Maisha Winn, "Futuring Black Lives: Independent Black Institutions and the Literary Imagination," in conversation with Adam Banks

Learn more about Professor Winn's work in this May 2026 article, "AERA Presidential Address 2026 The Future Is Here: Historical Signals in Education Research."

Futuring Black Lives is a historical ethnography examining Black institution builders in the late 1960s and early 1970s and their work to leverage the power of publications and the literary imagination to engage “concerned men and women” in conversations about the educational journeys and futures of Black children. While many began as reactions to anti-Blackness and American public schooling failing Black children, Independent Black Institutions (IBIs) came to be viable ecosystems anchored in a shared Black value system preparing Black children in three areas: identity, purpose, and direction.

The rationale for establishing and valuing IBIs remains highly relevant, given the sociopolitical landscape of education today. In addition to persistent racial disparities in academic achievement and Black students’ highly disproportionate experiences of punishment and “discipline,” friction and legislation against critical examination of race, racism, and racist ideas in school settings are front and center, and children’s and young adult literature are under attack through censorship and outright book bans. Yet Black institution builders left useful maps of and for the educational future/s of Black children that remain available in journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and other ephemera. Author Maisha T. Winn demonstrates how and why the historiography-grounded futuring of Black education can and should inform current pursuits of equity, justice, and liberation through education.

Maisha T. Winn is the Excellence in Learning Graduate School of Education Professor and Faculty Director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning's Equity in Learning Initiative. She is the Principal Investigator for the Futuring for Equity Lab. Her scholarship examines how non-dominant youth and communities have developed literate trajectories across a range of historical and contemporary settings within and outside formal schooling. She seeks to understand how communities that have been depicted as under resourced create practices, processes, and institutions of their own—and what we can learn from those examples to build more just, more collaborative, and more equitable futures. An ethnographer by training, Dr. Winn also engages in historical research focused on social movements in education.

Sponsored by the Research Institute of CCSRE.