Finding ourselves as Black women in Eurocentric theory: collaborative biography on learning and reshaping qualitative inquiry

Abstract

Purpose

Qualitative research consistently centers Eurocentrism through courses' integrations of ontological, epistemological and axiological perspectives. This literal whitewashing was a source of great frustration and confusion for the authors, four Black women, who found their identities omitted and disregarded in qualitative inquiry. Using Collins' outsider-within concept and collective narratives to center their experiences, the authors seek through their writing to actively repurpose and re-engage with qualitative scholarship that generally seeks to exclude Black women.

Design/methodology/approach

Theoretically informed by Collins' outsider-within concept, the authors use Deleuze and Parnet's collective biography to tell the stories of four Black doctoral students negotiating race, gender, class and intellectual identity, while critiquing Eurocentric theory, through coursework. The collaborative writing process provided shared space for the engagement of individual thoughts and experiences with(in) others' narratives.

Findings

Black women can interpret qualitative inquiry outside of the Eurocentric norm, and qualitative courses can provide spaces for them to do so by repositioning Black women philosophers as central to understanding qualitative inquiry.

Originality/value

Through collective biography (Deleuze and Parnet, 2007), this paper centers the voices of four Black women scholars who use a creative writing approach to think with/through theory as Black women (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012). The paper offers new discussions of and ways in which qualitative researchers might decolonize Eurocentric ways of knowing in qualitative inquiry and qualitative pedagogy from students' perspectives.

Citation

Summerville, K.S., Campbell, E.T., Flantroy, K., Prowell, A.N. and Shelton, S.A. (2021), "Finding ourselves as Black women in Eurocentric theory: collaborative biography on learning and reshaping qualitative inquiry", Qualitative Research Journal, Vol. 21 No. 4, pp. 456-468. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-06-2020-0050