She-Search: The Fertile Ground of Black Indigenous Methods in Qualitative Inquiry

• In Event: Me-Search: Pursuing Race, Culture, and Gender in the Heart and Healing Work of Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
Education research methodologies are often situated in the onto-epistemologies of patriarchal whiteness. Lacking critical emotionality, these designs repress natural human instinct for the fallacy of scientific objectivity. The life-giving methods employed by Black women educational researchers are in opposition to these positivist empirical designs. From this backdrop, guided by our collective “she-searches,” we conceptualize Black indigenous methods (BIM).

Theoretical framework/Methods
Utilizing afrocentricity and Black feminist love as theoretical lenses and engaging in the Black feminist tradition of storytelling (Toliver, 2021), we recount our application of Black indigenous interview method through our research journeys by “she-telling” our lived raced and gendered experiences with study participants or doctoral students.

Results
Through this excavation of self, we unearth the fertile ground of Black indigenous methods, which encompasses the following core features: 1) centering interlocking intersectional identities and thus connecting us within a humanistic community and 2) co-constructing collaborative knowledges and truths. More specifically, through our application we find that Black indigenous interview method enacts spiritual storytelling conversation when collecting data with participants. Candidly, our she-searches were rooted in uncertainty, renewal, and the refusal to bracket ourselves from our research.

Scholarly Significance
Persisting through, we advance the field of qualitative inquiry by unearthing the fertile ground of BIM and offer insights into our methodological sense-making for emerging scholars of color when the rainbow is simply not enuf.

Authors

• Abiola Farinde-Wu, University of Massachusetts - Boston

• Bettie Ray Butler, University of North Carolina - Charlotte