The Spirit of Her Work: Dr. Cynthia Dillard & Responsibility

• In Event: (Re)membering, (Re)cognizing, and Responsibility: How Cynthia Dillard’s Work Helps Us Meet the Current Moment

Abstract

In the current educational climate increasingly shaped by anti-Blackness and Black erasure, it is more urgent as educational researchers to (re)member who we are—beyond bearing witness to the gutting of our profession, our research, and our future dreams (Love, 2023; Dillard, 2000). Dr. Cynthia Dillard (2000), in her seminal article “The Substance of Things Hoped For, the Evidence of Things Not Seen: Examining an Endarkened Feminist Epistemology in Educational Research and Leadership,” reminds us that knowledge is neither neutral nor individualistic. She writes:
“I will argue here that when we begin to move beyond race/ethnicity and gender as biological constructions to more culturally engaged explanations of being human, and when we seek to examine the origins of such knowledge constructions as to the very nature of how reality is known (its patterns of epistemology), we will find that what constitutes knowledge depends profoundly on the consensus and ethos of the community in which it is grounded” (Dillard, 2000, p. 662).
Dillard calls us to understand knowledge as communal, rooted in Black feminist traditions, a framework she names Endarkened Feminist Epistemology. This epistemology centers “the historical roots of Black feminist thought” while (re)membering that “the insistence of our humanity is in our DNA” (Dillard, 2022, p. 2).
Endarkened Feminist Epistemology is not simply a lens; it is a mandate to reframe research as responsibility within a “spiritual life,” which she defines as a “consciousness of and attention to the order, power, and unity that flows through all life and that encompasses an energy and responsibility greater than ourselves” (Dillard, 2022, p. 3).
Drawing on Dillard’s work this paper begins to ask: What is the educational researcher’s responsibility when we are called to be “serious enough to interrogate the epistemological, political, and ethical level of [our] work” (Dillard, 2000, p. 663).
We must ask ourselves:
• What is our responsibility as educational researchers in an age of educational anti-Blackness and erasure?
• How do we name and confront the systemic forces that demand our silence, neutrality, or complicity?
• How do we center Black life, joy, resistance, and futures in research that is being surveilled, co-opted, or defunded?
• In what ways must we (re)member our traditions, ancestors, and intellectual lineages as acts of scholarly resistance?
It is within the spirit of her work that our responsibility lies—for the future ahead of us as educational researchers who are “Black on purpose for a purpose” (Dillard, 2022, p. 8).

Author

• Bettina L. Love, Teachers College, Columbia University