Human-Centered: Discussion of How a Black Women's Collective Works to Disrupt the Research Process

• In Event: Humanizing Research Labs: How Faculty Use Their Labs to Dismantle, Redesign, and Reconstruct Oppressive Systems

Abstract

What began as a Black woman professor assessing local needs has become an interdisciplinary collective of Black women scholars committed to disrupting institutionalized ideas about how research can be done. The seed for Black Madison Voices (BMV) was planted when a Black alumni of Madison public schools critiqued the disturbing absence of Black perspectives in the city’s efforts to address educational inequities. This seed found fertile soil. This professor studies all-Black educational spaces and how they can serve as fugitive spaces offering shelter from anti-Black violence while inviting non-hegemonic Blackness and Black intellect and joy. This research led the professor to start a Black women’s writing group; following the dialogue with the aforementioned alumni, it was this group she contacted.
The writing group members decided to meet outside of their normal time to discuss their shared interest in centering Black women’s experiences, politics, and ethics. These meetings did not have a specific research aim or source of funding, but we are organized around understanding research in relation to ourselves and engaging interdisciplinary literature that supported us in setting our intentionality as Black women scholars. This practice of honoring our experiences and sitting in a space that encouraged honest and hard conversations allowed our group to build relationships with ourselves and each other and consider if and how we might work together. We discussed what it meant to be Black women in institutions that are violent, adversely impact our health, and even precipitate our death (Priest, 2008). We reflected on building spaces of radical love (Swift, 2020) built on our collective needs and desires and those of the communities we hope to learn and work alongside. Ultimately, we were drawn to scholarship that featured Black womanist epistemologies, research methods, and analyses (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002, 2005; Dixson, 2005; Lightfoot, 1983; Walker, 1984; Watson, 2018).
Soon after we began meeting, we joined an institutional grant submission to improve equitable access to higher education by building more accurate, community-based narratives about histories of racism in the scientific, technological, mathematical, and medical (STEMM) fields. Our research focus and name, Black Madison Voices, emerged out of this submission. Our mission became to: (1) honor institutional harms done to communities within K-12 and higher education settings, while creating new relations with and within those institutions; (2) elevate and amplify the voices of Black folks in Madison through reparative and humanizing relations; and (3) to learn from Black Madisonians’ to develop more just educational policies, practice, pedagogies, and curricula that respond to their needs and desires.
This paper explores how BMV is developing processes that humanize researchers, community members, and our research design, methods, analyses, and products. This paper will expand on how we are collectively building internal and external tools rooted in love, justice, and dignity throughout the research process to support the health and wellness of our team and Madison’s diverse Black communities. Our work refuses power hierarchies and dynamics of extraction and exploitation to (re)define research labs for Black women in academia as life-giving work.

Authors

• Maxine McKinney de Royston, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Virginia Downing, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Ashley N Gaskew, University of Wisconsin - Madison