Conceived as a tribute to Manuel Barkan, this award is presented to an individual who, through their published work in either Art Education or Studies in Art Education, has contributed a product of scholarly merit to the field of art education. The 2025 Manuel Barkan Award Lecture will be given by gloria j. wilson. The title of the presentation is “Cartographies of Black Life: Meditations on a Black Sense of Place in and Through the Arts in Education.” This dialogical engagement explores how Black Geospatial Inquiry and Aesthetic Praxis converse across disciplines, engaging Black studies, the arts, geography, environmental humanities, and education. Through discussions of spatial liberation and aesthetic praxis, this conversation examines how Black life navigates the spatial, material, and environmental conditions that shape, constrain, and reimagine possibilities for movement, and self-determination. Drawing from recent work, we consider how Black compositional thought functions within education and the arts as both spatial consciousness and refusal, as well as a generative force for Black ways of knowing, being, and doing. Participants are encouraged to bring questions, insights, and provocations.
