Ruth Nicole Brown

Heartbeats: Exploring the Power of Qualitative Research Expressed As Autoethnographic Performance Texts

One of the ways to participate as change agents in the struggle toward a true participatory global democracy is constructing spaces in which to communicate across race, ethnicity, religion, class, and culture. This collaborative, auto/ethnographic performance text was started during a pre-conference workshop titled “Heartbeats: Writing Performance Texts,” I designed and facilitated with the help of my colleague Carolyne J. White. The purpose of the workshop was to encourage colleague participants from around the globe to construct spiritual and physical spaces for creating sacred, performance texts grounded in their lived experiences both as researchers and as socially conscious beings in the world; and to share them out loud in an ad hoc learning community environment. The environment was created in part, by transforming a traditional university meeting space into a space filled with cultural artifacts, photographs, music, and the voices of men and women gathered together for a brief period of time, in the hopes of encouraging the construction of more sessions like this in traditional university conference settings.

Persephone's Triumph Reflections of a Young Black Woman Becoming a Real Political Scientist

This article is a poetic retelling of insight gained as a Black woman surviving graduate school. The purpose of this autoethnographic narrative is to document a few pivotal graduate school experiences that illustrate all that it means to become disciplined in and by higher education. Although the violence committed in such a privileged space may seem trivial, the hurt is real and needs to be given voice. Written to warn and to inspire those not yet overcoming, the metaphor of Persephone and Demeter (as adapted by Rita Dove) is invoked in this essay to demonstrate how it is more than possible to reign in the midst of pain.

Teaching Love: “teaching the power of the word”

Teaching Love is a commentary and response to “Teaching the power of the word,” an ethnodrama based on a series of narrative interviews conducted with an outstanding teacher of English in the Chicago Public Schools, Anise Arcova, written by Charles Vanover (and also submitted to QSE as an original work). Brown and Vanover intend for the two manuscripts to be linked and considered together.