Storying a Black Village Poetics of Landscape & Literacies (Poster 8)

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

Abstract

Within my dissertation research project Storying A Black Village Poetics of Landscape & Literacies in West Philadelphia, I improvised up the critical qualitative method of Black Village Storying which revealed multimodal poetics and embodied placemaking literacies as critical avenues in which Black West Philadelphia residents grasp and further otherwise arrangements of their sociopolitical worlds. The approach finds its origins within George Lamming’s classic In the Castle of My Skin (1991) and the character of place he described as “The Village.” The Village as “place and symbol of a way of life” refuted the dominant Western episteme of “individual wills'' toward storying the collaborative development of a shared critical consciousness that served to underwrite the as-yet-unfinished transformation of their world. Purposefully designed to reflect the familiar aesthetics of Black diasporic storying traditions, my narrative inquiry research project explored participant (re)storying (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) that contemporary West Philadelphians utilize to assert Black personhood and worldmaking possibilities, collaging together critical qualitative frameworks of Projects-in-Humanization (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014), Critical Place Inquiry (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014), and story circle traditions (O’Neal, n.d.).

Author

• Christopher R. Rogers, Haverford College