Jennifer Esposito & Venus Evans-Winters embolden activists & intellectuals to fight harm

Jennifer Esposito is Chair of the Department of Educational Policy Studies and is a Professor of research, measurement and statistics. Her research focuses on how race, class, gender and sexuality impact experiences of education and how marginalized groups are represented in popular culture. In this conversation we mainly focus on her recent co-authored book Introduction to Intersectional Qualitative Research. She wrote the book with her frequent collaborator Venus Evans-Winters. Dr. Evans-Winters is a former Professor of Education at Illinois State University in the College of Education with faculty affiliation in Women & Gender Studies, African American Studies, and Ethnic Studies. She is also the Founder of Planet Venus and creator of the Write Like A Scholar program, and has worked with the African American Policy Forum and the SayHerName project, led by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Venus has a vast research purview, focusing on the social and cultural foundations of education, Black feminist thought, critical race theory, educational policy, and qualitative inquiry. Her books include (Re)Teaching Trayvon: Education for Racial Justice and Human Freedom and Black Feminism in Education: Black Women Speak Back, Up, and Out. Their book is a completely unique intervention on the purpose and practice of intersectional qualitative research. The book, they explain, isn’t only pedagogical, “it’s a political act of resistance.” They are trying to create the conditions for a radical rewriting of the very rules of the game of academia. From their perspective, intersectional qualitative research is an “intentional disruption” of the persistent “deficit narrative” that “keeps white supremacy alive” by presupposing that there is something wrong that must be fixed within BIPOC communities. In Venus’ terms, what would it mean to “embolden those who want to use intellectual activism as a weapon” against harm? We’ve largely been “hoodwinked" by a linear narrative that counts only certain texts and voices and styles as valid in academic study. “What happens,” Venus asks, “when we focus on joy?” On “movement struggles?” On “meaning-making?” We also zoom in on the question of how thinkers collaborate and write effectively together. It takes, they say, a certain capacity for “emotional labour” and for a more meaningful and relational kind of accountability. Learning to write together means sharing our “rituals” and sharing what we think it means to be “a contemplative researcher, an ethical researcher, a mindful researcher, a Black feminist thinker and researcher.” Questioning this insidious assumption that there is, as Jennifer puts it, “only one way of writing” or “thinking critically.” Against this, she says that she feels an intense responsibility to “help [students] rediscover their authentic authorial voice.” That responsibility to students is a central theme of this discussion. They really emphasize this idea that, under this system of neoliberalism that demands the commodification of knowledge and that teaches us there are certain knowledges that are just “worth more on the free market,” they feel like they have to be “up front” with students. What they frequently find, though, is that students already know or sense that there are certain ways of knowing that are more readily rewarded, and yet they still choose to pursue and produce knowledge that helps their communities. Dr. Esposito and Dr. Evans-Winters explain how they’ve charted a course from being young scholar-activists to the present day, where Venus has, in her words, “broken up with her oppressor,” and Jennifer feels her calling is to stay in the academy and “push against the boundaries and the borders,” to “chip away” while mentoring other folks that will help her chip away at the steep edifice of higher education, in the interest of advancing these core values of authenticity, integrity and accountability.