Community is central to the praxis of transformative justice as communities provide social, mental, and financial support. This article utilizes transformative justice as an analytic to examine my experiences in community with Black queer folks at Shuga Shaq: An All People of Color Burlesque Revue. I utilize Black feminist autoethnography to interpret and historicize my experiences in community among Black queer folks in a predominantly white U.S. city. I examine the structure of a typical Shuga Shaq show, concentrating on the hosts, cohosts, performances by burlesque dancers, and kinship formation with audience members. The political and cultural messages embedded in performances on and off stage constitute joy, self-love, and a celebration of Brown and Black bodies of all shapes and sizes.
In conversation with qualitative researchers regarding culturally responsive and anti-racist methods, I detailed a critical qualitative method that came about from my work with Black high schoolers in the Midwest called congregation meetings as our group met during 2021-2022 in the wake of the #BlackLivesMatter resurgence. Congregation meeting methodology is a response to the need for reflexive and participatory projects that honor Black life and the nuanced knowledges that come from collective experiences. In addition, congregation meeting methodology recognizes the historical and current need for spaces outside of "formal" social institutions, such as schools, that welcome critical epistemologies and action plans for resistance. Following this historical tradition, congregation meetings connect community and creativity as ontological facets of Black meeting spaces. This methodological approach disrupts the prescribed ways of distancing ourselves from the people participating in our research studies as means of generating research which tells nuanced truth that counters deficit discourses that is prevalent in social science research.
This article proposes affective ethics as an intervention in critical qualitative research, particularly in emotionally saturated, justice rooted, and institutionally implicated contexts. It argues that procedural and relational ethics are insufficient when engaging stories shaped by institutional betrayal and emotional labor. Building on Ahmed’s theory of affective economies, Pillow’s insistence on uncomfortable reflexivity, Boveda and Bhattacharya’s critique of extractive research ethics, and Patel’s framework of answerability, the article reframes ethical rigor as emotional and relational accountability. It calls on researchers to treat grief, silence, and contradiction as evidence of institutional weight and to remember participants through design.
This essay presents a six-week ethnographic study of The Thread, a participatory installation art project installed in Vernon Park in Philadelphia’s predominantly Black Germantown neighborhood in the summer of 2024. Framed by its creators as a sacred space for collective grief, the installation invited parkgoers to engage with a disconnected rotary phone to talk to the deceased and contribute to a memorial mosaic. Yet across 60 hours of fieldwork, I observed sustained public refusal of this installation. Drawing on performance studies, critical qualitative inquiry, and theories of aesthetic autonomy and over-solicitous care, I argue that the community did not simply reject the artwork but refused its moral script and therapeutic authority. Situating this refusal within the cultural performance of ecumenical Black spiritualities, including the Nation of Islam, Pentecostal prayer, and everyday rituals of survival, the essay shows how existing sacred, racial, and cosmological frameworks already organize grief, memory, and relationships in Vernon Park. In this context, refusal emerges not only as disengagement but also as a spiritually and politically grounded practice through which publics assert sovereignty over how urban loss is lived, named, and remembered.
