Black Feminist Empiricism: An Exploration of a Black Woman’s Science Engagement

Abstract

In this dissertation, I develop Black feminist empiricism as a conceptual framework grounded in Black feminist epistemologies to recognize Black womxn’s contributions to science and science learning. I build on work in critical human geography to conceptualize rational spatial domination, a mechanism that positions Black womxns’ knowledge production in science as impossible. Black feminist empiricism is fundamentally political, as it is tied to the oppositional knowledge production that Black womxn produce as an oppressed group within the context of White supremacy. I draw on the three dimensions of this conceptual framework to examine the final project of a former student in a university Science Modeling course, a Black woman creating an embodied model using Black womxns expressive cultures to understand plant growth in new ways. The findings demonstrate a rich sensemaking practice tied to an intellectual genealogy that is currently not recognized as an empiricist tradition, highlighting the necessity of this theorization towards a more equitable forms of science learning for Black womxn.