Sisterlocking Discoarse

<p><b>Follows a Black woman's forty-year career in academia sharing how race and gender can disrupt and enhance the professional and the personal from leadership and policies to family life.</b></p><p>Finalist for the 2021 <i>Foreword</i> INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Education Category</p><p>In <i>Sisterlocking Discoarse</i> hair is a medium for reflecting on how academic leadership looks performs and changes when embodied by a Black woman. In these ten essays Valerie Lee traverses disciplines and genres weaving together memoir literary analysis legal cases folklore letters travelogues family photographs and cartoons to share her story of navigating academia. Lee's path is not singular or linear but rather communal and circular as she revisits her earliest years in her grandmother's home advances through the professoriate and senior administration and addresses her hopes and fears for her own children. Drawing inspiration from the African American storytelling traditions she has spent decades studying and teaching Lee approaches issues of race gender social justice academic labor and leadership with a voice that is clear intimate and humorous. As she writes in the introduction <i>Sisterlocking Discoarse</i> is about braiding and breathing and believing that a Black woman's journey through the academy is important. Lee's journey will appeal to students faculty and administrators across fields and institutions who are committed to making higher education more inclusive while speaking to the experiences of professional women of color more broadly.</p>