Beats of Endurance: A Womanist Spatial Examination of Black Women’s Academic Refusal Through Hip Hop Testimonios

• In Event: It’s in My Bones: Advancing the Embodiment of Theory for and by Blackgirls and Women

Abstract

Purpose
This paper explores how Black womxn doctoral students and recent Ph.D. graduates conceptualize and contest academic space through embodied refusal and narrative resistance. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of spatial imaginaries and womanism, this work centers the spatial and emotional geographies of Black womxn navigating epistemic violence within the academy. Using a dual-method approach that combines testimonio with hip hop music elicitation, this paper illustrates how participants use cultural expression to resist, endure, and reimagine their academic environments. The study advances theory and method by naming and legitimizing the emotional and spatial labor of Black womxn as a site of knowledge production.

Perspectives
The study draws from two primary epistemological frameworks:
1. Womanism: Emphasizing Black womxn’s full humanity, moral wisdom, and radical care, womanism in this context serves as both a theoretical and methodological stance. It centers the sacredness of Black womxn’s lived knowledge and their historical role in community healing and justice.
2. Spatial Imaginaries / Critical Geography: This lens considers how spaces are not neutral but imagined, material, and imbued with power. The academy, in this framing, is a historically white, patriarchal, and exclusionary space. Participants in this study expose and resist this spatial narrative, articulating their belonging through cultural, emotional, and physical refusals.
Together, these frameworks support the development of Womanist Spatial Theory, which conceptualizes how Black womxn reclaim spatial power by transforming their environments through embodied resistance, spiritual endurance, and community grounding.

Discussion
This study examines how early academic Black womxn navigate and resist the racialized, gendered terrain of academia. Participants described their endurance not as passive resilience but as an intentional, embodied practice. Through strategies like strategic silence, cultural anchoring, and refusal to conform, they crafted ways of knowing and being that challenged institutional norms.
Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” emerged as a shared site of resistance and reflection. The song was not merely background music; it became a theoretical anchor, helping participants name harm, reclaim space, and imagine survival. Their engagement with music, particularly hip hop, was deeply epistemological.
Rather than adapting to the academy’s constraints, participants reimagined academic space on their terms. Their testimonios revealed theory in motion, theory that lives in the body, in the beat, and refusal. Their ways of knowing challenge dominant paradigms and call for more expansive understandings of scholarly legitimacy and belonging.

Author

• Monet Harbison, Drexel University