Toward Ethnographic Fabulation as a Theory and Method for the Analysis of Historical and Contemporary Black Literacy Practices (Poster 32)

• In Event: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research
  In Invited Poster Session: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research Poster Session

Abstract

This presentation offers a detailed overview of my theorization of ethnographic fabulation, a methodology I employ in my research to integrate archival and ethnographic data in order to draw conclusions spanning the centuries of Black literate experiences. I understand the lack of attention to slavery and its afterlives in contemporary literacy research to be the most significant oversight in scholarship on Black literacy. My theoretical orientation and my methodological approach to studying Black literacy necessitates sustained engagement with the past in the present. This methodology rejects rigid conceptions of temporality in order to understand how both the rhetoric surrounding Black literacies and the literacies themselves have emerged, evolved, and/or departed from chattel slavery.

Author

• CoCo Massengale, Stanford University