Visual stories as communal truth-telling : The placemaking practices of Black female undergraduates in a Historically White Institution (HWI)

Hanson, Alix and Vincent, Jonathan (2025) Visual stories as communal truth-telling : The placemaking practices of Black female undergraduates in a Historically White Institution (HWI). PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis employs a Black Girl Cartography to examine the placemaking of undergraduates, as they navigate a predominantly White university in which they are one of few Black students on their course. Utilising participant-generated visual methods — including images crafted with generative AI and other digital tools — as well as online interviews and focus groups, Black female students create, share and discuss artefacts that represent their experiences of and strategies for placemaking in a setting in which they are the minority. With the addition of online interviews conducted with Black female educators within the same institution, the research delves into student and staff insights concerning Black placemaking. Rejecting overused deficit narratives relating to Black students in historically White institutions (HWIs), elements of culturally grounded Appreciative Inquiry are drawn upon to explore their creative engagements beyond a sole focus on oppression, conscripting students to co-envision their ideal academic space, in real time. Epistemologically recentred as African, I propose that their placemaking rituals and strategies emerge from a combination of a pervasive sense of hostility from predominantly White environments which is experienced as a lived reality, coupled with an intrinsic indomitability, which gives rise to what I term Simbatic Practice. I contend that this is uniquely discoverable through a methodological strategy called Afro-visual Inquiry (AVI).