Womanist Ethnography Conference 2024

The 6th Annual Womanist Ethnography Conference invites participants to rethink, and reimagine, womanist ethnography when Black women's bodies are intentionally centered as narrative and narrators of experience. We are invited to think about the ways, possibly limited ways, Black women's embodied experiences have been portrayed in our research, storytelling, and theories. This year's conference requires us to let Black and Brown women's bodies speak and direct our attention. As in previous years, in addition to attending to the positionality of womanist ethnographers and how it informs our research, we will take time to collectively participate in remembering, honoring, and celebrating our ethnographic ancestors and elders.

Womanist Ethnography Conference 2023

This year we again offer sessions that focus on ethnographic research methods, relational processes, and participant engagement as essential to womanist ethnography. We are committed to beginning with Black women’s lives as understood through the intersecting realities of culture, gender race, sexualities, and, sometimes, religion. We listen before any analysis. We value Black women’s experience in public and social spaces; we value Black infused conversations emerging from the diversity of Black expressions throughout the diaspora. We strive to make our conferences accessible and thought provoking. Our work, at the end of the day, is a labor of love, resistance, creativity, and hope.

Womanist Ethnography Conference 2022

This year’s conference centers the voices of womanist ethnographers, activists, and conference attendees alike. We wrestle with the questions of vocation, purpose, and aims of our work. We seek to deepen our commitment to social transformation.

Black women’s lived experience continues to be our compass and guide in womanist ethnography and social transformation.

Womanist Ethnography Conference 2021

We bring together community leaders, scholars, activists, and students who are interested in foregrounding a womanist ethnographic method that centers the lives and experiences of Black women and women of the African diaspora. 

Past conferences have focused on Black women’s vocational narratives (funded by a Louisville Institute Research Grant), Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Puerto Rican, and US Black women in South Africa, Black Women’s Religious Experience, and Sexuality. 

This year marks the 3rd annual Womanist Ethnography Conference: June 17-18, 2021

The conference will be virtual this year beginning Thursday afternoon 2:00—5:00 pm, and concluding Friday morning, 9:00—12:00 am. This year’s theme, “The Moral of the Story: What does Womanist Ethnography Teach Us About Black Women’s Ethical and Moral Deliberations?” Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

The theme gives rise to another question: What do Black women’s lives demand of us?  Each year the conference opens with a ritual to remember the ancestors and request their presence as we host an interdisciplinary lineup of scholars, community religious leaders, and activists to engage in conversations as means to share their work. 

This year, we begin the conference with a panel of elders who will discuss how they came to be ethnographers, womanist approaches, and what they have learned along the way about “the moral of the story.”  The second panel will address power in the womanist ethnographic space and the third panel follows with a conversation on womanist ethnography and activism. Our final panel will respond to the question, “What does “Africa” mean in ‘African Diaspora’-focused womanist ethnography?  

Each day of the conference is anchored by an ethnographic experiential process whereby conference attendees engage in a mini-community ethnography exercise that they can use “at home” as part of their community’s work toward transformation. 

Finally, the goal of the conference is to make womanist ethnography a research process informed by and for Black women’s communities.

Womanist Ethnography Conference 2019

This year we bring to the table women from the United States, the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, Mexico, as well as women whose vocation takes form in (the combination of) congregational ministry, social justice activism, theological education, chaplaincy, and public spirituality and care. Some are professors, graduate students, and pastors; some are artists, poets, lawyers, painters, and all are radical change agents in her/their own way. Some identify as straight, lesbian, queer; black, brown, Afro-Puerto-Rican, Afro-Latina, African American, African Caribbean, Mexican, southern, northern, rural, urban. And more. We are a diverse group of black, brown, women ethnographers who know our stories/our lives matter.

Womanist Ethnography Conference 2018

2018 Womanist Ethnography and Black Women’s Vocation: This is my Calling: An Ethnography of Black Women’s Vocation.

“This is my Calling: Womanist Ethnography and Black Women’s Vocation" brings together the voices of black women interviewees, womanist ethnographers, and religious leaders to gain a deeper understanding of Black women’s vocational trajectories.
The formation of a vocational identity is a complex process intertwined with the lived realities of social location, and intersecting identities.  Our discussions highlighted (?) highlight the relationship between race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion in the process. Additionally, we ask presenters and participants, “What is your vocation?” “How does your work attend to vocational formation of black women?” “What makes you/your work “womanist”?  How does your work move from theory to practice?  Funded by a Louisville Institute Research Grant Funded.