Embodied Knowledge: The Lived Experiences of Black Disabled Women

• In Event: Centering the Voices of Black Women and Girls in English Education

Abstract

Through a series of recorded conversations, the study explores how their intersecting identities, shaped by experiences as both learners and teachers in spaces historically marked by exclusion and marginalization, influence their perspectives. Rather than treating their narratives as outliers, this study positions their experiential knowledge as vital to understanding the institutional structures, cultural norms, and pedagogical practices that define and constrain the field of education.
The methodology draws on phenomenology to honor the fullness and complexity of lived experience, with particular attention to the ways the participants make meaning of their journeys through academia and into educational leadership. The conversations between the co-researchers function as both data and methodology, rooted in Black feminist traditions of storytelling, care, and mutual witnessing. Together, they trace shared themes including: the tension between hypervisibility and erasure in predominantly white institutions; the labor of navigating ableism and anti-Blackness while upholding commitments to inclusive and justice-centered pedagogy; the embodied toll of institutional survival; and the creative strategies they employ to build community, reimagine education, and resist erasure and thrive.
Findings illuminate how institutional discourse and structures often obscure or invalidate the knowledge of multiply marginalized educators, while simultaneously demanding their labor. Yet, through dialogue, reflection, and co-theorizing, the participants articulate a liberatory pedagogical stance rooted in disability justice, Black feminist thought, and a commitment to student humanity. Their conversations surface the emotional and intellectual work of crafting accessible, inclusive learning environments while contending with everyday institutional harm. The study highlights the power of counter-storytelling and community-based meaning-making as not only methodological choices, but survival strategies and sites of transformation.
This paper contributes to the growing body of scholarship that calls for deeper engagement with the experiences of Black Disabled educators, especially within English education and teacher preparation. It challenges narrow conceptions of who holds pedagogical authority and expands our understanding of what inclusive education demands—not only in theory, but in the daily practices, relationships, and decisions of educators. Ultimately, this work invites teacher educators, researchers, and institutional leaders to reflect on how structures of exclusion are maintained and how they might be reimagined through the wisdom and leadership of those most directly impacted.
By centering interwoven narratives of resistance, vulnerability, and thriving, this study resists the fragmentation of academic identity and insists on the legitimacy of Black Disabled women’s experiences as sites of knowledge production, specifically within the educational research world.

Author

• Elena Darling-Hammond, Stanford University