Browsing by Author "Edmonds, Joseph Tucker"

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    Intersectional Solidarities: A Design Approach to Building Collective Power in Racialized Organizations
    (2024-05) Carey, Nicole C.; Schall, Carly; Shasanmi, Amy; Edmonds, Joseph Tucker; Wheeler, Rachel
    This dissertation explores the development of a novel framework for fostering intersectional solidarities within racialized organizations, aimed at enhancing anti-racism efforts and building cross-racial coalitions. Drawing on Critical Participatory Design and grounded in real-world experiences, the Doing Intersectionality framework is presented as a practical tool for practitioners navigating the complexities of racialized organizations. It presents the importance of addressing power dynamics, belief in marginalized stories, the creation of inclusive norms, disruption of harmful narratives, implementation of transformative change, and the importance of continuous healing. Theoretical underpinnings from scholars like Gloria Anzaldúa, Patricia Hill Collins, and Audre Lorde informed the framework, emphasizing the role of consciousness, healing, and coalition-building in dismantling dominant narratives and fostering new realities in solidarity. The discussion also navigated the lived experiences of Black and/or Latinx professionals in Indianapolis, highlighting how their identity formation and relational dynamics inform cross-racial interactions and contribute to multiracial coalition-building efforts. Practical insights were shared, including challenges encountered during the design process, such as resistance to change and the emotional toll on professionals of color. The dialogue underscored the necessity of adopting an intersectional and relational lens in organizational practices to address complex social issues and promote equity and inclusivity. By integrating theoretical insights with actionable strategies, this research advocated for a new consciousness in organizational antiracism work, one that acknowledges the interconnected liberation of individuals across diverse social locations. This synthesis aims not only to contribute to the academic discourse on race, identity, and organizational behavior but also to offer tangible solutions for practitioners committed to fostering meaningful systemic change within their organizations.
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    Neva Fah Get Home: Constructions of Black Roatánin Identity in Roatán, Honduras
    (2023-10) Wilmoth, Idalia Theia; Jackson, Tambra; Morton, Crystal; Etienne, Leslie; Edmonds, Joseph Tucker
    This dissertation focuses on Black identity formation throughout Central America’s Caribbean Coast. Within the Global South and Africana Studies there has been little to no research that centers Afro- Caribbean’s from Central America. Countries such as Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama are primarily focus points. Afro- identity in Honduras is overlooked. Most of the available scholarship centers Honduras’s Afro- indigenous population, the Garifunas. Within the Bay Islands of Honduras, there is Roatán which is natively full of Black citizens. This dissertation fills the historical gaps by using narrative inquiry, podcasting, and conducting interviews with first and second generation Roatánins. As these Roatánins create hemispheric migrations, their Black identity is collapsed into the racial categorization of the United States in ways in which they leave their ethnic identity. Black Roatánins identity is racialized within an historical continuum of geographical space. The major research questions guiding this study were: (1) How do Black Roatánins (re)create or (re)construct Roatán identity? (2) How do they describe their lived experiences in relation to race and racism? 2(a) What racial and cultural context are key influencers in their identity development and lived experiences? (3) How do they describe their racial identity in relation to their nationality? And (3a) In what ways does the legacy of colonization by Honduras impact their racial identity development? The research design was undergirded by Black geography theoretical framework and narrative inquiry. Data sources consisted of podcasts and five individual interviews. Seven themes emerged from Black geography analysis of the data. The seven themes included: (1) ‘Black Geographic Imagination: Spatial Imaginaries/Memories’, (2) ‘Homeland’, (3) ‘Cultural Displacement’, (4) ‘Triple Consciousness: Social Context of Identity and Citizenship Making,’(5)‘Honduras Religious Institutions and Respectability Politics,’(6) ‘Constructing Citizenship’, (7) ‘Diasporic Identification: Triple Consciousness. Findings from this study yielded implications for future research and theory in the Global South and higher education.
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    The Soil of Our Grandmothers' Gardens: Womanist Visual Culture Excavated From Memories and Depictions of Plantations in Antebellum America
    (2025-03) Gladden, Shonda Nicole; Edmonds, Joseph Tucker; Daniel, Jamie Levine; Haberski, Raymond; Mingo, AnneMarie; Morgan, Kelli; Etienne, Leslie Kenneth; Craig, David
    This dissertation is about Black women’s experiences and memory excavation; centering the lives and land of Black women descendants of formerly enslaved Africans, and portraits of Black women’s lives as depicted in plantation themed cinema. I position my research in relation to and in conversation with Womanists, social scientists, and American Studies scholars who have utilized their scholarship to subvert power structures that demand particularized form and function. By staking my theoretical claims in Womanism, I am demarcating the kind of American Studies scholar that I am: one who studies within communities of Womanist scholarship, and in conversation with Black people who corporately wrestle with the construct of America from the vantage point of embodied, thinking Black people of faith, who live for, and love Black people and Black culture. The nontraditional form of this dissertation specifically, and the fungibility of my research identity in general, are intentioned expressions of my scholarly voice and orientation to the field. As part of this dissertation research, I conduct community engaged research through a film festival. I exhume effects of memory and storytelling through oral histories. I unearth artifacts of soil and sacramental re-memory through ritual soil collections. These three seemingly disconnected modes of research are tethered together to answer the question, “How do vestiges of plantation narratives inform Black women’s resilience in light of anti-Blackness embedded in modern institutions?” To answer this question, I examine soil as source of affect, develop and host a film festival as a means of localizing and illumining modern experiences with a transhistorical materiality- namely the plantation, and conduct oral histories as a means of cultivating an epistemic archive. At times I am interpreting soil as place, utilizing its excavation as method, and at other times deploying it as metaphor; always tilling the soil as a potentiality for fertile memory excavation.