Background: Community-based youth mentoring programs are popular interventions that serve a large number of Black youths throughout the country. Interestingly, the majority of mentors who volunteer their time for mentoring organizations identify as non-Hispanic White. This study examines how White mentors address topics acknowledging ethnic/racial…

The unprecedented racial justice movements of 2020, intensified by George Floyd's tragic murder, catalyzed a global mobilization. This dissertation investigates the intersection of these movements with sociotechnical tools that shaped the movement, focusing on the youth deeply engaged with socioalgorithmic systems and their developmental…

Education is often positioned as a solution to incarceration while simultaneously using police (or commonly named School Resource Officers) to enforce discipline; or metal detectors and cameras for surveillance within school buildings as a measure of "safety" (Meiners, 2011). Sojoyner (2016) argues that both schools and prisons function…

Inspired by the life and works of Grammy Award® winning artist, Lil Nas X, we explore ways a young Black queer musician has enacted emancipatory utopias to disrupt dominant cultural modes of being--offering unapologetic expressions and expansions of race, gender, and sexual identity. In this paper, we draw upon José Esteban Muñoz and Ytasha Womak…

There is an overwhelming presence and dominance of white-centric methodologies in educational research. To create necessary re-envisionings, we theorize how approaches to methodology can be disrupted and rethought through Black feminisms, Chicana feminism and Womanism. While each are distinct in their standpoints and contours, they have strong…

The article is meant to be a discursive libationary tribute to Audre Lorde's theorizing on Black women's survival. An example of Taliaferro-Baszile's critical race/feminist currere and Pinar's curriculum as complicated conversation, the article brings together Lorde's voice with those of other Black women to analyze my past, present, and future. I…

Join the authors of this book in starting a movement of hope and possibility for an antiracist child care and early childhood education system. This volume disrupts mental models regarding where the work of early care and education began--with enslaved African women--and how the stigma of that beginning relegates present-day child care workers to…

We understand the terrors of this historical moment: rising white nationalism and white supremacist violence, xenophobia, homophobia, sharpening economic inequality, homelessness and underemployment, neoliberal assaults on workers and the environment, Islamophobia, attacks on immigrants, kids in cages. While schools are guilty of perpetuating some…

Since March of 2020, two pandemics have hit the United States of America like a bag of bricks. The health pandemic as a result of COVID-19 that has killed over 180,000 Americans and the racially-charged genocides that continues to murder our Black brothers and sisters. As a result of constant disregard for Black lives, in part 1, we analyze the…

The way a teacher perceives relational justice--the feeling of being treated equitably and being included--in their work context is central to understanding the negotiation and enactment of teacher identity. For LGBTQ teachers, the degree to which they are out of the closet with their students and colleagues leads to many possible outcomes. These…

Contradictions between precious ideals and social realities are often handled by locating the problems of inequality in a limited setting, so that the rest of social life will not be disturbed. Racial inequality in America, starting with slavery, is concretely expressed in the troubled relations between agencies of social control, like the police,…

Critical reflection helps social work students gain a better understanding of their role and how to address social justice issues through empowerment and awareness. One way to encourage critical reflection is through the use of innovative methods such as immersive theatre. This qualitative study examined critical reflection to increase students'…

This qualitative study aims to analyze the definition of the African American/Black racial group and how it affects the United States education system. Document analysis and interviews are the key approaches used. Constructs of social justice, critical race theory, stereotype threat theory, and color-confrontation theory collectively serve as…

In this article, the author argues that teaching toward a new political economy requires educators and instructors to cultivate classroom climates rooted in Black queer and feminist (BQF) ethics of love and care. In doing so, teachers are better positioned to guide students as they tackle challenging conversations concerning systemic inequity,…

This article is a reflective piece that draws from local experience, historical, and educational literature. I argue the ways in which intersectionality can support analyses in the local uprisings for the Black Lives Matter movement in Philadelphia. Some uprisings, focused on anti-Black state violence linkages to schools and approaches to…