Finding Balance
Promoting Cross-cultural Psychology Research in the Caribbean: Best Practices in Intersectionality
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sandra Gonsalves Domond
Given the Caribbean’s post-colonial history with daunting, carceral challenges of the following: structural racism, patriarchy, and colorism as epiphenomenal outcomes, it is imperative that cross-cultural investigators using 21st century research paradigms honed and crafted from strengths-based approaches, interrogate issues of national and cultural identity. Additionally, push-pull factors in migration, acculturative influences, psychological resilience and coping strategies within non-pathologizing frameworks of inclusivity and intersectionality are fodder for empirical research. These holistic perspectives borrow from multiple standpoints in Black Psychology as scholar-activists rejected and deconstructed Eurocentric models in explaining Black psyche and behaviors. The discursive frame around subaltern voices, is that, it deracinates pan-universal theories, splinters and challenges hegemonic assumptions. Moving from the mechanistic, binary constructions placing a premium on only quantitative models with concomitant devaluations of qualitative approaches, this author argues that the kind of cross-cultural research that offers the most qualitatively-rich analysis is ethnography. This approach embraces concepts of lived epistemological realities of participants. As a vibrant cross-cultural tool, it triangulates participant observations, interviews, and case studies. The ethnographic report illuminates the following: the uniqueness of indigenous psychologies; addresses issues of language; and grounds the work within multidisciplinary perspectives offering more cogent analyses of cultural phenomena. Further, even research ensconced in academic knowledge-production should hue to the penultimate, translational goals of nation building, community flourishing, and human capital development.
Identity, Diversity, and Rhizomatic Complexity
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bert Olivier
This paper addresses the vexing question of identity in relation to diversity and ‘rhizomatic complexity’ – a phrase that signals its Deleuzo-Guattarian orientation. It is argued that, far from being something that can be comprehended in unitary substantialist fashion (that is, as something unified and forever resistant to change), ‘identity’ can instead be articulated as a function of the constantly shifting relations and interrelations between and among the ‘processes’ comprising the ‘subject’. According to this rhizomatic conception, the subject – if indeed it can be called that – comprises an assemblage-in-becoming, whose contours change as it enters into open-ended processual relations of desiring-production. This simply means that Deleuze and Guattari, complexifying Lacan’s already complex subject (stretched between the real, the imaginary and the symbolic) even further, have theorised a non-substantialist version of it, which accommodates change as well as intermittent, albeit fleeting, stability. This allows for a subject that may be described as identity-in-flux, which means that identity is not cast in stone, but instead that the rhizomatic, open-ended structure of the assemblage subject accommodates reconfigurations of identity, with the caveat that such reconfigurations cannot instantiate a leap over the abyss of nothingness to a point that is rhizomatically untethered to the hitherto temporally evolved assemblage-subject. This conceptualisation of the subject has far-reaching implications for, among other things, cultural reorientation on the part of rhizomatic interrelationality of individual subjects.
Balancing Wellness and Leadership: Exploring Black Women Administrators' Subjective Well-being, Resilience, and Radical Self-Care in Higher Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session La Shae Grottis
Leaders in higher education experience high and unrealistic demands for their skills, time, and energy, causing stress, competing priorities, burnout, compromised health, and attrition. However, unlike other racial and gender groups, Black women higher education administrators experience these challenges more intensely. As a result of chronic stress associated with being undervalued and overworked, discriminatory and unwelcoming workplaces, and intersectional biases, Black women leaders are leaving higher education workplaces. Despite the link between gendered racism and unwellness, little is known about the problem from a positive leadership perspective. The problem this study addressed was the lack of knowledge of the wellness strategies Black women administrators in higher education use to persist in leadership. Guided by Black feminist thought, this study explored Black women administrators’ lived experiences with well-being associated with the intersection of race and gender and the radical self-care and resilience strategies they use to regain or maintain well-being while leading in higher education. The research questions included how do HEI Black women administrators describe their lived experience with subjective well-being and stress associated, resilience, and radical self-care in association with the intersection of race and gender. Using the interpretive phenomenology framework, this qualitative research included semi-structured interviews of 11 Black women in leadership positions at community colleges and universities while offering them the chance to create knowledge through their stories. The results provide higher education institutions knowledge and awareness to mitigate issues contributing to the attrition of Black women leaders.
