Blessed Positionality

Foreword

Venus E. Evans-Winters

Blessed Positionality: Reimagining Intersecting Subjectivities Between Black Women and Girls as Researchers and the Researched is more than a collection of scholarly ponderings; instead, it is a resounding call to remember who we are and who we are becoming. In these pages, Black women scholars, educators, and community healers have not only theorized liberation beyond the Western scientific gaze but have illustrated how we can embody liberatory practices in our words, scholarly pursuits, and praxis. This volume responds to the urgent call for research grounded in collective care and the unapologetic affirmation of Black girlhood and womanhood as sites of knowledge, resistance, and the sacred blueprint for Black futurity.

In the spirit of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, bell hooks, and numerous other Black feminist/womanist writers, this anthology illustrates the past/present/future of spirit work (Dillard, 2021) in knowledge-seeking (in formal and informal settings). As seekers and knowers, storytellers and story keepers, visionaries and African surrealists, the editors and contributors have crafted a sacred intellectual space that challenges dominant paradigms in social science inquiry. By interrogating the taken-for-granted, especially the notion of positionality, they reposition Black women’s and girls’ ontological presence not as marginal data points, but as spiritually rich and theoretically generative texts.

Drawing on Black feminist epistemologies, African cosmologies, and traditions of communal truth-telling, this work challenges positivist logics and so-called critical methodological traditions. The editors, Drs. Lewis, Southwell, and West-Olatunji, further critical, interpretive, and decolonial qualitative paradigms by boldly, yet sophisticatedly, proclaiming Black women’s blessedness (Chapter 6), intersubjectivity, and ancestral wisdom as legitimate sites of knowledge production. Specifically, throughout the text, the ontological position of blessedness serves as (1) an inner “lens” for understanding and engaging with the world; and (2) a positional perspective that transcends the material world and social world (the concerns of social science inquiry). From a critical Black feminist onto-epistemology, then, blessedness as a positionality reaches toward something more expansive and sacred. Readers are asked how a blessed positionality leads researchers and participants to engage in research that synchronously evolves, transcends, and evokes.

From the invocation of ancestral voices to the centering of Black girlhood as sacred and sovereign, this volume challenges the false dichotomy between the academic and the personal, as well as the spiritual and the intellectual. Here, Black women are not merely objects of science, but we are the theorists, the architects, and the griots of our own lives. We are reminded that there is a sacredness in research done with and between women and girls. The sacred is witnessed in the sanctity of whispered stories shared over kitchen tables (Chapter 1), the warmth of healing circles (Chapter 3), and the tears and laughter exchanged in the co-creation of knowledge. Sacredness is honored in Blessed Positionality, where contributors do not separate their scholarship from their spirit (work). The book stands as a testament to the truth that to study Black women and girls with integrity is to do so with reverence. Blessed positionality is to positionality as the African mosaic is to paint-by-number.

Blessed positionality calls forth a deeper ethic of presence, where data is not simply gathered for the public good but also honored, and where knowledge is not just situated but anointed with purpose. Blessed researchers enter rituals! By centering Black women and girls lived experiences, the contributors develop a ceremonial methodology. The book presents research that listens, loves, and labors with intention. Drawing on the sacred in intersectional research, the contributors demonstrate how research can serve as a form of spiritual restoration and collective witnessing. Readers witness a weaving of Black women’s written narrative traditions, critical Black feminist epistemologies, and African cosmological ways of knowing. As I read the presented chapters, I thought to myself: How can my internal and collective power resist hegemonic power that attempts to erase my humanity? How do I know what I know? What is the purpose of knowledge? What is the purpose of sacred knowledge? What is the purpose of healing communities in the face of subjugation? Can spirituality function as an ethical framework in qualitative research, or does its legitimacy remain constrained by institutional definitions of ethics? Researchers, practitioners, and students of research should reflect on these questions before and after each entry.

Critical reflexivity is evident in each telling, not in a domineering way, but in a manner that seeks to better understand the relationship between the personal and the political, as well as the political and the sacred. The contributors do not speak in a singular voice but in a polyphony that reflects the rich textures of diasporic Black womanhood. They draw upon oral history, poetry, ethnography, autoethnography, theory, pedagogy, and prayer—and dare I say, the collective (African) unconscious? The mosaic presented by the editors is deliberate and resonant. We witness an artistic dance between the academy and the sanctuary, between the margins and the center, between the past and the infinite. As a Black woman scholar rooted in the Black feminist/womanist narrative and ethnographic tradition, I am reminded that our stories are rich data. Our communal rituals are not supplementary; they are methodology. Our cosmologies are not mystical; they are intellectual blueprints. Blessed Positionality is thus not just a scholarly intervention; it is a portal.

For me, Blessed Positionality is a homecoming for those of us who have long sought spaces where our spirit and scholarship can sit side by side and engage in conversation (with ourselves and the “other”). I suggest that you read the editors’ introduction and authored chapters as a curated mosaic of theory, lived experience, and spiritual praxis. We all benefit from learning how to write with, through, and alongside Black women and girls in ways that generate methodologies of care that are as “systematic” as they are restorative. In this way, the volume functions as a scholarly intervention and an ancestral offering, gesturing all of us toward more liberatory, ethical, and relational futures in qualitative research.