Ancestral Agency as Liberatory Research: Guardians of Heritage Graduate Students’ Experiences

• In Event: Theorizing, Research, and Renewal Within the Black Intellectual Tradition: “How Do It Free Us?”

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of an African-centered educational collaborative, the Guardians of Heritage (GoH), within an intergenerational African Diasporic program, dedicated to creating an educational space free of racial injustice as the remedy and repair to cultural censorship. Further, this work seeks to explore the perspectives of Black educators as matriculating graduate students at a Minority Serving Institution (MSI) in the South working within this program. The authors discuss their journey of creating an underground railroad of cultural truth that fostered a series of learning experiences inclusive of students, parents, and elders across two continents.

The Black Intellectual Tradition honors how Black folks used literature, art, linguistic style, music, and many other methods to release themselves from the chains of the Eurocentric intellectual tradition that limits the truth-telling of the Black experience. Alridge et al. submit that the Black Intellectual Tradition centers "the twin objectives of defining and defending Black humanity and of demanding social justice and the dismantling of racial apartheid" (2021, p. 90). As burgeoning Black scholars born in the South, we acknowledge how Black intellects resisted western intellectual traditions and used the experiences of our ancestors to give Blacks the intellectual and academic tools to deconstruct the norms of Eurocentric knowledge while developing a sense of being and belonging beyond traditional eurocentrism’s empirical ideologies.

Above, we have outlined our theoretical underpinnings to examine how the GoH experience influenced our epistemological journey as graduate students. In this paper we use Afronography to document our experiences as graduate students in the GoH space. Afronography is a research method grounded in normative Afrocentric theory (Asante, 2003; Ellis, 2004; Holman Jones, 2005) that gives way to reflexively examining one's thinking through an Afrocentric lens.

Data sources include personal visual evidence, field notes and transcripts from two years of GoH meetings, photographs from on the ground activities and vignettes highlighting this experience from our perspectives as graduate students.

Considering the recent trends in educational policies which endorse an ahistorical presentation of the United States, (i.e., active book bans, censorship on race-based conversation in classrooms, etc.), the findings conclude a need for education spaces that cultivate cultural autonomy in the research training graduate student’s experience. To achieve the emotional, epistemological, and spiritual liberation that sparks from learning, learning requires cultural autonomy that centers one’s heritage knowledge as a frame to ground the student’s experiences. Given our identity and heritage as people of African ancestry, the degree to which one involves their ancestral underpinnings directly in one’s preparation to conduct research influences their agency to learn and be free while doing so (Stewart, 2022).

The GoH program provided a framework for growing one's ontological and epistemological sense of self while creating a cultural learning space that lifts and centers the heritage knowledge of historically marginalized people. This type of learning frame enables graduate students to directly counteract the harm of “epistemological nihilation” (King, 2017) thereby providing a remedy to the attacks on recent educational policy (Florida Senate, 2022; GHOR, 2021).

Authors

• Danie Marshall, Georgia State University

• Candice Pettaway, Georgia State University