To Go Back and Retrieve: The Black World in Education—Fugitivity, Memory, and Futures of Freedom

Overview:

As we stand at a pivotal moment in educational history amid intensifying global repression, attacks on equity-based learning, and the attempted erasure of Black histories the RFBE SIG calls upon scholars, educators, artists, youth, and organizers to consider what it means to move Sankofa-style: to go back and retrieve that which must not be forgotten, misnamed, or erased.

In this spirit, the 2026 RFBE SIG theme foregrounds fugitivity the historic and ongoing practices of escape, refusal, reimagining, and reinvention that have defined Black educational struggle and survival. We seek proposals that illuminate how these fugitive logic past and present can animate radical Black educational futures.

We invite contributors to consider:

• What educational lessons and practices emerge from Black fugitive life—across time, place, and geography?
  
• How can we teach, learn, organize, and lead with a Sankofa orientation—honoring the past while imagining liberated futures?
  
• How do Black diasporic geographies, memory work, and speculative traditions offer models of freedom for educational spaces?
  

We especially encourage submissions that engage interdisciplinary methods, creative modalities, and community-grounded research rooted in Black diasporic and Afro-Indigenous traditions.

Proposed Focus Areas Include (but are not limited to):

• Sankofa Pedagogies and Practices: Educational frameworks rooted in ancestral retrieval and diasporic wisdom
  
• Fugitivity, Flight, and Educational Refusal: Histories and theories of Black escape and resistance in educational contexts
  
• Diasporic and Afro-Indigenous Educational Formations: Global Black educational practices grounded in sovereignty, land, and ritual
  
• Fugitive Archives and Black Memory Work: Counter-archives, oral histories, and embodied ways of knowing
  
• Afro-Futurism and Black Educational Futures: Visionary thinking, sci-fi, and speculative approaches to liberatory schooling
  
• Maroon Studies, Black Geographies, and Education: Place-based resistance, geospatial imagination, and educational maroonage
  
• Ancestral Knowledge and Healing Pedagogies: Education as ritual, remembrance, and care work
  

Proposal Types:

We welcome submissions for paper sessions, symposia, roundtables, performance-based sessions, and alternative session formats that align with the 2026 AERA guidelines. Proposals should demonstrate alignment with the RFBE SIG mission and the annual theme.

Proposal Submission Guidelines:

Please submit proposals through the AERA online portal by the AERA submission deadline (typically mid-July). Submissions should adhere to the AERA format and word limits, including:

• Title and abstract (up to 120 words)
  
• Proposal body (up to 2,000 words)
  
• Keywords and related AERA divisions/SIGs
  

All proposals will undergo a peer review process coordinated by the RFBE SIG program committee.

Questions?

For questions about the call or to discuss a proposal idea, please contact the 2026 RFBE Program Chair at khalilah.ali@spelman.edu