PhD Poetry

Exploring Black women's current and historical experiences at Oxbridge, my PhD research project asked How do Black women students respond to the coloniality of Oxbridge? My research employed Critical Poetic Inquiry to draw on Black women’s literary trends of breaking from traditional form and prose through storying and poetry writing.

Critical Poetic Inquiry is distinct from other forms of qualitative inquiry in that it prioritises justice. Drawing on Black Feminist and Womanist traditions, in a fashion exemplified by Kafayat Okanlawon in her 2019 book This Is Us: Black British Women and Girls, my research and writing became “a lament, a war cry, a chant and a belly laugh” they are “a joyful, painful rupture, a disruption, a deliberate transgression, a riff, and a drum beat… a prayer for all we have lost and for all that we can be” (6). Ultimately, my PhD research is a justice-centred project aimed at celebrating and memorialising the lives and experiences of Black women students of Oxbridge, past and present. 

My discussion on the emotive realities of coloniality and its impacts necessitated creative communication. My use of poetry draws on the rhythmic musicality of Black Studies and Yoruba storytelling traditions. Such traditions often adopt a round-about way of communicating, leaving some of the lessons to be deciphered by the audience while making others more readily understood.

Poetry is featured throughout my thesis, operating as an added layer of research analysis while also becoming the research text to itself be analysed (Davis, 2021). My hope is that your engagement with the poetry of PhD project will move from the posture of objective observer to emotive engager. By employing CPI, within my PhD, I called on poetry to engage readers in a manner of reading and hearing that transcends standard engagement with academic texts.

Below, you can listen to the poems featured in my thesis as an alternative way of engaging in my academic research.