You Won't Break Our Souls: Using Podcasting to Create a Homeplace in Academia

• In Event: A Homeplace in Podcasting: Holding Space for Critical Conversations in Education

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose
bell hooks (1990) defined “homeplace” as a space through which Black women have historically survived and resisted the oppression of “white power and control” (p.383). As Black women faculty in academia, which can be both an oppressive and anti-black space, we created a homeplace through podcasting. In this paper, we share how our podcast is a homeplace that provides Black faculty and students ways to navigate the culture of white supremacy in teacher education. We argue that creating a homeplace within academia is not an easy task and that for Black teacher educators, scholars, and students in teacher education finding a homeplace is challenging because of how white supremacy culture is centered within these spaces.

Perspective/Theoretical Framework
We situate our work within the theoretical framework of Black feminist thought (Collins, 2009). is rooted in the idea that Black women’s experiences of the world, including their experiences of marginalization and oppression, are interwoven with their identities as Black individuals and as women (Collins, 1989). To fully understand the impact of white supremacy and racism that is encountered by Black people, specifically Black women in academia, the racialized experiences of Black women must be explored and analyzed. The homeplace created through the podcast allows these experiences to be shared and for those that hear the podcast an opportunity to think through their racialized experiences and find strategies and practices to navigate white supremacy within academia.

Methods/Modes of Inquiry/Data Sources
We use Black feminist-womanist storytelling (Baker-Bell, 2017) as a methodology to center our experiences and stories of how our podcast has been a homeplace for us and helped us navigate the whiteness of academia. Black feminist-womanist storytelling weaves together ethonography, 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 a the same time as healing from them (Baker-Bell, 2017).
After recording and listening to all the episodes of the podcast, we reflected on each recording and our experiences. Authoethnography provided us with tools to ask ourselves specific questions. As we reflected, we wrote our responses to the reflection questions individually, and then shared our responses with each other for analysis. In examining our experiences, our autoethnographies provided us space to be participants, creators, researchers, and observers in our own study. Our analysis led to two themes: Podcasting for Liberation, Joy, and Healing: The Stories of Two Black Women in Academia (co-creators/faculty) and Blackness is the Compass that Guides our Work: The Stories of Black Doctoral Students using the podcast (doctoral students).

Arguments/Conclusions/Significance
Sharing our stories as Black women in academia of how podcasting has created a homeplace for us helps provide Black faculty and students with ways to seek joy and liberation within academia as a collective. Also, it creates an opportunity for exploration of ways to create homeplaces within teacher education.

Authors

• Shamaine Bertrand, The College of New Jersey
  Presenting Author

• Kisha M Porcher, University of Delaware
  Presenting Author

• Margaret Owusu, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Brittany Powell, University of Delaware
  Presenting Author