Podcasting Storytelling As Emancipatory Practice: A Constructivist Grounded Theory Study of African American Narrative Meaning Making

Abstract:

African American communities continue to navigate structural inequities while producing narratives that challenge deficit-laden portrayals and center resistance, agency, and collective meaning-making. This study builds directly on a prior qualitative study analyzing six podcast interviews with African American women (n = 6) from Chicago’s South Side. The initial study demonstrated that podcast-based personal storytelling functions as a site of counter- narrative construction, identity affirmation, and resistance to deficit-based portrayals. The current effort expounds on the initial study through a nationwide qualitative inquiry that expands to include African American men and women (n = 50), shifting from thematic description to a process model of countercultural storytelling. Whereas the initial study highlighted the strengths and achievements that disrupted negative portrayals, the present study shifts analytic focus toward storytelling as an emancipatory narrative practice – examining how interpretive authority is reclaimed and mobilized as resistance within contemporary public platforms. This dissertation is positioned as cumulative, not exploratory, and the expanded study is grounded in existing empirical findings rather than speculative interest.

Methods:

This study employs constructivist grounded theory as the primary analytic framework, supplemented by a phenomenological orientation to examine how podcast storytelling functions as an emancipatory practice among African American men and women across the United States. This methodological pairing is intentional. Within this design, constructivist grounded theory serves as the primary analytic framework guiding data engagement coding, and theory development. The phenomenological orientation does not function as a separate method but as a synthesizing framework directing attention to the depth, texture, and lived experience as expressed through narrative. This distinction is critical. Grounded theory constructs how analysis proceeds, while phenomenology informs how experience is approached, interpreted, and understood within that analytic process. Together, these approaches support an analysis that is both process-oriented and experientially grounded. Unlike traditional interview data, podcast narratives are self-directed, dialogic, and publicly situated, providing access to forms of narrative expression shaped by cultural context, audience, and relational dynamics.