Kinship as Foundation: Reclaiming Self and Spirit through Sisterhood in the Aftermath of Institutional Violence

• In Event: From Spirit Lynching to Radical Well-Being: Kinship as Resistance to Violence in Higher Education

Abstract

In the face of spirit lynching—a form of public, racialized-gendered violence described in Presentation #1—we turned to one another to survive. This presentation explores sisterhood/kinship not just as a personal coping mechanism but as a rigorous research methodology and collective healing praxis. We draw from traditions of Black feminist thought (Dillard, 2000; Hill Collins, 2000), radical love (hooks, 2001), and critical collaborative autoethnography (Davis et al., 2021) to show how kinship functioned as a powerful counter-sorcery against institutional violence, systemic gaslighting, and public shaming.

Following a traumatic conference incident that marked our collective with grief, confusion, and spiritual fatigue, we began meeting regularly across Zoom, text, voice notes, and spontaneous calls. These weren’t mere check-ins; they were acts of reclamation. We came to call these spaces “kinship sessions”, intentional gatherings for mutual witnessing, radical listening, truth-telling, and soul-tending. Kinship here is not merely friendship or support; it is a methodology rooted in ancestral survival strategies, a praxis of embodied resistance that honors both affect and intellect, both silence and sound, both survival and dreaming.

Our collective is composed of three Black Caribbean women and one white, non-binary U.S.-born scholar. This configuration intentionally disrupts essentialist notions of solidarity by showing how kinship can transcend racial and gender lines when rooted in shared political commitments, vulnerability, and reciprocal care. In this presentation, we share key elements of our kinship methodology:
* Sketching as self-seeing, where we drew our pain and resilience as a mode of embodied reflection
* The “Soul Balm” playlist, a curated 25-song archive of musical healing
* Love letters to the self and each other, offering affirmations and rituals of remembrance
* Audio reflections, spontaneous verbal journalings that served as data, therapy, and prayer
This kinship practice was not supplementary to our scholarship, it was our scholarship. The healing became the inquiry. Our truths became our findings. In this presentation, we emphasize the importance of creating intellectual spaces where emotionality, grief, rage, and joy are not only permitted but necessary. Importantly, we frame kinship as a method of resistance to the isolation and internalized doubt that often follow spiritual violence. In an academy where survivors are gaslit into silence or pressured to “move on,” our kinship allowed us to pause, to feel, to rage, to laugh, and to reorient ourselves toward life. As such, kinship became a methodology of resilience, aligned with a focus on adaptive response and wellness across the educational lifespan.

We argue that such practices are essential to the future of educational research. If the field is to truly reckon with its death-making structures, it must also take seriously the creative, embodied, spiritual practices that offer alternatives. Kinship, in our framework, is not nostalgic; it is radical, iterative, and forward-facing. It prepares us not just to survive the next wound, but to dream beyond the wound entirely.

Author

• Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel, University of California - Berkeley