No Shelter in the Time of Storm: A Black Womanist Inquiry into Teaching, Studying, and Surviving in Higher Education

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

Abstract

This paper explores the emotional, mental, and spiritual vulnerability of Black women navigating dual roles as doctoral students and adjunct instructors in higher education. Framed through Black Feminist theory (Collins, 1986; hooks, 1994) and the lens of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), the study draws upon phenomenology and autoethnography to interrogate the lived realities of inhabiting academic spaces structured by whiteness, patriarchy, and institutional hierarchy.
The methodological approach is twofold. First, it employs a phenomenological lens to examine how Black women experience and make meaning of academic life at the intersections of race, gender, and professional status. Second, it incorporates autoethnography as both method and data, grounding the analysis in the author’s personal experiences across doctoral study and university teaching. This approach privileges embodied, emotional, and spiritual ways of knowing that are often devalued in traditional academic discourse. Drawing from Dillard’s (2000) Endarkened Feminist Epistemology, the paper affirms that Black women’s knowledge production is deeply rooted in lived experience, cultural memory, and spiritual consciousness.
Findings highlight three key themes: (1) hypervisibility and epistemic marginalization in doctoral training; (2) emotional labor and pedagogical precarity in the classroom; and (3) the absence of institutional care, resulting in sustained emotional and psychological risk. These findings are situated within the broader structural context of higher education, where Black women are often positioned as “outsiders within” (Collins, 1986), expected to teach, mentor, and represent, all while navigating spaces where their intellectual and personal safety is consistently under threat.
Through thick description, reflexive analysis, and a commitment to theoretical clarity, this paper illustrates how Black Feminist phenomenology can disrupt dominant academic narratives and reposition Black women’s lived experiences as legitimate sites of knowledge. By foregrounding personal narrative as both method and meaning, the study shifts the discourse from one of individual resilience to one of structural critique and institutional accountability.

Author

• Vivett Cereta Hemans Dukes, Teachers College, Columbia University