Mica, Talk That Talk: Reflections on Power-Consciousness in Action Research with Black Girls


Stephanie Fearon, York University

Canada boasts a diverse and longstanding Black population. The country’s relationship with Black Canadian communities is marred by practices of enslavement and segregation, and racially restrictive immigration policies (Aladejebi, 2021; Maynard, 2017). Black scholars point to the ways that Atlantic chattel slavery and its afterlives continue to unfold in Canadian institutions like education (Brand, 2020; Maynard, 2017; Walcott Abdillahi, 2019). In these afterlives, anti-Black racism is endemic to Canadian public schools and profoundly shapes the lives of Black children (Walcott and Abdillahi, 2019; Maynard, 2017). A growing number of Black scholars and community members uphold the collection of race-based data as an integral component to disrupting and dismantling the hate and violence wielded against Black children in Canadian schools (Walcott, 2020). Indeed, empirical inquiries on Black life are vital to establishing policies, practices, and pedagogies for the wellbeing and academic achievement of Black Canadian children. University-based researchers have long been at the helm in developing and facilitating empirical inquiries on Black Canadian communities. However, Black Canadians’ relationships with academic institutions are fraught and tenuous (Walcott, 2020). Black people have long denounced research emanating from these institutions as extractive and exploitative. Black Canadians decry the power hierarchies and oppressive discourses inherent in Eurocentric research processes (Fearon, 2023). In fact, Black leaders accuse these empirical inquiries as benefiting the researchers collecting the data more than the Black people being researched (Walcott, 2020). In this arts-informed autoethnography, I investigate my own practice as a University professor with a research profile focused on the experiences of Black Canadian women and girls in schools. I am particularly interested in the ways that I use an endarkened feminist epistemology and the arts to shift the power imbued in my researchers identity to the Black girls with whom I collaborate. In so doing, I imagine and advance a power-conscious inquiry process that is useful for researchers wishing to embrace a collaborative ethic grounded in Black onto-epistemologies when working with Black girls. Specifically, I explore the ways that I create conditions whereby I, the researcher, can be cognizant of power relations and disrupt the prevalent researcher/researched dichotomy and more deeply invite Black girls to become collaborators and share power within the inquiry (Stewart, 2022). The following questions guide my autoethnography: How might educational researchers imagine and develop a power-conscious collaborative inquiry process with Black girls? How might this process attend to and disrupt the prevalent researcher/researched dichotomy? How might this inquiry process shift the power imbued in a researcher’s identity to Black girls? I begin this paper by providing a critique on power and its manifestations in Eurocentric forms of inquiry. I, then, present the tenets of a power-conscious framework grounded in an endarkened feminist epistemology (Stewart, 2022). Through a creative non-fiction short story, I showcase how I partnered with three Black Canadian girls to reconceptualize their role in the research process. Centering my work with Mica, a 10-year-old Black girl in a special education program, I highlight my research journey to embracing a collaborative ethic. To this end, with humility, I showcase the shortcomings and successes I faced when working with Black girls in a power-conscious collaborative inquiry. The paper concludes with a series of reflective questions challenging scholars to engage in power-conscious collaborative research with Black girls.

This paper will be presented at the following session: