2026 Theses Doctoral

Joy as Epistemic and Ontological Practice: Young Women of Color Becoming in Elite, Predominantly White Independent Schools and Media Spaces

Harris, Chinyere; Lesko, Nancy Louise

This dissertation examined how young women of color become within elite predominantly White independent secondary schools and media spaces shaped by broader historical and representational discourses that have often positioned them within deficit-based narratives. Existing scholarship largely emphasizes harm, discipline, and marginalization—primarily in public school contexts—while offering limited attention to diasporic young women of color’s practices of joy and agency as sites of epistemic and ontological self-definition within elite institutions. This study addressed that gap by exploring how young women of color understand their own becoming and how they juxtapose their self-annotations against curricular and media representations.

Grounded in the theories of joy, Black and Transatlantic Feminisms, Currere, and Currere Toward Decolonization, the qualitative study drew on 15 months of fieldwork in an elite, predominantly White independent school in the southern United States. Data sources included interviews with 10 young women of color and four alumnae, interviews with faculty and administrators, focus groups, classroom observations, and participant-generated visual artifacts. Interview transcripts, fieldnotes, and visual artifacts were engaged as analytic materials and examined through narrative analysis and Fairclough’s dialectical-relational Critical Discourse Analysis to trace patterns of meaning-making and discursive positioning.

Findings revealed that the becoming of young women of color is shaped not only by institutional efforts, constraints, and historical conditions but also by sustained practices of joy, relational belonging, creative expression, and intentional refusal. Participants critically engaged curriculum, school spaces, and media representations, disrupted deficit narratives, and reframed dominant scripts to articulate their identities beyond imposed and expected stereotypes. Their everyday practices of joy operated as epistemic interventions—generating alternative ways of thinking and knowing—and as ontological commitments to relational wholeness and self-definition. The study concluded that joy functions as an epistemic and ontological practice of becoming, enabling young women of color to produce knowledge about themselves and the world around them; transform physical and representational spaces; and reimagine relational, curricular, and institutional futures both within and beyond elite educational contexts.