Becoming CRITICAL CREATIVES

Radical Healing for Liberatory Futures in Higher Education and Beyond

Abstract

This article examines trauma-informed healing and multidimensional well-being as key to radically (re)imagining and critically co-creating liberatory futures in higher education. Utilizing a bricolage, critical arts-based methodology, this multi-study qualitative research explored the meta-research-question: How are higher education stakeholders radically (re)imagining liberatory, abolitionist, decolonizing, and queering futures within U.S. higher education and beyond? Emergent findings cast visions for humanizing and radically healing higher education futures and identified that trauma-informed healing and multidimensional well-being for individuals/collectives/ecologies are both strategies for sustaining radical imagination and critical creativity (RICC) praxis to engender those futures, as well as practices that are reciprocally sustained through RICC praxis. Because of the embodied and communal nature of RICC praxis, trauma-informed healing (i.e., repairing harms, restoring generative relationships with individuals, community, and ecologies) that is both interpersonal and intrapersonal is integral to the praxis of dismantling what is while simultaneously radically imagining and critically creating what can be.