"For Loretta": A Black Woman Literacy Scholar's Journey to Prioritizing Self-Preservation 

• In Event: 43.018 - Changing the Dominant Narrative: A Call for Using Storytelling as Language and Literacy Theory, Research Methodology, and Practice

Abstract

Haddix (2015) reminds us that “our words and our stories matter and are deemed sources of legitimate knowledge” (p. 22). This wisdom is at the crux of what I am referring to as Black Feminist-Womanist Storytelling. Black Feminist-Womanist Storytelling is a methodology that weaves together autoethnography, the African American Female Language and Literacy Tradition, Black feminist/womanist theories, and storytelling to create an approach that provides Black women with a method for collecting our stories, writing our stories, analyzing our stories, and theorizing our stories at the same time of healing from them. In this presentation, Speaker 3 uses Black Feminist-Womanist Storytelling as a method to put her racial, gendered, and sometimes classed experiences in conversation with one another through storytelling.
In examining my experiences as a Black woman language and literacy scholar on the tenure-track with a family, autoethnography provided me with space to be a researcher, participant, and observer in my own study. It enabled me to deeply reflect on the relationship between my personal and cultural experiences outside of academia to those within. Additionally, autoethnography provided me with the tools to ask myself questions such as: In what ways did I sacrifice my spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental health to juggle the demands associated with my academic career and family? How did I exist and resist within the first few years on the tenure-track? How did these experiences relate to or differ from other Black academic and non-academic women? How did I learn to balance my commitments to my academic career and family with my commitment to self-preservation? To reflect on these questions, I relied on my personal memory and recollection of experiences, journal writings, old text messages, social media interactions, and conversations with family members, friends, and mentors. These helped me to gather important pieces necessary to tell my stories.
In this demonstration, I use autoethnography and Black Feminist-Womanist Storytelling methods to share stories of my existence and resistance during my first three years on the tenure track as a Black woman and emerging language & literacy scholar with a family. Through these stories, I illustrate how the culture of academia expects Black women to embody the StrongBlackWoman characterization and forces us to “splinter ourselves, our lives, our work, and our politics to better fit within the academy” (Nzinga-Johnson, 2013, p. 10). I situate this conversation in the field of language and literacy to (1) illuminate the undocumented narratives of Black women’s experiences and working lives within and beyond the academy and (2) complicate dominant notions of what it means to be a literacy researcher and who can be a literacy researcher. I conclude with self-preservation tips for Black women who are navigating the tenure track with family. These tips can also be considered recommendations for institutions concerning how to sustain Black women in academic spaces. 

Author

• April D Baker-Bell, Michigan State University