Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Social Welfare

Advisor

Michelle Fine

Advisor

Willie Tolliver

Committee Members

Alexis Jemal

Subject Categories

Africana Studies | Community-Based Research | Other Arts and Humanities | Social Justice | Social Policy | Social Welfare | Social Work

Keywords

Black Healing Practices, Call and Response, Community Care, Love, Liberation, Black Creative Resistance

Abstract

This work is a love letter to Mary Turner and her descendants, by which I mean all Black people, that lifts recipes and roadmaps of Black creative healing and liberatory praxes. It is a freedom dream (Kelley, 2002) that dares to (re)imagine mental health care by holding Black healing and liberation centrally in mind. I do not seek to prove through this work but rather to provoke [thought|action|repair]. In this work, I unsettle prescribed notions of therapy that have long dismissed/erased/ignored the needs and [therapeutic] practices of Black people. The Black MAP Project resists epistemologies of ignorance (Mills, 2022)—born in and reproduced by social and clinical systems—in search of counter and cultural narratives of healing. This work refuses the long held saying/belief that Black people don’t do therapy by lifting our deep and expansive repertoire of creative therapeutic practices. These practices have endured amid the presence and weight of racial capitalism, ideologies and practices of dominance, and the evolution of policies and social contracts rooted in plantation and carceral logics. This project is a celebration of Black creative healing practices and Black survivance . . . it is a riff on Lucille Clifton’s (2020) call to celebrate the attempts to exterminate and undo Black people have failed. We, Black people, continue to exist/resist/heal/practice freedom at every turn. The Black MAP Project lifts this legacy of Black radical healing. Leaning on Black feminist and womanist ideas and practices, this work necessitated Black epistemological, methodological, and aesthetic frameworks. Therefore, this work (a) recognized lived experience as a valuable knowledge-source and conversation as knowledge cocreation (Collins, 2006); (b) understood the urgency and importance of embracing endarkened storywork in qualitative research (Toliver, 2021); and (c) centered Black aesthetics, ontologies, epistemologies, theories, and writing in academia (Christian, 1987; Collins, 2000; hooks, 1994; Toliver, 2021). In concert with the creative imperative of the Black MAP project, I engaged call and response as epistemology and method, which recognizes re:search as inherently subjective and relational. I re/turned to U.S. history alongside Black creative histories; cocreated the Black MAP archive, which invites Black people to share their narratives and experiences of healing; and, engaged in oral history dialogues with 15 Black creatives/thinkers/practitioners to discuss histories and possibilities regarding Black creative healing and liberatory practices. What has emerged is a curation of recipes and roadmaps for healing. Without asserting this is the way for Black folx to heal, the Black MAP Project is an endeavor [rooted in love] that offers Black folx a way to heal.

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