Dr. LaShawn Faith Washington on the cruciality of a Black feminist education
“bell hooks urges us to transgress. She gives us an avenue to think about the academy in a non-white manner; hooks teaches us to de-center the heteronormative and patriarchal right-centered way of the academy,” says Dr. LaShawn Faith Washington, seated behind her desk at the University of Oklahoma-Norman (OU) in the Department of Educational Psychology. Mid-Zoom call, she turns her camera to illuminate a shelf in her office: an entire section dedicated to her collection of bell hooks’ work. “She has guided me and has so heavily influenced who I am,” Dr. Washington shares. “She has heavily influenced my teaching and my research. She reframes how I think about love. You don’t always think about love and the academy concurrently, especially as you go higher up in rank. For me, the framework of love gives us a way to ask: what does it mean to create a loving space in an environment, particularly PWIs, that were not made for students who are not white men?”
This question was one Dr. Washington posed in her 2023 dissertation under the guidance of Department of African American Studies affiliate and Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, Dr. Rachelle Winkle-Wagner (Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara, current African American Studies chair, was also a member of her committee). That dissertation, like nearly all her work, is shaped by hooks’ theories and approach to love, personhood, and liberation. Dr. Washington acknowledges the difficulty of pursuing advanced degrees, especially as a first-generation, non-traditional student. She emphasizes the importance of community in navigating academic life. For her, UW–Madison was a space of becoming. “Grad school is hard. College is hard. But when you’re supposed to be where you are, you move differently,” she shares. “I knew I was supposed to be at UW–Madison. And I did not do it in isolation. You must do this work in community.”
Dr. Washington, a Ph.D. alum of UW–Madison, keeps her Department of African American Studies-branded coffee mug nestled amongst her bell hooks shrine. “So many great minds have come through UW, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and bell hooks. Knowing that bell hooks went to UW gives me an extra affinity toward her and her work. Her writings capture me and allow me to fully embrace my Blackness and fully embrace my humanness lovingly and critically, and in an accessible way that the academy doesn’t always allow us to be, or to even read or research in. bell hooks heavily influences my personhood; I try to bring as much of myself as possible to what I do, what I research, and what I teach.”
Dr. Washington recently received a $22,000 grant to expand her dissertation study, which explores the experiences of Black women at PWIs. Her research uses qualitative ethnographic methods, inviting women to draw themselves and reflect on those self-images in focus groups, to investigate how Black women embody healing, sisterhood, love, identity and resistance within academic spaces. “We’re looking at how Black women are storying themselves through pictures,” says Dr. Washington. “Some drew abstract representations, others drew literal images of sisterhood—it’s beautiful work.”
As a scholar of race, gender, and higher education, Dr. Washington is particularly invested in transforming how we credit the intellectual contributions of women of color, noting, “Women, especially Black women and women of color, live in the shadows of their own theories and contributions. Many people will say ‘I’m a Marxist’ or ‘I’m a Foucauldian’. Scholars who are men get the accolades and schools of thought named after them, but women don’t. By saying I am a bell hooks scholar, or a bell hooksian scholar, I am reclaiming the name and the knowledge and contributions made by women like Audre Lorde and bell hooks. These women have full bodies of work.”
While she is currently an Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research at OU, she will be transitioning to The University of Texas–Austin in Fall 2025 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy. Dr. Washington’s teaching philosophy is rooted in a holistic view of students, which affirms their intellectual and spiritual lives. Viewing education as a practice of freedom, she rejects the hierarchical models that dominate academia. In her classroom, students are not just learners, they are people. “I expect my students to treat me as a professor, yes, but also as a person,” she explains. “Things happen. Life happens. I bring my full self to the classroom, and I want my students to do the same.” Dr. Washington’s pedagogy is not only about representation or inclusion, it is a fundamental reimaging of what teaching and learning can be. Through syllabi framed by Black feminist thinkers and assignments that prioritize reflection, creativity, and connection, she cultivates what she calls “loving spaces” which are particularly critical at predominantly white institutions (PWIs). “For me, love is not a soft add-on to education. Love is structure. Love is rigor,” she says. “It is about asking: how do we create spaces of care and affirmation within institutions that weren’t built for us?” Her classroom becomes a site for that critical inquiry, where students engage theory with lived experience.
She is especially attuned to the stakes of visibility and power in the classroom. As one of the first Black women professors many of her doctoral students have encountered, she doesn’t take the responsibility lightly. “To go ten years in higher education and never have a Black woman professor? That’s unacceptable,” she says. “So, I walk into that role with pride. I know what it means for students to see me at the front of the room.” Her teaching is an invitation to think critically, to connect deeply, and to reimagine. And for Dr. Washington, this is not simply a professional commitment, it is personal and political. She teaches from a place of purpose, conviction, and faith, guided always by the legacy of Black women who have come before her. What she learned from Dr. Clark-Pujara is that, “There are no objective questions. All of who you are is brought into the questions you ask. And that’s what makes your work unique and necessary,” and these words help carry Dr. Washington and inspire her to disrupt higher educational spaces and research.