Adult and Continuing Education and Teaching Commons^™

Talkin' Back And Shifting Black; Black Motherhood, Identity Development And Doctoral Study, Amber Tucker

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine how the context of doctoral study within predominantly white and elite research institutions in the Midwest facilitates identity development among Black doctoral women student parents. This phenomenological study employed Black feminist epistemologies as both a methodological underpinning and interpretive lens to examine how seven Black women doctoral student parents negotiate and made meaning of their intersectional identities.

The six key findings that emerged from this study were: (1) negotiating intersectionality as trauma in childhood; (2) negotiating microaggressions related to invisibility/hypervisibility; (3) negotiating structural macroaggressions as violence; (4) hidden costs of negotiating …