Critical Black Futurism

Affecting Affinities within Curriculum Studies

Abstract

In this concept essay, I attempt to amplify this sense of critical futurity through my reading of scholars and teachers attempting to imagine beyond the past and present of what Henry Giroux (2012) has called the “age of disposability” of students’ futures in schooling and wider society, which could easily be read as also the age of dis-possibility. Within such a dystopian moment, I read and write in increasing awareness of my position as a White curriculum studies scholar in a rather White Canadian university – becoming aware that there is a distinct differential to whose futures are made disposable by the ways of “beingknowingdoing that strongly contextualize not only everyday interactions but also the understandings that undergird policies and programs” in education, yet nevertheless remain largely unexamined in social justice scholarship, even as such practices might reinforce marginalization of those they are in ostensible allyship (Gershon, 2020, p. 61; 53).