Journal Article

A Black Gaze, a Freedom Dream and the Afrofuture

Foster, Marquita D, India Cooley Williams, Pickens, Andrea

2025

Overview

This article challenges the notion that alternatives are deficient or less substantial. In the Black-oriented homeplace, we situate alternatives as organic and ordinary, but also revolutionary and radical acts, where the Black gaze, freedom dreaming, and the Afrofuture serve as tools for reimagining possibilities and disrupting traditional forms and functions in the EdD landscape. We primarily focus on the methodological and theoretical decisions of Black women scholars, researchers, and graduate students because their decisions are many times culturally rooted, lack institutional support, and are reshaped during the dissertation process or co-opted in ways that strip their radicalness so that they pass through portals of Eurocentric masculinist acceptance. We also advocate for non-traditional graduate students whose unique experiences and needs often remain underserved in traditional graduate education. We argue that due to the knowledge-validation processes, new ways of knowing are deemed deviant or peculiar. However, despite questions around the legitimacy and quality of Black women’s knowledge production, their incalculable ways of knowing and acts of resistance against epistemic violence serve as emancipatory blueprints to guide the reimagining the EdD.

• Publisher: University Library System, University of Pittsburgh
• Subject: Black people / Education / Graduate students / Nontraditional Education