(Re)Centering the Spirit: A Spiritual Black Feminist Take on Cultivating Right Relationships in Qualitative Research

Through a study exploring the role of spirituality in the lives of Black women pursuing engineering doctorates, this article provides a reimagining of researcher/participant relationships in qualitative research and highlights new possibilities in cultivating research relationships that are both humanizing and healing. This reimagining is guided by two frameworks. The first is Black feminist thought enunciated by Collins (1990/2000) to affirm Black women’s knowledge claims through lived experience, the centrality of dialogue, and the ethics of personal accountability and care. The second is endarkened feminist epistemology’s methodology of surrender (Dillard, 2006), which embraces love, compassion, reciprocity, and ritual.