Internal Tensions of Building a Dissertation through the Lens of Black Finesse: Toward Decolonizing Higher Education

Abstract

In this paper, I focus on the process of building a dissertation that honored the Black souls of my undergraduate participants along with my own Black soul as a form of resistance to advance racial equity in higher education. Through endarkened narrative inquiry, this paper will address the internal tensions I navigated in building a dissertation that centered Blackness through the prism of what I have conceptualized as Black Finesse. I unveil components from my dissertation that manifested a shift in how knowledge generation can be developed and written. I conceptualized a methodology entitled race-grounded phenomenology (RGP) and call for a re-imagining of qualitative research around the ways Black students navigate higher education. I reflected upon the internal tensions and mental leaps of my dissertation process through theoretical decolonial inquiry. As decolonial praxis to unmake the canon of research and dissertation creation, I lean upon four elements of decolonizing higher education as a way to reimagine decolonial futures that were actualized via my dissertation process.

Keywords

• Black Finesse
• decolonizing higher education
• endarkened narrative inquiry
• race-grounded phenomenology