Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research

A groundbreaking, research-based text that centers Black narrative traditions, Afrofuturism, and womanism to transform qualitative research methods. Through a semi-fictional Afrofuturistic narrative, the book challenges white-centric methodologies and elevates Black storytelling as a valid and powerful onto-epistemological tool.

Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research is a groundbreaking and transformative scholarly work that redefines the foundations of qualitative inquiry through the rich traditions of Black storytelling, African epistemologies, Afrofuturism, and Black feminist womanism. Challenging dominant white-centric and Eurocentric research paradigms, this book offers a radical reimagining of research as a culturally rooted, ethically grounded, and justice-oriented practice.

Drawing inspiration from the ancestral knowledge systems of African griots, the text weaves theory, methodology, and imagination into a semi-fictionalized Afrofuturistic narrative. This innovative approach disrupts conventional academic formats and positions storytelling not merely as a method, but as a powerful form of resistance, survival, and meaning-making within qualitative research. Through this lens, research becomes a space for healing, reclamation, and futurity.

Centering the lived experiences, wisdom, and dreams of Black girls, the author foregrounds voices that have historically been marginalized, silenced, or misrepresented within traditional research frameworks. Black storytelling is presented as an ethical, methodological, and theoretical foundation for qualitative data collection, analysis, and representation—one that honors relational accountability, cultural memory, and communal knowledge.

The book introduces Endarkened Storywork as a transformative research praxis, offering scholars and practitioners a liberatory framework for engaging with education, culture, and social inquiry. This approach resists deficit-based narratives, counters epistemic violence, and reclaims erased histories while imagining emancipatory futures rooted in Black joy, creativity, and collective dreaming.

Ideal for scholars, educators, graduate students, and practitioners engaged in qualitative research, Black studies, education, sociology, cultural studies, feminist inquiry, and critical race theory, this essential text speaks to those committed to anti-racist methodologies, decolonizing research practices, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and social justice-oriented scholarship. By bridging ancestral knowledge and speculative futures, Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research invites readers to rethink not only how research is conducted, but why it matters—and for whom.