Graduation Year
2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
Communication
Major Professor
Aubrey Huber, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Aisha Durham, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Patrice Buzzanell, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Tangela Serls, Ph.D.
Keywords
Lived Experiences, Performances of Racialized Gender, Agency, Invisibility, Justice, Resistance, Trap Feminism
Abstract
This dissertation adopts a “for Black women, by Black women” approach to examine how Black women’s lived experiences and performances of racialized gender become communicative acts of agency as they navigate the intersecting challenges of race and gender within pedagogical contexts.
Grounded in Black Feminist Pedagogy and expanded through Trap Feminism, this study celebrates the complexity of racialized gender performances and theorizes them as intentional communicative acts of resistance. These acts not only confront dominant ideologies but also create ongoing spaces for truth-telling, spaces where Black women can reframe how their stories, labor, and brilliance are recognized in academic contexts and imagine what is still possible.
This dissertation employs Black Feminist Autoethnography and Sista Circle Methodology to center narrative as both a site of knowledge production and a form of collective resistance. Through autoethnographic vignettes that reflect on my twelve-year journey as a Black woman in academia, I connect personal experience with broader structural critique. Sista Circles, function as a socially and culturally situated, Black woman centered ethnographic focus group that provides communal spaces where Black women affirm their identities, speak back to systemic erasure, and collaboratively envision pedagogical practices that honor our full humanity.
Together, these narratives highlight the transformative potential of communication to create pedagogical possibilities. In doing so, this work positions Trap Feminist Pedagogy as a framework that insists on ever-evolving ways of teaching, learning, and resisting in the academy, ways that center Black women’s ways of knowing and being as essential to reimagining what education can and must become.
Scholar Commons Citation
McKoy, Chazman Deira, "Communicating the Truth-Telling and Space-Making of Black Women in Higher Education: A Trap Feminist Study" (2025). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/11093
