Other suns: Designing for racial equity through speculative education

Abstract

The concepts of time and place are often described in specific and concrete detail in scholarly analyses focused on the dire material consequences of systemic racism in formal education systems. As educational researchers, we are trained to pinpoint exactly where and when youth and communities are experiencing harm and to painstakingly document the particular mechanisms through which such harm accumulates (or lessens). Conversely, when it comes to both conceptualizing and achieving racially equitable outcomes in education, time and place areas much more blurrier and deferred. Discussion and implication sections of study write-ups that seek to challenge or describe disruptions to structural inequity vaguely gesture toward the necessity of massive transformation in education systems but acknowledge the limited vista within which current findings are framed. “There,” our field points, “Solutions to equity lie over there” ever further, perhaps just out of reach. Considerations of where and when beckon us toward an aspirational mirage of just and liberatory futures on our horizon. But what if our research demanded just futures now? What if we focused our theoretical and methodological lenses squarely on articulating and designing these desired horizons as a precondition for laboring within the incremental constraints of present conditions? This special issue seeks to begin answering this question by introducing and empirically exploring a paradigm of speculative education. As will become clear, speculative education is an exhortation to educational theory, research, and practice to think urgently and creatively about the worlds in which we currently find ourselves and the worlds we can learn to create. Thus, we invite you to join us in some initial musings about the origins of this framework (and special issue) as a prelude to the research itself.