Fireproofing as Collective Defense

Our session took place during the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting week, as scholars across the country gathered to discuss schooling. We gathered to build beyond it.

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Educators, professors, fellows, and community members came together on land to complete the bench and arch for Ms. Louise and her family. It was a communal response to the Altadena fires, but also the fires of state-sanctioned anti-blackness.

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We began with a death meditation.

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Much of what we are asked to participate in, educational systems, institutional structures, frameworks of equity, continues to produce harm without accountability. Within these conditions, Black students folk are expected to persist, respond, to repair, often without the resources required to sustain their own well-being.

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So the question guiding the session was not how to improve the institution.

It was: What/how do we build when the institution does not change?

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Fireproofing emerges from that question.

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As shared through this framework, protecting Black life within institutional spaces has been likened to “pieces of paper in a burning forest.” The conditions are not neutral. The harm is not incidental. The environment itself is unstable.

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The work, then, at its least anyway, is defense.

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We returned to the structure to complete it.

The bench was reinforced. The arch was finished. Layers that had been built over months were brought to completion. The structure now holds weight. It can be used. It can gather people.

This distinction matters.

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In earthen architecture, a structure is only complete when it can hold what it is meant to carry.

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The same question applies beyond the build: What are our institutions actually able to hold?

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Lalin, Ms. Louise’s daughter, grounded this further. This land held generations of memory and possibility for her family. The fires disrupted the structure, but not the relationship. Rebuilding here is deeply connection to continuity under conditions of loss.

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At the same time, fellows from the Life-Sustaining Fellowship joined the space, bringing ongoing work centered on suicidality among Black youth through community-rooted, culturally grounded practices. Their presence made visible a broader truth:

 

While institutions merely document harm, our communities are already responding to it.

 

Fireproofing, in this context, is a collective defense strategy.

 

It answers these questions:

• How do we remember structures that can sustain us when systems do not?

• How do we move beyond survival and create under these conditions?

 

The bench and arch do not resolve these questions.

 

But they hold them.

 

They stand as evidence that something else is possible because people chose to build differently within and beyond it.