Mutual vulnerability and intergenerational healing: Black women HBCU students writing memoir

ABSTRACT

This qualitative phenomenological study was designed to gain insight into the unique experiences of six Black women students who were writing creative non-fiction toward the goal of self-definition in a Black feminist learning environment at a Historically Black College/University (HBCU). Interviews were triangulated against participants’ personal writing, revealing obstacles of racism, sexism, internalized oppressions, and an initial difficulty with sharing personal experiences. Participants wrote about overcoming these obstacles through survival and success strategies like practicing mutual vulnerability with their classmates and teacher, and practicing healing transformation through intergenerational healing (re-gifting their new awareness to the next generation). Findings revealed underexplored reciprocities in Black feminist pedagogical delivery and engagement, which may advance culturally specific expressive writing and research methods, and offer culturally specific methods to advance the healing of multigenerational traumas that impact Black women students.

KEYWORDS:

• Black feminist theory
• expressive writing
• HBCU
• intergenerational healing
• multigenerational trauma

Disclosure statement

The study within this article was conducted as partial fulfillment of the researcher’s doctoral degree from Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, conferral May 2018. Therefore, this article is based on data previously published as a doctoral dissertation.

The researcher’s current research interests include inquiries into the ways creating personal experience-based literature while consuming personal experience-based literature has the potential to be emotionally, psychologically, and socially transformative for individuals. Populations of interest are college students, Black women and girls, people of color, and financially disenfranchised people.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by a grant from the Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences at Lesley University, and by research funding provided by North Carolina Central University through an Alumni Endowment to the department of Language and Literature.