Continuing to Build the Collective: ReExamining Black Feminist Thought as Methodology (Poster 7)

• In Event: Imagining Black Worlds: Emphasizing Black Methodologies in Reparative Educational Inquiry

Abstract

Almost a decade ago, I was a contributor to an offering of Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) Black Feminist Thought (BFT) as a methodological perspective (citation blinded for proposal). Our work was an articulation of the inquiry we engaged in and the learning that surfaced as members of an intergenerational collective of Black women who gathered regularly for fellowship and community fulfillment. One element of the unique power that interactions between Black women generate is the interchange and reciprocal nurturing of wisdoms and understandings (Walker, ; Dillard, 2006). Such exchanges feature warm and lovingly assertive challenges to new and/or habitual ways of thinking along with opportunities to entertain new perspectives while determining which pre-existing thoughts will be held onto, purged, or reshaped. While the original group of women who contributed to this work are not meeting together in the same ways that fueled the original article, the conclusions we shared in that manuscript take on a new life as these ideas are pollinated across the academic research community when other researchers apply and reimagine our gleanings. In this poster presentation, I share a case study of the work contained in 15 of the over 150 peer-reviewed articles that have cited our initial work. Each of these examples makes a contribution to the developing conception of BFT as methodology via explanations of how researchers are putting this approach into practice as well as how its application is generating knowledges. I aim to excavate how the wisdoms shared by the generative collection of Black women with which we began continue to expand, influence and contribute to critically driven research endeavors. Analyzing these cases using the lens my colleagues and I detailed in our original article, my results will also include reflections on how the work has been taken up including how original ideas have been maintained and how they have been evolved via interaction with other scholars’ thoughts. In what is perhaps best described as a meta-methodological endeavor, I will consider the ways in which we think about how we think about methodological perspectives and their proliferation along with what this intellectual exercise contributes to critical, equity-driven scholarly work poised to make substantive contributions to the Black community. The scholarly significance of this contribution is a step toward normalizing what it means to honor the collective nature of research over celebrating offerings made by any specific individual. The renewals we seek within the educational world need to occur at the level of the community. Thus, we must also seek remedies that can repair at the community level.

Author

• Ashley N. Patterson, Pennsylvania State University