Articulations, A Radical Methodology for Black Pedagogy Redefining Education through Black Women’s Hair Experiences

Chapter One
Black Hair Literacy
Patience, Right?
Hairlines and Headlines
Why Black Women
Why Black Hair
Why Black Women Educators

Chapter Two
Black Women in Education: Reclaiming Mind, Body, Spirit, and Humanity
Mind
Body
Spirit
Humanity

Chapter Three
We Are Our Hair
Black Hair (Re)members, (Re)pairs, (Re)stores
Protectin’ and the True Cost
Afros and Locs

Chapter Four
To Be Black, Radical, and Free: A Methodology
Wrapped Mentality
Hair Matters
Moisturized and Wrapped Healing Circles
Detangling Traditions One Strand at a Time

Chapter Five
(Re)member Who You Are
Protect the Hair and the Spirit
Healing through Shared Narratives: The Art of Identity
Where Hair and Education Meet
Appendix 5.A: QR Resource, Moisturized + Wrapped H.C. Resource Page

Chapter Six
Secure the Lace
Native Schools, Fugitivity and Protection
Segregated Spaces and Natural Styles
Integrated Spaces and Straight Hair

Chapter Seven
Hair as a Battleground
Colonization of the Body
Disembodied Voyeurism
Post-Traumatic Hair Subversion
Texturized Code-Switching…With Agency
Textured Expressions of Liberation

Chapter Eight
Dead Ends, New Beginnings
Why This Matters

Biography

Dr. Eghosa Obaizamomwan-Hamilton is a Black motherscholar working in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, but prioritizes working for her community. Prior to higher education, she was a K-12 educator for 16 years. Her broad research and teaching focus on Black Critical Race Theory, Black Educational Studies, Black Feminist Thought, intersectionality, critical pedagogy, and the sociology of race and education. She is the co-founder of the nonprofit organization Making Us Matter and co-founding editor of The Black Educology Mixtape "Journal". Her scholarship investigates the complex intersections of race, identity, gender, and education, and is published in peer-reviewed journals such as Harvard Educational Review, Equity & Excellence in Education, Race Ethnicity and Education, and Educational Studies. Drawing on 18 years of experience, her writing, teaching, and research intersect to explore interdisciplinary themes deeply informed by and engaging with Black intellectual traditions.

With direct and unapologetic language, Dr. Obaizamomwan-Hamilton has given us instructions—if we are to do right by Black women educators, we must move with honesty, responsibility, commitment and love. In honoring their process of healing, we must take heed to their stories, lessons and imperatives to build new worlds. Anything less is unacceptable.

—David Stovall, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago

Dr. Obaizamomwan Hamilton’s cutting-edge radical methodology for Black pedagogy highlights the power of utilizing research in service of personal and collective racial healing as a necessary form of educational reparation. Centering the (her)stories of Black women through their hairstories, including her own, she poetically embodies the dignity and necessary politic of unapologetically honoring the intersections of being Black and being woman within and despite educational institutions shaped by anti-Blackness and misogynoir. Her own 16-year teaching career in public education, along with the Black women teachers in her healing centered racial affinity space, invites readers to seriously consider what is needed to recruit, prepare, retain, and nurture Black women in a field that has shamefully failed them since the inception of schooling.

—Farima Pour-Khorshid, Ph.D., University of San Francisco

To be seen, to be loved, felt—is a sacred act of regard. Articulations, A Radical Methodology for Black Pedagogy: Redefining Education through Black Women’s Hair Experiences offers an invitation, a mirror, into the plight, fight, beauty, healing, and em(body)ed experiences of Black women. Hair holds memory, ancestral legacies, the bonds of our DNA, our storying. Black hair, coarse, textured, exemplifying resilience, has been used as a weapon to tame and control toward respectability; yet, like our stories, its agility, its ability to move, take shape, shift, BE, and adapt, lives in memory. Black hair tells our collective stories of (re)claimation, and remembering, interwoven, Loc’d in.

Dr. Obaizamomwan-Hamilton’s 4C methodology offers Black women communion and a pathway toward what bell hooks defines as a radical state of being, rooted in love and liberation, moving beyond systems of domination and toward authorship. It offers US a radical approach that positions Black women’s hair as a site of healing, mind, body, and spirit, honoring our textured experiences, both racialized and gendered, while creating a portal to embodied knowledge and intuition.

—Yaribel Mercedes., Adjunct Professor of Literacy, Hunter College

Articulations, A Radical Methodology for Black Pedagogy: Redefining Education through Black Women’s Hair Experiences offers a novel, yet relatable way of providing context for understanding the uniqueness that is the professional life of the Black woman educator. As a writer, mother-scholar and educator Dr. Obaizamomwan-Hamilton can be described as "The Connector." She deftly connects what seem to be two disparate topics, those being Black women’s hair and education, and thoroughly weaves them together (pun intended) in a way that intricately describes the ways in which we love, nurture, and protect our crowns and our whole selves in spite of it all, despite every damn thang.

—Dr. Heather M. Streets, Doctoral Writing Coach and Adjunct Professor, University of San Francisco

Dr. Eghosa Obaizamomwan Hamilton, using Black hair as a framework, literally roots her work in her identity as a Black Motherscholar, leaving in her wake a multi-generational text lovingly speaking to both the past and future ancestors. Her words, part biography, part manifesto, & part blueprint are plaited into a basket to carry the experiences of multiple Black women (re)discovering identities damaged, desiccated, and disrupted through schooling experiences. Articulations, A Radical Methodology for Black Pedagogy: Redefining Education through Black Women’s Hair Experiences, through its introduction of new(old) ways of seeing Black women educators, is a work of futurity, in that it is impossible for the reader not to imagine a world in which all Black women and girls specifically, but Black people in general are celebrated as cultural, structural, spiritual cornerstones of not only these united states, but any place an afro has eclipsed the sun.

—Dr. Andre Carter, Editor, Black Educology Mixtape and Adjunct Professor, San Francisco State University and City College of San Francisco