Pandemic as Portal for Change: Finding Possibilities Amid the Chaos of COVID-19 and White Supremacy

Abstract

In this special issue, we invited scholars to re-imagine school and community spaces against the backdrop of the chaos unleashed through COVID-19 and the ever-present pandemic of white supremacy. This is especially acute in light of the current climate in the U.S., which goes beyond the quotidian rejection of anti-racism efforts to viewing any acknowledgment of race and racial inequities as anti-American or criminally “political.” These precarious phenomena constitute a twin pandemic, a confluence that has been noted across disciplines (Elias et al., 2021; Hudson et al., 2022; Jones, 2020; Krieger, 2020; Lamont Hill, 2020; Liebman et al., 2020; Monahan, 2021; Newman et al., 2022; Wegemer & von Keyserlingk, 2022; Yeh, 2020) and emerging in academic educational literature (Bailey et al., 2022; Rogers-Shaw, 2022; Souto-Manning, 2021; Zhao & Watterston, 2021). This special issue invites discussion and research about how and what to “break with the past” and imagine better worlds. Now, more than ever, it is important to continue imagining the possibilities for education that dismantle and transgress the dystopian ruts that remain, especially for those who have been marginalized in U.S. schooling (Counts, 1978; Freire, 1996; Giroux, 2001; Oakes & Lipton, 1992; Pyscher & Lozenski, 2014; Tuck, 2009). Challenging the assumption that a return to “normal” is necessary or inevitable, authors offer conundrums and reimaginings of how schools, community-based spaces, and related policies could look and feel that range from redesigning educational space to shifting curricular