I Need You to Tell My Story: Qualitative Inquiry for/With Transnational Black Women

Abstract

Drawing on a yearlong qualitative research project with seven Black transnational women, this article employs a transnational Black feminist approach. It is guided by the following questions: What does it look like to conduct qualitative research rooted in a transnational Black feminist framework? What implications related to storytelling, reciprocity, and the relationships with participants emerge from this work? In exploring these questions, I consider some of the ways transnational Black feminist theory can be operationalized to counter re-inscriptions of dominant ideologies onto the research process with marginalized communities, particularly under consideration of contemporary national and transnational processes and discourses.

Keywords

Black women Black immigrant transnational Black feminism qualitative research methodologies

Introduction

One afternoon in the fall of 2014, I meet Naima at a café to help her study for her upcoming GED exam. We embrace after speed-walking toward each other with smiles on our faces. It has been weeks since we have been able to meet and we only have two hours to make it through a stack of GED materials. She hugs me tightly, and I am briefly engulfed in soft tufts of orange and brown fabric, inhaling a familiar scent of “uunsi,” the incense Naima burns daily in her home. We enter the coffee shop and she reminds me: “I am paying today, don’t forget!” We both smile about our ongoing competition when it comes to treating each other. We order two cups of coffee from a cheerful cashier, whose long blonde hair is messily stuffed under her uniform cap. Naima quickly hands her a 50-dollar bill, and I know her swiftness is meant to discourage me from paying. The cashier smiles at me generously, hands me two empty coffee cups and 46 dollars and a few coins. Stunned into silence, I briskly hand the change to its rightful owner, Naima. ¹

The narrative that opens this article encapsulates a sliver of the complexity that has led me to conducting research with Black women who migrated to the United States. I met Naima 5 years ago, after she was referred to me for English as a Second language (ESL) tutoring. Since then, she and I have shared many moments—as mundane as the one described in the vignette—that were shaped by our marginal positions in U.S. society as im(migrant) women who are racialized as Black and/or “Other.” Remembering and recounting our interaction with the cashier, Naima and I concluded that it was the complicated interplay of racialization, religious affiliation, and English language that made the young White woman read our bodies, or what was on our bodies (Deiri-Rieder, 2018) and decide to hand Naima’s money to me, thereby contributing to Naima’s ongoing invisibility as a Somali Muslim woman. I frequently bore witness to her invisibility in public spaces, such as stores, in which most clerks avoided eye contact with us. Soon after we met, she began to insist on bringing me along whenever possible to avert this behavior from others, which prompted me to think more deeply about my role in her life, as well as the complexity of transnational Black womanhood in the United States. Her asking me to accompany her during public outings was also indicative of my own “passing” and “being read” as an American (Tudor, 2017), due to my clothing and the Americanized accent I cultivated as a teenager in Germany, and later as an exchange student in the United States. These experiences taught me that “Black women are at once invisible, seen through only stereotypical manifestations, yet simultaneously hypervisible” (Ferdinand, 2018, p. 53) in the public sphere.

Thus, while Black women are often invisible in and/or absent from professional spaces, they are rendered hypervisible in leisure spheres (Mowatt, French, & Malebranche, 2013). This hypervisibility, however, functions in different ways depending on the lens through which the body is read. For instance, Naima’s hijab and abaya, render her body as being read as Muslim and/or a threat (Kahn, 2007; Shams, 2018), and therefore hypervisible in ways that differ from the bodies of Black women who wear Western clothing, who are often read through a lens of abnormality (Young, 1997) and deviance (Roberts, 1997). Of course, all readings are embedded in the larger discourses about immigration, citizenship, race, and gender, as well as the specific context of the United States, which can be theorized through a lens that marries Black feminism and transnational feminism. Because of how Naima’s body is read in the public sphere, she became simultaneously hypervisible and invisible, as cashiers, store clerks, and salespeople quite literally turned away from her, whereas the same salespeople sought me out to provide services.

However, Naima has been a citizen of the United States for almost 18 years, while I have been a temporary visa holder for roughly 9 years. Driven by the complexity of our shared and individual experiences, and the questions about belonging, language, and citizenship it raises, this article seeks to explore the following questions: What does it look like to conduct qualitative research rooted in a transnational Black feminist framework? What implications related to ethics, researcher positionality, and the relationships with participants emerge from this work? Reflecting on these questions, I consider some of the ways transnational Black feminist theory can be operationalized to counter re-inscriptions of dominant narratives onto the research process with marginalized communities. The aim of this article is to present a set of considerations that emerged from a qualitative study that sought to explore the racialized and gendered experiences of Black transnational women in the United States. The next section will enter this discussion by providing the context of the larger study, after which I will present the theory that undergirds this approach.

Why This Study?

When I first conceived of this research project, I held a student visa and had been in the United States for roughly 5 years. I felt simultaneously out of place and at home in my academic department, which was the focal point of my local life, since I had solely moved to a city in which I knew no one, to pursue my doctorate. I recognized that my own body—due to its in-betweenness—did not fit into the spaces of U.S. academia (Diversi & Moreira, 2009). The readings, assumptions, and conversations about migration often erased the experiences of Black immigrants, refugees, or temporary residents, whereas the literature about Black womanhood typically centered the African American experience, and rarely called into question how race and gender function outside of a U.S. context. Being racialized as Black and/or biracial was not new to me when I came to the United States. However, the discourses about Blackness and biraciality differed from those I was exposed to in Germany due to the histories of race and racism and settler colonialism in the United States.

Seeking to learn more about the specific experiences of Black immigrant women, I found that scholarship on migration, which includes a gendered analysis (Charsley & Wray, 2015; DeLaet, 1999), rarely attends to the processes of racialization. On the other hand, scholarhip on racialization and the process of becoming Black in North America (Ibrahim, 2014; Waters, 1994), does not typically explore the intersection of race and gender. This calls into question how Black women who come to the United States from Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe make sense of their experiences and potentially shifting identities. My own experiences and my experiences with other Black immigrant women, such as Naima, compelled me to place an intentional focus on the racialized and gendered experiences of African-descended transnational (immigrant, refugee, temporary visa holder) women more deeply.

Participants and Data Collection

This inquiry was also shaped by the ways the public and political discourses about migrants, immigrants, refugees, and Black women developed between 2015 and 2017. It was driven and impacted by the uncertainty, fear, and resignation in light of the U.S. presidential campaign and elections, as well as the rhetoric and initial policy making that emerged. For the larger study, I sought out seven Black transnational women between the ages of 25 and 35 years, who had already been in my life for a substantial amount of time. In this context, I used “transnational” to refer to women who did not have valid visas, women who had been through the resettlement process and held U.S. citizenship, women who had married and received documentation, and women who held student visas or shared their time between the United States and their home countries. We spent time together, conducted several interviews that were often bi-directional in the sense that the participants asked me questions as well, and reflected on some of our shared experiences with race, gender, and language. The text used in this article is taken from the data constructed with three of the seven women.

However, collecting data with participants who play a significant role in my life meant that some of the key concepts of qualitative research such as reciprocity, ethics, and exploitation required layers of reflexivity I had not anticipated. There was no clear line between research and life, as our everyday experiences prompted the inquiry, and our relationships with each other kept the research going. In this article, I include narrative vignettes from data I collected with three of the seven participants: Naima, Chrisette, and Marisha.

At the time of this project, Naima was 35 years old and had come to the United States from Somalia through a resettlement program. After meeting her husband in her early 20s, she relocated from the Pacific Northwest to the Midwest, where she and her husband raised their four children (two of whom lived in Somalia for an extended time period while the research project was conducted) and attended ESL and GED (General Educational Development) courses.

Thirty-three-year-old Chrisette was my neighbor in the apartment complex I lived before and while I collected data. A mother of three, Chrisette had overstayed her visitor visa and therefore did not have documentation. During this research project, I supported her in pursuing her request for asylum. Although she had one of her children with her in the United States, the other two had remained with her husband in her country of origin, Haiti. She supported her family by working in the service industry, which was made difficult by her lack of documentation and support.

Marisha was 35 at the time of the research project. She is one of my relatives and also did not have documentation after overstaying her visa and was in the process of pursuing her legal status. Due to my deep, yet different relationships with all three of these participants, the stories that emerged through the project were shared. The next section will provide a theoretical framing for these stories, rooted in a Black and transnational feminist approach.

Qualitative Research Rooted in Transnational Black Feminism

January 2017: I pick up my phone and see 5 missed calls from Naima. I am concerned. Is she cancelling our interview? I really need to wrap up my data collection. When my call to her connects, I hear her sobbing. “Tanja . . . it’s my mother!” Thinking the worst, my mind wanders to the random terror attacks in Somalia, the months of filling out paperwork with Naima, and the online research about the immigration process. “She got stuck because of the Muslim ban,” Naima continues. I feel cold and helpless. “What do you mean?” I ask weakly, for lack of a better response. The U.S. administration had just released a hasty ban on immigrants from certain countries, essentially not allowing the plane that carried Naima’s mother to depart to the United States and become stuck in her layover city. Naima asks if I can come over and make some phone calls on her behalf and to use my Americanized accent, which she seems to believe carries magical social capital. I wrap my infant daughter into layers to protect her against the Midwestern winter air and drive to Naima’s home, where she instructs me on which airlines to call for information. The efforts are futile and I know so, but keep going. We never conduct the interview about leading transnational lives in today’s United States.

I tell this story to illustrate and theorize what it means to operationalize a transnational Black feminist framework for the purposes of qualitative methodology. Hall (2016) outlines four guiding principles of transnational Black feminist activism: “intersectionality, scholar-activism, solidarity building, and attention to borders/boundaries” (p. 91). In conceptualizing a transnational Black feminist approach to qualitative methods, I particularly consider intersectionality as an analytical tool that emerged from Black feminist and Critical Race theoretical critiques (Crenshaw, 1991) Another central consideration is the role of the nation-state and how individuals interact with and move through its borders/boundaries (Grewal, 2005). In this context, I consider borders both as physically imposed manifestations of the nation-state to control and legitimize/delegitimize entries and exit of (im)migrants, as well as metaphorically, as the state’s impact via over-policing and under-policing particular communities, form requirements, and definitions (e.g., racial identifications) shape the selfhood of those who interact with it.

In addition, solidarity must be considered one goal of the process and product of this type of inquiry, as readers enter and engage with the stories we tell, to gain better understandings of their own experiences and those of others. In this, I follow Mohanty (2003), who asserts that practicing solidarity is a way of centering communities of people, who decide to collaborate and struggle together, rather than working from the assumption of a shared “commonality of oppression” (p. 7). Considering solidarity, rather than a shared experience of oppression, enables us to do this work across difference.

Born out of Black Feminist Thought and Critical Race Theory, intersectionality has been widely used as an analytical tool to better understand how systems of oppression manifest themselves in particular instances or through particular experiences (Carbado, Crenshaw, Mays, & Tomlinson, 2013). Without considering which obvious and innocuous intersecting dimensions are at play when conducting research in contexts in which one is an outsider within (Collins, 1999), it may be more difficult to safeguard this work from making generalizations, rather than understanding nuances and the particular. Pinto (2013) notes that studying the ways racial, national, gendered, and sexual identity categories are produced and assigned meaning in the African diaspora requires us to consider “the strategies of representation in both/all of its complexities” (p. 7). While these strategies of representation should be deeply considered for all projects and participants, working with participants who are particularly vulnerable due to their visa or documentation status, or due to harmful and essentializing discourses about their communities, requires the radical centering of their protection from potential harm caused by being identified or misrepresented in the research process. In the case of this study, framing these experiences through a transnational Black feminist approach made it possible to both contextualize and de-essentialize the experiences of the participants to work against misrepresentation.

Operationalizing a Transnational Black Feminist Approach

Narratives and storytelling are part of Black feminist traditions and therefore compatible with, if not integral parts of, a transnational Black feminist approach. Furthermore, story narratives are also one way qualitative researchers can attend to the necessity of thinking of ways to (re)present the complexities of identities experienced on the continuum of “migration horror stories” (Davies, 1994) as well as the fulfillment of the diasporic subject’s version of the American dream (Moore, 2013). The following takes up some of these complexities, particularly with respect to telling stories through a transnational Black feminist lens. We begin with Chrisette:

“I need you to tell my story, I mean write it down,” Chrisette cuts right to the point after knocking loudly on my door. She is holding a stack of paperwork in one hand and clutching her toddler’s hand with the other. She exudes an excitement and anxiety with which I am familiar; the mixed emotion I too have felt whenever I have received information that would move my visa case further. Or perhaps I am projecting. As we sit, she explains to me that the organization that agreed to support her asylum case needs her story—the story of why and how she came to the United States—in written form. At that point, I had heard bits and pieces of the story many times, first in her living room over fried plantains, in a mixture of English and French. Then, in the office of the organization’s support staff, in which the staff member alternated between listening, taking notes, and interrupting her to clarify dates, places, names, and other types of verifiable information. The last time I heard the story she told it to a third staff member, adding details she had never included, that were necessary to make her case believable, her trauma verifiable and real enough to be considered for asylum. Finally, when the charge came to her writing a plea, she provided me with documents that bore tables and checklists for what needed to be included. We recorded her telling of the story in French and English, based on which I crafted a written product, which I slipped under her door while she was at work. On that day, she returned, with tears in her eyes. “It is exactly, no better, than I would have written it, if I could have,” she noted. And: “I like that when I give you a job, you do it perfectly.”

I think about this interaction with Chrisette and her story often. I can easily recall my own discomfort throughout each retelling of physical violence, her fear, and uncertainty underscoring every word. I can remember her story in its initial stages, before it was forced into the form required by the U.S. government agencies that would ultimately never review her case. In many ways, hers was a “migration horror story” (Davies, 1994), in the sense that it was her horrific experience of violence in Haiti that prompted her to seek asylum in the United States, where her situation grew perpetually direr. On one hand, Chrisette’s written story would be used to evaluate whether or not the abuse she experienced was politically motivated and horrific “enough” to qualify her for asylum. On the other hand, her story would also be added to the already existing body of stories that perpetuate a Western narrative about Haiti as “dysfunctional, child-like, and dependent” (Balaji, 2011, p. 50). Thus, the making of Chrisette’s story both illustrates how the bureaucratic process of the nation-state (in this case, governmental agencies) functioned to shape and limit this narrative through the boundaries of Westernized storytelling, and the hidden values of evaluating who is worthy of asylum, and who is not.

In her first iterations of the events that prompted her to leave her husband and two of her children behind in Haiti, Chrisette and her experience were at the center. Through a stream of consciousness devoid of dates and oftentimes without chronological order, she retold what and she wanted her audience to know about her experience. The meetings with staff at a nonprofit organization that advocated for her required that she retold the story to strangers, to re-assemble the story in chronological order, to include certain information, and to omit experiences she had previously included, which were deemed unimportant. Through the process, the focus shifted from her as teller of the story, to her experiences and violence and trauma for the sake of citizenship. In many ways, in writing her story with/for her, I hoped that it would not only meet the needs outlined by the form but also be true to her and, in light of her disappearance, serve as proof that she was here²—in my life, in my neighborhood, in the Midwestern city we temporarily called home.

Analyzing the process of coauthoring of the story and the story itself through a framework that considered the role of the nation-state in shaping its process provided insight into the ways it positions migrants and refugees, and the values that drive this process. The form’s requirements necessitated a particular emphasis on a chronological recounting of violence and pain to establish eligibility. Proof had to be furnished for each described instance of violence, which was the point at which Chrisette’s faith in the process waned. The police in Haiti asked for large sums of money to provide police reports that could substantiate Chrisette’s story. She was unable and unwilling to pay the money, worried that she would have to continue to pay without receiving her documents. The process required Chrisette to navigate bureaucratic processes in two countries, each with a different set of requirements. In the end, she gave up on the process of seeking asylum.

Another dimension that played a central role in the development of the storied document was language. Chrisette told me the story in English and French, feeling more comfortable in French. Because I had become familiar with her story in both languages, I was able to fill in blanks in her official interviews. My role in this case was that of an advocate, rather than a translator. Baker-Bell (2017) also notes the centrality of language in an approach she calls Black Feminist-Womanist storytelling. This approach interweaves autoethnography, African American language, and literacy traditions, along with Black feminist theories. The goal is “to create an approach that provides Black women with a method for collecting our stories, writing our stories, analyzing our stories, and theorizing our stories at the same time as healing from them” (Baker-Bell, 2017, p. 6; emphasis added). Transnational dimensions extend these Black feminist theories and methods by, for example, attending to the tradition of “diaspora stories” (Christou, 2009) and “migration horror stories” (Davies, 1994). To think more deeply about how to tell these stories, however, we must also consider what it means to (re)present our participants and their stories. We must consider the liminal positions in which we researchers find ourselves as we determine which stories we tell, and which stories we should not tell, all of which are rooted in relationships.

Relationships, Friendships, and Liminal Positionings

Naima, Chrisette, Marisha, and the other women with whom I conducted my research are my friends and my family members. Knowing their liminal positioning in U.S. society, which was often connected with fleetingness, instability, and insecurity, meant that I paid close attention to the ways I would represent their stories, often because their circumstances brought with it a certain urgency to protect them. I argue in this context, that it is crucial for researchers who seek to pursue a transnational Black feminist framework to think deeply about the best—least violent—ways to disseminate the findings of their work. As Richardson (1990) notes, “No matter how we stage the text, we—as authors—are doing the staging. As we speak about the people we study, we also speak for them. As we inscribe their lives, we bestow meaning and promulgate values” (p. 12)—which applies no matter what our relationships are with the participants. By centering friendships (Tillmann-Healy, 2003) and dialogue, rather than distance and a single voice, Owton and Allen-Collinson (2013) contend, researchers move toward the goal of disrupting the power imbalance between them and their participants.

In addition, my close relationships and ongoing dialogues about struggles, successes, and learning experiences with the women made me cautious not to reiterate common tropes about the various identities the women were ascribed or ascribed to themselves (Black, undocumented, Muslim, Christian, highly educated, not formally educated). I pursued an approach rooted in reflexivity and care with respect to our own multiple identities and selves, our relationships with participants, and the audiences who may read and interpret this work (Doucet, 2008; Joseph, 2016). Furthermore, I recognized that I had to be reflexive with respect to the spaces we navigate and enter, as “Black girls and women’s liberatory practices have been, and will continue to be, rooted in the spaces that we demand, seek, create, and cultivate” (Butler, 2018, p. 30). I found research to be such a space, because it enabled us to ask questions of each other, to theorize them, and to negotiate our understandings in ways that would not have otherwise happened. However, inviting my family and friends into a research project also meant that I had to represent them in ways that not only would avoid harming them as individuals but also would not violate our long-standing relationships.

At times, I found myself in personal conflict, particularly regarding comments made by Naima and Chrisette that were in stark contrast with my own politics, beliefs, and ways of knowing. Although I wanted to just listen without pushing back due to my new role as a researcher, I did critically engage some of their statements, and pushed back if they disagreed with me. I recognized that to be my authentic self as a researcher, I would seek to listen over talking, but as their friend and family member, I would still engage their thoughts through dialogue. This engagement of their ideas came from a place of love and understanding with respect to the types of education to which they both had access, the types of media they consumed, and the various worldviews and contexts in which we were socialized prior to coming to the United States. Our existing rapport allowed me to delve into difficult questions without destroying our trust, but it did not always mean that it was easy to work with people who also knew me well. In these moments of learning, however, I recognized that these were discussions I would not share, because they could be used to re-inscribe stereotypes and deficit-views already associated with immigrants, Muslims, and Black people. Even if recorded, I chose these moments to open up dialogue, rather than to draw conclusions about the participants’ ideas. This reciprocal approach required a “kind of intense sharing that opens all lives party to the inquiry to examination” (Lincoln, 1995, pp. 283-284), in which I tried to be only as open as I expected the participants to be. However, despite this striving, there were moments in which the larger contexts combined with the pursuit of research did impact the responses, interactions, and ultimately the richness of the data I was able to collect. For example, Marisha (to whom I am related) provided me with extremely careful answers during one of our interviews. In the transcript excerpt below, I asked about the racial climate in the United States:

Marisha:

Racism, it’s definitely here. I definitely experienced it personally. And based on everything that’s going on in the news, I think it’s in our everyday life as a Black woman.

Tanja:

Do you have any experiences that you want to share?

Marisha:

[long pause] No.

Tanja:

Okay.

Marisha:

Not really [laughter].

Tanja:

So how would you describe the climate around race and racism in Jamaica?

Marisha:

In Jamaica, we’re all like 90%, 95% still Black people, but there is people with lighter skin tones and darker skin tones. And that’s how our racism kind of is because if you have a lighter skin tone you’re—you could have a lighter skin tone with no education and you could get a job at a place where a darker skin toned person with a higher education would never get a job because of the color of their skin.

Tanja:

So where do you think that comes from?

Marisha:

I just think it comes from just history, just the mindset of people and the way they think. Actually, I think it’s coming from here, in the US [laughter].

Tanja:

You think it’s coming from the US?

Marisha:

It’s coming from slavery and it’s coming from—it’s just the history, just the mindset of people. I just think it’s the mindset of people.

Tanja:

Have you seen that change at all?

Marisha:

What do you think? Where do you think that it all comes from [laughter]?

The exchange above was part of an interview I conducted with Marisha, in which I asked questions about her own racial identity, her experiences with race in the United States and Jamaica, and language. In the beginning of the exchange, Marisha notes that she experiences racism frequently. When I asked if she cared to share any of these experiences, she first paused and then declined. Toward the end of the conversation, which focused on the racial climate in Jamaica, she turned the question to me and I provided a brief response. After the recording stopped, she told me that my response “sounded better,” than hers, although I merely elaborated on her point that colorism is an outgrowth and manifestation of colonization and globalized White Supremacy (Allen, 2001). Although I cringed at inserting my own voice and ideas at the time, I recognized that building on the points of the other speaker, developing thoughts in the moment, and co-constructing knowledge this way was a legitimate way of conducting interviews (Harrison, MacGibbon, & Morton, 2001). When I asked Marisha why she was so careful in providing answers throughout the interview, she noted that she did not want to sound uneducated or give incorrect answers on record. She began chatting away about the topics with great interest and asked my opinion about her responses. When I reflected on the conversation later, I also recognized that her sporadic answers, particularly those that aimed to speak more comprehensively about the future, her plans, and how to achieve them, connected to her lack of documentation at a time when she was still fighting for documentation and therefore hesitant to speak about any future plans or goals in more detail.

In many ways, however, this uncertainty and inability to plan for the future, the deep concern about discussing things on record for a myriad of reasons, further strengthened my understanding of the ways our lives were governed by the larger structures and discourses about immigration in the United States. Recently, Marisha told me that she often thinks about the interview with regret, because she feels that today, she would not respond with as much hesitation; she notes that her recent enrollment in college has boosted her confidence in her own intellectual abilities, while obtaining permanent residency status has eased her worries about deportation and the future. The specific context of this interview, then, led to data that initially seemed to lack depth; however, my ongoing relationship with Marisha allowed me to both consider the larger contexts that impacted the interview, and to continue our discussion.

Before engaging in this work with Naima, Chrisette, and Marisha, I studied qualitative methods rigorously. However, during the process, I recognized the ways in which I was not prepared for the realities of conducting research with/in my own community. I knew that as a researcher, I would have to answer to my community of origin and my community of interest (hooks, 1984), which overlapped. The consistent ethical turmoil that emerged because the boundaries between my life and the research were not only blurred³ but nonexistent, caused me to question how research impacted my interactions with the participants, rather than how my interactions with the participants impacted the research. In approaching qualitative research from a transnational Black feminist perspective (Hall, 2016), I had to reconsider my positioning in relation to the participants at all times.

Thus, when Chrisette dragged a bassinette, baby bath, and diapers from her apartment to mine when I was pregnant, I did not refuse these gifts, because of the many conversations we had about childbirth and loss. On another occasion, Chrisette called me over to her place and when I came to her apartment, she opened her refrigerator and showed me a single egg, which was all she had for dinner for herself and her daughter that day. All of her money had gone to supporting her family in Haiti. I pulled out my last cash and handed it to her. As I wrote a field note about the encounter, I realized that me handing her money could be considered crossing a line, considering that she was participating in my study. However, thinking of the single egg and the relief that registered on her face after I handed her the money, I realized that a line would have been crossed had I betrayed our friendship by keeping clear lines between our role as researcher and participant.

Ultimately, as there existed no lines between our lives and the research project, I recognized that questions of ethics and reciprocity would oftentimes be complicated by the nature of the work and the relationship. Not accepting her presents would have likely eroded our relationship and could have exacerbated the feelings of isolation and sadness she was already experiencing. Not helping Chrisette in times of need would have resulted in feelings of guilt on my part. Reciprocity, then, did not only refer to the “collaborative theorizing” (Lather, 1991) I, for example, engaged in with Marisha; reciprocity also meant that I would not disrupt the give and take of the relationships I already had with the participants.

Some of the relationships I had with participants did shift through the research process. Spending increased intentional time together brought us closer and made me more willing to ignore my own boundaries. Thus, I did not refuse Chrisette’s request to drive her around town for several hours while I was 9 months pregnant, in search of a job agency that would hire her without documentation; and I agreed to spend hours on the phone with governmental agencies, and watch children, even when I felt exhausted. These moments, however, were indicative of our trust, and the need to rely on each other in moments when, away from our families and networks, we were each other’s only support. In this sense, working from a perspective that radically centered our relationship allowed me to maintain interactions that were authentic and also collect data that emerged from a feeling of mutual trust and oftentimes, shared experience.

Living/Researching Intersecting Immigrant Liminalities

In December 2016, Chrisette’s phone was disconnected only a few weeks after she moved out of the apartment complex we both lived in. I received a call from the complex’ management, learning that I had been her emergency contact. I was unsure how to answer questions regarding her whereabouts, because although I did have her new address, I knew that she had interrupted her application for asylum and still did not have a valid visa. Months later, when I too moved out, I found a dirty letter in the parking lot. Instinctively, I picked it up and found that it was addressed to Chrisette. I drove by the address she provided, but could not find her. After years of a close friendship, Chrisette had disappeared from my life. On my recorder, in my memory, and through our shared writing, I hold proof of our friendship and her impact on my life.

In this article, I presented some considerations for conducting qualitative research from a transnational Black feminist perspective with participants who are and were an integral part of my life. The stories, reflections, and other data points I included showed how privileging relationships over the research process meant that often, the richest data were gathered outside of the predetermined methods of the project (interviews, scheduled observations, etc.). Furthermore, considering the role in which the larger transnational contexts (e.g., the Muslim ban) and nation-state(s) (in Chrisette’s story) played in shaping the lived experiences of the Black transnational women with whom I conducted this research reflected the complexity of their lives, as well as the need for intersectional analyses of these complexities.

For researchers, who do not wish to perpetuate violence in their communities, or the marginalized communities they enter, doing this work means that we must not only question the methods we use to collect and analyze data but also consider the particularity and complexity of the instances we represent through storytelling and other means of representation. Working with and in communities that are our own requires that we reflexively engage kconcepts of qualitative inquiry, such as reciprocity and ethics in the particular context of the community and the research project. In light of the increased aggressiveness with which the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has been pursuing the deportation of immigrants who do not hold valid visas or other forms of documentation, the resulting detention of children, and the centuries of state-sanctioned murders of unarmed Black people, there are few aspects of our lives that are unaffected by the nation-state. Considering the rhetoric about immigrants as pollutants (Potts, 2017) and Black communities as violent, dysfunctional, and impoverished (Fausset, Blinder, & Eligon, 2016), reproduced by the current administration, “diaspora stories” (Christou, 2009) remain crucial in creating postcolonial counternarratives (Fitzpatrick, 2018), and serve as a tool to build solidarity across borders, walls, and communities.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

ORCID iD

Tanja Burkhard

Author Biography

Tanja Burkhard is a qualitative researcher and Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work explores the racialized, gendered, and linguistic experiences of Black transnational women from a transnational Black feminist and anticolonial perspective.

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