The Healing Project is a Black feminist research, praxis, and creative inquiry initiative concerned with the politics of resilience, knowledge, and possibility. We examine how people and communities navigate conditions that have historically demanded survival while asking what becomes possible when survival is no longer accepted as the measure of a life well-lived.
Grounded in Black feminist epistemology and healing justice, our work takes seriously the knowledge people produce about their own lives. We are interested in who gets to name, know, and theorize; how story, art, embodiment, relationship, and collective inquiry expand what can be known; and the conditions that make healing, flourishing, liberation, and transformation possible.
The Healing Project is grounded in Black feminist epistemology and deeply informed by the knowledge traditions of Blackwomen.
We understand lived experience as a consequential site from which knowledge can be produced, interpreted, contested, and theorized, and we approach knowledge-making as situated, relational, embodied, and shaped by power.
This grounding calls us to ask not only what we know, but how we come to know; whose knowledge is recognized as legitimate; whose ways of knowing have been marginalized or ignored; and what different possibilities emerge when those historically positioned as objects of knowledge are centered as theorists, creators, and knowledge producers.
Black feminist epistemology is therefore not simply one area of study within The Healing Project. It is an intellectual and ethical grounding from which we engage broader questions of resilience, strength, healing, story, creativity, relationship, community, and transformation.
bell hooks, 1981
Who gets to know?
Who is recognized as capable of producing theory and knowledge about resilience, strength, healing, well-being, and the conditions of their own lives?
What becomes knowable?
What forms of knowledge emerge when lived experience, story, art, embodiment, relationship, and collective inquiry are treated as consequential modes of knowing?
What can knowing make possible?
How might different ways of knowing transform what we understand to be possible beyond imposed survival: for healing, flourishing, resistance, liberation, and transformation?
Interrogating how resilience, strength, adaptation, and protection are constructed within conditions that have historically demanded survival, while theorizing possibilities for healing, flourishing, liberation, and transformation.
Examining how lived experience, story, creativity, embodiment, relationship, and collective inquiry function as sites of knowledge production and challenge conventional distributions of epistemic authority.
Investigating how the conditions under which knowledge is produced shape what can be known, imagined, practiced, and ultimately made possible.
The Praxis Lab is the student-scholar and collaborative research community of The Healing Project. Through independent study, mentored research, collaborative scholarship, and project-based inquiry, students work alongside Dr. Watkins and collaborators to engage questions connected to THP's evolving research program.
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