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This study offers the results of a Black feminist project in humanization designed to understand administrators' role in interrupting the over-disciplining of Black girls in urban public schools. Carried out with 5 Black girls on probation and 5 Black urban school leaders, the findings suggest that the approaches the administrators used to uplift social justice were not as useful to Black girls' educational experiences as they were assumed to be. In discussion, the paper attributes the disconnection between intent and reception to the competing demands administrators are subject to in a racialized neoliberal educational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The methodology of 'occupation' through re-reading The Combahee River Collective Black Feminist Statement (The Combahee River Collective, in: James, Sharpley-Whiting (eds) The Black Feminist Reader. Blackwell Publishers Ltd., Oxford, pp 261–270, 1977) demonstrates the necessity of temporal linkages to historical Black feminist texts and the wisdom of Black feminist situated knowers. This paper argues that racism produces grief and loss and as long as there is racism, we all remain in racial grief and loss. However, in stark contrast to the configuration of racial grief and loss as something to get over, perhaps grief and loss can be thought about differently, for example, in terms of racial grief and loss as a resource. This paper questions Western Eurocentric paternalistic responses to Black women's 'talk about their feelings of craziness... [under] patriarchal rule' (The Combahee River Collective 1977: 262) and suggests alternative ways of thinking about the psychological impact of grief and loss in the context of racism. In this paper, a Black feminist occupation of racial grief and loss includes the act of residing within, and the act of working with the constituent elements of racial grief and loss. The proposal is that an occupation of racial grief and loss is a paradoxical catalyst for building a twenty-first century global intersectional Black feminist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One popular strategy of opposition to practices of female genital cutting (FCG) is rooted in the global feminist movement. Arguing that women’s rights are human rights, global feminists contend that practices of FGC are a culturally specific manifestation of gender-based oppression that violates a number of rights. Many African feminists resist a women’s rights approach. They argue that by focusing on gender as the primary axis of oppression affecting the African communities where FGC occurs, a women’s rights approach has misrepresented African women as passive victims who need to be rescued from African men and has obscured the role of certain international institutions that have perpetuated the oppression of African women. In this paper, I defend these critiques by arguing that the use of a women’s rights framework to combat practices of female genital cutting among African communities has often been practically ineffective and morally inappropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Florence Mills was one of only a few African American women vaudeville performers to become an international success. Born in Washington D.C. in 1895 and raised in Harlem, New York, Mills was a child performer in dramatic and musical theater. Through analysis of Florence Mills' performances in Shuffle Along (1921), Dover Street to Dixie (1923) and The Black Birds Revue (1926), I seek to reveal the ways Florence Mills made use of the cultural economies of vaudeville to resist dominant constructions of race and gender. In particular, I assert that Florence Mills manipulated white American and European desires to consume slave culture, and expanded economic and cultural possibilities for African American women entertainers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this theoretical essay, I argue that the contemporary over-disciplining of Black and Native youth can best be understood through understanding the culturally violent roots of the heroic white woman teacher. I use analytical tools from settler colonial theory and feminist of color theory to inform my epistemological framing of power as a site of multidimensionality existing across space and depth (Sandoval, Methodology of the oppressed, vol 18, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2013) and comprised of mutually constructed systems of oppression (Collins, Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment, Routledge, London, 2002). Revisioning the "discipline gap" from this vantage point moves us away from culturally focused or individualized deficit thinking aimed at communities of color and toward understanding the structures and histories foundational to our contemporary school systems, and the individuals who have informed and upheld those structures for nearly 200 years. I close with a discussion of immediate practical changes we can implement in classrooms, as well as a perhaps less practical call for reimagining decolonial futurities for teaching and schooling, both taking into account that the current U.S. teaching force and enrollees in credential programs are majority white and female whereas the student population is not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "multiple jeopardies" that often act as barriers for Black women in both leadership and society may be the same barriers that provide the uniquely diversified leadership perspectives needed to address a rapidly changing global society. However, the dominant image of leadership is still primarily White and male. Disrupting this image calls for the centering of little-known lived experiences and insights from those on the margins of the leadership narrative, such as the 15 Black women graduate student participants included in this phenomenological study. Findings from this study highlight the hidden and invisible obstacles facing Black women, as well as how these obstacles impact: (a) perceptions of their leadership qualities, (b) personal leadership philosophies, and (c) potential employers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public climate conversations are inattentive to how differences in social location and culture shape people's knowledge of and responses to climate change. Instead, emphases on climate apathy and climate skepticism overrepresent privileged sensibilities, marginalizing those who fall outside of what Black feminist theorist Audre Lorde calls "the mythical norm" (1987). In so doing, predominant approaches obscure forms of climate engagement that do not resemble researcher identified pro-environmental behaviors. In order to illustrate relationships between social location, culture, and response to climate change, we apply the notion of environmental subjectivities in a secondary analysis of climate engagement in two communities, one of which resembles and one of which lies outside the "mythical" norm. Both members of the Karuk Tribe and urban homesteaders frame climate change as symptoms of unsustainable political-economic structures. Yet differences in the structural location of each community result in divergent understandings of and practices in relation to the changing climate. These divergent community understandings and practices cannot be explained by individual preferences or cultural differences alone. Instead, the concept of environmental subjectivities (1) calls attention to the situated knowledges of climate change that emerge in relation to differences of indigeneity, race, and class, (2) relates community environmental practices to interlocking power structures, and (3) illustrates how elite narratives obscure the role of the colonial, settler, capitalist state in the generation of climate emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to explore the perspectives of women diagnosed with co-occurring disorders on the treatments provided by a state psychiatric hospital so that appropriate recommendations for changes in treatment may be made. Critical ethnography was used and the data was viewed through the lens of intersectionality from the black feminist perspective. Seven women hospitalized in one psychiatric hospital in the Mid-Atlantic region participated in the study. Data was collected via semistructured interviews, Consumer Perceptions of Care survey, researcher's observations, and archival data. Three major findings emerged: (1) Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) was identified as a beneficial treatment, (2) a lack of trust in the system and people in the system, and (3) housing or homelessness was perceived as a barrier. Based on the results of this study, it is recommended clinicians, administrators, and policy makers listen closely to individuals receiving treatment to make decisions regarding treatment accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expanding on Black feminist scholarship and sexual script theory, this study explored the sexual negotiation strategies of Black adolescent girls. Specifically, in this study, I sought to understand how Black girls confront sexual coercion and ways that racialized and gendered sexual scripts influenced their resistance. Two focus groups were conducted with 17 Black American high school girls. Using thematic and dimensional analysis, four themes of individual and collective resistance emerged from the data including Personal Responsibility, Finding Sexual Autonomy and Desire, Media Transformation, and Giving Voice. Themes replicate and extend existing African American sexual scripts as reported by Stephens and Philips (Sexuality & Culture 7:3-49, 2003). Implications for future research and psychological interventions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study takes account of the salience of activism in informing the worldviews and professional practices of a multigenerational sample of 42 African American educators in Birmingham, Alabama. Framed by life course, Black feminist thought, and hip-hop educational research perspectives, the study highlights how the participants grapple with: generational misunderstandings; re-visioning traditional notions of activism; and forging intergenerational alliances. Birmingham, forever bound by its haunted yet sacred civil rights history, is presented as a prototypical space for examining this inquiry and sparking a resurgent activism among African American educators. The author concludes with implications for the capacity of contemporary African American educators in the U.S. South to forge intergenerational alliances to advance the aims of African American education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experiences of a Black Female academic, working at a Predominately White Institution (PWI), is explored in this work. The author suggests that Black women have been historically marginalized within most PWI's and historically this has been viewed in a negative light. Here it is suggested that Black women in academe view this position as one of power which can be used to propel them towards the goals of tenure and promotion. This work uses Black Feminist Theory to examine these experiences and to provide a proper context for analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a discussion of South African soap operas, I will place the idea of visuality in a discourse analysis that incorporates a feminist epistemological lens, or an epistemology that integrates reflexivity and an acknowledgment of the dialogic nature of visual media. Through this discussion, I will examine the possibilities that dialogism provides for unpacking and exploring the politics of imperfect translation between the visual and the textual. These methodological interventions, I argue, will help enrich discussions of the visual’s role in the contested realm of geographic imaginations and move beyond the distanced position of the masculine gaze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]