IK: 0:13

Welcome to the Cohort SysSys podcast, where we give voice to the stories, struggles and successes of Black women and non-binary folks with doctoral degrees. I'm your host, dr Ejama Cola, and today we are joined by Dr Taryn Brown. She's an illuminating force in academia and in Black girlhood studies. Dr Brown received her PhD in educational theory and practice, with an emphasis in critical studies and social foundations, at the University of Georgia, and also holds the role of assistant professor in the teachers, schools and society program at the University of Florida.

IK: 0:48

As a program coordinator for the school, society and policy specialization and education sciences at University of Florida, dr Brown has dedicated her journey to exploring the intricate interplay between gender, race and class within the lives of Black women and girls. With a blend of scholarship and activism. Dr Brown's work resonates at the intersection of Black feminist thought and in-depth research and storytelling, enriching our understanding of identity construction, literacies and socialization. Beyond the classroom, dr Brown founded the Black girlhood collaborative, a dynamic space amplifying research, teaching and learning within the realm of Black girlhood. We're so happy to have you here, dr Brown, specifically because your work really captures the heart and the essence of what CohortSys is doing. So welcome to the podcast.

TB: 1:39

Thank you. Thank you, I'm excited to be here and share.

IK: 1:42

Yeah, so tell us a little bit about who you are off paper. Where are you from? Where do you currently live? What do you like to do when you are not working? Championing and just being an exemplary kind of like scholar, academic practitioner?

TB: 1:57

Yes, absolutely. I am originally from, or I spent the majority of my childhood in North Carolina, so small town, kind of wedged in between the cities that folks know are Chapel Hill, durham area or Greensboro there's like some small towns in between there, so that's where I spent the majority of my time. I had parents that both worked at on a university campus, so I always was around and, honestly, I think that's probably also at the core of even just where I've ended up professionally, because I've always been on a college campus, whether it was following mom or having to be with mom and dad when they went to work or them having some kind of event that I needed to go to attend, and so that was pretty cool. But the area for the most part was pretty rural, like where my town was, so small community, filled with families, I think, and, honestly, friendships that are still part of it even today, like folks that I go back home to and get full of, full of love, full of laughter and full of life. I am the proud mother of two little ones and proud wife of a husband that also works here at the University of Florida. My little ones are nine, or almost nine, and a newly minted five year old daughter, who is every bit of the reason, I think sometimes why do the work that I do? Because she needs the space to be herself, to thrive, to shine, and so they take up the bulk of my time. When it's not work related, I am spending time with them. We're just getting into the realm of extracurricular, after school activities. So I, you know, big ups to parents that have kids in multiple things. I am venturing into one activity per child and it is already like geez, like my days don't end till 8 pm because I have to leave here or leave campus and then take them to do their do their thing.

TB: 4:05

I love a good movie. I am definitely like I was the one that sat down with my mom and watched all black movies, like from your historical fiction to your. What do they call them now? I call them black love movies. But like the 90s, like the movies that came out late 80s, early 90s, I can watch those movies over and over and over again. I think, honestly, when I do get a bit of time, I like to just go back and kind of partake. I think the early 90s was the jam. I teach on that sometimes, actually like some of my classes, I'm going to use some of the film, the media, the pop culture that we got from that genre, because now, on the other side of it, I'm like, oh, we're just replicating or this is a mirror of what we have seen before. So, yeah, if I can get some downtime, I love to watch a good film.

IK: 5:03

So you mentioned that family. Your family has always kind of been integrated in education space, specifically higher education. So your parents work at a college campus. You just said that your spouse also works at the same university as you and I know that there are people who I'm one of those people, who my parents did one thing and I was like I will do literally anything besides that.

IK: 5:28

And I think there's some people who follow and their parents footsteps and their families footsteps and other people who kind of like go the opposite way. Can you kind of talk about why it has been either really enriching for you or illuminating for you to have education not only be something that you are personally interested in, professionally interested in, but really something that seems to be a bedrock in your family's story?

TB: 5:53

Absolutely Well. So my, my father, I am Zimbabwean, so my father was an international student, so my father was from Zimbabwe. My mother, though, was from this rural Bristol Virginia, like. If you know anything about the state of Virginia, it's in the mountains, it's very, very rural. I talk about my upbringing being rural, but those that family is like deep, deep south, and I laugh because people always say I have a Southern twang, like a Southern draw or twang, but you have not heard the family from Bristol Virginia that really truly have that deep south, that Southern draw.

TB: 6:31

And so my parents met when they were both undergraduate students at Berea College, which is a small liberal arts school in Lexington, kentucky, and my mom's parents didn't have as much education. I think my grandmother wasn't able to make go beyond middle school. My grandfather did have a high school degree, but they didn't come from. They came from humble beginnings, if you will, and I know at the core of what my mom used to instill in us is that she saw education as a pathway and an opportunity to open doors, which is why she pursued higher education as she met my father. My father's side of the family did come from a very. My grandfather, for example, graduated with his master's degree in the 60s as an international student, so that had always been a part of his upbringing. So I kind of was like the. My upbringing and my center, my centering of education was really the combination of both my mother's reality of what she knew she wanted for her family, and then my father's connection to the legacy of his family and wanting us both to Wanting them both to have their children navigate that very same experience, and so I would say that Again, it's crazy, I lost my mother, actually in 2019. And so much of what I do now is is foundationally grounded into things that she would say that I don't even know if I really value.

TB: 8:03

So if you would have asked me, you said you know, growing up I said I wanted to not be with my parents. I think I would have probably said the same thing. And then I look back and I'm like, wow, I as a child, I didn't ever say I wanted to be an assistant professor, absolutely not. I actually really wanted to be. I really wanted to be a music producer, and a puff daddy is actually what I used to say. He's getting down, I mean, he's changed, but I really was into production and I'm a creative Right. You know. I played instruments as a child and that's why I thought I was heading.

TB: 8:37

And then, lo and behold, you know my production is now not in the music industry but rather in the context of education and how we might dream up greater possibilities for kids to thrive. So I don't think then I would have been able to say the same thing. But I know that when I think about their histories, their stories, their lived experiences, that for sure kind of underscores even the ways in which I was making decisions that I might not have even thought like those are kind of tethered to, you know, those nuggets that your parents kind of drop along the way, and I'm so very appreciative for it now and I hope that I'm also doing a very similar or creating similar possibilities, not only for my own children but for all of the kids that I'm connected to in the spaces that I'm in, with kids in their learning processes.

IK: 9:21

Yes, oh, I love that reflection and it was really beautiful to hear how you know the different sides of the family, how they each individually had come to this understanding of the importance of education but also a desire to really channel that and build legacy around that. So that's really beautiful to hear. So, you know, it's one thing to be interested in education. It's another thing to study it professionally. So how did you become interested in educational theory and why? You know, as you said, you were as sound as if you were on the music production track. How did you end up in a doctoral program?

TB: 9:55

How did?

IK: 9:55

you just like the very opposite thing. I loved the way that you said that you produce. You know you still produce, just in a different way. I like that little tidbit. But it is not music. Teaching is not music. So how did you end up in a doctoral program? How did you end up studying educational theory?

TB: 10:13

Yeah, so as an undergraduate student, I did my undergraduate and my master's degree at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro but it has an undergraduate student. I was very engaged. So your office of leadership and service learning, I was never in I ended up going or having experiences as a graduate student with housing, residence life. I've never. It wasn't already a lot of people that I know that have a very they have some similarity and trajectory professionally had a more active role as like an RA or some kind of leader in that way. But I was always in play music I mean I was in band at the university level, savannah band at the university level any kind of leadership opportunity that I could get into office of multicultural affairs, student organizations like I started a student organization actually and when I was an undergrad, like I was always very engaged in that way. That really pushed me into the space of recognizing that people pursue careers in higher education to run like college student development Resources across campus. So like those will be those offices leadership and service learning, multicultural affairs, housing, residence life, student success. You know academic affairs and so my, my, my bachelor's is telling of my aspirations in music because it was media, film and television and media studies. That was my bachelor's degree. But then, as a student leader, I got pushed into higher education as a master's degree because I was that student leader and they were like, hey, you know, you can pursue this as a career. So I got my master's.

TB: 11:48

But while I was getting that master's I took a course called sociology of education and that was my first time really experiencing the language and the scholarship that underscores like systemic and structural realities for schools. So, as I shared before, I came from a really small town, kind of wedge between these two kind of big cities in the triad area of Merkler liner, and I came from a space where I saw things happening to friends, family, but I wasn't able to name exactly what it was Right. So I have friends that became parents while we're in school. I had friends that had different financial circumstances and realities I had. We didn't have as many resources. I didn't even really realize how much we didn't have in our school district until I got to college and recognized like what is the AP course like? Because we didn't have those. We didn't have those things Right. I mean, I didn't know kind of Western in this small space.

TB: 12:45

And so when I got into my master's program, I took the course Dr Patiz was her name, dr Sylvia Patiz was my faculty member and we learned about systems, we learned about structures, we learned about theory. So, pierre Bourdeau, social reproduction theory, how there's this ideology that we are just socially reproduced into the spaces that we are born into and really as a farce to suggest that we are able to pull ourselves out of those circumstances without some real jolt in the system, right. And I remember in that class and in conversations, because that really catapulted me into spaces where I was then in like critical working groups and larger national organizations that center like race theory and social theory, to just learn more, because I was hungry for it, I guess, if you will, I wanted to understand it because I had lived and still live some of the realities of the things that we were learning. And there was a conversation one time that talked about where folks always say oh, you know, you know, education is a pathway, you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. And now, sitting in a session and somebody had said that, and and one of the facilitators said well, what, if you don't have boots, how do you pull yourself up? How do you pull yourself up and that was like an epiphany moment, like to want to know more about, because this is just one class. So this wasn't my master's program, this is one class in a larger program of study, and so that really, I think was the spark of interest in critical studies in education, what I now kind of sit in the city, and the social foundations of education.

TB: 14:21

How do we think about these systems, these implications for student experience, both in traditional contexts but also in non-traditional contexts? I've always been in education but I wasn't trained as the classroom teacher. I ran your community embedded centers, I ran your programs at the YWCA Boys and Girls Club. So I've always been the teacher, but in the non-traditional sense, and oftentimes the person that was the wraparound services in response to what students were not getting in their typical learning environments.

TB: 14:52

And so that also kind of I think is at the forefront of how I've kind of oriented myself in a college of education is thinking about how much learning and possibility set in that space, how many folks that I have that were traditional K-12 educators or folks that were in that space that recognized there's a lot more autonomy sometimes in other spaces to really respond to the needs of students in the ways that are needed by those students and not with the boundary and the restriction that sometimes is cast in traditional educational environments.

TB: 15:24

That really, those wonderings, those thoughts, those points of conversation that I had over the years, is really what I think situates me now, more concretely, in a college of education, in a teacher education. I mean curriculum and instruction program, school teaching and learning, thinking about the possibilities beyond within schools, but also beyond the schools, because the reality is, when I think about what I didn't have and what I know my school district from a hometown still doesn't have, it's gonna take key stakeholders or stakeholder groups beyond just the school to respond to what's happening and what kind of supports are necessary for students. So that's the thing that keeps me here, that's the thing that I think that I can name, what got me here and then also what keeps me here.

IK: 16:12

Yeah, you bring up a really good point, which is that a lot of people who enter into higher ed and higher ed research and studies, and even people we've spoken to on the podcast, did come from a K through 12 background. Right, they used to be teachers at some point. Like I'm trying to think of that, there's someone who I've spoken to who hasn't hadn't touched the classroom at some point, and I think if they exist, they're few and far between. So I think it's really interesting that you have identified and really niche yourself as a scholar who understands the importance of the relevance for educational growth and progress and advancement outside of the classroom in ways because especially children don't just learn and they often learn more outside of the classroom than they learn in the classroom. And so I think that that's also a testament for folks who might be thinking about going into higher ed, thinking about studying higher education at an academic sense, but maybe feel like, well, I don't have classroom experience, like can I get into a doctoral program Cause I haven't taught in the classroom, and so I think that your story, hearing your story, hopefully, will be inspirational to some folks to recognize that it's you don't have to have taught in the traditional sense, in the classroom sense, in order for you to be a thought producer, a knowledge producer, to have something very critical and important to say about how education should happen for our children. So I think I really thank you for sharing that and for putting language behind your experience and what you were really bringing to the field.

IK: 17:48

So at what point? So you're working, you're in your master's program. Rather, at what point do you decide I'm gonna make a joke here that you're gonna enter the life of struggle and do a doctoral degree? What was that decision for you? Did you work a little bit beforehand and then, pulling into that, what did you decide? That the University of Georgia was the right choice for you? How did you one decide to pursue a doctor in the first place and then two, really decide on that program?

TB: 18:22

Yeah, so I did work a little bit. So I graduated with my master's in 2009,. And then I went straight into position entry level position in student affairs. How's the new residence life? So my first position was at Georgia Tech in Atlanta as a housing coordinator or housing director I'm mixing up some of the titles.

TB: 18:46

I did that and then I transitioned from there to Elon University, which is a small private back in North Carolina, clearly missing home, so I went back went to Atlanta, came back went back to North Carolina and worked at Elon and during that time I think I would have been able to name my research interests as a student affairs professional or practitioner, as centering like mentoring is my jam.

TB: 19:14

I've always been there to mentor. I've been someone who's benefited greatly from very amazing mentoring experiences and I've also experienced not great mentoring experiences, and so I recognize what can happen on the latter side and so I've always been extremely interested in like how do we think about mentorship? How does that tie into retention? How do we think about that as support programs? So during that time, postmasters in the field, as a higher-year professional student affairs practitioner, I was interested in retention of students of color, so I often was co-advised and a co-mentor in different organizations or groups or voluntarily kind of signing up to be in that space. I think it was probably in my third year. I don't know if it was the third year.

TB: 20:04

The latter year of my Elon experience is that I I don't know if I went to a conference, but I feel like I was sitting there and I thought to myself I'm really interested in, like, how do we retain students of color, recognizing that one. Both institutions that I had worked at as a practitioner, they students of color were the minority, or black students in particular, were the minority, and it was really hard sometimes to like, give them, make sure they had what they need so they felt like they could thrive. But then I thought to myself in those conversations with some of those students where they would talk about friends that didn't ever go to college, like, and so this, like disconnect between who they felt, like they were in their current context and who the people were that they loved and that they cared for, that didn't choose this particular pathway. And so there was a question that I had around how do we think about the students that never even make it in? Like, what is happening? K-12 for students that never even consider post-secondary education? That's really also the extension of that sociology of education like folks. What is happening? How do we name that? How do we explore that?

TB: 21:06

That was the push to be interested in applying to a PhD program and I actually, at UGA, was in the, was admitted as a doc student in social foundations of education. My social foundations of education program deactivated while we were students in the program and so students the remaining is the testimony but the students that were remaining in the program we had to. Whoever was our faculty advisor, we switched into that program. So my degree is educational theory and practice, with an emphasis and critical studies in social foundation. But I really applied to social foundations because that's what I was very interested in and if you, if I was to name it's rare that I would even say that I have a. I'll say education theory and practice. That's what's on the paper, but what I've been trained to be as a scholar is us, is in social foundations. How do we think about these broader kind of philosophical, sociological insights into teaching and learning and schooling? And so that catalyst pushed me into the doctoral program.

TB: 22:09

I do think there was tensions around the fact that I wasn't coming from the classroom and that I wasn't and that I didn't pursue a PhD in higher ed, because I was already in that context and there is a PhD in higher ed. But I felt like my masters when I, when I did my masters, a lot of those classes were with PhD students, like those classes were blended, and I wanted something different because I felt like I had that higher ed, master's degree, college student development theory, all of those great resources and that great scholarship. That also informs who I am, I think, as a faculty member. But I wanted a pivot or an extension of that in a different space, and so that pushed me into the PhD at UGA.

TB: 22:51

By that time. Uga was the option because my partner was there in the state and I was just looking for programs that were there. So I looked at Georgia State, which is in downtown Atlanta, and then UGA is in Athens and I landed in. I landed in Athens and I think as much as there was a, that was a rocky experience. It was a challenge. You said at the beginning like the struggle, definitely a struggle, but I made it through and I think that I wouldn't change it because I know it has informed who I am as a faculty member and even how I think about my own mentoring and supportive current doctoral students that I now kind of advise.

IK: 23:30

It always like catches me off guard when people drop what I feel like our bombs in the episode and they just like move on past it. What do you mean by your program was shut down, like you just said it so casually? That sounds like so destabilizing and disruptive.

IK: 23:46

So can you talk more about how you navigated that and like, did you consider, like what were some of your other options? You even think about leaving and doing something else. I don't know what year you were in Maybe it just felt like it was too late but would love for you to speak a little bit about, about that part.

TB: 24:03

That experience? Yeah, absolutely no. So it wasn't too late, it was within the first year. So they admitted a cohort of three doc students. There was three of us that came in the year that I came in and then, within a year, the program is being deactivated. And so in the deactivation of the program, as they rallied, you know, the three of us, they came in together and then, of course, there were folks that were more senior than us. They gathered all the students and they just had a. The university and the college had a commitment to students that had applied and been admitted to this program would be fully supported to the completion of their program. What they ended up doing with the social foundations components is infuse them into other programs.

TB: 24:41

So, like there are still sociology of Ed and philosophy of like those courses that made social foundations, now we're just those courses were placed hodgepodge across the university and unfortunately, I think that was a very trying time. I think I actually tried to stick it out as best I can. I think I didn't even switch into Ethereum practice or make the decision to switch into education or theory and practice until year four. So I stayed social foundations for four years, took me six years, took me six years to finish. I had both of my children and my doctoral journey and had my son after coursework and then I literally walked across the stage five months pregnant with my daughter. So I did both of those things. But I didn't switch out of social foundations as like my stamp degree until year four because I had to switch all of the instability also kind of fostered. I had to switch chairs late in the game and that's something that I've had to provide some insights to other doctoral students and I tell students all the time whomever is your chair, whomever is your chair and whomever forms your committee, you need to feel like you can be 100% vulnerable with those individuals and sometimes that works well for some, depending on the faculty that you feel like you have access to, and sometimes not so much, and I do understand sometimes you have limitations there.

TB: 26:01

But I had to make the very hard decision in year four to switch advisors and at that point that some of that was the program was kind of we didn't have a program. We kind of were these students in limbo that weren't really umbrellaed under any particular thing and although we were being supported, it just felt we didn't get what we needed and I tell people all the time I did not get what I was supposed to get. As a doc student you should be mentored effectively. You should be supported to kind of start the development of your scholarly identity and presentations and publications in connections and collaborations. I didn't really have any of that until I switched advisors. I switched advisors in year four and that advisor I had for the last two years of my program really was extremely instrumental. She's still faculty at the University of Georgia and I call on her even still until this day because she was the one that really pushed me to keep going.

TB: 26:58

I feel like at year four I was just like I think I'm going to take my master's degree and go back to where I know people, because higher ed makes money. If you can be a vice president or provost or director of a department, they have a really nice lucrative career. It's a lot. It's a lot of work that they do. That's what my husband is in. He's still on that side. It's a lucrative career but it also takes a lot from you.

TB: 27:25

I was really ready to leave all this exploration, inquiry space and just kind of revert back to and I remember my chair and then I had a dynamic. We called each other sister scholars. We still call each other sister scholars Black women, phds that were all at UGA at the same time. We actually have a book. I wrote a chapter in the book, co-edited by Dr Brittany Anderson that's the University of Muscalana, charlotte and Dr Shakwinta Richardson, who's in private practice. But we wrote about what it meant to be gifted black women in PhD programs, like what it felt, and each person that wrote a chapter wrote about. Mine was, of course, about.

TB: 28:09

I was in a deactivated program and then I had kids and kind of navigated this. You can't be both. You can't be a mother, you can't be a mother and get a PhD or have a career and have a family. And so we wrote about that experience because, also, they were very instrumental. When I needed to cry, I cried, when I was like I'm quitting, they would say, ok, girl, you're going to quit for 10 minutes and then we're going to get back to this work. And it was them. It was those experiences, those sister conversations that we would have. That kind of got us all through. And we have two amazing.

TB: 28:44

I came out in 2018. And then there's a group of black girl PhDs. That was 2017. And then a group that was after. I feel like that is like 30.

TB: 28:52

I would love to see where we all landed, because some, of course, we were closer to closer than others, but we all ended up at the commencement like rallying all the black girl magic, like come take a picture and we have these photos of like 10 black women PhDs graduating in the same semester, and we had those across three years.

TB: 29:11

So what I will say, even in the chaos, uga was making space for black women PhDs. We did maybe have to find our own supports in each other, sometimes our own shoulders to cry on to make it through, but we had a community. In a way that I know when I talk to other people now professionally when they talk about their PhD programs. They were like one and I can say that there were groups of us, and not all at theory and practice. We were like over in the hard sciences, clinical psychology, like we were all over the university, but we found each other and would come together and like be in community with one another, and that was also instrumental in, I think, helping me feel like I could make it to the end of those six years.

IK: 30:01

Yeah, so important to have peer mentorship alongside faculty mentorship, and I think that people often miss out on that realization until it's pretty late in the game and even when thinking about what programs to go to, a lot of schools do peer mentorship better. And so, thinking like that, if you feel like it will be important for you, either you look at a program, you look at a school that is doing a better job than others on diversity or you have to be really, really intentional from jump about creating that own community for yourself Now that those cohorts it does. It's easier, hopefully, to find people If you are in a space where there isn't anyone else, so you don't feel like there is anyone else on your campus. But either way, I feel like that is really the key to success. That was my story, so many other people's stories. Once you find another sister who is like yes, just as you said, you can be upset. Today you can be mad.

IK: 31:03

You can drop the email that you're going to quit, but you're not going to send the email.

TB: 31:07

You're not going to send the email Because we're going to finish together. And so.

IK: 31:12

I feel like a lot of the scholarship. I'm starting to read some scholarship that talks about mentoring, the importance of mentoring for Black women pursuing doctoral degrees, and one thing I really love is that a lot of the research is not just talking about faculty mentoring but really this importance of peer and communal mentoring as well. I want to talk a little bit about your research, because there's a couple of concepts and terms. I'm not a sociologist, I'm not an education person, so I'm really just curious Can you talk about the concept of Black girl cartography and what does that mean and what's the significance of that in your research?

TB: 31:51

Absolutely so. Black girl cartography actually stems from Tamara Butler's work. She's actually one of my mentors as well and she is at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. But she gives us language to name what it means to think about spaces, where spaces and negotiations with space that Black girls work through. So really a lot of her work is an extension of Catherine McKintrick's work. So we have Catherine McKintrick, another amazing critical scholar that leverages Black women in space and place and what it means. Her book is forgetting the latter half, but Demonic Ground is the title of the book, but it talks about, it follows the journey of Black women's lived experiences historically and what space has meant for framing lived experience and the histories of those spaces and the realities of Black women. So she gives us language, the language of cartography, which is a term used in geography for being able to capture those negotiations. So we see the language being placed with McKintrick, with Black women, and then to Tamara Butler's work.

TB: 32:54

Dr Butler's work gives it to us in the context of Black girls' lived experiences. So how do we think about Black girls' negotiations of space in typical school? How do we think about Black girls' negotiations in afterschool enrichment programs? How do we think about Black girls' negotiation with family and what we know in the context of Black girlhood, black girlhood being a space that is now considered a field of study that's about 16 years old, but we know that it's existed well beyond that time. But what it does is it captures opportunities for us to think about those intersections of what it means to be Black and girl and how that at the intersection of a particular space can have different circumstances. So my negotiations, when we think about Black girl cartography, if we wanted to take my Black girl experiences in schools, is going to look very different from the spatial analysis of where I was from, from where you were from right, and how you negotiate a space, how your family was structured, and so Black girl cartography really has you kind of coding those different aspects of space at the intersection of your experiences with your Blackness and then also with your experiences in your girlhoods or your womanhoods, if you put it in the context of women's experiences, and that has become Extremely instrumental, I think, in how I've come to think about the projects that I've been tempted to and the work that I do.

TB: 34:16

I am naturally a community engaged person, like I love to do community engaged work and what I found is not kind of reckoning with that space.

TB: 34:27

The histories of that space, the realities of that space can skew perceptions, interpretations or understandings of what's happening. So Black Girl Cartography has given me the language and really some foundational underscoring for the work that I do in Black Girlhood, to also take into the fact that we know that places and spaces are historically situated and that we also need to think about that when we are in these spaces working to do qualitative, critical, qualitative research that wants to understand a phenomenon. Right, we can't understand that if we don't think about the histories of the space in which that negotiation or interaction is taking place, and that, I think, is central. I think it should be central to anybody's research. But I think in particular, as I think about the work that it is that we do, we have to reckon with the histories of spaces for Black folks as a people and Black girls more explicitly when it comes to my work, to really truly understand what's happening and what needs to happen for future casting and the realities of those communities.

IK: 35:22

I appreciate you explaining that because that makes makes a lot of sense. And, yeah, you're right, and I think that everyone should consider space as they're thinking about, any research, but especially research on Black communities and particularly research on Black girlhood. I want to talk now a little bit about the non research and actually I would love for you to challenge me on that if that is incorrect. So how you think about the work that you do with Black girlhood collaborative, can you talk about the mission and some of the objectives and how you really use a collaborative as a space for research, teaching and learning? You know, do you feel like it's an extension of your academic work, to feel like it's more activist, organizing work? A blend of the two? Just left you to talk on that a little bit more.

TB: 36:07

Absolutely and, yes, it is absolutely tailored to my research and I think that's the combination of the two. So the Black girlhood collaborative really spawned was created really right before the COVID hit. So I was recruited here to the University of Florida in 2019. And I had the ideas kind of forming there around like this kind of community space because my dissertation work center Black girls. I did dissertation work on the narrative experiences of Black teenage mothers and I was a school embedded pregnant and parenting team program. So I've always been in this space, although as a UGA doc student there was nobody else doing this kind of work. So I felt like the anomaly doing work on Black girls explicitly. I got challenged a lot like why, why Black girls? Were you a team mom? Is that why you want to do this work? Like this, like need to validate. You know black experiences is still something we navigate to today. But it really pushed me into like this desire to seek community or to see other folks that were also writing or capturing some of these moments. And so the collaborative was really an extension of looking for partnerships and in a COVID time it was looking for. It really expanded just looking for them within proximity to now we're all online, we could pop into zoom or whatever, and then we could build relationships with people, and so that was really like the formation of Black girl hood collaborative, because I was finding that there were these pockets of folks that were very interested in not only what it was that I was interested in pursuing and research that I was doing, but that we're doing very similar things or extensions of things and and we we thrive better in community, like when we get together and group, think and share. There was something that was happening there, and so I decided to kind of bring those folks together and put a name to it the, the.

TB: 38:00

The ultimate kind of vision of the black girl hood collaborative is leveraging or co creating learning communities and teaching, learning and research in black girl hood because it they are teachers. Actually, just pulled out of our numbers, I think we have about 32 different institutions represented. We're at a little over 60, maybe a little under 70 folks from all across the country. They are teachers, they are community workers, they are at leave student leaders in the schools, they are graduate students and graduate programs undergraduate students and they are professors. These are all people from an intergenerational perspective that are very much vested and interested in teaching, learning and service and being in community for and with black girls, and so I've been very excited to kind of see it grow. I've been excited to see how it serves as a support as you reference even cohort sisters.

TB: 38:49

Being able to be a community is been that as well for folks that are like I want to study this thing but no faculty are present, but nobody's here. I don't. Where do I start with the reading right? I send out. All the time I get tapped from graduate students from other institutions that are like he's using me a reading list and I have them develop. Now they're ready, they're on cue to like just say okay, yeah, read, read these things right, because I know what it means to feel like you have that kind of support.

TB: 39:18

The collaborative also is like the umbrella group that helps support the community, engage work that I do. So I also run a critical reading group for girls 1318 here in a lateral county, which is where you have said, and we center critical text in black girlhood and we just talk about who we are and what we want to be and how we want to exist in the world. And so we just came out of just had a doc student they just attended her dissertation that spent this whole last year in the collaborative kind of helping facilitate the reading group with the girls that we have, and I have another doc student that also wants to come behind, understand experiences of teachers of what it means to work as the alternative learning space, so what it means to be a teacher in this space. How do we support girls of color? So the collaborative is is is community, it is support, it is, it is even in of itself like a space for mentoring because there's connections happening outside of me.

TB: 40:16

I really encourage that like find your people, come, we meet once a month. Also. We started that last year. We started meeting once a month virtually for collective conversation. I can have my book here because I was going to send the email out. We're reading charisma turn. I'm written by Dr Coopson, which is a graphic novel and black girlhood. So we'll, we'll.

TB: 40:37

We meet for critical reading once a month and then I also facilitate like right in, because for girls like me who I feel like my writing is okay, I still say my writing is just okay.

TB: 40:48

I can always get better, but you feel alone sometimes in the writing process and also I am in this space of disrupting like forms of tradition. I was trained in the traditional way as a doc student, so as a researcher, theories and things. I was trained in a very traditional way and then I recognize like my work is very interdisciplinary and I don't want to just sit in this box with tradition. When it comes to being a scholar, a scholar, practitioner, I want to think about more creative, exploratory learning and scholarship, and so a lot of the conversations that I have with graduate students from all over is around like kind of owning that ability to know. I know traditional, but I also know this space that I think situates itself more concretely with the work that it is that I do in the communities that I serve, which is more arts based, you know, more critical and captures a broader capacity for access in a way that I don't think that all research does sometimes.

IK: 41:50

Yes, you are speaking my language. I'm just like yes.

IK: 41:54

I don't want to like digress into all the different, many different ways in which that resonates heavily with me, because I do want to ask one more important question before we start to wind down. I remember the question as you were talking about the reading group that you do with black girls, and I am just so fascinated and always like admiring people who can live and work and sustain their lives and research in Florida. So would love if you could speak a little bit about how the political mobilization against what I feel like is basic inclusion of black history and culture in education, how that impacting your research, how that's impacting your work and maybe even how that's impacting your parenting as a mother of a young black girl and a mother of black children. How, how is everything that's going on, and not just in Florida, many other places around the US, how is that impacting your research and your scholarship?

TB: 42:58

Yeah, I think that's a powerful question and I get it a lot. We, just when I went to our conferences are very heavily a lot of conferences that I can learn the spring and you go to the conference and your name tag says your name and then it says where you are and it's like folks looking at your Florida. Oh, I'm so sorry. And so I get this question quite a bit, and the reality is that there's the communities that need to be served here. Is it impacting my work? Sometimes we feel the boundary, but I also feel like it's a distraction in this in a way. So, like, at the core of who I am also is my faith, and so I also do this work because it's tethered to my purpose. So I call it purpose work and so I'm gonna continue to do this purpose work until I can no longer do it in this space and at this particular season of my life I've been called to just be in this space. So I have been back down, I have rally support of colleagues and peers, and there are those of us that are here, that are here in the number right, that are staying committed to doing the work, that are staying committed to still running a program, a critical reading group. I just came out of a summer. I also helped run a freedom school here. We just came out of a freedom school summer. This is our second summer and it was funded. Folks were giving money to support this right From the community. So there are people that want this work and the reality is that we have to not lose sight in the noise of the things that are happening. We need to stay aware of it, we need to hear it and know that it's around us and for some of my colleagues and community members also protecting ourselves from the harm and the safety concerns that also come from continuing to do a work that is currently being challenged. But it's when I go to my community embedded learning center with my girls and they're excited, right, and I hear other mothers and teachers that are in communities. They're like please don't stop doing this program. Right, like please don't leave us. And I think about the exemplars that we had in history Women, black women, black men, folks from a variety of areas of expertise that did work in places that weren't always accepting of that work. Right, they didn't do the work in places where folks were like, yes, absolutely, come here and do this work. They did the work, they had the hard conversations, they protested, they marched in spaces where they lost their lives many of them and so for me, I take it as an extension of that work.

TB: 45:31

This is not new what we're navigating. It's just repackaged with a different wrapping paper and different bow, and we're just having to figure out what is our strategy in this generation, for our generation, for those of us that are in the work now, that are committed to this work. What is the move for us? To continue to do the work that our ancestors have already been on for centuries, right? So how do we continue to kind of move that needle forward?

TB: 45:56

And that comes equal parts with self-care. That comes equal parts with kind of coalition building. That comes with all of those parts. So I'm not naive to the necessities of those parts of my experience. But my response to that question is I'm gonna do the work until I can't do the work. And if I can't do the work, I know that it's. My season has shifted to do the work in another place because again, it's tethered to my purpose and what I feel like not only I've been trained to do as a faculty member, as a black woman with a PhD, but also what I know. I mean it comes so natural like there's some gifts in there, right, and that's how I know it's a part of that purpose, because there's some natural kind of gifting in that space to do this work.

IK: 46:44

Thank you so much for sharing that. So what is one final piece of advice that you have for black women and non-binary folks who are current doctoral students or thinking about pursuing a doctoral program? What is one final takeaway that you have for them? Just one.

TB: 47:01

I know just one Timing don't rush. Timing is big. It took me six years to finish. I thought I was gonna be done in four. A lot happened. I switched chairs. I thought I was gonna drive, I was over it, I was done.

TB: 47:19

I had two babies, all kinds of things happened and so I had to trust the timing, I had to trust the community and I had to trust the process. So find your people and feel okay with the timing. Don't feel the pressure. I think also what it does in the journey is make you feel like, when you do have groups of friends, that you have to be at the same pace. But you might not be. That doesn't mean you're not still in community. Your timing might be just slightly off, it might not be in tandem, right, but you're still there together and you're gonna pull through.

TB: 47:52

And I say that because I had a dear friend again, the editor on that book that I've mentioned before. He graduated a year before me but she was there every step of the way. I said I had one more year and she was still there. She flew in for graduation. She would fly in and help my kid. She was just there, right. So my timing was different and when I came to terms with troubling just like perspective of what timing should be and really trust it in what the timing was going to be, then I made it right. I graduated and here I am on the other side five years into a faculty line doing the thing that it is that I love. So just trust the timing that is a part of your process and know that you'll be fine.

IK: 48:33

Fantastic advice. Thank you so much, Dr Brown, for joining us today on the Co-Works Sisters podcast and for sharing your journey as well as your really important work and, as you said, it's so deeply tied to not only your purpose but your gifts. Thanks for that reminder as well. Absolutely. ["the Co-Works Sisters Podcast"]. Thank you again for listening to this week's episode of the Co-Works Sisters podcast. If you are a black woman interested in joining the Co-Works Sisters membership community or you're looking for more information on how to support or partner with Co-Works Sisters, please visit our website at wwwcohortsistuscom. You can also find us on all social media platforms at Co-Works Sisters. Don't forget to subscribe to the Co-Works Sisters podcast and leave us a quick review wherever you're listening. Thank you so much for joining us this week and we'll catch you in next week's episode. ["the Co-Works Sisters Podcast"].