Black Graduate Women and Femmes a/r/Tography for Collective Sensemaking and Healing

This paper presents findings from a larger project wherein Black women and femmes in graduate school came together to make sense of their professional socialization experiences, through curating and sharing creative and geographic visual data during 2020’ s COVID-19 pandemic quarantine period. The paper builds on the author’s prior scholarship about the (a) spiritual identity development of Black women and femmes in education, and (b) use of embodied research methods in social sciences scholarship done for/by/with/about Black women and femmes.

Moreover, it illustrates using two research methods that support engaging Black women’s and femmes’ embodied knowledge about a developmental process: a/r/tography, and critical geography. The use of these methods in tandem allowed study participants to explore, “manners in which Black [women] (co-)construct geographies for their professional growth that (a) retain Black [womanhood] at their centers – and in doing so, (b) challenge academia’s dominant discourses about students’ socialization processes and outcomes” (Author). The data are rendered as digital collages and digital maps of participants’ academic institution, which participants developed based on IRB-approved prompts.

“A/r/tography is an interdisciplinary, nonlinear, and collectivistic approach wherein participants are simultaneously artists, researchers, and teachers. A/r/tographers aim to engage knowing, doing, and making by interpreting and representing knowledge through creative praxes (e.g., dancing, photography, poetry, etc.; Irwin, 2012; Irwin & de Cosson, 2004)” (Author). “Critical geography is the examination of physical spaces as social constructions wherein daily realities are de/re/constituted, negotiated, and performed (alexander, 2022; Ko & Hong, 2019; Lefebvre, 1991). Ko and Hong call attention to ways that peoples’ inter/actions and movements in a space shape and are shaped by conditions that are fluid.... (2019) and thus, allow for both meaning- and place-making by participants within and beyond a given Inquiry” (Author).

In presenting the study’s findings, the author will discuss:

• embodiment as an epistemic framework;
• prevalent constructs for embodiment in social sciences scholarship – which have been used, expanded, and championed by Black women and femme scholars and practitioners;
• definitions and key principles of a/r/tography;
• definitions and key principles of critical geography; and
• how a/r/tography and critical geography, as embodied research methods, support Black women’s and femmes’ knowledge processes in social sciences scholarship.

References:

• alexander, e. (2022). Locating themselves: Black womxn’s geographies of professional socialization. Research in Education Policy and Management, 4(2) (Special Issue: Reimagining Educational Policy and Leadership Beyond the Plunder of Neoliberal Technorationality), 80–98. https://doi.org/10.46303/repam.2022.8
• Irwin, R., & de Cosson, A. (2004). A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry. Pacific Educational Press.
• Irwin, R. L. (2012). A/r/tography. In L. M. Given (Ed.), The SAGE encyclopedia of qualitative research methods (pp. 27–28). Sage Publications.
• Ko, D., & Hong, J. J. (2019). Social production of space and everyday microaggressions: A case study of (im)migrant youth in South Korea. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 5(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2019.1697468
• Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Blackwell Publishers.