Reimagining Black Women's Epistemologies: The Knowing and Doing of Aliveness

Abstract

Producing scholarship within the academy often requires Black women scholars to conform to epistemic standards and research methods that are far removed from the ways of knowing we know to be true (Collins, 1990; Dillard, 2006; Saunders, 2008). This dissonance can be deeply damaging, as Black women are often expected to abandon their epistemologies and standpoints in favor of dominant knowledge systems legitimized within the academy (Dillard, 2006; Saunders, 2008). Consequently, the everyday knowledge and experiences of Black women intellectuals beyond the academy remain marginalized and undertheorized in educational research (Dillard, 2006). In this critical ethnographic study (Madison, 2005), I challenge the marginalization of Black women’s epistemologies in educational research by examining how Black women in my extended kinship network create and share knowledge intergenerationally through everyday cultural practices, including food-making and storytelling. I illuminate everyday contexts where food, family, and knowledge converge to better understand how these domains shape knowledge production and transmission across generations of Black women in my family. Guided by Black feminist epistemology (Collins, 1990) and Black aliveness (Quashie, 2021), this study centers on the everyday knowledge practices of Black women that are often overlooked in educational research. The findings highlight three key patterns in the production and transmission of knowledge. First, the women in my family primarily share tacit and embodied forms of knowledge through food and food-making practices. Second, this knowledge circulates within an adaptive intergenerational network shaped by lived experiences and broader sociohistorical contexts. Third, knowledge adapts and evolves as family members respond to changing structural and material conditions, leading to moments of epistemic rupture. Together, these findings demonstrate that food and food-making function as epistemic sites where Black women actively construct, preserve, and transform knowledge, while also sustaining aliveness (Quashie, 2021) across generations. By positioning food as a conduit for knowledge and food-making as a process through which aliveness is sustained (Quashie, 2021), this study contributes to scholarship that recognizes the epistemological and methodological significance of understanding everyday cultural practices within Black families. I offer this study as both a meditation on the brilliance of Black women and an example of interdisciplinary educational research that centers Black life and being rather than solely on Black suffering.