IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A

Abstract

In the wake of the ongoing dismantling of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives in U.S. higher education, art educators are increasingly challenged to reconsider how classrooms and curricula can function as spaces of care, critical inquiry, and student-centered learning. This paper draws from an arts-based education research course to examine fugitive pedagogy as a pedagogical orientation that moves beyond inclusion toward Black self-determination, relationality, and knowledge-making. Grounded in Black Studies scholarship and informed by geospatial praxis, the paper asks how art education might sustain minoritized students amid political precarity while preserving the experimental, dialogic, and material strengths of arts-based teaching. Centering the pedagogical question “Where do you know from?”, the paper examines how graduate students were invited to situate their learning within lived experience, ancestral lineages, and the spatial conditions shaping their knowledge. Through positionality statements and arts-based research projects, students engaged photography, collage, performance, and community-based art practices as methods of inquiry and refusal. These practices reframe the art classroom not as a neutral site of skill acquisition, but as a relational space where embodied, historical, and community knowledges are taken seriously. By foregrounding student work and reflection, the paper illustrates how fugitive pedagogy (Givens, 2023) supports forms of learning that resist anti-Black curricular logics while fostering critical and creative literacy attuned to history, place, and care. In dialogue with current debates on the future of education, this paper offers fugitive pedagogy as a student-centered, justice-oriented approach that reimagines art education’s ethical commitments without abandoning the possibilities of studio-based learning.