Jameta Nicole Barlow’s Writing Blackgirls' and Women's Health and Science: Implications for Research and Praxis embodies womanist health empowerment by providing a roadmap not just to Black women’s health and wellness but also to Black women’s full vitality. Everyone who works with Black women and girls in their pursuit of health and wellness, whether in medical or non-medical settings, should read this book and absorb its messages. Black women, too, whether health professionals, healers, or everyday healthcare consumers, will be inspired by being ‘seen’ in this text. Barlow has curated and convened a virtual ‘sister-circle’ of Black women’s health visionaries and innovators. This book belongs on every health and wellness bookshelf!
— Layli Maparyan, professor, Wellesley College; executive director, Wellesley Centers for Women; author of The Womanist Idea (2012); editor of The Womanist Reader (2006) and Womanism Rising (2024)
Dr. Barlow and colleagues have pulled together some of the most empathetic and informed scholars, practitioners, theorists, and thinkers to deepen our understanding of Black women and girls. This book is an important contribution—allowing Black women and girls to share their lived experiences in the context of their lives.
— Monica R. McLemore, University of Washington
A beautifully written, raw, and honest critical examination of the complexities that influence the health and well-being of Black girls through the lens of influential Black women scholars. Threaded throughout are theoretical frameworks that center the voices of those who understand what it means to be Black and female in our society. This book addresses all aspects of our beings, from our history to our hair. It is a must-read for anyone who states their mission is to improve the reproductive lives of Black girls.
— Lucinda Canty, University of Massachusetts
This text offers compelling accounts of the many ways Black women and girls haveconstructed ways of knowing out of the margins of their lived experiences. The authorsgather the sum of their knowledge and experience about the health of Black women anddare to reimagine a narrative constructed in our own image. It is a crucial book in thegrowing library on Black women and health.
— Sarita Kaya Davis, Georgia State University
Writing Blackgirls' and Women's Health Science is the transformative paradigm-shifting collection that so many of us in the field of Blackgirls and women’s health have been waiting for. This is an enormously powerful book which will shake up, interrupt, and intervene in the staid discourses and research agendas that have silenced and/or minimized Blackgirls’ and women’s epistemologies as it intersects with health and healing practices.
— Michele Berger, Case Western Reserve University
Like a warm summer rain welcomed after an arid patch of unrelenting heat, Writing Blackgirls’ and Women’s Health Science: Implications for Research and Praxis offers a radical, refreshing, and rare approach to the topic of Blackgirls and women’s health and wellness. By centering Blackgirls and women within their rich, intersectional, and social-structural realities and strengths, this edited volume offers a bold and innovative philosophy of science grounded in Blackgirls’ and Women’s Philosophy of Science. As Dr. Jameta Barlow, the editor of this badass volume proclaims in her introduction: ‘Black women be knowing.’ This book is a joyous reclamation of science for Blackgirls and women and a must-read for anyone interested in charting a transformative path to Blackgirls and women’s health, wellness, and liberation.
— Lisa Bowleg, The George Washington University and the Intersectionality Training Institute