Federal contemporary education reform such as President Obama’s Promise initiatives construct and circulate crisis discourse that promotes a moral obligation among local actors to intervene in remaking targeted locations for capital accumulation and economic growth. The Promise discourse coupled with promising practices carry harmful flows that erases and alters the memory of place. The local Promise Zone construction is, in its implementation, a colonial act that devalues local knowledges and views space as empty, ripe for the extraction of labor, knowledge and resources. Black musical aesthetics and intellectual traditions are centered as a form of social investigation to name the coloniality inherent in the deficit-oriented, data-driven discourse of contemporary education reform initiatives. This research explored the spatial imagination and knowledge within collaborative community change initiatives constituted by the local Promise Zone designation. Afrosonic inspired educational research in the Pan-Afrikan intellectual tradition centered the process of inquiry in collaborative community change spaces to understand the ideological acceptance of normalized knowledges that rationalizes disparity, deprivation and destruction in the reconfiguration of social-material reality. Pedagogical and theoretical tools were established to inform a praxis of librarianship and genre of collaborative community change conceptualized as SONAR and a student/intellectual-artist identity. The research literally and figuratively digs in the repository of creative intellectual texts, listens to the local/global knowledge and discourse, chops and layers samples and puts them in the mix to turn the table(s) on normative knowledge systems and structures toward decolonizing the architecture of knowledge for health and wellbeing. Conceptualizations of SONAR and student/intellectual-artist actively listens to sounds, silences, voices and rhythms to inform collection building and encourage knowledge-making activities that address complex local/global challenges. The knowledge-making practice of SONAR opens conceptual space for student/intellectual-artists to engage in critical dialogue, autonomous learning and imagination. SONAR is a form of storytelling, a mixtape (soundtrack) of community learning and change.