Mothering While Black in the Academy

• In Event: 75.015 - Advocacy and Activism in Curriculum Studies: Reconceptualizing the Field

Abstract

I write for the purpose of wrestling with the constant tentativeness of my identity within/against the academy and within/against the context of the South—both past and present—so as to trouble those static notions of who I am/who we are supposed to be in this complicated context. This chapter joins two previous writings (Guillory, 2011; Guillory, in press) aimed at theorizing my academic identity as a hip hop feminist (Morgan, 1999) working as a teacher educator in a predominantly white institution in the South. Until now in this chapter, I have not analyzed my positioning as a black mother-scholar raising a black boy child in the South and the ways in which the work I do as a mother-scholar within/for the academy impact and are impacted by the work I do as a mother-scholar outside of the academy.
I utilize the autobiographical inquiry method of currere (Pinar, 2004; Pinar and Grumet, 1976) to analyze the intersections of my identities, with a particular focus on the ways mothering intersects with other identity categories, within the context of predominantly white schooling institutions in the South. Conceptualized as “a complicated conversation with oneself (as a ‘private’ intellectual)” and an “ongoing project of self-understanding in which one becomes mobilized for engaged pedagogical action—as a private-and-public intellectual—with others” (Pinar, 2004, p. 37), currere is the process I utilize to examine past and present representations and lived experiences of black mothering as well as conceptualize possible futures for women like me in the academy. This is my form of activism, to interrupt dominant narratives about what it means to do the “work” of the academy as a researcher, teacher, and mother in a university context which Pinar (2004) likens to “corporations” that have become “skill-and-knowledge factories” (p. 3). Problematizing the concept of “work” within such a context, I grapple with my own work’s significance and relevance in the larger space of home and school and with my work’s effect on the raising of my son.
This presentation is grounded in theory by hooks (1981) and Kupenda (2012), who problematize and contemporize cultural representations of mammy; by Lorde (1984/2000) and Gumbs (2012), who queer traditional notions of black mothering; and by Collins (2013), who conceptualizes what intellectual activism means for those in the academy who are simultaneously “insiders and outsiders” (p. xi). I use this theory to analyze and problematize my own lived experiences, which I will present in a series of autobiographical narratives; together these narratives and my analysis of them are meant to perform the kind of intellectual activism that Collins calls “truth-telling,” which she maintains “harnesses the power of ideas toward the specific goal of confronting existing power relations” (p. xii). I hope to locate a through-line of common themes relative to my lived experiences as a black mom scholar while I simultaneously examine the influence of the schooling institutions in the South on these experiences

Author

• Nichole A. Guillory, Kennesaw State University