Some of us die: a Black feminist researcher’s survival method for creatively refusing death and decay in the neoliberal academy

Abstract

I engage Black feminist thought in this genre-blending text to further theorize Black feminist memory work, a visual research tool for embodied reflexivity. Using my lived experience surviving bereavement, I demonstrate how Black feminist thought—as anchored to the concepts of creation, improvisation, and memory—shaped the aforementioned self-invented method for humanely undertaking the task of heeding the embodied intensities of grief-borne sorrow and suffering. Sorrow and suffering can be exacerbated by systemic marginalization in dehumanizing settings such as the output-obsessed neoliberal academy. Black feminist memory work extends a long lineage of Black women subversively creating alternatives that defy the body-numbing demands of the death and decay-inducing knowledge production normalized in academia. Alternatives to those repressive and oppressive demands offer qualitative researchers apparatus with which to creatively re-member—that is, to return to the body—in order to increase the heart’s capaciousness and capacity for compassion. As qualitative researchers, embodied (re)connection to the essentially compassionate core of our human/e selves is imperative for resisting, recovering from, and surviving the deadening trap/pings of neoliberal academia.