Empathic Historical Ethnography: Finding Previously Understudied Black Women in the U.S. Professoriate

• In Event: "How We Get Over": Methodological Approaches for Black Herstory in Education

Abstract

My studies of how Black women historically pursued graduate education and the professoriate are efforts to better understand the “loves” [empowering or inspiring points] and “troubles” [mediating oppressive structures] that remain in place today (Gilkes, 1993). Sparked by an archived newspaper clipping, I embarked on a study that spanned two years, archives in nine states, and pedagogical and socio-anthropological travels on three continents. In light of structural impediments in place during her lifetime, I asked the archives: (1) Who was sociologist Florence Beatty Brown? (2) Who and what did she value? (3)How did she determine her career path? (4) Why had I never heard of her, (5) Did she feel that she had a full and enriching career?
Combining Black feminist and womanist thought with Vanessa Siddle Walker’s conceptualization of historical ethnography, this reflective methodological essay forwards empathic historical ethnography as the way I conducted historical research on one Black professor’s life and career to understand Black female professors heretofore unclaimed as exemplars. From Black feminist thought, I draw on lived experience as a criterion of meaning and the interconnectedness of forms of oppression that mediated Brown’s lived experiences (Collins, 1990). Womanist thought provides the search for commonalities among Black female scholar educators in the United States, “even if the entry point is through the life of a particular individual” (Sheppard, 2003, p. 8). Walker (2009) combining anthropological and historical methods, explains that historical ethnography “ delineate[s] a historical period, event, and/or person with attention to time and place but also infuse[s] meaning into the events through a subaltern lens that elucidates the meaning the period or event held for the persons involved” (p. 241). Collins(1990) asserts that because of where Black women sit in overarching societal structures, we see the world (and its inhabitants) more sharply and can ask more pointed questions than someone differently positioned.
I discuss how I felt my way through archival documents and palpable archival silences based on my lived and observed experiences as a Black mother completing graduate education at the same institution as Brown and in my trepidation about a career in academia alongside a discussion of my systematic archival research methods (Fuentes, 2016). Brown and I share much in how we navigated higher education. These commonalities include personal decisions, health concerns, academic frustrations, (single) motherhood, and loss. Iteratively, I allowed myself to laugh, cry, get angry, doubt myself, and regroup as I searched for and made sense of Brown in the archives. I met silences not only with “a measured use of historical imagination,” but also experiential embodied knowledge (Hall, 2021, p. 36). It is because graduate education, and the pursuit of a career in academia remains just as fraught for many Black women as it was for Brown that I could conduct this study with an eye to where & how I might find her in the archives and where & how I surely would not.

Author

• Francena F.L. Turner, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author