As demonstrated through the disregard for Black humanity and respondent Black social movements throughout Latin America, anti-Black systemic racism is a transnational phenomenon birthed from global White supremacy. Across the Americas, the hemispheric parallels undergirding collective resistance to anti-Black racism and state-sanctioned violence lend themselves to multifaceted interdisciplinary scholarly examinations. Using transnational anti-Black racism in Latin America as a point of departure, we advance a theorization of critical race theory in education capable of interrogating racist structures of coloniality, modernity, and White supremacy that operate globally to suppress Black humanity and humanness in general. To that extent, we draw from and reposition critical race theory (CRT) from its sociohistoric heritage in the United States and instead conceptualize transnational anti-Black racism vis-à-vis a Black Diaspora reading of CRT. Finally, we return to education as a key site of contestation for transnational anti-Black racism and draw implications for the meaning of this global theorization of CRT in urban education, praxis, and educational research. We end by charting new and old directions for CRT in educational research.

The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, Plus non-conforming identities (LGBTQ+) individuals who have pursued a professional career in the outdoor recreation industry. Six stories of queer identity in the outdoors were gifted to this study, with the understanding that not all LGBTQ+ individuals experience the outdoors in the same way. Each participant was encouraged to guide the study through individual expression in alignment with an emancipatory critical narrative research design. This study considers participant experiences across the span of their career, where job advancement and the role of colleagues both arose as prominent themes that shed light on the pervasiveness of hegemonic culture in the outdoor recreation profession. Outdoor recreation organizations may learn from these stories to disentangle harmful social norms from curriculum and practices by creating structural pathways for professionals with non-dominant identities, and authentically consider how an organization’s history informs its culture. The findings have important implications for creating inclusive culture in the outdoor recreation profession.

Since its introduction as an analytic and theoretical tool for the examination of racism in education, CRT scholarship has proliferated as the most visible critical theory of race in educational research. Whereas CRT’s popularity can be viewed as a welcome sign, scholars continually caution against its misappropriation and overuse, which dilute its criticality. We draw from the cautionary ethos of this canon of literature as the impetus for examining CRT’s terrain in social studies education research. Starting from Ladson-Billings’s watershed edited CRT text on race and social studies in 2003, this study provides a comprehensive theoretical review of scholarly literature in the social studies education field pertinent to the nexus of CRT, racialized citizenship, and race(ism). To guide our review, we asked how social studies education scholars have defined and used CRT as an analytic and theoretical framework in social studies education research from 2004 to 2019, as well as how scholars have positioned CRT within social studies education research to foreground the relationship between citizenship and race. Overall, findings from our theoretical review illustrated that contrary to the proliferation of CRT in educational research, CRT was slow to catch on as a theoretical and analytic framework in social studies education, as only seven of the articles in our analysis were published between 2004 and 2010. However, CRT emerged as a viable framework for the examination of race, racism, and racialized citizenship between 2011 and 2019, with a majority of these studies emphasizing (a) the centrality of race as a core tenet of CRT, (b) idealist interrogations of race, (c) the perspectives of teachers of color and White teachers in learning how to teach about race, and (d) the role of race and racism in curricular analyses that serve as counternarrative to the master script of the nation’s linear social progress in social studies education.

If we are to truly realize a vision of a more democratic society, then teaching about Black life and in particular Black Lives Matter, should not constitute a radical act, but rather a moral imperative for social studies educators. Furthermore, when we say [and teach] Black Lives Matter, the Black Diaspora reminds us “to articulate and transcend nation-state boundaries” (Paschel, 2017, p. 28).

Social studies education and research can and must play a central role in sustaining democratic societies. As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of this vital journal that aims to strengthen social studies education, democratic societies face numerous serious challenges. Although today's circumstances are unique, many of our current challenges have existed (and will continue to exist) in some form throughout the history of democracy. In this article, scholars from various sub-fields of social studies education explore how research, scholarship, and practice in the field can address seven of these persistent civic challenges: ecological sustainability, media literacy, equity and inclusion, civic engagement, political pluralism, civic competency, and sociohistorical change. Essays on each of these topics analyze relevant prior research and offer suggestions for how future research and scholarship can explore how educators can help to address these persistent civic challenges, with the goal of supporting robust participatory democracy.

Early adolescents go through developmental changes which are also mediated through social and structural forces that reproduce stratifying hierarchies around race, class, gender, and sexuality. Despite the intersection of early adolescent development with social and institutional forces, critical concepts such as race are often omitted in general discourses of middle level education. It is important that the leading body for middle level education, the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE) and their doctrinal text, This We Believe, explicitly address the nexus of race, early adolescent development, and schooling. In this article, we draw upon critical race theory as a conceptual framework and critical race discourse analysis as methodology to examine how This We Believe negotiates the social construction of early adolescent development as rooted in whiteness in addition to the racialized realities of middle level education for students of color. Findings indicate This We Believe utilizes colorblindness alongside racialization discourses to create majoritarian narratives of middle level education and early adolescent development. In conclusion, we offer three alternative philosophical statements to This We Believe critical educators can adopt that are attentive to the intersection of race, adolescent development, and middle level education.

Our current moment is abundant in examples of global antiblackness whereby racial violence visibly signals the quotidian elimination of Blackness, or the making of Black people into an object or abstract discourse to be terminated. That antiblackness is global is nothing new. In fact, antiblackness has been and continues to be central to the making of Western empire and modernity as we know it. However, until this point, the social studies education discipline has yet to fundamentally advance a critical analytic that captures the specificity of global antiblackness and the invention of Black as non-human and anti-citizen. In this article, we aim to problematize vernacularized conceptualizations of citizenship in social studies education that sidestep the socio-historical significance of anti-Black world systems in the creation of human/non-human and, consequently, citizen/anti-citizen. More specifically, we argue that BlackCrit interlopes antiblackness in the intellectual apprehension of taken-for-granted concepts such as Blackness, globality, citizenship, and racism. In drawing from BlackCrit, we suggest that social studies education, and educational research in general, must reconcile that the world operates on the premise that to be human is to be distant from Blackness and to be citizen is also to be distant from Blackness. Overall, this article serves as a provocation to rethink our philosophies, theories, and paradigms of global citizenship within the domain of anti-citizen and non-human.

Background/Context: Anti-Latinx political discourses have long positioned Latin America and, by extension, U.S. Latinxs as economic, sociocultural, and political threats to the general welfare of the United States. In formal school curricula, this threat narrative has become one of the many political curricular discourses for codifying citizenship as White, and noncitizens as Other (read Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American). Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The purpose of this study was to illustrate how collapsible Latin American tropes and current anti-Latinx sentiments are reproduced in social studies curricula across the United States. Drawing from and expanding upon Leo Chavez's notion of the Latinx Threat Narrative as a framework, we analyzed secondary social studies curricular standards across all 50 states and the District of Columbia to determine how anti-Latinx and anti-Latin American political rhetoric is reified in U.S. civic and citizenship-based curriculum. The following research question guided our study: In what ways do secondary U.S. civic and citizenship education curricular standards situate Latinxs and Latin America within the Latinx Threat Narrative and current anti-Latinx political sentiment? Research Design: To carry out our study, we conducted a critical content analysis of secondary social studies curricular standards with a particular focus on U.S. history, civics, and economics content standards and benchmarks across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Situating our theoretical framework as an analytic tool, we systematically extracted and analyzed all standards with explicit or implicit references to Latinxs and Latin Americans. Findings/Results: Findings indicate that Latin America and, by extension, Latinxs are regularly situated as social and political dangers to the overall welfare of the United States, suggesting the presence of what we refer to as the Latinx Third World Threat Narrative. We argue that this hemispheric homogenization of Latinx peoples in curricular standards flattens important historical and cultural distinctions, thereby facilitating exchange of anti-Latinx stereotypes present in contemporary political rhetoric. We also show how U.S. Latinx civic agency is encoded as an illicit, corrupt, and destabilizing force. Conclusions/Recommendations: In light of our findings, we suggest that educators pay specific attention to the political amalgamation of Latinx subjectivities. Additionally, policy advocates and educators must move beyond understanding curricular representation as just an impediment to students' heritage knowledge and begin to understand state-backed curricular standards as part of a larger political apparatus.

US-based scholars often colloquially employ Brown as a monolithic reference to Latinidad in education research without attention to its racialized and anti-Black underpinnings. In this conceptual essay, we apprehend the currents of hemispheric racial formation within a South–North orientation to problematize the essentialist ethos of US Latinxs as monolithically Brown. To do so, we briefly trace the anti-Black sociohistorical and sociopolitical etymology of a uniform Brown Latinx identity as a byproduct of colonial logics and homogenizing political philosophies in Latin America such as mestizaje and racial democracy. In conclusion, we offer implications for theorizing Latinidades in educational research that moves beyond mestizaje and colonial logics to consider Afro-Latinx, Afro-Latin American, and Indigenous Latinx subjectivities.

This chapter elucidates how critical theories and studies of race either are or can be addressed in the educational domain as it relates to the racial politics of identity for AfroLatinxs. It offers a review of educational research to shed light on how race and the politics of identity surface in various educational contexts with regards to the treatment of Afrolatinidades, AfroLatinx subjectivities, and the experiences of AfroLatinx youth. Any endeavor to frame Afrolatinidades and AfroLatinx subjectivities within the bounds of African Diaspora theory in education should not map Blackness as a cultural fact but rather tangle with its political dimensions of process and condition. Hence, Afrolatinidades and AfroLatinx subjectivities require us to fundamentally rethink the geohistoricopolitical consequences of the construction of the "Americas" as it relates to identities and ethnoracial categorization. Finally, the chapter concludes with an analytic turn towards AfroLatinx Studies in education and its implications for educational policy.

Anti-Black racism continues to manifest as a hemispheric concern, with racial violence and forced displacement as critical issues throughout South America. This inquiry highlights how educators and students can more adequately contextualize anti-Black racism in Latin America as a human rights issue. Educators are encouraged to engage students in a careful analysis of anti-Black racism in Brazil and Colombia through the use of multimedia resources. More importantly, this inquiry underscores ways in which educators and students can take informed action on this global concern.

The development of critical sociohistorical knowledge is needed to assist teachers in negotiating and deconstructing the relevance of race, racism, and black history in global-themed social studies courses. Drawing from Diaspora Literacy as theory and Critical Studyin’ as method, I situate Afro-Latin humanity within educational research relevant to black history knowledge development, and its proximity to the teaching and learning of race in social studies education. This Critical Studyin’ case study examined how one world history teacher developed critical sociohistorical knowledge relevant to Afro-Latin humanity, inclusive of Afro-Latinxs and Afro-Latin Americans. Concurrently, I analyzed how the teacher positioned their knowledge for a Diaspora Literacy conceptualization of world history curriculum. Findings point to the utility of black studies frameworks in aiding social studies teachers’ knowledge development. I conclude with a call to more appropriately situate Afro-Latin humanity within curricular and educational research discourses relevant to black education.

Current research has turned a gaze towards teacher education programs' desire to recruit students of color.Yet very little has been done to deconstruct the intersectional racial structure and grammar of teacher education in order to provide meaningful learning experiences for preservice teachers of color (PSTOC) who often endeavor to teach in the very underserved communities of color that educator preparation programs fetishize.Moreover, we do not know much about the first-generation preservice teachers of color.Drawing from Critical Race Theory in education as a conceptual framework, we use critical counter-storytelling within intersectional narrative methodology to foreground how four preservice teachers of color--U.S. Black and Latina-navigate the racial grammar of teacher education.Similar to prior studies, findings indicate that racial incongruence underscores preservice teachers' of color experiences in teacher education programs.Furthermore, students' experiences speak to how race, class, and gender function together in creating a structure and grammar of teacher education that creates barriers of entry for educators of color.In light of our findings, we call for greater attention to discourses of Black and Latinx educator recruitment.

Critical media literacy approaches to teaching are a pedagogical imperative in twenty-first century education. It is increasingly important educators rethink what constitutes media and extend this conceptualization to Hollywood film as directors and producers also communicate sociopolitical messages. This article explores the intersection of critical media literacy, Hollywood film, and Black males through the lens of Black cultural projection. We use prior research to argue Black males are portrayed as endangered in school curriculum, namely social studies, and this portrayal parallels what students encounter when watching Hollywood films. The significance of this multimodal distortion of Black males is crucial to consider as films are increasingly used in social studies classrooms. We offer a critical analysis of the Hollywood film The Blind Side as an example of Black cultural projection; then conclude with a call for critical media literacy to be applied towards the use of film in social studies classrooms.

Despite a troubled past, race and racism have received increased attention in social studies education in recent years. In light of this newfound agenda, concerns remain regarding how race is contextualized in research and K-12 curriculum in addition to how race discourse is positioned in social studies teacher education courses. While there is a growing body of research dedicated to race and pre-service social studies teachers, the voices and experiences of scholars of color are absent. This book chapter centralizes the experiences of two Black faculty who enact race pedagogy in their individual elementary social studies methods courses. Using journaling, teaching artifacts, and cogenerative dialogues as data sources, we construct a narrative detailing how our racialized life experiences influence our pedagogical and curricular decision-making. We also highlight how students responded to our use of race pedagogy. Our hope is to provide the field with insight into the complex, challenging, and non-linear experiences of social studies faculty of color who adopt anti-racist aims in their social studies methods courses.

Drawing from Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit) as a theoretical framework, this study examined how Afro-Latin@s are represented in U.S. world history textbooks alongside global narratives of race and anti-Black systemic racism that are fundamental to understanding Afro-Latin@s' historical and contemporary lived experiences. Research findings revealed that world history textbooks confine Afro-Latin@s' lived experiences and histories within two reductionist narratives: enslavement and mestizaje (race mixing). I argue that these representations perpetuate violence against Black bodies by reducing Afro-Latin@s to passive historical agents. Furthermore, Afro-Latin@ identities are circumscribed to fit within the neoliberal socio-political narrative of Latin America as a racial paradise.

Afro-Latin@ identity has received increased attention by scholarly and mainstream media outlets in the twenty-first century although Afro-Latin presence has been a mainstay in Latin America for centuries. Despite a significant presence, Afro-Latin@s have been marginalized and oppressed in historical and contemporary Latin American society. This chapter offers Latin@ Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a curricular framework for interrogating race and racism in Latin American society specifically as it pertains to the formation of Afro-Latinidad, Afro-Latin identity.