Making, Feeding, Teaching: An Ontology of Care Learned from My Grandmother
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/28169344.173Keywords:
Endarkened Storywork, Othermothering, Caribbean pedagogy, Black feminist narrative inquiry, Ontology of CareAbstract
Abstract
Afro-diasporic mothers have always found innovative ways to sustain families and communities despite challenging socioeconomic, political and historical conditions (Collins, 2000). These methods of sustaining care have often been undervalued as intellectual and pedagogical work. This creative non-fiction piece challenges that erasure by narrating how my grandmother, a Jamaican educator, used community-based practices as adaptive systems of care and knowledge transmission. These practices are consistent with the notion that within the Afro-diaspora, ancestral wisdom provides the blueprint for ways of being and is an embodied experience. Drawing on Endarkened Storywork (Toliver,2022), Black Feminist theories on othermothering (Collins, 2000), the narrative recovers fragmented memories to theorize an ontology of care as praxis. The piece resists extractive biographical writing through play between concealment and revelation. Finally, this piece seeks to affirm Caribbean women’s material labour as a site of knowledge production (Dillard & Tyson, 2018; Hartman, 2019).
References
Evans-Winters, V. E. (2019). Black feminism in qualitative inquiry: A mosaic for writing our daughter's body. Routledge.
Hartman, S. (2019). Wayward lives, beautiful experiments: Intimate histories of riotous Black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals. W. W. Norton & Company.
Toliver, S. R. (2022). Recovering Black storytelling in qualitative research: Endarkened storywork. Routledge.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Saran Jendayi M James-Vaughan
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