The Healing Project is a Black feminist research, praxis, and creative inquiry initiative concerned with the politics of resilience and the conditions of human 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 within and about their own lives. We ask who gets to name, know, and theorize; how story, art, embodiment, relationship, and collective inquiry expand what can be known; and what kinds of conditions make healing, flourishing, liberation, and transformation possible.
Our scholarship is not simply saying that marginalized ways of knowing should be included alongside dominant ones. It asks whether encounters with those ways of knowing might require us to relinquish some of the categories/constructs/concepts through which we thought we already knew the world.
Black feminist epistemology is not a perspective we apply after research questions have been formulated. Instead, it changes what can become a question in the first place. It asks who has been authorized to know, whose interpretations become theory, why some knowledge is considered rigorous while other knowledge is considered anecdotal, why embodied knowing must translate itself into academic language before it becomes credible, why communities repeatedly enter research as sources of information while researchers within the institution retain the authority to decide what the information means, and what happens when that arrangement is refused.
Blackwomen are central to this intellectual genealogy. Not because Blackwomen represent a demographic niche within The Healing Project, but because Blackwomen's intellectual traditions expose something fundamental about knowledge itself: that people can be rendered hypervisible as objects of research while remaining illegible as thinkers and co-creators of knowledge. The Healing Project begins inside that contradiction and moves beyond it.
What kind of human is resilience asking us to become?
Resilient people cope, recover, regulate, persist, return, and function. But return to what? Function for whom? And what disappears when the evidence that a person is doing well is that they have learned how to continue inside conditions that should perhaps have been made impossible?
We study resilience not simply as a human capacity but as a political, epistemic, and disciplinary problem. We ask how resilience became something recognizable, measurable, desirable, and increasingly compulsory. And we ask what other possibilities for human life disappear when strength and survival becomes the evidence of success and successful adaptation.
Who gets to make theory and knowledge claims?
Blackwomen have been measured, diagnosed, classified, surveilled, studied, praised for strength, blamed for pathology, and repeatedly made available as evidence for other people's theories. The Healing Project begins somewhere else.
What happens when Blackwomen do not enter inquiry as cases to be interpreted but as thinkers whose interpretations trouble the categories themselves? What if lived experience does not merely provide data; what if it produces concepts?
What if story does not simply illustrate theory; what if story is one of the places theory emerges?
What does space know?
Research is never conducted nowhere. Every inquiry has a room, a history, a temperature, a set of permissions, and a distribution of risk. Someone gets to ask and someone is expected to answer. And someone decides when an answer counts.
RARE Spaces emerged from our refusal to treat those conditions as methodological background noise. We are interested in what happens when the environment of inquiry itself becomes an object of thought. What becomes speakable under different conditions? What becomes imaginable? What forms of relation interrupt the ordinary choreography and cadence of researcher and researched? Can a space change not only what someone is willing to say, but what becomes possible to know?
What if this world is not exhaustive?
There is a tendency in critical scholarship to become extraordinarily skilled at describing the machinery of the world as it is and we need that work. But description cannot become destiny. The Healing Project is also interested in the excessive, the unfinished, the not-yet, the forms of living that exceed forced survival, and the strange knowledge carried by story, body, memory, art, landscape, relationship, environment, and wonder.
We are deeply interested in possibility without pretending that imagination alone dismantles power. We are interested in the otherworldly not as escape from this world, but as a refusal to let this world's present arrangements dictate the full range of what human life is allowed to become.
We do not organize our work into sealed research silos. We understand that:
For now, our work gathers around several constellations:
How resilience became something we know, measure, praise, prescribe, and expect.
How the ecology of inquiry shapes what can become known.
What happens when story is treated not only as raw material for theory, but as a critical site where theory is made.
An emerging line of inquiry into adaptation, environment, flourishing, relation, wonder, and what becomes possible when survival is no longer accepted as the outer boundary of human life.
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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