(Un)deniable Grief & Healing: Historicizing and Futuring Intersectional Grief Literacies Among Black Women Faculty

• In Event: Grief as Remembrance: An Antidote to Institutional Trauma Across Educational Contexts

Abstract

We do not experience bereavement, grief, trauma, or healing in a vacuum. Therefore, this paper builds upon the urgent rationale, definition, and vision for “intersectional grief literacies” (Everett, 2023), a humanizing theoretical and methodological framework that seeks to explore, integrate, and create much-needed bereavement and grief resources that unapologetically, yet compassionately acknowledge race, gender, and class-related health disparities and death rates. By design, intersectional grief literacies, creates space to acknowledge how the interplay of racism, sexism, classism shape grief and grieving as well as who gets opportunities to grieve and heal. Drawing from a national mixed-methods empirical study (DeCuir-Gunby, 2020), this paper will (1) discuss how the academy imposes a loss of remembering, particularly of Black women’s bereavement and grief, (2) how Black women faculty engage in grief as remembrance and opportunities to heal—while also futuring research, teaching, and service in their respective fields of inquiry. This equity-oriented work is committed to the intersectional intellectual projects of (1) increasing the visibility and inclusion of Black women’s bereavement and grief experiences and (2) (re)shaping Black women’s relationships with bereavement and grief resources and research. In doing so, intersectional grief literacies generate possibilities to acknowledge, process, assess, and build capacity for humane and transformative racial and gender equity in bereavement and grief research, policies, and praxis.

Author

• Sakeena Everett, University of Connecticut