Picturing persistence: High-achieving Black undergraduate women’s photographs of community cultural wealth in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract

Few studies have focused on the pandemic experiences of Black collegiate women who have been successful amidst unprecedented health, economic, and racial crises in the COVID-19 pandemic. In this qualitative study, we utilized a community cultural wealth (CCW) framework to examine the key factors that seven high-achieving Black undergraduate women students at a Historically White University attributed to their persistence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Countering research that overemphasizes the role of individual factors in Black women's educational success, this study utilizes CCW to represent the multileveled and interrelated individual, relational, and institutional factors related to Black high-achieving undergraduate women's persistence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Guided by photo-elicitation methods, we created a photographic writing task to foreground the challenges that Black undergraduate women high achievers experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and the resources that nurtured their success. Through photographic and/or online imagery, written captions, and individual interviews, Black women participants illuminated the social, familial, aspirational, resistant, and navigational capital that they accessed and leveraged to persist beyond pandemic times. Recommendations for practice and future research are discussed.

Celebrate with me: a black adolescent girl’s speculative multimodal design of intersectional college and career futures

“…To answer my research question, I analyzed Alayah’s data set in two interrelated cycles. In the first cycle, I closely analyzed the 15 individual images in Alayah’s speculative design using an intersectional multimodal content analysis template that I developed (Turner, 2023). Building with visual interpretive frameworks (Serafini, 2014) and the intersectional multimodal literacy framework guiding this study, I used the template to index specific content including: intersectional representations (e.g., Black girls’/women’s depictions in the image); intersectional positionings (e.g., Black girls’/women’s positionings relative to other people/objects in the image); intersectional agency (e.g.…”

“…This research is guided by an intersectional multimodal literacy framework (Turner, 2023). Rooted in Critical Race Theory, Black feminism and legal studies (Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 2015), intersectionality explains how Black girls and women experience racism and sexism as interlocking and intermeshing systems of oppression based on their membership in two socially subjugated groups (i.e.…”

Review and Scholarly Syntheses as Anti-Racist Action

“…The emerging research on young people during the COVID-19 pandemic addresses issues such as how they have experienced the shift to virtual schooling from home, their mental and physical health, and their social relationships and practices (Chamberlain et al, 2020; Schaefer, 2022; Toste et al, 2021; Turner, 2023). Young people reported physical and mental challenges from long hours tethered to a computer screen apart from their peers.…”

“…But the small body of evidence we currently have suggests that youth exercised agency and innovation in caring for themselves and one another. Students described being mindful of preparing healthy meals for themselves; creating safe outdoor convenings with friends; and taking on new, or rediscovering old, physical exercise activities to maintain healthy minds and bodies (e.g., Schaefer, 2022; Turner, 2023). Young people also engaged in the arts as a means to sustain themselves (Curwood & Jones, 2022).…”

“…Turner (2023) invited three Black collegiate women to compose multimodal essays about the things that sustained them during the pandemic. The young women took photographs that represented their practices of intentional care for their minds, bodies, and spirits—nurturing their relationships with other Black women and women of color, investing in taking care of their natural hair, and choosing physical exercise practices that suited their own dispositions and interests.…”