Using Currere and Lens-switching as Critical Inquiry - The Case Study of Voices of Baltimore: Life Under Segregation

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores how experiencing the film Voices of Baltimore: Life Under Segregation (Homana, et al., 2017) becomes an avenue for practicing anti-racist critical self-exploration. The author considers how an experience of “lens-switching” in tandem with the process of currere (Pinar, 1978) creates nodes, or intersections, between the two where the narrative framework of the film viewer is interrupted by a different (and disruptive) narrative framework. Lens-switching becomes self-interrogation, through the four phases of currere, providing opportunity for historical dislocation; a process that alters self-perception -- or, “decolonizing the mind” (Baszile, 2015, p. 124) -- and then integrates an altered perception of self and its relation to justice, that leads toward action. The data included in this paper indicate how this film (and others like it) might provoke a call for replacing dominant White-centric “liberal” understandings of historical events like desegregation with a new language, and a new lens – one centered on Afro-centric narrative frameworks.