Tanja J. Burkhard's book Transnational Black Feminism and Qualitative
Research: Black Women, Racialization, and Migration is reviewed.
In transnational Black Feminism and Qualitative
disquisition, TanjaJ. Burkhard centers on the narratives of Black women as told
by themselves, whilst proposing transnational Black Feminism (TBF) as a
qualitative frame to tell and assay these stories. Throughout 75 runners, this
short text makes a theoretical, empirical, and methodological donation to the
study of race, gender, migration/ borders, and intersectionality in the social
lores. It's written in a clear and engaging style, furnishing an excellent overview
of and primer to transnational Black Feminist qualitative inquiry. The frame is
proposed as a way of undertaking disquisition with people that we know and
love, without compromising the quality of the disquisition of the important
connections that sustain us.
The first two chapters of the book concentrate on the
pivotal methodological and theoretical challenges and openings that arise from
conducting disquisition using a TBF frame. At the heart of this is Burkhard’s
offer of TBF as a disquisition frame that supports researchers to take over
disquisition within their communities whilst attending to the original, public
and global surrounds that frame and shape the lives of Black women across time
and space.
Constitutionally, TBF is a system of analysis and
fabricator which contextualizes ‘Black women’s ways of knowing by placing them
frontally and center in the qualitative disquisition process’( 3), whilst
examining the structural, nonfictional, spatial, and affective forces that
shape Black women’s complex, changing lives. In her use of the frame, Burkhard
encourages us to suppose both through and beyond borders of nation countries,
sewing vestments amongst the landmasses of Africa, the Americas, and Europe to
contextualize and assay the lives of transnational Black women living in the
US.
Crucially, the frame emphasizes how multiple spaces
simultaneously configure what we make of ourselves and others. Using her
empirical data, for illustration, Burkhard shows how ideas about what Blackness
is are culturally, spatially, and temporally contingent. TB, thus, e pushes
back on the idea that the US (or any one state) should constitute the primary
or only position of connection for Black feminism – or that Black feminism and
Black/ African women located in the US are not always shaping and being shaped
by another corridor of the world. The frame, therefore, disrupts methodological
prepossessions with the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis. rather,
TBF proposes a transnational sense that works to consider the connections
between different spaces and places in shaping the different exploits of Black
women.
After setting out TBF as a qualitative frame, the
ultimate two chapters of the book present and assay the empirical data
collected for this disquisition. This consists of a series of interviews
conducted with seven Black women with whom the author holds particular
connections of varying degrees of closeness, as well as reflexive perceptivity
from the author herself.
At the core of the book’s empirical discussion is a
sensitive and dutiful commitment to telling the stories of these women.
Burkhard weaves the words of her disquisition actors into the fabric of her
canny political analysis, whilst bringing attention to the affective
complications of conducting qualitative disquisition. After all, as she
emphasizes, the ‘data’ she collects are the particular stories of real
individual people. And indeed, there are corridors of their stories that can
constantly be delicate, traumatic, and emotional to tell and to hear. From this
view, qualitative inquiry is revealed to be a complex affective affair that
requires perceptivity to how ethics, power, and reciprocity frame how the
disquisition is conducted.
The final chapter, which specifically addresses
questions around reflexivity and reciprocity, is perhaps one of the most
precious corridors of the book for those presently conducting or looking to
embark upon directing their qualitative disquisition, especially with
racialized communities. Burkhard insists on the ‘ need to suppose critically
about engaging in solidarity, the coalition- structure, and() to suppose about
what exploitation and reciprocity may mean in their particular surrounds ’(
60). This means moving down from extractive modes of disquisition where the
disquisition hassle begins and ends with the interview.
Burkhard describes how their reciprocal heritage in
the disquisition conducted for this book manifested in conditioning analogous
to English training, furnishing emotional support, and supporting with claims
for sanctum. But she notes the pitfall of researchers risking their health and
good in bearing this labor under the spirit of reciprocity. this speaks to
wider enterprises about much of the spare overdue labor that women
disproportionately take over both within academia and down formerly. This does
not abstract from the value of this book, still. So, as a florilegium and
qualitative researcher, I was left curious about some of the strategies that
Burkhard put in place to navigate this aspect of her disquisition. How exactly
does a researcher set up these boundaries? Who decides what they are and is
predicated on what criteria? Which resources proved important in supporting a
healthy dynamic of reciprocity? These are ongoing questions for multitudinous
researchers working on systems-founded ethics of reciprocity.
Not only is it important to consider how qualitative
disquisition is conducted, but also how we tell the stories entrusted to us as
researchers. Burkhard’s perceptivity to Black feminist fabricator can be seen
in her attention to what she refers to as the poetics of Black women’s lives.
She litigates poetry out of the words from the interviews she conducted.
Drawing on the interview content, she pangs together the words of her multiple
actors in beautiful poems which exercise an emotional aspect whilst slipping
light on the harsh politics which frame transnational Black women’s lives in
the US.
Integrating Poems into the text the book works truly
well as the poems add texture and color to the stories that sit at the heart of
Burkhard’s political analysis. The poems speak vividly to the fundamental goods
that move us and make us. But they do this without inching on or diverting from
the incisive analysis of how disquisition actors responded to the politics of
race, gender, class, nation, and so on. Constructing poetry from interview
content is a curious and amping way to engage with qualitative data. It would
have been interesting to know further about how the creative process of
constructing these poems worked, setting it up further as an implicit tool for
other researchers to draw on.
In this book, Burkhard makes a compelling argument for
espousing TBF as a system of qualitative inquiry, showing how TBF accounts for
the significance of terrain, - ref-reflexivity, and researcher-party power
dynamics. Crucially, Burkhard does not recoil down from bringing her full
researcher tone to the text and disquisition. Reflecting on her particular
narrative and exploits as a Black German woman and former international pupil,
she shows how the differences and parallels in which she shared with her
disquisition actors – who were also Black women but of different backgrounds –
colored the types of exchanges they had in their interviews. Bringing these aspects
of a particular narrative into the discussion illustrates the value of engaging
in a strong practice of reflexivity from both theoretical and methodological
perspectives.
The book’s keen attention to the particular ways in
which researchers enjoy positionalities shape and frame qualitative inquiry
adds to feminist affirmations that lores are ‘deposited’ – that is, the
knowledge that we produce is always deposited within and therefore shaped by
the specific geospatial, temporal and cultural terrain of the researcher as
much as the disquisition actors. Given TBF’s attention to the connections
between space, power, and the product of knowledge, this concise book is an
especially precious resource for researchers committed to conducting further
indifferent disquisition that disrupts academic traditions of exploitative and
extractive knowledge product. For Black women researchers, in particular, this
text enhances our understanding of how to conduct rigorous but sensitive
qualitative disquisition amongst and within our communities.