Walking Our Currere

The Four Black Scholars’ Creation of Counterspace through Black Placemaking in the Academy

Abstract

Drawing on Pinar’s (1975) method of currere, this paper examines how the Four Black Scholars navigated their doctoral programs at a historically white institution (HWI) and, collectively, cultivated a counterspace through practices of Black placemaking in academe. Using scholarly personal narrative across the regressive, progressive, analytical, and synthetic stages of currere, the authors trace how individual doctoral trajectories converged to create a place that resisted isolation, racialized marginality, and self-doubt, resulting in a space committed to persistence, belonging, and scholarly survival. Grounded in Critical Race Theory, Black feminist epistemology and counterspace scholarship (Solorzano et al., 2000), the collective theorizes Black placemaking as a relational space that supports their academic endeavors, disrupting the hegemony embedded in doctoral programs that socialize doctoral students to value individualism and assimilation. The paper concludes by arguing that Black placemaking offers an important analytic for understanding how minoritized doctoral students actively transform hostile academic environments, and places the onus on the field of educational leadership to move beyond rhetorical commitments toward equity by materially supporting spaces of belonging for Black and Brown students of color.