Speaking back through repetitioning: black women’s resistance and empowerment in global university spaces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores how repetitive language functions as a form of resistance for Black women navigating academic spaces across Ontario, Canada, and England. Drawing on Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso), W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness (Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. Knoxville, TN: A.C. McClurg & Co), and Black Feminist Thought (Collins, P. H. 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham: Duke University Press), alongside discourse analysis (Johnstone, B., and J. Andrus. 2024. Discourse Analysis. John Wiley & Sons), this study examines how the repetitive patterns in Black women’s language act both as individual expressions of experiences and as communal affirmations of identity. This research underscores how language challenges institutional structures, revealing the creative and nuanced ways Black women resist and reframe oppressive narratives. Using in-person and online conversations with Black women across university roles in Ontario and England this paper shows how thematic dimensions of talk such as vulnerability, self-preservation, resistance and reclamation resonate with repetition as a linguistic practice. The analysis shows that repetition is not merely stylistic: it functions as a tool of collective assertion, critique, and affirmation. Through repetition, contributors forge solidarity, challenge institutional failures, and celebrate Black joy in defiance of systemic constraints. These findings contribute to scholarship on language as resistance and self-definition, and underscore the need for academic institutions to recognise and address the unique experiences of Black women (Rollock, N. 2021. ““I Would Have Become Wallpaper Had Racism Had Its Way”: Black Female Professors, Racial Battle Fatigue, and Strategies for Surviving Higher Education.” Peabody Journal of Education 96 (2): 206–217). By exploring Black women’s experiences in academic spaces, this paper also examines how workplace marginalisation is represented within their narratives, revealing how institutional policing manifests in their everyday interactions. By linking linguistic strategies such as repetition and parallelism with broader institutional critiques, this paper builds on scholarly discussions of how language is not only a response to systemic barriers but also a disruption of them, positioning Black women’s speech as an active site of resistance and transformation (Chance, N. L. 2022. “Resilient Leadership: A Phenomenological Exploration into How Black Women in Higher Education Leadership Navigate Cultural Adversity.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 62 (1): 44–78.; Williams, B. M. 2023. ““It’s Just My Face:” Workplace Policing of Black Professional Women in Higher Education.” Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education 16 (2): 67–89).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".