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Theory provokes and stimulates. This theoretical essay blurs the boundaries between academic and creative non-fiction writing to illustrate Black women artists mining self-serving economies of embodied, affective pleasure by crafting womanist erotica, that is, Black woman/girl-centred, eros-charged art, music, and literature. I play with words to produce a polyvocal diptych essay theorising the wonder of womanist erotica and elucidating my politics, perspectives and practices as a Black woman(ist) creative writer and educator concerned with Black women and girls' sex education. My illumination of, and indulgence in, corporeal pleasure is underpinned by knowledge of (a) the pain that characterises many Black women and girls' educational and schooling experiences broadly, but also specifically with regards to sex education; and (b) the racialised, gendered, and culturally situated feeling of shame that arises for many during sexual play, that is, during our participation in sexually (self-)gratifying acts. Hence, I offer a potent(ially) viscerally pleasurable reading experience while aiming to deepen intellectual and embodied understandings of the empowering rapture that womanist erotica can ignite. In addition to naming and (re)claiming sexual desire as a prerogative, I think through womanist erotica as a tool for excavating a spiritually rooted erotic economy of (self-)pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the rise of postmodernism and the archival turn in the mid-nineteen nineties with the writings of Jacques Derrida and others, much scholarship has been dedicated to the question 'who is not represented in the archives?' Indeed, suggested changes and alterations to traditional archival practice include the incorporation of newer models like social provenance, oral history testimonies, shared-stewardship, and community archives. While this wealth of attention and consideration towards creating more inclusive archives today are sorely needed, what can be done for archives of more distant pasts? In this article, I evaluate a number of different scholarly works which address, or demonstrate, the issue of finding minority voices in early modern archives specifically. Whether through the study of works of art, literature, or legal, government documents, these authors either find ways to breathe life into past histories once assumed to be utterly lost, or their problematic analyses uncover potential for using such methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When one college athlete's final track season is canceled due to COVID-19, he returns to his family farm to process a lost season with poetry. The author examined how a senior college athlete from the Midwest communicated the impact of COVID-19 on his final season of competition while quarantined on his family farm through envisionment building [Langer, J. A. (2015). Envisioning knowledge: Building literacy in the academic disciplines. Teachers College Press] during poetic inquiry sessions [Faulkner, S. L. (2019). Poetic inquiry: Craft, method and practice. Routledge; Fitzpatrick, K. (2017). Poetry, poiesis and physical culture. In M. Silk, D. Andrews, & H. Thorpe (Eds.), Routledge handbook of physical cultural studies (pp. 515–527). Routledge; Richardson, L. (1992). The consequences of poetic representation: Writing the other, writing the self. In C. Ellis & M. G. Flaherty (Eds.), Investigating subjectivity: Research on lived experience (pp. 125–140). Sage; Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 923–948). Sage; Sparkes, A., & Smith, B. (2011). Inhabiting different bodies over time: Narrative and pedagogical challenges. Sports, Education and Society, 16(3), 357–370]. The poetry read and written during the final four weeks of the spring 2020 collegiate sports season shows the athlete moving across Judith Langer's envisionment stances with authors of sports-themed poetry as guides in revisiting memories, people, and themes of a college sports career. The findings highlight the potential benefits of reading and writing poetry as athletic identity exploration. The author encourages athletic directors, coaches, and athletes to consider using poetic inquiry as an arts-based method to support student-athletes negotiating critical events, relationships, and identity that include cognitive and affective dimensions of sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]