Endarkened Feminism as/in Critical Participatory Inquiry: Lessons From First-Generation Women of the African Diaspora (Poster 7)

• In Event: Critical Participatory Inquiry in Transnational Research Contexts

Abstract

Black researchers are often situated as brokers in participatory research projects in which their knowledge and expertise is either limited to anti-racist scholarship or kept to the margins. Critical participatory inquiry (CPI) offers guiding epistemological commitments that steer researchers toward anti-oppressive and anti-extractive practices. Coupled with transnationalism, or the movement of groups across national borders, CPI interrupts the limitations around participatory research that prioritized and reproduced Western priorities to include anti-racist and decolonial epistemological commitments. Though transnational CPI works to include the perspectives of multiple national identities and attends to power differentials, Black researchers’ contributions and expertise are still questioned within participatory research (Drame & Irby, 2016). This presentation centers the contributions of a Black feminist approach, referred to as endarkened feminist critical participatory inquiry (EFCPI), to address ways in which researchers can pay attention to expertise, shared ownership, and the redistribution of power in the context of participatory action research.

Our research collective consisted of 21 undergraduate and graduate first-generation women of the African diaspora (Black, African American, African, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Latina) who were primarily located within the context of the United States; however, others were citizens of multiple countries, holding affinity for multiple nation-states. Our collective navigated and transcended borders with overlapping and complex commitments to examining nation-states and hegemonic expectations surrounding globalization, capitalism, and research. Our goal was to explore the broader circumstances in which racism and sexism continue to impact women of the African diaspora in college.

This presentation illustrates how an endarkened feminist epistemology (EFE) (Dillard, 2000), engages and fulfills CPI’s emancipatory and transformative potential. Specifically, we argue that this fulfillment occurs through EFE’s sacred centering of Black women’s knowledge and unveiling of Black women as knowledge creators who are held with reverence and honor (Dillard & Bell, 2011). We maintain EFE and CPI strengthen each other’s methodological and epistemological commitments. To demonstrate this, we analyze key moments in our project that touch on notions of expertise, shared ownership, and redistribution of power to embody the nexus of these transformative epistemologies. These epistemologically important moments – stories we shared of our experiences as first-generation college students (FGCS) – illustrate how we came to better understand and live out an endarkened feminist epistemological commitment to expertise, shared ownership, and the redistribution of power with our CPI collective.

This work is significant not only to center commitments of/to expertise, shared ownership, and redistribution of power in participatory inquiry, but also to interrupt extractive participatory research. We also demonstrate the implementation of an amalgamation of two important epistemological approaches, CPI and EFE, developed to best support a community of Black women scholars interested in doing PAR. Finally, this project serves as an example of what it means to push research methodologies to be more critical, Black feminist, and decolonial in nature while centering a transnational context.

Authors

• Sharrell Hassell-Goodman, George Mason University

• Ayondela McDole, George Mason University

• Shauna Rigaud, George Mason University

• Yulanda McCarty-Harris, University of Texas at Austin

• Jazmine Clifton, Purdue University

• Rukan Said

• Rochelle Davidson Mhonde, George Mason University