Black Motherscholars Figuring the Borderlands through Visual Duo-Nkwaethnography

• In Event: Black Motherscholarship within and Beyond the Academy: Reconceptualizing Radical Futurity

Abstract

Grounded in a Black critical feminist understanding that the personal is political and that me-search is research (Dillard & Bell, 2011), this paper explores the lived experiences of two Black cisgender women who became motherscholars during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both authors navigated early motherhood while transitioning from toxic academic institutions in the Midwest to a Minority-Serving Institution in the Northeast. As we grappled with these life-altering shifts, we turned to the concept of the borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987) and figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998) to examine how our identities as Black motherscholars emerged and were negotiated in the interstices of race, gender, class, and academia.
Black motherscholars exist within a liminal space marked by contradiction, precarity, and possibility. The pressures of academic productivity, financial responsibility, and caregiving often result in being “torn between ways” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 79). Yet, through this tension, we develop what Anzaldúa calls a mestiza consciousness—a way of being that embraces contradiction and ambiguity as generative forces. Informed by this framework, we ask: How can/are we re-figuring our worlds—free of the either/or—and embracing the borderlands of our motherscholar identities?
To address this question, we employed visual duo-nkwaethnography, a methodological fusion of duoethnography, visual inquiry, and nkwaethnography—a healing-centered, African diasporic research method (Allen-Handy, 2021; Dillard & Bell, 2011). Our data sources included video diaries, photovoice prompts, photoelicitative duoethnographic interviews, and critical reflections on care practices. We analyzed these elicited texts through a textual analysis approach (Charmaz, 2006), uncovering the affective, embodied, and epistemic dimensions of becoming Black motherscholars.
Two major themes emerged. The first, On the Borderlands: The Hard Balance, illustrates the ongoing negotiation of presence and absence in our roles as mothers and scholars. For example, one participant captured her son’s first steps after deciding to “say enough is enough” to work—highlighting the emotional and logistical costs of navigating academic motherhood in a system built to devalue both (see Figure 1a). These cultural collisions (un choque) reflect how academic norms discipline and constrain Black maternal labor while also exposing moments of resistance, choice, and agency.
The second theme, Figuring the Both/And, illuminates the transformation from fragmented roles into a more integrated mestiza identity. Through visual and dialogic reflection, we rejected binary logics that frame us as either “mothers” or “scholars.” Instead, we embraced a both/and posture rooted in flexibility, refusal, and non-duality. One participant’s video diary exemplifies this shift as she reflects on the labor of consciousness-building and the possibility of reimagining scholarly identity through the lens of embodied care.
Our project underscores the necessity of methodologies that honor the complexity of Black women’s lives and knowledge. Visual duo-nkwaethnography allowed us to make visible the intimate geographies of becoming—naming and valuing our evolving practices, negotiations, and refusals. In doing so, we offer this work as both testimony and method for imagining more humanizing and liberatory spaces within and beyond the academy for Black motherscholars.

Authors

• Laura Krystal Porterfield, Rutgers University - Newark

• Lynnette Mawhinney, Rutgers University - Newark