Stories from Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience

Abstract

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.

How Urban Black Girls Write and Learn from Ethnographically-based Poetry to Understand and Heal from Relationship Violence

“…What began as an ethnographic study of multiple experiences of violence in the lives of urban Black girls, melded with the authors' autoethnographic (Boylorn 2017) experiences of navigating society as urban Black and Brown girls and women and collective witnessing with the girls in the program. Then, the girls, through their poetry writing and poetic witnessing, began their own cultivation of autoethnographic and collective poetry.…”

On Being at Home with Myself

“…Even though demarcations of home are often invisible but explicit, autoethnography, as a method, pushes and blurs those boundaries by allowing us to be simultaneously vulnerable and visible. Blackgirl lives are situated on the margins and borders and are recentered when we see ourselves worthy of recognition in addition to critique (Boylorn, 2013a(Boylorn, , 2013bBrown, 2013;Durham, 2014;Love, 2012). Because ''autoethnographic writing is based upon and emerges from relationship and context'' (Anderson & Glass-Coffin, 2013, p. 57), it has significant potential for helping to voice marginalized and maligned lives.…”

Autoethnography and Family Research

“…These autoethnographies emphasize cultural analysis and fieldwork, foreground perception and sense making, and use personal experiences as a way to describe, and facilitate an understanding of, cultural expectations and experiences (e.g., Anderson, ; Ellis, ). Some interpretive‐humanistic autoethnographies use ethnographic research techniques such as interviews, fieldwork, and participant observation (e.g., Boylorn, ; Goodall, ), and some make personal experience and thick description the sole focus of a project (e.g., Denzin, ; Jago, ; Richardson, ). Interpretive‐humanistic autoethnographies make few, if any, references to systematic data collection, triangulation, coding, bias, reliability, validity, and generalizability, and they are not beholden to the conventions of social‐scientific writing.…”

“…Another example is Boylorn's () autoethnographic study of Black women living in the rural Southern United States. This study offered a thick description of the everyday values, practices, and experiences of these women and did not explicitly advocate for cultural change; in these ways, it resembles an interpretive‐humanistic autoethnography.…”

“…Some researchers have used autoethnography to study gender, race, and racism in the context of families. As mentioned, Boylorn () has used autoethnography to describe the everyday familial experiences of Black women living in Sweetwater, a rural community in North Carolina. She offered a nuanced sense of how race and gender are constitutive of Black family experiences for women.…”