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Globalization, advanced by technologies of production and information, created seamless world markets with profound impacts on the world economy. Vast amounts of wealth have been created, but that wealth has been unequally distributed. Such inequality has meant that large numbers of young people have not been able to find the kinds of jobs and careers that provide the “goods” life extolled in a consumer society. Nor do the dominant values of rationality, neo-liberalism or secularism hold much appeal. These conditions have encouraged the emergence of a number of subcultures of transgression, identity-granting communities of meaning which provide members with a sense of community with recognition and empowerment. As many such subcultures repudiate dominant norms, we note how they resemble the medieval carnival, which Bakhtin showed was a time and place of inversion, transgression, and celebration of the grotesque. It allowed the common people encapsulate realms of agency to articulate disdain and resistance. Yet this served to reproduce the dominant system.

In much the same way, insofar as globalization is intimately tied to cities, we have seen the growing importance of cities as nodal points for global commerce as well as sites for entertainment and tourism. These factors, together with the longstanding anonymity and toleration of the city, have become focal points for the emergence of a number of oppositional subcultures. They include those who embrace extreme body modification, numerous forms of body adornment through piercings (rings, posts, studs), tattoos, and surgical modifications such as implanted horns, furrows, or split tongues. Following Simmel, adornment can be seen as a means of inclusion within a group and differentiation from others. The practitioners of extreme body modification label themselves “urban primitives,” who see themselves rejecting global modernity, the occupation-based status hierarchies of the dominant occupational system and its shallow, materialistic culture. They see themselves as a moment of the “transvaluation of values” in which Dionysian passion triumphs over Apollonian control and restraint. This is especially evident in various genital decorations in which what heretofore has been private and exposure was a matter of shame. There has been a “cultural transformation of the pubic sphere.” While such groups find community, identity and recognition, they must also be understood as a key ingredient of the city in a global age in which diversity, cosmopolitanism, and the offbeat constitute essential moments of urban ambience.

Black feminist scholars describe resistance as Black women’s efforts to push back against ideologies and stereotypes that objectify them as the other. The contested sites are often neighborhoods, schools, the media, corporations, and government agencies. W. E. B. DuBois and Audre Lorde both spoke about a dual consciousness among Black women, and the larger Black population, that included the power of self-definition. This particular study centers the lived experiences of African American women living in Englewood, a neighborhood with high levels of violence in Chicago. Using data from 93 in-depth interviews, this study illustrates Black mothers’ efforts to resist ideologies and stereotypes about their mothering, beauty, socioeconomic status, etc. This study also centers their voices and lived experiences to capture the power they express by engaging in self-definition. Self-definition includes descriptions of themselves, their current situations and the changes they would like to see in their neighborhoods and the larger U.S. society. This chapter ends by discussing the implications of the findings in relation to two programs developed to help these mothers work toward neighborhood change called DREAM (Developing Responses to Poverty through Education And Meaning), and De.SH(ie) (Designing Spaces of Hope (interiors and exteriors)), a collaborative which seeks to remedy the paradoxical existence of spaces of hope and spaces of despair through an innovative approach that melds Architecture, African American Studies, Sociology, and beyond.

In the 30 years since Giroux (1983) named schools as a site of resistance, little has happened to sustain and embed that practice in schools. The contexts, structures, and policies in schools do not foster opportunities for resistance, and schools of education do not prepare teachers to support students’ critical actions in schools, ensuring the reproduction of inequity and injustice. While this is true for all historically marginalized groups, the specific legacy of discrimination (i.e., threats of deportation) faced by Latinx students and communities in the western United States often serves to silence their voices and efforts at resistance (Darder, Noguera, Fuentes, & Sanchez, 2012). In this chapter, we examine data from a student voice research project, including weekly observations (n = 102) for the school year across three public school classrooms, teacher reflections, and student work. This work is framed by the theory of sociopolitical development, implicating both teachers and students in the process of resistance and liberation. The data we explore captures (1) early conversations between students and teachers about issues of racial and economic injustice, (2) the initial resistance of students to having those conversations, (3) increasing trust between teachers and students supporting engagement with the issues, (4) students’ active resistance toward the issues that impacted them, (5) teachers and students working together to challenge unjust policies – at the school, district, and state level.

Purpose – This study examined the often minimized relationship between child sexual abuse and the body and asked: How, and by what means, is the body experienced by children after sexual abuse? The purpose of this work is to present children's interpretations of embodiment in their own words.

Methodology – Data include 10 years of semi-structured videotaped forensic interviews of children and youth seen for reported cases of sexual abuse. Utilizing an analytic-inductive method, children's verbal reports of sexual abuse were examined from a symbolic interactionist perspective in terms of re/productions of the body.

Findings – Discourse analyses revealed how children evaluated the body and negotiated related emotions. Youth ascribed meaning to the body as both materiality and social interaction. The body was experienced as object and somatic presence, as a marked or stigmatized body, and as a means of control and resistance. Through their own words, youth revealed how violence draws attention to embodiment, power, and subjectivity.

Value – Despite increased public and policy attention, limited research has explored how children describe their experiences of sexual abuse. This study addresses this serious gap in the literature by approaching the sexually abused body as a critical site of social meaning and social order. Of significant import, this work brings children's voices to the forefront; it shows how youth actively negotiate embodiment and expands work with child participants. It will be of value to practitioners working with children and to scholars in the fields of sexual victimization, sociology of the body and children/childhood.

Following particular feminisms that theorise the body as a place where the regulatory practices of racism, classism, sexism and speciesism are ‘inscripted’ or ‘sedimented’, but also understand the body as a site of resistance, a place where oppressive practices can be transgressed and transformed, this chapter explores the relation between ecofeminist theories of oppression, the notion of gender and species performativity and environmental activisms. Ecofeminist philosopher Deborah Slicer has argued that it is not only the human body that is capable of resistance through altering the performances around which identity is congealed but nature too has agency, is a player in processes of disruption and resignification. Ecopolitical theorist Catriona Sandilands has written about the ‘chain of equivalencies’ that discursively and materially link women, nature, people of colour, the differently-abled, queer folk and so on and has pondered how ‘a politics of performative affinity’ can help to emancipate both humans and the more-than-human world. Taking this brand of ecofeminist ecopolitical theorising as my starting point, I explore the role of environmental and feminist activisms, focusing on two instances of direct action, one from the US radical forest defence movement and one from the 1999 anti-World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests in Seattle, in disrupting hegemonic notions of who or what counts as a political subject and actor. Such actions, I argue, open spaces for subaltern voices, including non-human ones, to be heard. By considering the liberatory political possibilities of viewing species identity performatively, that is, as something that creatures, especially the human critter (to use the vernacular of the US forest defence movement) does rather than is, I suggest that activisms in all their variety are political sites where meaning is made and ecosocial relations configured, in ways that have material consequences for people and other beings of the earth.

This chapter is about the modern, Western education system as an economic system of production on behalf of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and globalization towards a single, global social space around market capitalism, liberal democracy and individualism.

The schooling process is above all an economic process, within which educational labour is performed, and through which the education system operates in an integrated fashion with the (external) economic system.

It is mainly through children’s compulsory educational labour that modern schooling plays a part in the production of labour power, supplies productive (paid) employment within the CMP, meets ‘corporate economic imperatives’, supports ‘the expansion of global corporate power’ and facilitates globalization.

What children receive in exchange for their appropriated and consumed labour power within the education system are not payments of the kind enjoyed by adults in the external economy, but instead merely a promise – the promise enshrined in the Western education industry paradigm.

In modern societies, young people, like chattel slaves, are compulsorily prevented from freely exchanging their labour power on the labour market while being compulsorily required to perform educational labour through a process in which their labour power is consumed and reproduced, and only at the end of which as adults they can freely (like freed slaves) enter the labour market to exchange their labour power.

This compulsory dispossession, exploitation and consumption of labour power reflects and reinforces the power distribution between children and adults in modern societies, doing so in a way resembling that between chattel slaves and their owners.

This article calls for educational leaders to reexamine Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) frameworks through decolonial leadership lens, during and post-COVID-19. “Based on our individual journeys, our collective voice is grounded on a bond that spans the decades …Our voice here is the enactment of our decision to listen to the oral traditions and connection to spirit of our ancestors…as mentors and collaborators in this work…[t]he validity of their voices…is unquestionable” (Sullivan TwoTrees and Pinto, p. 197). In this article, I intentionally center Mother Africa/Earth and incorporate indigenized expressions from narratives, dialogues, and interviews from assorted studies and sources. In the article Rekindling the Sacred: Toward A Decolonizing Pedagogy in Higher Education, Shahjahan et al. (2009) use a “tapestry of dialogical insights into… theorizing of how spirituality may be incorporated into teaching in higher education” (p. 1). So, with respect to K-12 education, anchoring decolonizing educational leadership to Mother Africa and practices and attitudes which support students who are behaviorally racialized and marginalized in our schools is integral. All through the chapter, I interweave my story with the narratives and dialogues of other voices to make the case for decolonization leadership approaches in our schools. Joining my voice are voices taken from a previous study focused on Special Education Workers who foster relationship and work directly with Students Labeled as Behavioral (will be defined later in this chapter) (Mitchell, 2020). In section one I locate myself in relationship to Mother Africa which informs this anthology chapter. Section two focuses on defining colonization and the theoretical framework and themes discussed in the anthology chapter. Section three examines the role educational leaders may play in creating school spaces for socially just relationship building, nimble student and teacher dissent, and opportunities for personal and community transformation. Section four provides a contextual analysis of educational leadership's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, namely how they impacted schools, classrooms, students, and teachers. Lastly, Section five introduces “ROCK”, a forward-looking conceptualization of a decolonizing leadership practice aimed at reclaiming one's indigeneity through nurturing connections to Mother Africa.

This project emerged from my desire to better understand the role of popular culture narratives in the dynamic and continual process of self-formation and symbolic interaction. While I could have chosen many popular source narratives to be the site of my inquiry, I chose the work of jazz-folk-punk singer-songwriter AnI DiFranco for a number of personal, academic, and socially relevant reasons.