Chapter 4: Activist Research in Social Studies Education: Renewed Scholarship for a Better World

In the summer of 2020, the United States experienced a national uprising for racial justice after the world watched the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis and learned of the murder of Breonna Taylor, killed by police who entered her home in the middle of the night executing a botched search warrant. During a global pandemic, people took to the streets to protest in major cities, with sustained protests taking place in multiple locations. As more unarmed Black citizens were killed, additional protests sprang up around the country (Sugrue, 2020), leading to a wave of support for #BlackLivesMatter and calls for the end of racialized oppression and state-sanctioned violence (Parker, Horowitz, & Anderson, 2020).