Endarkened Feminist Epistemology as Balm and Blueprint: The Enduring Influence of Dr. Cynthia B. Dillard on Educational Research and Praxis

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

Abstract

My contribution honors and engages the transformative scholarly contributions of Dr. Cynthia B. Dillard, whose articulation of endarkened feminist epistemology has served not only as a powerful intervention in educational research but also as a balm for those seeking more spiritually grounded, liberatory ways of knowing. While Dr. Dillard’s work is often associated with teacher education and K-12 contexts, her epistemological interventions—rooted in spirit, African diasporic identity, and Black feminist thought—offer expansive utility across disciplines, methodologies, and institutional borders (including my discipline of higher education). Her scholarship reminds us that educational research must be accountable not only to abstract theory but to the lived lives, histories, and futures of Black people.
My work, in many ways, has been an effort to follow Dr. Dillard’s invitation: to interrogate the epistemological, political, and ethical dimensions of our research practices. This paper synthesizes Dillard’s work with that of other critical scholars to propose a power-conscious model of collaborative research. Grounded in her notion of “research as responsibility,” we reimagine collaboration as an accountable, relational, and spirit-filled practice—answerable and obligated to the very communities we engage (Dillard, 2008, p. 4–5). I work to build a bridge between Toliver’s (2022) endarkened storywork by crafting a new narrative inquiry framework that insists on the presence of spirit, creativity, and ancestral knowing as essential elements of truth-telling and storytelling. Dr. Dillard’s work gives language and legitimacy to practices often dismissed as “unscientific” or “subjective”—offering instead a deeply rigorous, culturally grounded alternative.
I also had the opportunity to trace the nuances of Black feminist epistemologies in collaboration with colleagues. My contribution focused specifically on the tenets of endarkened feminist epistemology, highlighting how it honors the fullness of Blackness and spirit “on both sides of the water.” Dr. Dillard’s work disrupts dominant academic norms that too often ask Black scholars to perform whiteness for credibility. As she powerfully states, “Contrary to popular belief, Black scholars are not white scholars who happen to be Black; we have fundamentally different ways of seeing and thinking about the world” (Dillard, 2000, p. 663). Her writing, presence, and praxis are a portal into those different ways—centering love, joy, embodiment, and collective memory as critical to our intellectual labor.
In a time when educational research is increasingly constrained by market logics, technocratic imperatives, legislative and political assaults, Dr. Dillard’s work offers us a compass—one that guides us toward responsibility, integrity, and liberation. Her legacy is not only one of profound intellectual contribution but also of care, spirit, and joy. For those of us committed to transformative research and practice, especially in and beyond higher education, her endarkened epistemology is both a methodology and a ministry. In short, much like Dr. Dillard herself, it is a balm—and precisely what this moment calls for.

Author

• Terah J. Stewart, Iowa State University