Sistering as Understanding: Girl of Color Relational Work as Methodology

• In Event: Centering Epistemologies of Family: Relationality, Mutuality, and Care

Abstract

This presentation will examine the ways that an inquiry community emerged amongst a group of Black and Asian middle school girls in an after school writing club, which the girls named the “Unnormal Sisterhood.” A close look at this inquiry community will unearth possibilities for practitioner research as a feminist of color methodology that centralizes the knowledge and ways of knowing of women and girls of color. Women of color have long theorized the necessity for a reimagining of research methods, as so many dominant methodologies fail to capture the complexity and nuance of their existence, of their humanity (Collins, 2000; Delgado-Bernal, 1999; Dillard, 2000; Edwards, McArthur, Russell-Owens, 2016; Tuck, 2009;). These feminist of color ideologies around knowledge production illuminate the importance of cultural knowledge, dialogue, caring, and narrative as foundational to the generation of knowledge about women and girls of color. The presenter suggests that practitioner research methodologies offer opportunities for sisterhood as a means for knowledge production amongst women and girls of color. This vision of research builds on feminist (Lather, 1986), and, specifically, feminist of color (Delgado-Bernal, 1998; Dillard, 2000; Evans-Winters, 2019) research paradigms that emphasize knowledges often relegated out of traditional research paradigms. It centers the embodied knowledge, rooted in emotion and relationships, and community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) that girls and women of color bring with them and that positions them to best story, theorize, and suggest change around issues that affect them (Collins, 2000).

From the positionality of a woman of Color, the presenter will discuss a practitioner research study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) into a writing collaborative of Black and Asian middle school girls. Data analyzed through the lens of sisterhood will include fieldnotes, transcripts, and multimodal artifacts including girls’ writing and art. She will highlight the ways sisterhood emerged, opening possibilities for more humanizing (Paris & Winn, 2014) and democratizing research for and with girls of color. This discussion will reveal how sisterhood became both a site of knowledge production as well as an analytical tool to unpack the complications of forming solidarity across differences as the girls used community and cultural literacies to navigate understandings and misunderstandings of their radical connectedness and differences as implicated in solidarity. Sisterhood, then, has both pedagogical and methodological implications for the field of education. This is significant as girls of color remain often external to policy and research that fails to recognize either their strength or vulnerabilities born of their intersecting identities (AAPF & CISPS, 2015).

Author

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut - Storrs