Abstract
Our co-knowledged article conceptualized one version of an educator-activist collective’s Black relational methodology (BRM). Co-conceptualization began through Nate’s invitation to the Collective, a relational space dedicated to knowledge co-creation capable of imagining equitable and just educational policy futures. Over the course of four collective sessions, an answerability defense, a conference presentation, and co-authoring this piece, we agreed there was something ancestrally ordained about our Black onto-epistemology. Nate rendered his coding activities answerable to the Collective and we forwarded two epistemic themes—nuanced joy and relationality—as seminal to our BRM. By conceptualizing our BRM, we aim to amplify narratives offering paths towards equitable Black futures, center nuanced joy in educational research, and illuminate the influence relationality has on knowledge co-creation processes. Finally, we implicate how BRM could be an important onto-epistemological component in decisions to mobilize knowledge co-creation in pursuit of equitable educational policy futures.
Introduction
This co-knowledged 1 article shares a journeyed story sustained through a predominantly-Black educator activist collectives’ onto-epistemological and axiological decisions to center Black joy and healing while imagining beyond anti-Black educational policy realities. The co-authors, Nate, Meghan, Wali, Fawn, and Lizzy, offer this story to conceptualize Black relational methodology (BRM), or the centering of our relationships to each other as comrades and co-researchers in the pursuit of liberation and self-determination (Middlebrook, 2019). Human connectedness has been one of the most resounding forces in the buttressing of Black life and living (Walton et al., 2022). Moreover, reclaiming and recentering Black life and humanness, in knowledge co-creation, may be one of the most consequential steps Black people can take (Wynter, 1994, 2003). We set BRM juxtaposed to its epistemic potential to sustain Black joy as our collective continued to imagine, build, and act. This article shares the story of our work together to co-create a liberatory and healing space.
Our knowledge-creation activities explored how Black educators sustain their well-being and healing while co-imagining beyond anti-Blackness and being subjected to that oppression at the same time. Black educators hold a nuanced and in-depth awareness of the ways society perpetuates anti-Blackness at the structural and institutional levels. This awareness has led us to protecting Black students (McKinney de Royston et al., 2021) and connecting them with their critical consciousness (Goss, 2015) which may engender joy (Benson et al., 2021). However, heightened consciousness may lead to anger, rage, and discontent as Black teachers are bombarded by anti-Blackness at high frequencies (Frank et al., 2021; Wun, 2016). Black intellectual thought leaders have written about how heightened consciousness can render Black people in a constant state of rage. Famously, James Baldwin wrote, “To be [Black] in [the United States] and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage…almost all of the time” (Simons, 2020). Baldwin articulated a complex reality Black people have been forced to maneuver across the joy and rage continuum. In educational policy knowledge co-creation and research 2 , this maneuvering involves important sustainment considerations. Our piece offers paths forward within Black-led, conversational, and relational knowledge co-creation processes.
Our inquiry shares knowledge forwarding one version of Black relational methodology (BRM). We say “one version” because we do not claim ownership of this knowledge. In fact, we stand on the shoulders of our over 15,000 African ancestors and their knowledge contributions. Extending our ancestral gifts to imagine beyond (Kelley, 2022), our Black-led educator collective turned toward complexity, relationality, and joy in knowledge co-creation despite anti-Blackness. It is important to note that BRM is not a method, or a tool to gather data. We use Brayboy and colleagues’ (2012) helpful differentiation between methods and methodologies. That is, BRM is an epistemological, ontological, and axiological turn, or a stance surrounding what knowledge is, how it is valued, used, and created (Botha et al., 2021; Garcia & Mayorga, 2018). Black relational methodology is one system of knowledge co-creation in helping comrades identify co-conceptualization of truth, value relational and ancestral knowledges, and negotiate utility in the pursuit of Black liberation and self-determination.
Exploring nuances in Black-led knowledge co-creation, read knowing and being, is a crucial BRM component. Black educators are products of an infinite convergence of lived experiences, social localities, and identities. Thus, a monolithic theory of Black joy oversimplifies our social convergences. Black educators are justified in having intense anger at a system that disdains us (Dumas & ross, 2016; Matti, 2015). Simultaneously, white elites have long used demoralization and rage as a tool to engender disengagement, exhaustion, and pacify and criminalize movements (Kaba, 2021). Reconciliation between the realities to which we are subjected, and an unapologetic love of nuanced Black joy are essential considerations within BRM (Dumas, 2014). This article contributes to educational policy knowledge co-creation spaces that are Black-led and consider healing and sustainment in research activities. Our collective’s BRM contributes to the analysis, interrogation, and ultimate destruction of systemic anti-Blackness and it demands a turn toward relational, educational research paradigms.
Literature and Frameworks
Our work is theorized at the intersection of Black intellectual thought and relational research paradigms. Specifically, we center Black femme folks whose knowledge and writings have inspired us to pursue nuanced joy. We start with how Black women’s relationality, knowledge, brilliance, and lived experiences frame and center joy’s complexities and nuances.
Black Intellectual Thought and Nuanced Joy
Educational co-researchers’ relationship to joy stems from an infinitely complex process that involves convergent social localities, community, co-existence with rage, identities, temporal considerations, and mental health status. Black folks’ relationship to joy can be described as deeply nuanced to capture complexity. We argue Black women’s joy-related writings and perspectives (see hooks, 2006; Biana, 2021) must be the starting point due to Black feminist epistemologists’ “commitments to foregrounding Black women’s experiences and truths” (Stark, 2023, p. 6). In the anti-Black and patriarchal world system, white people or people who identify as men benefit in prioritizing Black women’s nuanced perspectives on joy. Our collective, made up of three Black women and two Black men, was committed to prioritizing Black women’s voices in our conversations.
The politics of Black joy has been historically situated within Black women’s intellectual contributions. The politics of Black joy have been identified in Zora Neale Hurston’s pursuit of Black self-determination, or the acts of centering Black decision-making and voices in creating ideas, concepts, or policies that directly impact Black people. Lindsey Stewart (2021) historicized Hurston’s work through illuminating how she circumvented progressive allies’ perceptions of Southern Black life. As early as the 1900s, white abolitionists and some Black academics described Southern Black life as focused on tragedy and sorrow. Stewart named “how the racism of [Black people’s] liberal allies is fed by stories of our abjection” (p. 7). She theorized Hurston’s Black southern joy as an act of refusal. Black joy was more than celebrating victories from acts to circumvent the violent realities whiteness constructed for Black bodies. Joy involved moving whiteness to the peripherals and centering everyday Black Southern jubilance. Stewart’s interpretation of Hurston’s work historicizes Black joy negotiations and situates joy as an inward struggle as opposed to outward resistance to white supremacy. Black people have mobilized and continue to mobilize joy beyond victories against white supremacy.
Black women have forwarded important considerations about the interplay between rage and joy. Brittney Cooper (2018) has written about how Black women have harnessed rage as a fuel to build new futures. Cooper is clear that Black women’s rage is justified and nuanced. In Eloquent Rage, she proclaimed, “Black women have the right to be mad as hell” (p. 4). Cooper described the long list of rage justifications from societal disdain to a lack of reproductive autonomy. Black women’s labor, bodies, and contributions undergird almost all economic, social, medical, or technological advancements (Jones, 2009). However, societal elites and policy processes continue to neglect, overlook, and undervalue Black women’s contributions. Cooper’s eloquent rage conceptualization holds an important nuanced Black joy perspective. As Audre Lorde (1981) proclaimed, My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, on that anger, beneath that anger, on top of that anger, ignoring that anger, feeding upon that anger, learning to use that anger before it laid my visions to waste…(p. 7)
Lorde believed anger, or rage, had an important and nuanced role in mobilizing her toward building new futures. Her attention to negotiating rage and anger begat her pursuit of anti-racist realities. Unequivocally, nuanced Black joy has stemmed from collective and individual rage acknowledgement and negotiation. Black people have set this emotionally intelligent rage acknowledgement juxtaposed to its future-building potential via movement sustentation. Nuanced Black joy dispels attempts to pacify rage in a system that causes suffering.
Black women’s descriptions of nuanced Black joy are steeped in mental health prioritization, sustainment, and relationality. Black feminist thought leader, adrienne marie brown (2017), has argued joy, healing, and pleasure considerations must be centered in movement spaces. Moreover, rage can be an all-consuming force of despair and hopelessness. There have been countless frontline community organizers we have lost to the mental health burden related to individuals’ transformative efforts (Viviano & Cooley, 2019). Thus, brown and other organizers have argued that there may be an opportunity to embed collective healing in movement spaces, including the classroom (Kokka, 2023). Embedded communal healing may position rage in its transformational potential and away from perceived inescapable pain.
Communal healing cannot take place without relationship building. Carruthers (2018), a queer Black woman activist, has asserted, “People and their relationships are—and must be—at the core of long-term transformative change” (p. 91). Justice movements’ foundations are people and their interconnectedness. Strong relationships can withstand dips and lows in mental healthiness and wellbeing. Black educators have demonstrated the ability to insulate themselves and their Black students in co-created Black educational spaces that place anti-Blackness bombardments at the peripherals (Jackson, 2020; ross et al., 2016; Warren & Coles, 2020). This article extends classroom-oriented Black spaces to research projects where Black educators co-create knowledge despite harmful educational policy systems.
Black Educators’ Joy Considerations
It is important to describe modern realities for Black educators and their relationship to joy because it impacts their capacities to prioritize their mental health. A heightened level of awareness places Black educators in emotional volatility where constant bombardments of structural anti-Black violence may lead to withdrawal, exhaustion, low mental health, and hopelessness (Acuff, 2018; Benson et al., 2021; Coles & Stanley, 2021). These educational policy realities relate to Hurston and Cooper’s Black joy conceptualizations. Hurston-inspired theorists would evaluate the level to which educational policy actors place deficit frames on Black educational spaces (see Ladson-Billings, 2006). Then, turn to Black educators’ efforts where whiteness is at the peripherals. Cooper-inspired theorists would interrogate how educators’ rage is simultaneously a deconstructive and future-building force. Our article considers how Black educators may negotiate these stances as an attempt to center joy, turn inward, and imagine new futures within research activities.
Black educators have mobilized ancestral freedom dreaming to co-imagine beyond current realities and this may be an important nuanced joy negotiation tool (Stewart, 2024). Freedom dreaming is rooted in Black peoples’ temporally transcendent and ancestrally-grounded co-imaginaries (Kelley, 2022). Joy stems from realizing Black educators may be able to transform policy if they pursue power fueled by human connectedness. Or, Black educators may be able to protect and insulate each other and their students from anti-Black structural harm. McKinney de Royston et al. (2021) have described how Black teachers act to keep Black students safe from harm through establishing structural protections. Here, Black teachers create insular spaces where students understand they deserve love and care. In another example of Black co-imagination, Kokka (2023) shared her co-creation of healing counter-spaces where Black students understood themselves as brilliant and critical mathematicians. Black educators routinely create spaces of projection and protection to honor Black students’ joy and humanity and reject an exclusive focus on Black pain and loss (Dunn & Tubman, 2024; Owusu et al., 2024). Black educational spaces are inundated with actions setting anti-Black structures at the peripherals while simultaneously centering educator-student relationships. Unequivocally, there is a negotiated messiness that takes place between and within Black educators’ relationality and co-imaginaries (Stewart et al., 2023). The messiness resides in maneuvering within anti-Black structures while imagining beyond them.
Relationality and Communal Healing
Relationality in research centers human connectedness in all knowledge creation activities. Relationality is an anti-colonial epistemological stance because it rejects settler colonial efforts to establish knowledge hierarchies (Patel et al., 2015 2016). In these hierarchies, western, white researchers may attempt to extract knowledge from Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities (Tuck, 2009). In opposition, relational researchers strive to abolish colonial hierarchies, collectively pursue humanization, respect negotiations, and sustain relationships throughout research activities (Fast & Kovach, 2019; San Pedro et al., 2017; San Pedro & Kinloch, 2017). Stewart & Thompson (2023), two of this study’s Collective members, theorized how co-researcher relationships and solidarity building can lead to healing across racialized harm. Nate and Lauren’s co-healing took place across cross-racialized social localities. In this article, co-authors explore relationality’s healing influence between and among Black collective members.
The act to center collective members’ relationships to each other and heal is an extension of the practices and knowledges of our African ancestors (Bird, 2022). Menakem (2021) has argued the most powerful contribution Black people can make to our futures is to acknowledge pain and heal potential intergenerational and racialized trauma. Intergenerational traumas have been defined as unhealed pain passed down from generation to generation. Racialized trauma indicates the negative influence European-created and mythical race hierarchies have on mental, physical, and spiritual health (Winter, 2020). Black co-researchers’ prioritization of healing in knowledge co-creation holds major implications to educational research and policy studies. When we regulate how racialized trauma may manifest in our bodies, minds, and spirits, then we can be better positioned to sustain our efforts to transform oppressive educational policy realities and mobilize knowledge co-creation. Specifically, our relational onto-epistemologies emphasize goals towards “…contemplating and actualizing [our] freedom…” beyond our oppression (Wilson & McMillian, 2024, p. 4). This article is guided by an intentional reflection on the extent to which relational practices are embedded in educational policy knowledge co-creation activities– we conceptualize this reflection as Black relational methodology, or BRM.
Methodology and Methods
Our Black relational methodology holds an interconnected epistemology, ontology, and axiology buttressing various knowledge co-creation activities. Our knowledge co-creation activities involved storytelling, co-authoring activities, and post-project conversations. As we co-theorized Black relational methodology, we strived for togetherness. We sought to connect with and value similarly-situated knowledge contributors in how co-researchers unapologetically center the power of Black relationality. This articles’ co-authors took part in an educator activist collective co-imagining Black-and-Indigenous-created educational policy futures. For this article, we focus on our Collective’s five Black knowledge contributors.
Our Black-led Educator Activist Collective
Nate, the study’s dissertator, sent out an invitation calling for a convening of Black, Brown, and Indigenous educator activists. He designed the educator activist project to co-create a space to place whiteness at the peripherals and imagine beyond anti-Black, colonial, and racist educational policy structures. Nate wanted to co-create a space that could allow for negotiation of tensions within co-imaginary and research activities.
Nine educators answered the call and five of the nine joined Nate in all knowledge co-creation activities. Our collective was composed of four women and two men. The final collective was made up of the five Black educators (including the study’s dissertator) and one Indigenous educator. We described ourselves as educator activists in a multitude of ways. Notably, Nate expanded his conceptualization of teacher/educator to mean those who teach and learn with youth in K-12 school spaces, not just state-licensed classroom teachers. Only two comrades were current licensed teachers (one middle school and one elementary), two others were former licensed classroom teachers (one graduate student and one dean of students), and two more were never licensed teachers but worked extensively with students in K-12 schools. The throughline was in how we mobilized our teaching and learning to invite the next generation of justice-oriented leaders. Our pedagogical and political activism utilized various resources, such as lessons, stories, and discussions, to connect students with their already-present process in acting to dismantle societal oppression (see Stewart, 2023).
The Collective held four sessions throughout the entire project, but most of the conversational data informing this article stems from dialogue during our third collective session. Days before the third session, the anti-Black policing system murdered a brilliant Tik Tok artist and 16-year-old Black girl, Ma’Khia Bryant. 3 Black communities have described anti-Black violence and its effect on communal well-being (Coles, 2018). When one of us is subjected to harm, we all feel it. Black people feel collective pain because we see ourselves in each other, loved ones, or our students—a communal sense passed to us from our African ancestors. Not only did we see ourselves in Ma’Khia, but several collective members had connections to community members and youth close to her.
There were discussions about canceling our third session due to anger, sadness, and despair. Relationally, Nate prompted an email discussion to inquire about comrade’s capacities to shift our session to center joy and healing (see Appendix A). Comrades’ email responses unanimously agreed to proceed with session three rooted in collectively negotiating Black joy and healing. We focused analysis on session three because we made an intentional and collective decision to inundate conversation with reconciliation through joy, healing, and rage. Further, session three became a staple in how our work extended beyond the dissertation project and cemented Black relational methodology’s central principles.
Moreover, the Collective’s Black relational methodology theorization stemmed from our reflections from Nate’s Answerability Defense. An answerability defense is something Nate imagined from his attempts to make clear the Collective’s commitment to each other as we moved our knowledge in ways that made sense for the group. Traditional dissertation defenses may leave little time for communal accountability through stringent university defense requirements. Countering western, white universities, Nate organized a public defense where all knowledge-contributors could demonstrate the collective nature of our knowledge creation. Data stemmed from the reflections each comrade offered based on several questions. The answerability defense conversation was important knowledge to include because it evidences Black relational methodology’s potential influence on all knowledge contributors.
The final data source was our informal reflections from an American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2023 session titled, The Unapologetic Love of Nuanced Black Joy: Our Relationships Sustain Us. Our symposium centered on Black joy as a paradigmatic shift toward understanding knowledge co-creation, and its mobilization, as a relational, nuanced, and negotiated act. The five Black Collective members and the audience explored reconciliatory considerations between the realities to which we are subjected, and an unapologetic love of nuanced Black joy (see Stewart & Mayo, 2024). We hope this article can extend the symposium conversation and demonstrate a firm connection between Black joy, knowledge co-creation, and liberatory futures.
Knowledge Co-Creation Process
A robust qualitative, thematic approach demands that researchers explicate the knowledge creation process. Specifically, Fereday and Muir-Cochrane (2006) have described a thematic analysis process that involves hybrid theory-checking and theory-emergent activities. In this hybrid process, researchers interpret themes from step-by-step procedures from developing a coding manual to crystalizing overarching themes. The hybrid process is sometimes described as an abductive approach because it allows for a flexible design that weaves between inductive and deductive reasoning (Goldkuhl & Cronholm, 2010; Żelechowska et al., 2020). It is important to note that our study’s methodology invoked a radical Caribbean epistemology that situates induction, deduction, and abduction within their settler colonial and anti-Black origins. Yet, the study’s radical Caribbean thought foundations situated abduction as a process to illuminate Black relational methodology’s marronage, or transgressive knowledge-creation paradigm (Kamugisha, 2019). In other words, our knowledge creation process interpreted themes grounded in the emergence of relationality and inquiries not asked in initial research design phases (Coghlan & Shani, 2021). The critical and abductive design allowed the co-authors to create knowledge in authoring this piece and reflections beyond the dissertation study’s research questions.
Corroborating and Legitimizing Coded Themes.
This article’s knowledge stemmed from conversational evidence referenced under the coding categories (reference numbers): Relationship Building (195), Vulnerability (101), Black joy (167) and Negotiations (599). Appendix B shows how Nate coded conversational evidence to transcription text to help a reader understand the intention behind Nate’s initial line-by-line coding process. The original coding structure included categories Nate coded on research questions relating to how Black and Indigenous educators converge their political and pedagogical activism. Additionally, it is important to understand a general breadth and depth of thematic frequency in the BRM conceptualization because it helps corroborate the themes (Sandelowski, 2010). With 100-plus references across coding categories, there was clear evidence of repetition across NVivo data files representing one-on-one conversations and the four collective sessions. Nate mapped the 1062 line-by-line references onto the two themes evidencing Black relational methodology. The coding rates yielded 782/1062 (73%) coding references on Black Joy’s Complexity and 913/1062 (86%) on Black Relationality. These rates are a proxy measure for understanding the strength of the relationship between the second-order themes and their underlying coding patterns.
Nate, as the project dissertator, was the sole coder and wanted to remain answerable to his comrades. Consequently, he invited comrades to conversations about patterns he interpreted throughout the four sessions and beyond. Black relational methodology should be understood as a conceptual model grounded in Nate, Meghan, Fawn, Lizzy and Wali’s inquiry into how Black educator activists negotiate nuanced joy through Nate’s invitation to co-author. Naeem, Ozuem, Howell, and Ranfagni (2023) have forwarded a useful description of how thematic analysis can inform co-researchers’ creation of conceptual models. They offered conceptualization terminology to link researcher processes to data interpretation procedures and decisions. In other words, conceptualization demands a description of how co-researchers found themes and nested them within a final concept. This study extends Naeem and colleagues’ work through a relational component. That is, BRM’s conceptualization was a product of Nate’s invitation to Meghan, Wali, Lizzy, and Fawn. Specifically, the conceptualization processes were ongoing, and they took place through a shared and editable document, conference presentation preparation discussions, informal discussions, email exchanges, reflections on collective sessions, text messages, and co-authoring this article. Nate pulled coded text from his dissertation, wrote up thematic findings to share, and invited his comrades to help him remain answerable to the Collective’s knowledge co-creation. Ultimately, the robust qualitative and thematic approach supported the co-authors’ interpretations informing the conceptualization of Black relational methodology.
Co-Created Knowledge (Findings)
There are two important second-order themes interpreted from Nate’s qualitative, thematic approach and the co-authors’ knowledge co-creation processes. Below, we describe the grouped patterns that evidenced the two second-order themes. Coupled together, the second-order themes informed our conceptualization of Black relational methodology.
Black Joy’s Complexity
We found that Black joy’s complexity matches the heterogeneity of Blackness present in how Black women negotiate nuanced joy. Our collective’s Black joy involved negotiation, affirmation, tension, and emotional regulation. Specifically, in the aftermath of police murdering Ma’Khia.
There had been time for us to process Ma’Khia’s murder leading up to session three and outside of the Collective space. For instance, Wali shared how he participated in a Black men educator-led and district-wide conversation. Ma’Khia Bryant’s memorial was part of the district-wide discussion. However, Nate had not yet experienced an affinity-group processing session and lack of processing was evident in how he started session three with his own reflections on joy and rage. I thought we could jump in and forget about the study for a minute and just center joy…I tell you what…I…And this is more personal reflection. When I read adrienne marie brown’s “Pleasure Activism” recently, I was just, I was struck, I feel like one of her points in her book was that Black people are good at the activism piece, but because of the way the capitalistic, patriarchal, white supremacist system structures itself, we are often conditioned to be separate from the pleasure side. It is almost as if we've been conditioned to be in this perpetual state of pain and rage, which is not to undermine that particular set of emotions, but to say that to sustain this work and to be able to continue in this work collectively, we may have to balance that with joy and healing as well, and I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about our work together.
Nate was still unpacking policing and its continued disdain of Black life but yearned for help and support from his comrades who were situated to affirm and comfort. Additionally, he posed an important Black relational knowledge co-creation consideration. The important consideration was about energy sources that sustain Black knowledge co-creation examining anti-Black systems. Meghan affirmed Nate, then naturally shifted to describing Black joy as a mother and teacher. A friend of mine introduced me to Akiea Gross’ woke kindergarten, and they are now like my favorite person, and so they create really great curriculum for young learners around topics of abolitionist teaching and anti-racism. And so, one of their most current like digital media things that they produce was about Black joy, celebrating Black joy, “what does that look like?” There's a picture that I have of my sons and I. They were 5 and 3, so they were babies and they've got these big, huge smiles on. I think we were at the park with all our goofy faces. And that picture, I used in our social justice lesson a couple weeks ago as an example of joy as resistance.
Meghan’s response to Nate’s reflection, centered on Black motherhood and her pedagogy, demonstrated a nuanced joy consideration. As she thought about Black joy reconciliation amongst anti-Black societal realities, she shared a story about her pedagogy and the joy it engendered. Second, there was an affirming connection producing a shift toward centering a mother’s love for her Black children’s happiness. Meghan’s act to start the collective off with joy and Nate’s internal reconciliation were not the only examples of complexity. In response to Meghan’s turn toward joy in her children’s happiness, Fawn, also a Black mother, shared a connection. You [Nate] asked the question about how we take care of ourselves and bring ourselves joy, so you know my son came home from school, and I'm talking about my adult son. He's getting ready to graduate from medical school.
Fawn’s pride and jubilance radiated through the computer screen. Her comrades affirmed her through applause, and she said she appreciated it. Fawn continued to describe the complexities of conversations with her son about societal events. My family is how I take care of myself. My kids are [adults] and they know I talk about racism and school stuff, 24/7. Because, I mean, he [Fawn’s son] may not know the eight hours that I'll talk about it [racism in society] at work, like, when I get back to work, I'm still talking about it [racism], when she [Meghan] was talking about that, and I agree and it's exhausting, it's exhausting and then you watch the news and it's just exhausting.
Black joy’s complexity was found in Fawn’s pride for her son’s accomplishments and the subsequent exhaustion sequence. Her exhaustion stemmed from school-level pushback to her unapologetically advocating for Black students and awareness of white supremacist systems. She described her exhaustion as mechanized through continuing the conversations when her son visits because she and her son want to support each other. Finally, the exhaustion sequence continues when she views the media’s consumption of Black trauma.
The Collective found Black joy’s complexity in conversations about history. Wali shared how he found joy in connecting Black students with their ancestral knowledges during a youth forum held in the aftermath of Columbus police’s murder of Ma’Khia. A reader should note how Wali starts with an intentional turn toward joy. Our youth forum was heavy. But, there was a part of joy in there. One of the kids, a ninth-grader, she said “what happened before slavery?” And I was like… I didn't know what to do with that question, it's like, “how far can I go?” and so I told her about the seven medieval kingdoms of Africa. You know, Mansa Musa, I told her about how the first skyscraper was in Ethiopia…I was talking about Africa. I could see, in their eyes, they were [positively] shaking their heads and I was like, wow, that just brought me joy. To talk about that, Sundial [Malian 13th Century]. The first coins were made in Africa, just all this stuff and then we shifted to America, and I said just about everything that's here we [Black people] invented…. The [students] brought it today, the kids really brought it, and that brought me joy.
There are two knowledge contributions to be highlighted in Wali’s words. First, his acknowledgement of the youth forum’s heaviness, but immediate turn toward what brought him joy in the youth-oriented session. Second, the refusal to engage in curricular tendencies to render Black history to enslavement and the Civil Rights movement while simultaneously teaching students about expansive contributions of African diasporans yields joyous feelings. Black students understanding their connection to African, ancestral knowledges yielded joyous considerations at the same time the youth forum was focused on navigating pain stemming from anti-Black police violence.
Finally, a joy negotiation resided in how the Collective members thought about supporting Black students who want to be themselves in a society that fears them and treats them as dangerous. Lizzy forwarded this idea in collective session three. I have such a joy and love for kids who are so self-aware that they're not going to water down themselves to fit in, but we also have to educate kids to be smart about it. We're not telling [students] that [they] have to code switch, we're not telling [them] to be fake, but be smart about it, because sometimes I feel like there's a line where you can be pro-Black…but that's a threat to people in blue [the police].
To Lizzy, the reality of anti-Black police violence shifts the ways Black educators may frame their Black student support efforts. There is joy in seeing Black students be unapologetically themselves, but there is worry rooted in how racist policing systems may criminalize unapologetic Blackness. The Collective was united in understanding Lizzy’s conceptualization of Black joy’s complexity.
Black Relationality
We found Black joy was the direct result of our relationality. Black human connection was the mechanism interlinking nuanced Black joy to sustainment. We interpreted Black relationality from excerpts and the Collective’s conversations during the answerability defense and reflections from our AERA presentation. During the answerability defense Wali shared about what the Collective’s knowledge co-creation meant to him. Y’all, for me it was different… It was a space where you didn't have to mince your words around. Professionals, that understood you. So, for me it was more therapy, you can call it Black therapy, there aren’t too many spaces. I can't name another space that existed, that allowed all of us to kind of unload our experiences and process them together.
Profoundly, Wali deemed the knowledge co-creation space “Black therapy.” The Black therapy space promoted mutual understanding and allowed us to process similar experiences. This co-processing space was a mechanism that linked nuance Black joy to our relationality.
At the conclusion of the third session, Nate and Lizzy stayed on Zoom when Lizzy enthusiastically said, “I got something I want to tell you.” Nate was simultaneously surprised and excited by the tone. She wanted to share that she finished Bettina Love’s book and share how session three’s discussion impacted her. Lizzy told Nate about how she had a new job opportunity but is worried about how the role took her away from her students. Concurrently, she wanted to solicit feedback from Nate about her own pursuit of doctoral studies. Their conversation was as follows: Nate: Based off what you're talking about it sounds like that could be a cool option for you [to pursue a Ph.D. focused on educational studies]. Lizzy: yeah, it's only been one day, and I already miss my kids. or hearing everyone [The Collective] talk about kids and seeing the kids, I'm like, “oh.” [As in, reconsidering her decision to leave]. Nate: you're like, “oh no.” [laughs]. Lizzy: Yes, “oh no”, but we'll see what happens. Anyways, I wanted to tell you that…. I might take over the world. [both laugh]. Nate: I'm so happy for you; I'm glad you shared that joy as well. It is much needed in these times.
Black relationality took place after research activities. Clearly, Nate and Lizzy’s relationship engendered a vulnerability in sharing current life navigation beyond the project. Moreover, the project’s conversation - specifically, the references to how students helped comrades find joy - moved Lizzy in a way reminding her of her students. Finally, Nate was thankful to be a listening ear in laughing with and affirming his comrade beyond study activities.
Another evident aspect of our Black relationality related to co-presenting at AERA Chicago 2023. The Collective worked together to co-author a proposal and design a session that would flip the traditional conference format. We started with a guided meditation to ground everyone in the messiness of joy. Then, we centered audience members as experts in casting implications of nuanced Black joy. After our session, we reflected on what this flipped format session meant to our relationships. All of us felt an interconnectedness that was sustained well beyond the official end of the original dissertation study project. Our relationality was being sustained in a way that had us already thinking about future knowledge creation projects and sustainment. The Collective’s Black relationality provides evidence of how nuanced joy considerations led us to continue to build our capacity for human connection.
Black Relational Methodology Implications and Discussion
Black relational methodology (BRM) holds major implications in studying an education system designed to omit Black knowledge, deny Black humanness, and worsen Black suffering. We find major implications in the energy typologies sustaining Black-led, knowledge co-creation activities (Dunn & Tubman, 2024). In our collective, Black joy was a fuel opening space for us to illuminate our feelings in a difficult moment and context. Instead of avoiding being in community, we collectively decided to lean into each other. Note, the point is not that withdrawal is an inappropriate reaction. In fact, withdrawal is necessary in mental health prioritization (Menakem, 2021; Winter, 2020) and canceling our session would have been an equally appropriate response to anti-Blackness. Black relational methodology leans into messy negotiations (Cooper, 2018; Stewart et al., 2023). Thus, our collective’s BRM demonstrated how a decision to center and support each other’s regulatory healing may hold implications in Black co-researchers’ continued examination of educational policy futures.
Our BRM framework should not be invoked to overlook anti-Blackness in research activities. We show a clear onto-epistemological and axiological stance that leans into relational negotiations across convergent social localities, community, co-existence with rage, identities, temporal considerations, and mental health status (Botha et al., 2021; Garcia & Mayorga, 2018; Wilson & McMillian, 2024). Therefore, we reject potential cooptation where unserious researchers may invoke joy to avoid pain and suffering. The argument is never to ignore pain or suffering and replace it with joy– this may be a form of unhealthy masking. Instead, our Collective engaged pain “before it laid [our] visions to waste” (Lorde, 1981, p. 7) and demonstrated the negotiations and communal decision-making required to move among and through pain. Wali’s profound description of our space as Black therapy emulates how BRM frameworks may embed a knowledge co-creation environment where joy can be negotiated, and our humanness can be reclaimed. Dumas (2014) argued acknowledging Black suffering holds power in co-creating space for us to “remain protagonists of [our] own narratives” (p. 26). Our Black relational methodology may support negotiations between withdrawal and a need to remain protagonists in knowledge creation. In making the decision to hold session three, the Collective decided it was important to remain protagonists in educational policy knowledge creation. Our BRM gives an example of the research activities, designs, and decisions that may sustain Black knowledge creation even in the face of anti-Blackness.
The Collective’s work continued beyond potentially stringent confines of research project timelines and other western research paradigms (Kaba, 2021; Stark, 2023; Wynter, 2003). Black relational methodology may open space for knowledge co-creators to think about sustaining authentic and genuine human connectedness in and beyond research activities (Stewart & Thompson, 2023; Wilson & McMillian, 2024). Wali and Lizzy described how the Collective’s research activities engendered reflection beyond formal interviews. Additionally, the Collective’s knowledge co-creation sessions became sites of joy and connection. Collective members were excited to participate in the sessions each month because of their connections to each other. Contemporarily, co-authoring conference presentations and this article continues our connection. Recently, relative to writing this manuscript, Nate and Meghan connected at a conference. Wali, Fawn, and Lizzy saw each other at an event although Nate joked how it had been difficult to organize the group when he was in the same city as them. Our BRM extends relational methodological work and illuminates how connectedness may lead to heightened levels of sustainment despite the heaviness of examining harmful, anti-Black educational policy systems.
Our BRM allowed comrades to see Black joy within a multiplex of negotiated messiness. Plainly, comrades were not required to enter the knowledge-creation space ready to shed their feelings in pursuit of the research question. Moreover, the Collective was not asked to give an objective opinion relating to dominant educational actors’ continuous disregard of Black life and living. Instead, comrades centered their relationality, humanness, Blackness, nuanced joy, and love for Black children. The negotiated messiness involved in an unapologetic love of Black children stemmed from our centering of Black feminist epistemologies (Biana, 2021). Specifically, Fawn, Meghan, and Lizzy’s lived experiences helped the Collective understand the messiness of talking to Black youth about the realities they will face and the importance of being authentically themselves (Owusu et al., 2024). Additionally, holding space for reciprocated authenticity affirmed the importance of creating a communal ethic of care within negotiations (Green, 2023). Our BRM’s multiplex of negotiated messiness contributes to educational research because the paradigm shifts knowledge creation to be better situated to open Black spaces to sustain co-imaginaries and heal.
Black relational methodology holds implications for healing in collective research activities. Perhaps the most significant implication, the Collective extends how co-created research questions exploring harmful, anti-Black systems, may require an intentional turn toward healing. Black educators are already exhausted by everyday anti-Blackness and racism infiltrates their capacity to engage in educational justice work. Anti-Blackness is further compounded in Black educators’ bodies, minds, and spirits and this reality can devastate their knowledge creation capacity (Menakem, 2021; Winters, 2020). Concurrently, this study’s comrades demonstrated how BRM via Black therapy, or embedded healing practices, may lead to sustainment across nuanced identity (Stewart & Thompson, 2023). Sustainment was evidenced in comrades’ continued willingness and enthusiasm to engage in knowledge creation before, during, and after formal research activities. Scholars have described knowledge contributors’ willingness as “rapport” in qualitative research activities involving Black women (Walton et al., 2022, p. 10). The Collective’s knowledge creation extends this work and illuminates how rapport-building, we frame as Black relationality, illuminates the affirmation, care, love, and connectedness needed for healing and sustainment.
Again, our collective is only one version of endless forms of Black relational methodologies. Other versions of BRM may sustain Black educators’ co-created spaces in different ways. We extend the knowledge and legacies of the Black educators and teachers who have demonstrated how joyous feelings flourish in spaces where anti-Blackness is peripheral (Coles & Stanley, 2021; Stewart et al., 2023; Stovall & Mosely, 2023). Joy stems from realizing we may be able to transform policy if we first build capacity for human connectedness and protecting each other from anti-Black structural violence.
Conclusion
Black relational methodologies must continue to be centered, expanded, bolstered, and negotiated. It is irritating when we feel like we must prove our humanness; but writing this article insulates our knowledge creation within our ancestral legacies and broadened movements for Black life. Our work showed healing may depend on Black educators and students’ ability to center energy typologies that have the most potential in sustaining Black-led knowledge creation. We can continue the legacy of our ancestors by not letting anti-Black educational policy actors and their systems send us into unrecoverable despair. Admittingly, not allowing anti-Black actors’ harm to consume us, via rage and despair, is messy and difficult work. However, the Collective’s BRM found that our power resides in the unapologetic pursuit and negotiation of Black relationality. Our knowledge creation story forwards Black relational methodology as one path toward healing via Black joy. Through written text, we join our readers and special issue authors in continuing to imagine what collective healing may look like in educational research.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material - Black Relational Methodology: Sustaining Nuanced Black Joy in Educational Knowledge Co-Creation
Supplemental Material for Black Relational Methodology: Sustaining Nuanced Black Joy in Educational Knowledge Co-Creation by Nathaniel D. Stewart, Meghan Gowin, Omowale K. Crowder, and Elizabeth Turner in International Journal of Qualitative Methods
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Fawn Harris. Columbus City Schools. Her knowledge contributions were instrumental for our conceptualization and synthesis.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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References
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