When the Theory Is Your Life: Embodying Black Critical Theory as a Home Place

• In Event: Creating Community: Student Support Networks for Black Students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Predominantly White Institutions

Abstract

As emerging Black critical scholars, we lean on Love’s (2019) understanding of, “theory is my North Star'' (p. 112), meaning theory is more than a static body of knowledge used for intellectual exchange. Theory is a living body of thought that helps us make sense of what has happened and what is happening to us, and identify a place where life could be lived out differently (hooks, 1991; Pollock, 2006). We discuss Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit) as a living compass that helps illuminate our experiences within the support network we cultivated upon starting graduate school. We argue BlackCrit and its three key framings function as a critical theoretical method in educational research (Dumas & ross, 2016), and could help reduce emotional and physical suffering experienced by Black doctoral students and support Black fugitivity and liberatory fantasy practices that are often policed in an antiblack world.
To guide our inquiry and analyses, we ask:
1. As Black graduate students, how do we use each other as a support network to navigate, employ, and embody critical theory?
2. How do we employ our support networks to use BlackCrit as a method to disrupt white dominant narratives about race, racism, blackness, and antiblackness in education?
3. How does BlackCrit in conjunction with support networks serve as a methodological approach for doing liberatory research with and for Black people?
This study is a collection of critical autoethnographic accounts of four Black women doctoral students at a predominantly white university. Our data is situated in Critical Racial Incident journal entries documenting how we viewed and interacted with antiblack racism while reading The Future is Black: Afropessimism, Fugitivity, and Radical Hope in Education (Grant et al., 2020). A BlackCrit-grounded methodology offers researchers a systematic, yet flexible lens to view and identify moments that are specific to and representative of a larger phenomenon: antiblackness.
In this paper, we dicuss our three most salient themes that detail the ways we use our support networks to combat the antiblack violence in the academy: “Slavery in the academy,” “Gravitational pull of the North Star,” and “There is no escape.”

Guided by BlackCrit, we discuss the ways that theory illuminates our positioning as Black folks within the world, the academy, and our cohort. Namely, we will acknowledge the totality of antiblackness which defines the boundaries of our invisible support networks. Then, we will address the tensions we faced as Black graduate students, and the ways that we navigate the academy as a cohort of Black women.

We remind ourselves that our work is never just "our '' work, it is a political act that helps move us forward towards educational spaces and a world worth living in.

Authors

• Blake O'Neal Turner, Marquette University
  Presenting Author

• Courtney A Douglass, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author

• Mary Johnson, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author

• Alexis Morgan Young, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author