Behind the Curtain and in the Pot: Visual Duo-Nkwaethnography and Recipe-Building for/By/about Black Motherscholars

This paper peels back the curtain of a yearlong collaborative visual duo-nkwaethnography (Allen-Handy, 2021) and photovoice project that explores how we construct and make sense of our identities as Black motherscholars. Here we explore the everyday ways that our lives are shaped by the interlocking effects of race, gender, class, and our laboring positions as motherscholars in and around higher education in the U.S. using weekly video diaries, semi-monthly photovoice prompts, photo-elicitation interviews (Wilson & Flicker, 2015), as well as critical reflections on our care practices. We are especially focused on the ‘graphy’ (process) and the ‘ethno’ (culture), wherein we use our own life stories and experiences as research methods and dialogic narratives (Lund & Sawyer, 2016). Using duo-nkwaethnography helps us draw out the hidden scripts embedded in our academic training and social conditioning as women, Black people, and scholars.

In this paper we provide a “backstage” view of our process (Goffman, 1959), pulling back the curtain on our lives and offering what we learn back to other motherscholars as a recipe of sorts. The focus of this paper is on the process of open ideation and the (un)learning that this methodological and epistemological approach affords. Drawing on Black and Indigenous ancestral wisdoms and practices of communal and familial survival – wherein resources, knowledge, and processes were/are openly shared and valued (Harrell, 2022) – we invite others to the table/pot to share and change the “recipe” ad nauseam. Our dialogic approach resists the capitalist impulse of information hoarding (Hersey, 2022), centering our intellectual exchange and meaning-making sessions as knowledge in and of itself (not as a derivative). Ultimately, we see this work as a catalyst for conversations on how gender, race, and politics interplay in care work at various scales in and around higher education and other scholarly spaces.