Outside Reading: Karla Scott's "Communication Strategies Across Cultural Borders"

Karla Scott's Communication Strategies Across Cultural Borders: Dispelling Stereotypes, Performing Competence, and Redefining Black Womanhood

When trying to decide on an article for this week, I thought back to my Master's program at Saint Louis University and remembered that one of my prior professors, Karla Scott, did qualitative work, specifically with topics on gender, race, and discourse. I pulled up one of her articles, a piece that I had read through previously, and paid more attention to method.

Overall, I think the piece is very well-done. Scott uses a focus-group method in order to solicit thoughts and narratives from Black women who regularly boundary-cross into predominately white spaces. She uses convenience sampling, and this results in a participant population that is largely sourced from the university. Ideally, the participant pool would have had more people from outside the university, provided the goal is generalizability. However, Scott takes a phenomenological perspective on the research, which suggests that this may not have been the goal after all.

The method used for this research followed the three-step phenomenological process by first gathering lived experiences, reviewing them to gather themes, and finally interpreting and analyzing the themes. Gathering the experiences took the form of focus groups, though Scott also included the written responses of 3 participants who could not be present at any of the focus groups. In the article, the second and third step are clearly visible-- she states the themes and then provides unaltered text from the accounts of the participants. This does the work of showing that the recurrent themes exist, but also voicing them through the phenomenological accounts of lived experience. It is clear to the reader that the themes are apparent in these accounts, suggesting that the theme represents a commonly experienced phenomenon for the Black women participants.

The importance of this article resides in its ability to describe the why and how of certain behaviors. As Scott notes, the acts of code switching or border-crossing are well-established, but little research has been done into exactly why and how those behaviors are enacted. As a piece of research building on Communication, Scott focuses on communicative strategies, particularly ways that Black women mitigate the stereotypes they face when in predominately White environments. Scott also notes that her work is written to challenge essentialist notions of Black womanhood, because, after all, it is not meant to be generalized to represent the communicative strategies of all Black women. Although a metric perspective would tend to shun this inability to generalize and predict, Scott makes a good argument at the end of her article-- if Black womanhood is not a monolith, then it should be studied in a way that represents its heterogeneity and complexity.