Daddy Lessons: Metaphor, Memory, and the making of a Daughter Scholar

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 7:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Memory as Method: Black Epistemologies, Counterspaces, and Ancestral Inquiry in Qualitative Research

Abstract

This paper explores Daughtering as a liberatory, embodied methodology rooted in Black feminist/womanist and ancestral knowledge traditions. Through critical auto-ethnographic letters written to my father, I illuminate how metaphors, epistles, and embodied memory serve as data, method, and analytic. This work reclaims familial epistemologies—especially those passed down through Black kin—as legitimate sites of inquiry. Engaging Daughtering as a Black woman scholar and daughter, I expand Black feminist inquiry by foregrounding ancestral influence as a methodological inheritance. This paper invites qualitative researchers to reimagine auto-ethnography not as isolated reflection but as a collaborative, intergenerational act of knowledge making that bridges personal history, political resistance, and epistemic liberation.

Author

• Martha Clavelle, Grossmont College