Written to initiate a dialogue about race in the academy, this narrative focuses on the experience of Black Ph.D. students in predominantly White academic institutions. Experimental in method and representation, this article poses important questions about race in academia. The author utilizes several qualitative opportunities, writing as autoethnography, poetry, and narrative. As a participant and researcher of the experience, the author is given the unique position of telling and listening, observing and explaining, strategizing and editing. The author takes your story (a construction developed to create a bridge between your world and mine) and combines it with her story, (the author’s motivations for writing about this experience), and folds it into their story (compiling the findings of the research based on an interview), to create our story (a collective narrative of the Black Ph.D. experience). Hence, the title, “E Pluribus Unum,” which translates “out of many, one.”
Reflexivity interrogates the cause and effect of self-awareness and self-reference in qualitative work. This article uses reflexivity to resolve the meaning and implications that race has on ethnographic research. The author argues that race automatically and inevitably influences research, therefore conscious race reflexivity is a useful tool for auto/ ethnographic work. Even when race is not named out loud, it is germane to how an ethnographic project will be conceptualized, interpreted, and completed. By using examples from ethnographic studies that concentrate on race and excerpts from personal experiences, the author names the reflexive stories "race stories" and identifies the analytic reflections that follow, "gray spaces," to reference and demonstrate the subjective and synergistic role of race in reflexive research.
Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience is an ethnographic autoethnography that collapses traditional ethnographic research, creative writing techniques, and autoethnography to tell a multi-generational story of growing up black and female in the rural South in the twentieth century. The following excerpts, taken from the Prologue and Chapter One, offer a framework and context for the reviews contained in the forum. By introducing the perspective of the writer, who situates herself as a researcher and insider in the community, these excerpts give the reader a glimpse into Sweetwater,* a rural community in the “heart” of North Carolina, where the stories take place.
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