Community-engaged ethnography as Black feminist praxis

• In Event: Exploring Black, Chicana, and Decolonial Feminist Methodologies in Critical Criminology

Abstract

This paper explores community-engaged ethnography as a form of Black feminist methodology, drawing on three scholarly traditions. First, it draws from critical ethnographies in criminology which employ a “sociological double-consciousness” approach, characterized by a reflexive methodological practice that centers the everyday life and lived experiences of communities of color (Rios et al. 2017). Second, it is guided by Black feminist epistemology and praxis in its approach to data collection, communities, and modes of analysis. It emphasizes an ethic of care (Nash 2018), producing knowledge in service of social justice (Collins 2013) and critical, reflexive, and transparent engagement with our multiple standpoints as “outsiders within” (Collins 1986) academia, but also in relationship to the communities we work with. Third, it is guided by the work of scholars who have made efforts to engage with the contradictions – both challenges and possibilities – of activist scholarship (Gilmore 2018; Hale 2019). In so doing, it approaches community engagement as methodology, to practice knowledge production in “accompaniment” (Tomlinson and Lipsitz 2013) – by walking and working side by side with – the communities whom our research concerns. Synthesizing these methodological approaches, this paper presents a case study exploring their merging to form a community-engaged Black feminist ethnographic praxis.

Author

• Jasmine Kelekay, Howard University