Navigating the Doctoral Experience as First-Generation, Gifted Black Women: Our Path, Our Voice

• In Event: Black Women in Defense of Ourselves and Our Work

Abstract

As a means to promote pathways to change, Black feminist scholars have advocated for the inclusion of Black women and girls’ experiences in way that addresses the complex intersectionality of their cultural knowings (Wing, 2000). These “knowings'' help us to not only think critically about sound solutions, but to also honor and amplify the voices that were once silenced so that their needs are incorporated into a more equitable and just narrative. This chapter focuses on high-ability, first-generation, doctoral scholars identifying themes, challenges, and triumphs related to their navigation of gifted programming as Black women.
We use an endarkened lens to situate our experiences navigating our K-12, undergraduate, and doctoral programs as gifted, first-generation scholars through an intersectional lens. The Endarkened Feminist Epistemology (EFE) provides a refreshing reworking of traditional feminist conceptualizations, through language, that have unrelentignly comissioned Black women and girls as a homeogeneous group, one with without differences (Evans-Winters & Love, 2015). EFE encourages the authentic understanding of the sacredness that exists within relationships among Black women in the endarkened spaces of Black womanhood (Dillard, 2012). This endarkened perspective embodies a distinguishable difference in the ethnological perspective that is located at the intersection of the culturally constructed socializations of race, gender, and other identities and the historical and contemporary contexts of oppressions and resistance for African-American women (Dillard, 2000). Using an endarkened feminist epistemology also helps to further understand the lived experiences of Black women and girls by merging their duality, welcoming them to represent who they are in spaces where the expectation of others might suggest otherwise and helping others become more culturally responsive to their changing needs at various levels of educational spaces (Evans-Winters & Love, 2015). We especially feel the need to engage our dualities, through duoethnographies, considering that our narratives are often framed in a static, single social category, creating a one-dimensional perspective.
Through duoethnographies, we identified three parallel themes that framed our understanding of our gifted identities, first-generation status, and doctoral journey: family socialization, gender identity, and schooling experiences. Through our narratives we identified similar experiences from our K-12 schooling and how these first-generation undergraduate and graduate pathways proved challenging in navigating doctoral programming.

Authors

• Brittany Nicole Anderson, University of North Carolina - Charlotte
  Presenting Author

• Shaquinta Richardson
  Non-Presenting Author