Date of Award

2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Sociology

First Advisor

Judson Everitt

Abstract

Black homeschooling has grown significantly among African American families, yet existing scholarship has not fully theorized how race, gender, and institutional power operate within homeschooling communities. My dissertation examines how Black mothers resist and reorganize a racialized educational terrain that extends beyond conventional schooling into homeschooling spaces. Drawing on Diamond’s (2006) racialized educational terrain framework, I introduce the Racialized Homeschooling Terrain (RHT) — an original conceptual framework that demonstrates how homeschooling spaces are racialized in similar and distinct ways. This framework centers Black maternal agency, as moms interpret, resist, and reorganize homeschooling spaces to construct communal homeplace. Using a qualitative, exploratory design grounded in Black feminist methodology, I conducted 30 semi-structured interviews and 200+ hours of ethnographic observation across two Black homeschool community groups in metro Atlanta, Georgia. Findings reveal that Black mothers engage in interpretive labor — reading institutional harm in racialized and gendered ways — and respond through what I call protective removal and affirmative withdrawal. Collectively, these mothers construct communal homeplace characterized by discourses of love, safety, and academic rigor, in contrast to the labeling, surveillance, and disciplinary logics that define their children's prior schooling experiences. This study contributes the RHT framework to the sociology of education and Black feminist scholarship, repositioning Black mothers as active architects of educational transformation rather than passive respondents to institutional failure. Findings underscore the need to theorize Black educational spaces as distinct, generative terrain worthy of study on their own terms.

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