On My Mama: A Collective Auto-Ethnography of Black Mothering/Daughtering in Academia

• In Event: AERA Graduate Student Research-in-Progress Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Explorations of Mothering and Motherwork in Research on Graduate Students and Teachers (Table 13)

Abstract

"Motivated by the homage to Black mothers through the Black linguistic colloquialism, ""On My Mama"" as sampled by Victoria Monet, this proposal explores the academic realities of three doctoral mother-scholars. Drawing from Alice Walkers' womanism framework (1983), and through the analysis of three mother - daughter dyads, we highlight ways we traverse higher education as doctoral scholars.
The collaborative work includes three mother / daughter dyads utilizing kitchen table talk methodology (Bolding et al, 2022). Critical discourse analysis are used to analyze the data from the transcription. From the initial open coding, emerged preliminary findings which include 1) embodiment: the reference to things we carry with us, 2) affirmation: the celebration of self, and 3) spirituality and sacred space making."

Author

• Alissa G. Irvin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign