Grammars of Care: On Care Full Writing as Black Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis

In Grammars of Care: On Care-Full Writing as Black Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis, I interrogate the processes through which care is theorized and enacted in order to make evident the ways in which anti-black state violence is narrativized as care and re-inscribed through formal education and professional practice. The method I activate in this project—what I call care-full writing—is informed and guided by the scholarship and creative practice of Black women and Black feminist writers that model strategies of writing as practices of care. Over four chapters, I use care-full writing to pursue a Black feminist project of Black study and care through reading and re-/writing stories of Black life. Moving across genres and into family archives, I study and engage a practice of autotheoretical research creation to expose violence re-languaged as care and as a means of writing a counternarrative of the practices and relations that attend to Black life.