Autumn Wilkinson
Research Mentor: Chanel Beebe
Mentor Department: Urban Technology, AUP
Author(s): Autumn Wilkinson, Chanel Beebe
Session: Session 3 (11:00 AM – 11:50 AM)
Presentation Type: Poster 19
Abstract
Storytelling and meaning making have long served as practices of survival and resistance within oppressed communities, offering a sense of agency and collective understanding. The prioritization of collective knowledge and participant agency has been neglected in current, oftentimes colonial, structures of research and academics. In the design of workshops that honor progression of time and reflection, this project considers the complex theme of “freedom†not as a definition, but as a lived and relational experience so that communities, Black women of Detroit in particular, may explore and notice it together. Each workshop in this project is designed from a developing framework called “Arranging Freedom†that coexist with the project’s goals to orient research practice to not be extractive from communities. This framework encourages participant reflection as they cut and arrange their selections of art or historical documents to create their own narratives. Once the conversations are transcribed, they are qualitatively coded so that meaning emerges naturally from individual and repeated sentiments, this process is known as “emergent coding†in order to honor how participants express their ideas rather than fitting them into a particular codebook. Coding the discussions in this way emerged themes around motherhood, domestic labor, care, nature, movement, and stillness which indicate the insights that can be generated from a carefully designed space. These design choices not only encourage participants to challenge the ideologies they live in but also work to challenge what is known about research and education. This framework calls for researchers to align with a community in a way that invites reflexivity and accurately represents minorities who have historically been misrepresented or unacknowledged in research cases.
