Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies: Beautiful Experiments (Vol. 3, Issue 1)

Posted by Swarthmore College on April 13, 2021

We are thrilled to announce the release of the latest issue of #CritEdPol, the online journal of critical education policy studies at Swarthmore College.

The theme of “beautiful experiments,” comes from writer and historian Saidiya Hartman (2017, 2019), who describes beautiful experiments as the moments, movements, and legacies of resistance, fugitivity, and worldmaking that are taken up to “refuse the menial existence” scripted for poor Black girls. Not a metaphor but a politics, we extend this politics to marginalized populations writ large to consider how their various experiments either respond to or raise implications for education as a site of struggle. While mainstream education discourse seeks to focus on the intersecting economic, political, and ecological crises that uphold a narrow, fixed victimhood of those deemed “the truly disadvantaged,” we believe the current discourse erases the ways students, families, community activists and agitators have continually imagined and actualized “otherwise” visions for education, reshaping the terrain of struggle for a more just world.

You can download the issue or individual pieces here.