Being B(l)ack in the Trenches: Navigating Fear and Intuitions as a Black Researcher Exploring Archives in the South.

In this critical autoethnography, the author interrogates her experiences as a Black woman scholar conducting research in the United States South. She travels to Mississippi and Tennessee to uncover her familial story from enslavement, sharecropping, Jim Crow segregation, and participating in the Great Migration that would end with multiple generations experiencing incarceration in the North. This longitudinal research journey evoked fear and terror pervasive in the South, and she shifted her research focus to explore these critical moments. The author tells the story of her experiences with racialized terror, spiritual intuitions, and antiblackness during the research process. This autoethnography examines what it means to be a Black scholar in Southern archival spaces and interrogates the culture, traditions, and practices that emerge from and shape Black life. The author concludes that autoethnography can be employed in more Black Studies scholarship to produce new ways of knowing and methodological insights that will help decolonize traditional research norms. She aims to investigate her familial experiences to help understand how the past structural oppression continues to shape life in Black communities and provide implications for social and racial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]