Dr. LaShawnDa Pittman and some UW students recently had an article published on MDPI's website. In the article, they examine how Black mothers devised strategies of resistance to prepare and protect their children during the Jim Crow era. Grounded in Black feminist standpoint theory, they rely on Black women's own perspectives to understand how interlocking systems of oppression shaped their mothering experiences and practices. They use Dedoose cloud-based software to conduct a content analysis of 210 oral histories from two oral history repositories. Their grounded theory approach to data analysis entailed a multistage coding process, revealing that Black mothers strategized to provide their children choices in the present that would give them more freedom and oppportunities in the future. This mother practice is referred to as the cultivation of "freedom choices".
Read the full article on this webpage: Freedom Choices: How Black Mothers Living in Jim Crow Protected Their Children from Anti-Black Racism and Prepared Them for Success.