BLACK FEMINIST PRACTITIONER INQUIRY INTO BLACK GIRLS’ SELF-LOVE LITERACIES

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Doctor of Education (EdD)
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Education
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01/01/2024
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Rosser, Barrett
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Abstract

Black girls experience violence in and out of school spaces. Therefore, considering their positionalities and the white patriarchal and sexist society in which we live, I theorize and practice Black feminist practitioner-research to explore how Black girls use their literacies to generate knowledge about love. This study centered the epistemologies of 13 high school-aged girls in order to disrupt traditional hierarchical notions of research and center the humanity of Black girls. Informed by Black feminist epistemologies, including theorizations of love, my research examined how high school-aged Black girls read, wrote, and talked about self-love in a biweekly out-of-school time inquiry group, making visible how they made sense of and practiced self-love. This digitally infused, 5-month qualitative study occurred in multiple settings, including a women’s center on a university campus, a national park site, and a memoir museum that honors Black girls. Through fieldnotes, journal entries, recordings, and transcripts of our sessions and semi-structured interviews, I looked closely at their experiences. Using collaborative inquiry, I privileged the girls’ knowledge to analyze data using observations, youth-recorded descriptive reviews, portraitures (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1983), journal reflections, and engagement in writing. Findings indicated: (a) the girls used their literacies to practice self-love through reflecting, moving, and knowing; (b) participation in the inquiry group made visible the histories, culture, and social constructs that shaped their knowledge and practice of self-love; and (c) Black Feminist Practitioner-Research is a spiritual act; it is praxis—using literacies to know and practice love.

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Waff, Diane
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2024
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