Learning to Breathe Again Navigating Academic "Weather," Grief, Microaggressions, and Misogynoir as a Black Woman on the Tenure Track

Abstract

This article uses Black feminist and critical race theories to foreground an autoethnographic account of grief, microaggressions, and misogynoir faced by a Black woman on the tenure track. This autoethnographic project seeks to highlight how the positionality of Black women faculty must be contextualized by larger social forces such as a global pandemic, misogynoir, and the prevalence of microaggressions in the face of personal experiences of grief. Research on Black women’s experiences in higher education is gaining more attention; work that focuses specifically on issues of grief remains limited, however. The goal of this article is to emphasize the ways in which the personal is political for Black women on the tenure track by providing an in-depth look at one Black woman’s personal trajectory.