized self, set against the problematics of participation within the world of visual art.
The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 2017
Fictions of KinshipMy own personal identity as a person of African descent is complex. I view my ... more Fictions of KinshipMy own personal identity as a person of African descent is complex. I view my point of cultural reference as multiple-a Filipino/Spanish/Chinese/Black1 American woman. I am sometimes questioned about my identity and am reminded how often I must negotiate the intersections of competing identities: racialized, social, cultural, and professional. To say that locating a fixed group membership (Tajfel, 1982) has been challenging is an understatement. Yet, I have been embraced, both by Black2 and Brown3 racialized groups as family-or rather, fictive kin. This kinship has proven a salient feature in the structuring of my aspirational pursuits within the art world.In this article, I ground my understanding of fictive kinship through a brief narrative of my subjective experiences as a Brown art educator and practicing artist. Additionally, I support my personal narrative to include the emerging narratives of fictive kinship from my study of three Black high school art teac...
The act of making a doctoral gown is a response and metaphor to describe the construction, reinfo... more The act of making a doctoral gown is a response and metaphor to describe the construction, reinforcement and intersections of racial and academic identity within a probationary period of employment in academia known as tenure-track. A collective arts-based autoethnographic project inspired my garment-making to examine three salient racializing moments during my transition from a Ph.D. programme and into the first four years of a tenure-track position. I use concepts of garment construction – marking, pinning, measuring, pressing and stitching – as aesthetic interludes to illuminate and organize moments of intersubjective dialogue, which ultimately lead to an ascribed racialized academic identification. The construction of a Blackademic identity emerges, inspiring the creation of academic regalia. This arts-based project describes a hypervisibility of racial experience within academic spaces and acts as a visual representation of systemic and intersectional factors, which have guided...
A growing and influential cohort of Black scholar–creatives are choosing
to think, theorize, aest... more A growing and influential cohort of Black scholar–creatives are choosing to think, theorize, aesthetically practice, and articulate blackness (Black being and living) in excess of a settled Western racial logic (nonbeing) that produced it. I set forth to advance a paradigm of Black study for thinking and theorizing the intersections of Black livingness and its inherent fugitivity within and beyond chattel enslavement. By expanding on the concepts of Black compositional thought and wake work, I illuminate an assembly of metaphors and materialities, working collectively to articulate the overall, ongoing condition and circumstance of Black life as a predictable and constitutive aspect of existing in the shadows of antiblack violence. Juxtaposing Torkwase Dyson’s aesthetic practice in concert with Christina Sharpe’s theorization of reading metaphors of Black life in diaspora (the wake, the ship, the hold, the weather), I expose how creative production and Black consciousness serve as tools for refusing “death” and offer possibilities for living.
In this essay, we, four Black women art educators, draw from Black feminisms and Afrofemcentrism.... more In this essay, we, four Black women art educators, draw from Black feminisms and Afrofemcentrism. Our practice considers nuanced ways that Black women curate spaces of communal care, which position forms of dialogic encounters with one another. We put forward aspects of Black life, as lived in and through sharing intimacies of the geospatial and as continuation of Black radical traditions. We argue that a kitchenspace indexes a Black praxis, centering intergenerational knowledge-sharing and methodology toward liberation. We think with Black feminist scholar/artists and insist a method of self-annotating, indexing our lives into the otherwise absences of Black women’s narratives in the field of art education. We practice the theorization and method of using images of personal artwork and our dialogues. These annotations realign new centers of knowledge and refuse cannibalization by Euro-dominant narratives
In this article, we, the authors, present our conceptualization of THOT/Thought-leading as disrup... more In this article, we, the authors, present our conceptualization of THOT/Thought-leading as disruptive pleasure enacted by Black women cultural producers, especially those engaged in hip-hop culture. Through our theory-cypher, we imitate the call-and-response nature of hip-hop cypher rounds through offering our hip-hop subjectivities as women of color; our historical and personal understandings of hip-hop culture; the ways we draw from various strains of thought from Black feminist discourse to articulate Black women’s hip-hop onto-epistemology; and why we desire to articulate this concept of THOT/Thought-leading for the ways that Black women embrace self-definition and reject controlling narratives and respectability politics. By engaging in this conceptualization of THOT/Thought-leading, we center the necessity of love, care, and valuation of Black women, our experience and/as knowledge, and our abilities as cultural and knowledge producers.
This commentary illuminates the intricate relationship between imagination, systemic oppression, ... more This commentary illuminates the intricate relationship between imagination, systemic oppression, and aesthetic injustice within American educational systems, drawing on the insightful arguments presented by Hardman (2024). The discussion extends to the complex interplay between aesthetic capacities and systemic oppression, as explored by scholars like Dalaqua (2020), Benjamin (2024), and Love (2023). These scholars argue that American democracy often necessitates the exclusion, criminalization, and punishment of imaginative capacities, particularly for racially minoritized students. The paper underscores the historical context provided by Monique Morris (2016) and Bettina Love (2023), who contend that policies from Ronald Reagan’s presidency pathologized and penalized Black children, contributing to systemic injustices. Further, it highlights Ruha Benjamin’s (2024) assertion that "deadly eugenic imaginaries" perpetuate narratives of criminality for Black youth, emphasizing the need to confront these harmful ideologies. Hardman calls for a radical imagination to address systemic aesthetic injustices and recognizes the transformative potential of educators in empowering racially minoritized students. The paper concludes by advocating for an expansive view of whose social imaginations are affirmed and valued, recognizing the historical and ongoing efforts of racially minoritized communities to imagine freedom and fugitivity despite systemic barriers. By dismantling oppressive ideologies and fostering environments that support radical imagination, this paper aims to contribute to a more equitable educational landscape where all students can envision and achieve their self-determination and agency.
A growing and influential cohort of Black scholar–creatives are choosing to think, theorize, aest... more A growing and influential cohort of Black scholar–creatives are choosing to think, theorize, aesthetically practice, and articulate blackness (Black being and living) in excess of a settled Western racial logic (nonbeing) that produced it. I set forth to advance a paradigm of Black study for thinking and theorizing the intersections of Black livingness and its inherent fugitivity within and beyond chattel enslavement. By expanding on the concepts of Black compositional thought and wake work, I illuminate an assembly of metaphors and materialities, working collectively to articulate the overall, ongoing condition and circumstance of Black life as a predictable and constitutive aspect of existing in the shadows of antiblack violence. Juxtaposing Torkwase Dyson’s aesthetic practice in concert with Christina Sharpe’s theorization of reading metaphors of Black life in diaspora (the wake, the ship, the hold, the weather), I expose how creative production and Black consciousness serve as tools for refusing “death” and offer possibilities for living.
Recently, scholars in the field of art education have advanced imperatives concerning complex hum... more Recently, scholars in the field of art education have advanced imperatives concerning complex humanitarian issues using critical frameworks and calling for change in the arts in education. Revealing systemic inequities, and thereby demanding fresh approaches for understanding the lived experience in and through the arts in education, one such framework, intersectionality, has received fresh attention. The authors of this article, two art educators, are inspired by recent call-outs of “endemic complacency” around matters of systemic oppression in the field of art education to address these calls for change through advancement of an intersectiopnal framework–hip hop feminist arts praxis. Responding to the question: how do we, as art educators, understand what change means in relation to communities, bodies, and learning spaces? these authors draw from their racialized/gendered positionalities as mixed-Black women, situated in hip hop culture, to make a case for an activist-based intervention arts framework within the art classroom.
In this paper, I describe an arts-based curricular project taught to ten White-identifying and tw... more In this paper, I describe an arts-based curricular project taught to ten White-identifying and two non-White-identifying pre-service art teachers in Fall of 2018. The curriculum used a cultural studies framework to examine Whiteness as both a hegemonic cultural construction and identity construct. As a means to expand an arts-based pedagogy and curriculum, I utilize film as a pedagogical tool, and the circuit of culture, as a framework to reveal the power inherent within various “moments” or processes of visualization culture. By using this framework, students analyzed, exposed and challenged White supremacist ideologies and were given a contemporary way to examine Whiteness and the power invested in its creation and how this investment impacts every part of their personal and professional lives. Three key cultural analyses of Whiteness are offered in this paper. In sum, I propose the necessity of development of Whiteness art education curricula in support of critical multicultural ...
The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education, 2018
With the goal of uncovering how Black Americans come to understand and situate themselves as part... more With the goal of uncovering how Black Americans come to understand and situate themselves as participators in the Western art world, this chapter uncovers the experiences of three artists whose lives have been influenced by a multitude of factors impacting their decisions in navigating an arts participation identity. Anchored by a commitment to solidify a position within a hegemonic art world, these artists skillfully facilitate their participatory movements alongside the pervasiveness of a legacy of exclusion and misrepresentation. I outline the utility of three artmaking strategies used by these artists as a means of calibrating their aspirational decisions. What is revealed in their narratives is an awareness of a racialized self, set against the problematics of participation within the world of visual art.
The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 2017
Fictions of KinshipMy own personal identity as a person of African descent is complex. I view my ... more Fictions of KinshipMy own personal identity as a person of African descent is complex. I view my point of cultural reference as multiple-a Filipino/Spanish/Chinese/Black1 American woman. I am sometimes questioned about my identity and am reminded how often I must negotiate the intersections of competing identities: racialized, social, cultural, and professional. To say that locating a fixed group membership (Tajfel, 1982) has been challenging is an understatement. Yet, I have been embraced, both by Black2 and Brown3 racialized groups as family-or rather, fictive kin. This kinship has proven a salient feature in the structuring of my aspirational pursuits within the art world.In this article, I ground my understanding of fictive kinship through a brief narrative of my subjective experiences as a Brown art educator and practicing artist. Additionally, I support my personal narrative to include the emerging narratives of fictive kinship from my study of three Black high school art teac...
The act of making a doctoral gown is a response and metaphor to describe the construction, reinfo... more The act of making a doctoral gown is a response and metaphor to describe the construction, reinforcement and intersections of racial and academic identity within a probationary period of employment in academia known as tenure-track. A collective arts-based autoethnographic project inspired my garment-making to examine three salient racializing moments during my transition from a Ph.D. programme and into the first four years of a tenure-track position. I use concepts of garment construction – marking, pinning, measuring, pressing and stitching – as aesthetic interludes to illuminate and organize moments of intersubjective dialogue, which ultimately lead to an ascribed racialized academic identification. The construction of a Blackademic identity emerges, inspiring the creation of academic regalia. This arts-based project describes a hypervisibility of racial experience within academic spaces and acts as a visual representation of systemic and intersectional factors, which have guided...
A growing and influential cohort of Black scholar–creatives are choosing
to think, theorize, aest... more A growing and influential cohort of Black scholar–creatives are choosing to think, theorize, aesthetically practice, and articulate blackness (Black being and living) in excess of a settled Western racial logic (nonbeing) that produced it. I set forth to advance a paradigm of Black study for thinking and theorizing the intersections of Black livingness and its inherent fugitivity within and beyond chattel enslavement. By expanding on the concepts of Black compositional thought and wake work, I illuminate an assembly of metaphors and materialities, working collectively to articulate the overall, ongoing condition and circumstance of Black life as a predictable and constitutive aspect of existing in the shadows of antiblack violence. Juxtaposing Torkwase Dyson’s aesthetic practice in concert with Christina Sharpe’s theorization of reading metaphors of Black life in diaspora (the wake, the ship, the hold, the weather), I expose how creative production and Black consciousness serve as tools for refusing “death” and offer possibilities for living.
In this essay, we, four Black women art educators, draw from Black feminisms and Afrofemcentrism.... more In this essay, we, four Black women art educators, draw from Black feminisms and Afrofemcentrism. Our practice considers nuanced ways that Black women curate spaces of communal care, which position forms of dialogic encounters with one another. We put forward aspects of Black life, as lived in and through sharing intimacies of the geospatial and as continuation of Black radical traditions. We argue that a kitchenspace indexes a Black praxis, centering intergenerational knowledge-sharing and methodology toward liberation. We think with Black feminist scholar/artists and insist a method of self-annotating, indexing our lives into the otherwise absences of Black women’s narratives in the field of art education. We practice the theorization and method of using images of personal artwork and our dialogues. These annotations realign new centers of knowledge and refuse cannibalization by Euro-dominant narratives
In this article, we, the authors, present our conceptualization of THOT/Thought-leading as disrup... more In this article, we, the authors, present our conceptualization of THOT/Thought-leading as disruptive pleasure enacted by Black women cultural producers, especially those engaged in hip-hop culture. Through our theory-cypher, we imitate the call-and-response nature of hip-hop cypher rounds through offering our hip-hop subjectivities as women of color; our historical and personal understandings of hip-hop culture; the ways we draw from various strains of thought from Black feminist discourse to articulate Black women’s hip-hop onto-epistemology; and why we desire to articulate this concept of THOT/Thought-leading for the ways that Black women embrace self-definition and reject controlling narratives and respectability politics. By engaging in this conceptualization of THOT/Thought-leading, we center the necessity of love, care, and valuation of Black women, our experience and/as knowledge, and our abilities as cultural and knowledge producers.
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Papers by gloria J . wilson
By dismantling oppressive ideologies and fostering environments that support radical imagination, this paper aims to contribute to a more equitable educational landscape where all students can envision and achieve their self-determination and agency.
to think, theorize, aesthetically practice, and articulate blackness (Black
being and living) in excess of a settled Western racial logic
(nonbeing) that produced it. I set forth to advance a paradigm of Black
study for thinking and theorizing the intersections of Black livingness
and its inherent fugitivity within and beyond chattel enslavement. By
expanding on the concepts of Black compositional thought and wake
work, I illuminate an assembly of metaphors and materialities, working
collectively to articulate the overall, ongoing condition and circumstance
of Black life as a predictable and constitutive aspect of existing in the
shadows of antiblack violence. Juxtaposing Torkwase Dyson’s aesthetic
practice in concert with Christina Sharpe’s theorization of reading
metaphors of Black life in diaspora (the wake, the ship, the hold, the
weather), I expose how creative production and Black consciousness
serve as tools for refusing “death” and offer possibilities for living.
By dismantling oppressive ideologies and fostering environments that support radical imagination, this paper aims to contribute to a more equitable educational landscape where all students can envision and achieve their self-determination and agency.
to think, theorize, aesthetically practice, and articulate blackness (Black
being and living) in excess of a settled Western racial logic
(nonbeing) that produced it. I set forth to advance a paradigm of Black
study for thinking and theorizing the intersections of Black livingness
and its inherent fugitivity within and beyond chattel enslavement. By
expanding on the concepts of Black compositional thought and wake
work, I illuminate an assembly of metaphors and materialities, working
collectively to articulate the overall, ongoing condition and circumstance
of Black life as a predictable and constitutive aspect of existing in the
shadows of antiblack violence. Juxtaposing Torkwase Dyson’s aesthetic
practice in concert with Christina Sharpe’s theorization of reading
metaphors of Black life in diaspora (the wake, the ship, the hold, the
weather), I expose how creative production and Black consciousness
serve as tools for refusing “death” and offer possibilities for living.