The Space Between Healing and Trauma in Qualitative Research: Narratives and Reflections on Fieldwork With Black Women Faculty

Qualitative methodologists often debate how close (or distant) researchers should be to participants. At the heart of these debates is how qualitative research can or should relate to trauma, pain, or healing. The role of researchers, and the possibilities for healing or invoking trauma, is even more complicated when researching historically marginalized populations. Thus, as an all-women, (mostly Black women) research team, we reflect on a national study that exposed the pain and joy of Black women’s tenure-track faculty life in academia. In this paper, incorporating Black feminist theorizing, we created a dialogue between participants and the research team on how we collectively navigated the space between healing and trauma in qualitative data collection processes and how participants used their agency within the research process to chart a pathway for their own healing. Black women faculty members described healing in multiple areas of both their academic and personal lives. As a contribution to critical reflexivity practices within empirical educational research, our findings indicate that the space between healing and trauma within research vacillates between joy, sorrow, and gratitude; and that engagements of healing and trauma within research can be transformative, therapeutic, and evoke vulnerability and aspiration for participants. Additionally, from the researcher standpoint, we advocate for the use of reflexive vignettes within research processes to elevate notions of care, love, becoming, and evolving as an avenue for collective hope and healing within qualitative inquiry.