The Double-Consciousness of Stakeholders: Black Women Using Sister Circle Conversations to Decolonize Qualitative Educational Research

• In Event: Decolonizing the "Critical": Working With Stakeholders to Dismantle Whiteness in Qualitative Education Research

Abstract

Purpose. When Black girlhood and womanhood struggle for “self-determination and self-definition against the world’s ghettoized image of them” (Richardson, 2002), there remains a need to center the needs and identities of Black women in qualitative educational research methods (Lindsay-Dennis, 2015). As a Black woman scholar, I acknowledge the lived experience of Black women as embodying both double-consciousness (Du Bois, 1903) and double-oppressions (Crenshaw, 1990) As such, we are both stakeholders of our experience while simultaneously experiencing a life at stake.

Framework. This study is grounded in the theoretical framings of both Black Feminist Thought (Collins, 2002) and Black feminist storytelling (Baker-Bell, 2017). Black woman storytelling reemphasizes three core values: 1) lived experience as a way of making meaning; 2) dialogue as a way to help establish validity and construction of knowledge and; 3) safe spaces of self-accountability are created through the inclusion of emotion. Leaning away from the traditional structure of group interviews, Sister Circles have been defined as “support groups that build upon existing friendships, fictive kin networks, and the sense of community found among Black women” (Neal-Barnett et al, 2011, p. 267).

Methods and data sources. This study examines how Sister Circle conversations when situated as a indigenous and dialogical method of communication for Black women, offers space for participants to discuss and reflect on their own narratives using their own language(s). I share findings (via cases) from a qualitative study of Black women readers of urban fiction who are interrogating their own narratives while also participating in their own co-construction of self. Through an adaptation of a listening guide by Brown, Debold, Tappan, and Gilligan (1991), I isolated and analyzed Black women narratives, dictated a verbal reply, which served as a form of an academic call-and-response, thereby creating a written model of the Sister Circle discussion.

Results/Significance. These conversations suggest that implementing Sister Circles as a methodology requires a consideration of the illusion of neutrality of group interviews, deconstruction of researcher positionality, and the necessary privileging the daily, innate interactions of Black women, their literacies, and the (re)production of knowledge. This, in turn, could possibly invite researchers to embark on allowing Sister Circle conversations to arise in their research, especially within research on Black women and girls.

Author

• Stephanie P. Jones, Grinnell College