Public History and Collective Transformation: A Case Study of Un/Learning the State

In the summer of 2020, amidst global pandemic and protest, a youth-centred non-profit organisation in Providence, RI, USA led a series of sessions meant to introduce participants to histories of slavery, incarceration, policing, abolition and transformative justice practices. Ultimately, it was an extremely successful experiment in popular education that revealed multiple dynamics: the failings of traditional education to engage with such histories; the uses of contextualising our own lives within the histories we have inherited; the importance of collaborative exploration of such histories and what Paulo Freire refers to as 'problem-posing' pedagogical models; and the necessity to engage deeply with histories of violence and resistance if we are committed to mitigating contemporary forms of violence and transforming our relationships with each other and within society as a whole. Our case study of these sessions, consisting of dialogue, reflection, research and critical theory, will creatively illuminate these and other dynamics through a deep mapping of the way the sessions and their content were situated within our own collaboration and within our larger community.