African Diasporic Liberatory Refusals to Global Anti-Blackness: Abolition As Method and Artivism As Pedagogy

International Study holds significant potential for social work students to engage in specialized self-directed learning and independent study. The facilitators of this workshop serve are Students, Team Leaders and Fellows of an experiential think tank based in New York City that prepares social workers to use Black liberation based theoretical underpinnings, culturally informed traditions, African diasporic spiritual practices, and abolitionist methods. Over the course of two semesters, the think tank prepares graduate and undergraduate students to cultivate research, clinical, liberation-based practices, and social justice advocacy skills in preparation for work abroad. Each year, the think tank hosts international trips to Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, Kenya and Senegal. Upon completion of the prep work and trip, the students earn credit through Independent Study as an elective course for their undergraduate and graduate degrees. Our centering of a Black Feminist Epistemological gaze and pedagogical praxis is foundational to our effort to interrogate, challenge and disrupt systems of white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. This workshop will explore the utility of bridging parallel geographies of domination that global African Diasporic people have experienced with the experience of African descendants of enslaved persons (ADOS)in the Americas. As Black women social workers and educators, we will discuss how our experiences born in the United States of America simultaneously converge with the experiences of African Diasporic women across 3 continents and 4 countries. In our workshop we will discuss the applicability of Abolition as a methodology that does not absolutely articulate the lives of Black women as knowable, accessible, or articulated along traditional qualitative nor quantitative methodologies. In order to survive global misogynoir, we contend that our art, counter-stories and witnessing cannot be translated through thick description. We will describe various types of Black Feminist Epistemological Abolitionist methods such as Daughtering, Mosaicism, and Critical Fabulation. We incorporate artivism as a pedagogical tool in social work education and share data (photos, artwork, poetry, term papers, and journal entries) from student Independent Studies. There are various strategies that Black women globally use to disrupt, unhinge, and unthink the state through arts-based activist strategies (art, storytelling, photography) to resist, refuse, and reclaim their humanity in the pursuit of collective liberation. Upon completion of the workshop, participants will; 1. Recognize the significance of pre-engagement planning, ethical decision making, critical thinking frameworks of practice, research, and policy; 2. Discover liberatory, participatory, and abolitionist methodologies; 3. Gain knowledge about the shared threads of refusal, resistance, and revolt to anti-blackness that persist across the global African Diaspora; 4. Synthesize the Artivist (art & activist) strategies African Diasporic peoples engage(d) in their pursuit of freedom; 5. Reconceptualize the utility and relevance of traditional qualitative and quantitative research methodologies built on settler colonialism, collusion, extraction, and anti-blackness; and 6. Account for the need to cultivate social work learning contexts that center African Diasporic cultural traditions, communal relationality, ancestral practices, and vast genealogies of pre-colonial knowledge production.