Plateaus, Puzzles, and PhDs: Un/Making Knowledge Differently through Digital Storytelling

Abstract

Digital storytelling as part of study creates an opening for reworking ideas. It marks an instance of recognition to access alternative ways of knowing, thinking, and doing. Guided by radical black studies and decolonizing methodologies, the authors draw on insights from digital storytelling to extend current understandings of educational research, theory, and practice. The connections across five digital stories are highlighted through a retrospective analysis of educational journeys to and beyond doctoral study. The digital stories are presented in a series of plateaus to (1) challenge the constraints of academic writing and (2) signal methodological openings in collective restorying. To that end, the authors unravel processes of becoming, trouble the pedagogical encounters in their work, and push for otherwise possibilities to make room for the not-yet.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the UnderCommons Constellation (UC2) for generating foresight, support, and intellectual practice in relational ways. UC2 propels various forms of writing, pedagogy, and inquiry through a space that sustains us within and beyond the UMass Collaborative for Global Studies and Transformative Education. In recognition of their labor and professional service, we are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback. We thank the journal editors for encouraging our contribution.

Notes

1 In this article, we build on the concept of braiding within the collective African tradition and indigenous forms of knowledge-making as demonstrated in a related storying elsewhere (see Rashid & Jocson, 2021).

2 We choose to write with a lowercase b rather than a capitalized B in an attempt to free blackness from biocentric categories. We take invitations from Katherine McKittrick (2021) who observes “how black knowledge is continually cast as biological knowledge” (p. 45). We also draw on La Marr Jurelle Bruce (2021) who notes: “Grammatically, the proper noun corresponds to a formal name or title assigned to an individual, closed, fixed entity. I use a lowercase b because I want to emphasize an improper blackness: a blackness that is a “critique of the proper”; a blackness that is collectivist rather than individualistic; a black-ness that is “never closed and always under contestation”; a blackness that is ever-unfurling rather than rigidly fixed” (p. 6). This collective writing maintains the use of black in lowercase with the exceptions of published works or established terms for continuity.

3 In their segment, Mariam and Benjamin write in the third person instead of using the pronoun “we” for clarification purposes. The use of “we” throughout the article refers to all of the authors.