Embodied: Africentric Spiritual Identity Development of Black Femme Students Attending Predominantly White Institutions

• In Event: 35.080 - Sheraton Roundtable Session Five - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 35.080-2 - College Student Identity in Context

Abstract

This investigation employs African diasporic frameworks to better understand how Black womxn make meaning of their spiritual identities through embodied experiences of race and gender, while attending predominately-White institutions (PWIs). I use these models, and Astin, Astin, and Lindholm, to guide the development and analysis of a study corpus. The corpus consists of 27 sources in which Black womxn discussed their spiritual journeys while matriculating. My findings suggest that Black femme students understand their spiritual identities as necessarily informed by and tied to their race and gender. Findings also suggest that they make sense of their spirituality through (a) divine interventions, (b) being agents of the divine, (c) questing through community, and (d) using spirituality to cope with misogynoir.

Author

• e alexander, The Ohio State University