Liming as Black Methodology: Black Early Career Scholars Engage Black Humanity in Research

Introduction

Critical scholars, such as those in Decolonial, Black Studies, BlackCrit, Black Feminist thought, and Indigenous areas of study argue that at present, education and schooling is a Western and Euro-American project (Dei, 2012, 2000; Ferguson et al., 2024; Hailu & Chea Simmons, 2022). Pedagogical practices in some educational spaces are not exempt from the oversight of “Eurocentric systems and processes, as well as ideas about what counts as education” (Dei, 2012, p. 103). Furthermore, traditionally valued systems of knowledge production and prized disciplinary approaches thrive due to their Western construction of certain people, (and their experiences) as humans and others as non-humans (Wynter, 1994). Aiming to facilitate a shift from Western norms of educational research, this paper engages continued discourse in order to build from and reflect rich epistemic orientations of Black thinkers, scholars, communities, and histories. This ensures that those often ‘studied’ outside of their culture and community, with disregard to their inherent ways of being, are centralized and recognized as powerful intellectual contributors.

Next, we look to the Caribbean methodology of liming to illustrate how educational research can be engaged. Liming is a “traditionally regarded…form of leisure and interaction characteristic to the Caribbean” (Santana et al., 2019, p. 100). Liming is a disruption to Western forms of study and inquiry that are most often limited in understanding the lived experiences of Caribbean people (Ferguson et al., 2024; Nakhid-Chatoor et al., 2019; Santana et al., 2019). As a methodology, liming illustrates how educational research practices can be enhanced by Caribbean ways of being and knowing. Specifically, I draw consideration on how liming allows Black researchers to be in conversation with and learn from the communities they serve. Additionally, I examine the considerations I gave myself (and my dissertation project) as a Black early-career educational researcher. As a reflective endeavor, this paper allowed me to push myself towards recalling how essential of a role it played, while detailing how liming emerged in my own work during the practice of research and writing.

In what follows, I first illustrate my personal connection into this work and how liming not only yielded abundant opportunities for my learning and unlearning but also molded my educational research practices. Secondly, liming is posited as a critical Black methodological approach. Thirdly, existing scholarly practices from the Caribbean compound to illustrate how liming emerged in my research. Next, liming’s implementation in my research processes (from data collection to analysis) is highlighted. Lastly, long ranging benefits of liming are named and acknowledged – across the worlds of knowledge production, educational research, and pedagogy.

Though this paper centers and uplifts liming, it harkens to the larger understanding and use of knowledge stemming from Black communities and African peoples across the Diaspora, by Black or African descendent scholars. Dei (2012) introduces the intellectual and political challenge that is Black or African scholars existing as their full selves while incorporating ‘African Heritage Knowledge’, despite the ways of the Western academy. Dei’s vision for it as a “cultural fund of the individual and collective knowledge of African peoples” (p. 105) is the beginning of a call to uplift African culture and intellectualism, and to deliberately move away from anti-colonialism in knowledge production and teaching and learning.

Finding Black Method-Making in Critical Sites of Study

With regards to Wynter ‘s (1994) call to reconfigure the how-to’s of knowledge production, and attending to this special collections call (No) Human’s Involved”: On the Potentialities of Black Research Approaches to Education, my objective is to demonstrate the potential in extending beyond the accepted processes of knowledge production (and research) that positions black life as other. In extending the classificatory norms and processes, reproducing black life as unknowables, I bring forward ways in which my own learning experiences in graduate school became buoyed by epistemologies reflecting the depth of black thinking, black intellectualism, and the black radical tradition. Further, Cedric Robinson’s (1983) framing of the black radical tradition upholds the “ideological, philosophical, and epistemological natures of a Black movement whose dialectical matrix…was capitalist slavery and imperialism” (p. 167). It is clear that black movements routinely use “collective intelligence gathered from struggle” (p. 167) against agents with non-liberatory goals.

In this paper, I follow in the Black radical tradition and work to advance Black thought outside of struggles within knowledge production in postsecondary learning spaces. In my attempt to mold my work and my research process with a mind towards black intellectualism, it has made clearer the interwoven history and strength of Black intellectuals and intellectualism. This labor inspires greater potential for deeply inspired research centering (and leading to) Black freedom, and decolonizing opportunities. Such decolonizing opportunities come to fruition as a result of centering Black life, Black method-making, and Black thought via black intellectualism. Higher education and educational research in particular are in dire need of this expanded understanding. Operating with certainty that Black life and Black method-making act together as critical sites of study and knowledge production (Alexander, 2005), I posit that research in and across higher education can benefit methodologically and theoretically from Black ways of being. The potentiality of such benefits is predicated on the strength and attributes of Black methods. McKittrick (2021) notes that the “black method is precise, detailed, coded, long, and forever” (p. 5). As a result, there is beauty in the exploration of “thinking and learning across many sites” (p. 5) while intellectually fellowshipping and generously calibrating our (Black thinkers) work within the Black Caribbean tradition of liming.

Following the contributions of Okello and Morton (2022) towards calling out and dismantling anti-black educational policies, arguing “Black people have created routes to literacy and knowledge” (p. 1), incorporating liming adds to the discourse. Next, I guide towards liming as a fully black diasporic (non-Western) concept and method. Liming as a concept and method is not contained, and is situated outside of Western thought and Western ways of knowing.

Theoretical Framework

Liming is a Black, Caribbean and indigenous research methodology that can be traced back to the Caribbean island nation of Trinidad and Tobago (Nakhid-Chatoor et al., 2019; Nakhid, 2022; Santana et al., 2019). Liming is inherently focused on community members (known as limers) who get together to simply “lime”. What occurs in a liming session, while people lime, is nothing close to simple. The act of the “lime” is revolutionary because it does not preclude that a certain level of educational attainment exists before participation, it does not preclude that an educational space be present for it to take place in, and it is open to the community at large. Liming has a social equity aspect to it as it is driven by community and provides reasoning space to discuss community affairs or politics.

“In the environment of a lime, meaning is negotiated, social and political discourses are elucidated and debated, and cultural products and spaces are collectively used” (Santana et al., 2019). Nakhid, (2022) articulates that liming “made its way around the [Anglophone] Caribbean region, adapting to the specific cultural mores of each of the Caribbean Islands” (p. 97). Across the Caribbean, liming stands as a communication based engagement for socialization within its communities (Nakhid-Chatoor et al., 2019). Hallmarks of liming are its humor, spontaneity, organicness, and non-formulaic touch. With deep roots in the indigenous traditions of Caribbean people, liming allows limers (the name islanders participating in it are called) to forge non-transactional relationships with each other. Limers take their time to reflect on what they say authentically and they question assumptions.

Liming, Again

In my life and community, liming was a regular occurrence. As a child, witnessing aunts and uncles partake in liming sessions was not unusual. It was the cultural norm to be playing with my cousins while our elders came together for spirited discussion. As this was my introduction to liming, courtesy of my Caribbean roots and upbringing, I would not depart from it. Before writing this paper, I had commonly shared experiences to other minoritized students attending a predominantly white graduate institution. Earlier reflections (and informal conversations with classmates) about my research ambitions drew on the complexities of relying on predominantly Western traditions and training; both overwhelmingly in learning, practicing, and executing educational research. Identifying the Western ways of knowing within my academic surroundings, made clear that there was more (in the way of cultural relevance) outside of that and I wanted to access it. Paris (2019) posits as much, likening academic research to a “settler-colonial project, and if research hopes to join and be part of resisting that project, we must learn from…Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander activists, researchers, and community members… are doing to resist, reclaim, and reimagine” (p. 221). My doctoral student curiosity continued to lead the way.

Through my solo graduate school experience, there were moments (café chats, on walks, and in-between classes), where fellowship with classmates underscored with clarity that we all might benefit from looking for methods to situate ourselves differently as researchers. Alongside decidedly prioritizing working with communities that reflected diversity and whose knowledge systems were not legible enough within the academic environment. These desires reflected an early crossroads as a scholar in training, where as an individual, I questioned the type of scholar I imagined my future self to be. Further, how successful would I be in ensuring that Black knowledge, Black inquiry, and Black community emerged in my research agenda? For example, my research centered issues related to dis/ability, race, and gender with a narrow focus on neurodivergent Black women in enrolled in graduate education. Yet there was limited engagement with scholarship that centered knowledges on neurodiversity from Black women’s racialized, gendered, and dis/abled lenses. As a result, I wrestled with the realities of knowledge production that occluded neurodivergent Black women from scholarly research, discourse, and representation of themselves. My reflections:

In higher education and student affairs, contemporary literature is advanced by the engagement with intersecting identities of student populations. As an intersecting identity, disability is often less researched and written about from the standpoint of multiply marginalized people. In my dissertation research, I brought race, gender, and dis/ability to the center, focusing on dis/abled Black women, when many studies continue to center dis/abled White men. My dissertation was grounded in Black Studies, Black Feminisms, (Black) Disability Studies, Caribbean Studies, Mad Studies, and Queer Crip Studies. As a Caribbeanist in the field of Higher Education, my sensibilities are typically oriented toward an Anglophone Caribbean lens of the (Black) world, and Blackness. In my dissertation research, I worked to bring concepts of race, ethnicity, Blackness, gender, and dis/ability to the forefront of understanding oneself, and understanding one’s neurodivergence and one’s dis/ability. Foregrounding those allowed me to interrogate Blackness and Race before, and alongside Blackness and Dis/ability. Both individually and as pairings, they have their own distinct culture that needed exploration and nuance within the academy’s ableist constriction of that.

While reflecting on these experiences a year after completing graduate school, I started taking note about liming and thinking how unknowingly, I may have been engaging with liming during my studies and how I may have used liming in research. Its reappearance in my work many years later was a surprise, but welcomed. For example, reflecting on my ‘interview’ process with research participants, was edifying and comforting. Perhaps, there was something deeper there. Furthermore, my conversations (with my participants) were adaptable with respect to various Afro-Caribbean based Creole languages, dialect, accent, or speech they preferred. This cultural competency offered more context to our conversations, and depth to the process of conducting research. These reflections and revisiting of my work led me to this juncture, to be in solidarity with my culture’s offerings.

Liming as a Critical Methodology in Educational Research

Regarding educational research, liming “can be considered a research methodology as it guides research and provides the philosophical basis for how research is carried out” (Nakhid et al. (2019) p. 8). As a research methodology, liming can be incorporated to stoke conversations about the processes of conducting research. Through liming, researchers invite research participants (also referred to as limers) in choosing how best to share their experiences and knowledge in authentic ways, steering away from otherwise inflexible interview protocols or research systems. Ferguson et al. (2024) in their decolonizing Caribbean methods work, offer ways in which those of us doing research with the Caribbean world can work with liming as methodology. In this context, the role of the expert is blurred and the limer (research participant) is positioned as an expert in their own right, with their knowledge essential in contouring the researchers understanding of the inquiry they are exploring. Simply put, researchers have an opportunity to undo and disrupt the one directional pathway of knowledge production, when there is knowledge everywhere, held by anyone.

Additionally, a straightforward explanation of liming centers one of its strengths as a non-hierarchical system. One way that liming is used is as a unifier, bringing communities together. Potentially the most meaningful contributions of liming is to facilitate community members better understanding of themselves, when that itself may be at odds with the very world they live in. Liming is powerful in that it helps people construct a sense of self, while their environment does the opposite. As educators and researchers, liming allows us room as to take apart and dissect the academy’s obtuse, unwritten, and hidden codes and rules. Santana (2019) and Ferguson et al. (2024) lay out three building blocks of liming methodologies: building connections, liming, and analyzing limes. This foundation requires overwhelming specificity and overwhelming care. A goal and outcome of liming is that in an educational research aspect, it should not add unnecessary difficulties, or mar the process with rigidity but rather to allow for information that is generative. As an example, reflecting on my dissertation research project, and my engagement with others, authentic opportunities to learn from others in my community were born.

As a doctoral student, my reflective conversations about research, work processes, and the scholarship I’d read happened in class, but also outside of class. Those encounters allowed for time and space to make sense of the academic environment itself. Given the richness that liming adds to educational research and pedagogy, I offer ways that researcher and educators can engage with liming. In the following section, I return to my research and teaching to illustrate ways that liming emerged in my own work.

Methods: Liming in Educational Research

During the act of reflecting on my own research with racialized and dis/abled women, I recalled different occasions in which liming arose in my work. Even though I was already engaging with Black methodologies and Black feminist thought in my research, it was not until I was reintroduced to liming via its power as a research methodology, (and outside of its cultural significance in my life), that the liming scholarship made clear the connections to my own academic work. In this section therefore, I illustrate how liming further emerged in my work, how liming can be implemented in educational research, as well as its link to specific aspects of data collection and analysis.

Discussion: Liming Onwards

My individual curiosities shaped a pathway toward Black scholarship, Black scholarly contributions and Black interventions. In this time of domestic and global unrest, I sought comfort in the works of the many Black academic forefathers and foremothers. This included words and works from Edouard Glissant, Walter Rodney, and Sylvia Wynter, who were haunting in their ability to remain prescient decades later, almost as if they expected me, in the aughts of New England’s academia, to seek them out. This served as reminders that the work(s) were and remained timeless. It also served as a reminder that we were forever bonded via the African Diaspora, through time and space, and through global Anti-Blackness and Anti-intellectualism. I knew that the living within me, did not wither due to the unliving in the halls of academia.

According to Gyimah and Adenekan (2023), Black scholars’ storytelling is powerful, and enacts change; not only to those benefiting from reading such scholarship, but to those writing the scholarship. In reaching back to older scholarship from African Diasporic writers and thinkers, I made certain to ensure that their works continued to thrive in the present. In this way, my chosen collaborations and opportunities laid the groundwork for the brilliance of Black thinkers and educational researchers, alongside their works that stood the test of time. This applicability in itself, illustrates timeliness, but also illustrates a continued search for self in the academy, and a pursuit of liberation and freedom in the work of Black scholars and Black researchers.

Academia did not take from me, despite navigating it in the shadows of a global pandemic, unrest over police brutality, and the loss of George Floyd. Justice, according to Alexander (2005) was something to be sought after in the teaching taking place in academia. Yet the realization, “teaching for justice is at odds with a hegemonic narrative that would foreground in a one-sided manner an ascendent corporate class as the sole agents of history” (p. 92). Me, as a curious Afro-Guyanese and Afro-Caribbean thinker, came from my South American home where I once lived, with the knowledges I was born with, to the place I now exist in. In that, I dared to make it something new and something unrecognizable. This is largely in part to the timelessness of Black scholarship and Black livingness. Black aliveness was well within me, and is within anyone wanting to intentionally disrupt Western understandings and concepts of knowledge. In this way, liming has propelled me forward and onward.

Nakhid et al. (2019) echo that “liming is crucial to community building and networking” (p. 7). The authors state that within the act of liming, resides new innovative practices that allowed for deeper engagement with other limers. Similarly, the free-spiritedness, unplanned nature and spontaneity germane to liming opened up potential avenues for “camaraderie -companionship, and solidarity” (p. 8). My doctoral training and process of becoming a researcher and scholar is tuned into liming practices, which were long part of my life and Caribbean and Black culture. Despite the many hurdles of this process, my study was shaped by Black forms of being.

The doctoral journey is both individual and communal. While research has shown it to be isolating, less has been written about in the ways that it can inspire. Inspiration to follow my curiosities, inspiration to write in ways that proved generative, and inspiration towards the future made my doctoral journey both special and paradigm shifting. Ensuring that Black stories and Black histories remain present in my work was intentional in storytelling, (Kinloch, 2020). Whereas much is made of the pitfalls of competition and un-collegiality in academia, I was grounded in ideas and ideals of community, collaboration, and liberation from my culture, which is now my practice as a researcher.

This liberation is connected to my desire, as a Black intellectual and researcher, to build from within the safety and protection of my respective universes. In my mind (and work), these universes eschewed global and domestic anti-Blackness. In my work, these universes eschewed hegemonic thinking and values, refusing to center a Western (and White) gaze. As a scholar from the Global South, this continued to be a trend in my academic and intellectual choices. The types of thinking and writing spaces I engaged in (or created) as a doctoral student were intentional and skewed towards nurturing ideas, being developmental, and supportive of those around me. I brought intentional and political citational practices to the physical space in my school of education, sitting and discussing texts, authors, and citational possibilities over lunch. In essence - a lime.

I worked with recognition that legacy building would be essential to my own work, starting with my dissertation research project. This forward thinking was only made possible by the generous thinking, modeling, and generative works of scholars (many of whom are now ancestors) where it could be seen in real time, traced by reading - the roots of their works. I could trace the connections and genealogy of works, of which work was made possible in part due to the work that came before those. This continues to be an act of reverence, and generational meaning making, the borrowing from works that reflect certain historical moments, freedoms, and independences from colonization, and serve as gifts to myself (and other Black scholars) in the here and now. My individual works and those of others, are in the same universe of legacy building and world building. My dissertation project itself was a creation of what could be, and what I wanted it to be.

In Conclusion: A Re/turning

In my integration of liming, my educational life was made brighter. Liming allowed me to be more reflective in my desires to engage in the writing and research process in a more grounded and less isolated way. I want my work to highlight my fortitude and to highlight the depth and breadth interwoven in varied intellectual approaches. The practice of liming allowed me room to live while in the practice of study and to take a typically individualistic experience such as doctoral training (and research), and imagine community thinking, community sharing, and community forecasting within it. As a result, I was able to acknowledge that I wanted the body of my work to highlight my fortitude in being a steward of my communities, and for all Black people.

Whether alone or in community, we as Black researchers can speak as members of our respective communities, bringing forward points of views that could best be identified by other Black researchers, and Black community members. Lastly, I positioned myself to have my work read broadly throughout the Diaspora, and the Diaspora within academe, as the Diaspora is present throughout the work. Perhaps, the method of liming would provide opportunity, and invite more into the community as not just researchers, but Black researchers. Finally, I felt the assurance of both answerability and responsibility, with, in, and around my scholarly contributions - so it has to matter, and meaningfully contribute to the canon of educational research.