Our research conference responded to concurrent pandemics related to racial injustice in the U.S. Among our goals was to initiate a national research agenda that prioritizes the use of visual and multimodal methodologies to promote educational equity and racial justice for youth of color. A conference focused on visual and multimodal methodologies is urgently needed because while students’ worlds have become increasingly visual, classroom practices and educational research methods still privilege written and spoken words. Further, for minoritized youth in this time of racial crisis, images often function as visual microaggressions that represent and perpetuate racist ideas and beliefs about people of color. Yet visual texts and visual-based methods can be used as tools for activism and tools for communicating hope. Our conference harnessed that hope, as we came together to discuss how visual-based educational research might support children who are experiencing racialized violence at this moment of crisis. Further, our conference sought to examine the ways expansive visual and multimodal methodologies provide new insights about diverse children’s and youth’s educational capital and racial literacies while disrupting and dismantling deficit perspectives about them.

During our two-day gathering, we convened participants to: 1) build community with an interdisciplinary group of education scholars and artists who utilize visual and multimodal methods in a range of contexts for the specific purpose of educational equity that validate the learning and multiple identities of diverse children and youth; 2) provide a forum where ideas can be exchanged through seminars, presentations, and interactive sessions; 3) create opportunities to develop joint research projects; 4) publish an edited volume that features the work from the conference centering visual scholarship that promotes educational equity and racial justice for youth.

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