Beyond the Monolith: Recovering Ancestral Methodologies to Study DAEUS Pre-Tenured Women Faculty Publishing Experiences

Introduction 

Descendants of Africans Enslaved in the United States (DAEUS) pre-tenure women faculty have asserted epistemological sovereignty since at least the 1940s, navigating publishing systems intentionally structured to delegitimize knowledge traditions not rooted in Western epistemologies. The systematic aggregation of Black women faculty data erases the distinct liberatory experiences of these DAEUS scholars. 

In parallel with research demonstrating that racial group data aggregation can obscure subgroup specific experiences of marginalization, this study argues that such aggregation – particularly when racial categories remainundifferentiated – can also conceal epistemological navigational strategies unique to heritage-specific groups such as DAEUS women scholars. These underutilized strategies could significantly alter the projected century-long timeline to achieve global gender parity in higher education leadership. 

Goals and Methods 

The goals are to co-construct epistemological frameworks rooted in DAEUS pre-tenure women faculty's lived experiences and transform exclusionary academic publishing practices through participatory, liberatory methodologies. Participants will be selected through: (1) an initial survey identifying potential participants, n=100 or 8-12 weeks whichever comes first; (2) homogeneous sampling selecting DAEUS women in pre-tenure positions with recent publication activity navigating epistemological challenges; and (3) snowball sampling building to 15-20 participants for focus groups to reach saturation. Collaborative thematic analysis using participatory coding will be conducted via Dedoose, enabling real-time co-coding, transparency, and reliability metrics while centering participants' meaning-making and epistemological sovereignty.

Expected Results 

This study aspires to center the epistemological agency of DAEUS pre-tenured women faculty, positioning their heritage-informed navigation practices as transformative interventions, and to examine how co-designing epistemic justice principles might transform rather than critique existing publishing systems globally. 

Conclusion 

By establishing DAEUS women pre-tenured faculty as a distinct analytical category requiring specialized examination, this research challenges international qualitative research communities to recognize a broader issue – how aggregated monolithic racial categories perpetuate erasures and cloak liberatory practices. Contextually, hindering epistemic justice in publishing impacts international gender disparity within Higher Education leadership.