We Are the Evidence: Exploring the Personal As Scholarly and Experience As Knowledge

This roundtable brings together four scholars from across the Black/African diaspora, each positioned at various career stages within academia, to explore the racialized experiences they navigated in pursuing doctoral training and academic advancement. Through autoethnographic storytelling, participants offer embodied reflections that center lived experience as legitimate scholarship, illuminating institutional and psychological barriers while challenging dominant paradigms of knowledge production and academic belonging.

Grounded in the use of autoethnography as both a research method and a mode of resistance to support knowledge transfer and reclamation, this session affirms that personal narratives and experience are not ancillary to research but central to it; particularly for scholars whose bodies and identities are often rendered hypervisible or invisible within predominantly White institutions (PWIs). This methodological choice affirms the legitimacy of personal narrative and experience as research, allows for the interrogation of intersecting systems of power that shape academic identity formation, experiences, and survival, and challenges the epistemic demands that Black scholars leave their embodiments at the door.

This roundtable will focus on several central tensions: the burden of representation and invisibility, the emotional and intellectual toll of navigating Whiteness in the academy, access to effective mentorship, and the structural inequities embedded in doctoral training and faculty pipelines. Each speaker's narrative highlights personal vulnerability and collective struggle, allowing for insight into the everyday realities faced by Black scholars in higher education. Their diverse positionalities, ranging from African/Black diasporic heritage to gendered experiences and varied other identities, experiences, and affiliations, enrich this exploration.

Importantly, this roundtable does not aim to provide a singular truth, but instead honors multiple, coexisting truths rooted in diaspora, culture, and lived reality. Through dialogue, it aims to cultivate space for community-rooted knowledge. Lastly, this discussion contributes to an expanded understanding of scholarly legitimacy and offers a critical lens for examining the emotional, professional, and intellectual costs of academic survival for Black scholars.

The session structure includes a brief framing introduction, individual narrative sharing, and an extended interactive dialogue with attendees to encourage collaborative reflection and meaning making. It is especially relevant for academic administrators, doctoral advisors, faculty mentors, and students committed to equity and justice in higher education. Attendees will leave with tangible takeaways, including strategies for developing and cultivating affirming mentorship ecosystems, policy considerations for retention and equity, and community-building approaches to disrupt isolation and foster scholarly well-being.

By foregrounding personal experience as vital to scholarly inquiry and cultivating space for scholarly dialogue, this roundtable contributes to the broader SSWR theme of leading transformative change in social work education and research. It invites a reimagining of what constitutes valid knowledge, who holds epistemic authority, and how academic institutions must evolve to serve the communities they purport to uplift.