Black Motherscholarship within and Beyond the Academy: Reconceptualizing Radical Futurity

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium centers the narratives and intellectual labor of Black motherscholars whose lives rupture and reimagine the academy. Grounded in Black feminist and queer epistemologies, the session explores how race, gender, queerness, and motherhood intersect within higher education to shape both constraint and possibility. Using critical race mothering, poetic inquiry, autoethnography, and visual duo-nkwaethnography, presenters illuminate the everyday survival, spiritual resistance, and care practices that sustain Black scholarly life. Individual presentations will lead into a panel discussion exploring collective themes, tensions, and visions for institutional transformation. Refusing deficit framings, this symposium affirms Black motherhood as a source of knowledge, creativity, and liberation—calling for educational spaces that honor the complexity and brilliance of those historically excluded.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Research on Women and Education

Chair

• Crystasany R. Turner, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

Papers

• Conceptualizing Spirituality in Critical Race Mothering Within and Beyond the Academy - Larissa Malone, University of North Carolina - Wilmington

• We Ain’t Going If She Can’t Come With Me: An Auto-ethnography of a Black Single Mama who Walked Across EVERY Stage with her Daughter - Daphanie N. Bibbs, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Black Motherscholars Figuring the Borderlands through Visual Duo-Nkwaethnography - Laura Krystal Porterfield, Rutgers University - Newark; Lynnette Mawhinney, Rutgers University - Newark

• Interrogations of the Mythical Norm: Using Endarkened Poetic Inquiry to Queer Black Motherscholarship - Meghan L. Green, Erikson Institute

• Looking Back to Move Forward: Unpacking Maternal Misogynoir in the Academy - Crystasany R. Turner, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

Session Organizer

• Crystasany R. Turner, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

Discussant

• Venus E. Evans-Winters, The Ohio State University