23:T42c,

Based on data collected from 12 young Black women, and the literary voice of Janie Crawford, Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 protagonist in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Kelly Pryor creates an ethnodramatic script reflecting the perception, portrayal, and performance of hope. Reflectively acknowledging her role as ethnographer, Kelly Pryor creates this script by re(membering) narratives from the literary text and transcripts, while maintaining fidelity to each interlocutor’s words. Kelly Pryor uses this one-act play to demonstrate the Black female literary tradition is a space of transcendence that echoes social theory, further enabling her to explore the complex voices of identity and hope in contemporary qualitative inquiry. Creating a new genre of ethnodrama, a literary ethnodrama, Kelly Pryor concludes this experimental method further offers reader and author opportunities for envisioning a world in which art and science coexist to illuminate topics often neglected in empirical investigations.

24:T44d,

How might ethnodrama (re)present ways that academic mothers responded to the collision of work/home, especially as it was intensified by virtual/electronic tools like Zoom? In 2021, we interviewed 54 academic mothers about their experiences in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. In hearing their stories, we became interested in the ways spaces were constructed for both privacy and/or accessibility, relative to what was (in)visible when on camera. Noting the interconnectedness of their experiences and work/home spaces, this paper elevates the possibilities of ethnodrama as humanizing methodological means of emphasizing the individual yet interconnected perspectives and lives for these academic mothers. Drawing inspiration from the Chorus, as a literary device grounded in ancient Greece and feminism, ethnodrama explores how these participants came to create spaces in relation to their roles as academic mothers. The resulting tale(s) and characters are, like dramatic Choruses, many and one: specific and universal, descriptive and interpretive, historical and prophetic.

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“Hope’s Elevator”

Enter,the Chorus: An Ethnodrama of Academic Motherhood in (and Beyond) the COVID-19 Pandemic