This talk will argue that one of the key challenges to reimagining education is for scholars to muster the courage to consciously break from the long-accepted standards and traditions of academia’s elite. In other words, a new generation of rule-breaking scholars needs to emerge to reinvent the discipline of education so that all people and cultures can be respectfully served in the process of producing knowledge, as well as sharing knowledge in the classroom.

This argument will be made in part by discussing a paper the presenter recently had published titled, ‘Transcending the ‘Dys-Care’ of Doctoral Students: Assessing How Cultural Similarities Between the United States’ Black Gangster Class and Academia’s Elite Adversely Influence Student Agency and Relevance in Knowledge Production’. https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_913586_smxx.pdf (See page 22.) In addition, some lived experiences in academia involving cognitive injustice will be shared, along with ideas for how to reform the academy and construct new directions for the discipline of education. One illustration will include a discussion about how racialized public pedagogy has historically been such a powerful force in perpetuating derogatory black stereotypes, yet scholarly critiques of public pedagogical theory have focused much more on the import and impact of museums.