The Virtual Geography of Afrodiasporic Womanist Love: Black Women Critical Educators Collectively Cultivating Solidarity and (En)countering Loneliness Online

Abstract

In this multimodal article, we respond to the pervasive erasure of Black women’s knowledge-making practices and pedagogies in academic literature writ large while illustrating the use of creative methods for making meaning of community, connection, sociality, and solidarity, in virtual or online adult learner education spaces. We begin by narrating how our collective of U.S.-based Black women comparative and international education scholar-practitioners lovingly banded together for a Study Abroad Program. We theorize the diasporic Blackness undergirding our womanist love of one another as a spatial, relational, corporeal, and political force helpful for cultivating critical community and affective solidarity in our virtual geographic context. Then, using kitchen-table talk as a reflexive method of inquiry, we probe the particularities of that Afrodiasporic womanist love—the energy cohering our collective in an online environment—as noun and verb: a source of sustenance, a reprieve from loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a care-full comforting and healing practice. We locate our theorizing in the genealogy of Black feminist thought, and to interrogate how Afrodiasporic womanist love is shaped by and situated in time, space, and body(ies), we explore our geohistories and legacies. We conclude by reflecting on how, in addition to building solidarity, Afrodiasporic womanist love helped us form a supportive critical community online that provided sanctuary as we (re)conceptualized justice, freedom, and humanity in our individual and collective praxis vis-à-vis the intimacy, authenticity, and vulnerability demanded by this type of Black love.