Martin Luther King Jr.'s Call for Creative Maladjustment Has Much to Offer Educators in the Modern Battleground

Abstract

In this essay, justice-oriented educators Lauren B. Cattaneo and Wendi N. Manuel-Scott take up Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 call to academics to join the ranks of the “creatively maladjusted,” recognizing that education is a perennial site of struggle, particularly in times of social upheaval. In detailing King's call for maladjustment as an ongoing commitment to resisting conformity to societal structures that perpetuate inequity and to the practices and paradigms in disciplines that reify and rationalize those structures, they expand the idea of creativity through the work of writers who have provided insights on imagination, radical hope, and the cooptation of creativity that can block transformational change. To elaborate the idea implicit in King's writing that nurturing generative collectives is at the heart of creative maladjustment, they provide several examples of creatively maladjusted educators past and present who they find particularly inspiring. The authors conclude with a call to hold both the precarity and hope that creative maladjustment invites, answering King's urging that we stick with the struggle of pursuing justice in the face of uncertainty.