James A. Winn Graduate Fellow
About
“Care in Containment: The Geography of Black and Indigenous Encounters within the Captivity of School”
Schools continue to be hostile spaces as anti-CRT legislation, anti-trans legislation, and gun violence grows. At the heart of these contentious issues is erasure, discipline, and violence—the technologies of colonialism. This project theorizes the classroom of a Black teacher, as a Black geography where particular struggles emerge that can help us describe the contours of and the escape routes from antiBlack settler colonialism (McKittrick 2006; ross 2021). By describing the location of a classroom as a Black geography, this project witnesses what Joy James (2016) would describe as carework that emerges in this place of struggle—a place of compounding enclosures that order, discipline, and prescribe the possibilities of the classroom (James 2016; Sojoyner 2016). As pessimism about cross-racial coalition stews, as theorists offer apocalypse as the necessary impetus for healthy solidarity, as care and care work is critiqued for its collusion with state violence, what might educators and their classrooms reveal about the nature of Black-Native carework and relationalities within a settler state?
Anna Almore is a Ph.D. Candidate in English and Education.
