Stepping Outside the Barred Room: Building Coalitions to Advance Shared Principles

Abstract

For more than 45 years, Bernice Johnson Reagon has been a major cultural voice for freedom and justice, spending her career as a scholar, artist, singer, and teacher to speak out against racism and organized inequities of all kinds. In this article, the author turns to the work of Reagon to surface a few possibilities for the curriculum studies field to productively work within and through the crisis and tensions that the field has experienced since its inception. The author focuses specifically on the importance Reagon placed on building coalitions for working through a crisis in constructive ways during a speech at the West Coast Women's Music Festival in 1981. Drawing on Reagon's understandings of coalition politics, the author argues that coalitions in the curriculum studies field are necessary to move toward a future that does not endlessly repeat the present and for creatively and productively working through and within crisis.