I Am Because She Is: Epistemological Permission through Endarkened Knowledge-Ways

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

Abstract

Introduction/Objectives
Epistemology is something we do, not something that happens to us. Many Black scholars are welcomed into the academy via epistemological closure—the presumption that all legitimate knowledge traditions have been discovered and catalogued, with certain paradigms positioned as foundational while others are systematically excluded. In my own academic formation, I engaged in sustained study of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Rosenblatt, Foucault, and Dewey. Black and Indigenous scholars, however, were compressed into a “critical perspectives” week that acknowledged their existence while withholding the sustained engagement. While scholars of color exist in the field, their intellectual contributions are positioned as supplementary rather than foundational to educational knowledge.
However, scholars like Cynthia Dillard challenge this closure by centering African ascendant ways of knowing. Dillard’s work provides awareness of alternative epistemologies and permission to engage approaches assert the validity of knowledge systems rooted in African diasporic traditions. So, in this paper I consider how Dillard’s work creates space for scholars to move toward the active employment and study of decolonized knowledge practices. To do this, I center two questions: (1) In what ways does Dillard’s foundation offer epistemological permission for otherwise ways of knowing, being, and doing in educational research? (2) How might this permission create openings for scholars to employ similarly expansive knowledge-ways?

Methodology
This study employed critical autoethnography (Boylorn & Orbe, 2021) undergirded by Dillard’s Endarkened feminist epistemologies. Critical autoethnography focuses on culture, power, and cultural identities while centering the researcher as a site of analysis and demanding a cultural focus that broadens self-examination into larger discussions about culture, identity, and ways of knowing. For this paper, I generated data through analysis of documents from my graduate school experience (syllabi, course papers, reading lists, and personal notes), separating data into pre- and post-Dillard categories to note shifts in my thinking. Using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), I grouped data into categories, examined links, and took research memos, comparing information across clusters and noting themes using central organizing concepts. Following critical autoethnography’s emphasis on storytelling, I wrote findings as a Black feminist mosaic (Evans-Winters, 2019), placing Dillard’s work in conversation with my own findings.

Findings
I generated three findings. (1) Permission to Remember: Dillard’s Endarkened epistemologies validated my own cultural knowledge-ways that had been dormant in academic spaces, offering permission to reclaim ancestral ways of knowing. (2) Permission to Research Otherwise: Her framework provided methodological pathways that centered relationality, spirituality, and embodied knowledge as legitimate research approaches. (3) Permission to Be Whole: Dillard’s work created space for bringing my full self—cultural, spiritual, and intellectual—into scholarly practice rather than compartmentalizing identity. The Black feminist mosaic revealed how encountering Dillard’s epistemological offering transformed my research questions, methodological choices, and understanding of what counts as valid knowledge in educational research.

Significance
This work contributes to critical scholarship by demonstrating how specific epistemological frameworks can serve as sites of permission for marginalized scholars. It extends Dillard’s theoretical contributions, showing their practical application in graduate student formation and offers a methodological example of critical autoethnography tracing epistemological transformation.

Author

• Stephanie R. Toliver, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign