Join the Center for Women's Studies for Professor ParKer Bryant's talk on Imagination as Critical Future Literacy: Preliminary Findings on Advanced Literacy Subjectivity. 

ParKer Bryant is a PhD candidate at Syracuse who investigates the function of literacy at the intersection of imagination and learning potential. Their research employs critical frameworks and participatory methodologies to examine how subjective experience serves as a source for innovative insight and transformative education.

Guided by the life and work of Toni Morrison, “Imagination as Critical Future Literacy” operationalizes Morrison's concept of an "unhobbled" imagination through the brilliance of Black Feminist Thinking and the Black Radical Tradition. Rooted specifically in Morrison's literary critique, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, which contends that “there is no escape from racially inflected language, and the work writers do to unhobble the imagination from the demands of that language is complicated, interesting, and definitive” (Morrison, 1992, p. 12).

The study explores experiences and perspectives of youth learners and the ways they are developing critical skills to navigate our rapidly changing, complex, high-tech global societies, and thus suggests that the ability to imagine and shape the future is a powerful and contested political space. The project unapologetically challenges methods of teaching and learning that shape minds for societal compliance and comfortable resistance, proposing instead that imagination and perspective are not just personal traits, or to be constrained by limiting definitions of the arts, yet essential dimensions of literacy that must be engaged and interrogated through a critical lens to become vital tools for building more equitable worlds.