The (Re)search for Goodness: Quilting a Womanist Archival Praxis in Education

This paper introduces womanist archival praxis as an endarkened, arts-based, and spiritually grounded approach to historical inquiry. It explicitly centers Black women’s intellectual, spiritual, and embodied lives, and reimagines the archive as both a site of violence and of possibility. Responding to the erasure and distortion of Black women within dominant historical narratives, this paper proposes the (re)search for goodness as a methodological and ethical stance that centers care, creativity, and relationality. Grounded in Black feminist and womanist traditions, and drawing on Black women’s quilting as metaphor and method, this praxis treats archival work as a sacred craft—a process of piecing, stitching, and binding fragmented histories into collective wholeness. By stitching historical analysis, creative expression, and ethical reflection, this praxis cultivates a multi-layeredapproach to archives. Ultimately, the womanist archival praxis of (re)searching for goodness transforms the process of coming to know, through the archive, into a reparative, love-infused act of remembrance that honors Black women’s lives and living, wisdom, and enduring presence across time.