Durell M Callier
Biographic Data
| ID | 100601 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Durell M Callier |
| GIVEN NAMES | Durell M |
| FAMILY NAME | Callier |
| SIGNATURE | CALLIER D M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Delaware |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1402-4519 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Autoethnographies of Precarity
This article serves as the introduction to the special issue “Risky Business, Uncertain Futures, and ... the Work Continues.” The special issue emerged from the preconference of the Autoethnography Special Interest Group of the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry meeting in 2025. The article presents autoethnography as inherently risky and as a methodology that can sustain us through uncertain times and events that call us to reflect…
Presencing Particulars and Possibilities Across Time
Part autoethnographic reflection, and performance this essay describes the opening performance to the 20 th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Autoethnography SIG Day. The Autoethnography SIG is a special interest group of the larger conference, providing a home-space and community for those who do or are interested in various forms of autoethnography. Accordingly, this essay marks the convening of the event, describing the material a…
Introduction to Presence Tense
This introductory essay introduces the themes of the gathering at the 20th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry that gave rise to this special issue, and frames the ten contributed articles with four intersecting themes related to autoethnographic inquiry: autoethnography as making space , embodied futurity , intergenerational responsibility, and resistance
Advancing Qualitative Inquiry Toward Methodological Inclusion
As a collective of critical, minoritized, feminist, queer, and decolonial scholars who hold multiple identities simultaneously, this manuscript advances an argument for methodological inclusion grounded in axio-onto-epistemological responsibility. Writing in a dangerous sociopolitical moment marked by intensified attacks on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, the authors refuse epistemic neutrality and instead approach qualitative inquiry …
Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet
Autoethnography That Moves the Soul
This essay uses autopoetic narrative and reflexivity to unpack the possibilities of autoethnographic research and writing rooted in the spirit of collaboration. We reflect on the experience of a workshop centering collaborative autoethnography. Specifically, our reflection attunes to the affective and viscerality generated during and after collective exploration of the stakes within the moment. Overall, the essay explores (re)membering contentiou…
Feelin’ Real/Unbroken
This autopoetic inquiry offers insights into and critiques of public education. The author specifically interrogates the absence of curricula, which focuses on the fullness of Black LGBTQ+ representation. Through the usage of pivotal artists, lyrics, poetry, and reflection, the author centers a Blackqueer analysis to argue for a reparative educational experience for Black LGBTQ+ youth. Mirrored within the essay is the reality that Black and queer…
Surviving (Black) Together
How do Black feminism and womanism foster interconnectedness to one another and the sacred? What knowledges manifest through collective practices of wondering and wandering together? This essay provides reflections on our own engagements with creative-relational inquiry, manifested through our collective practice, Hill L. Waters, a scholar–artist collective rooted in love, Black queer resistance, and art as activism. Organized around and through …
Taking a Moment for Life
This essay foregrounds Black and queer youth stories of encountering and surviving violence, as reenacted through Tell It!: A Contemporary Chorale for Black Youth Voices. A performance ethnography, Tell It! draws from narratives on the bullying experienced inside and outside K-12 schooling contexts, and narratives of anti-Black and anti-queer violence. Throughout the essay, I argue for the reframing of anti-Black and anti-queer violence as mutual…
Notes on Terrible Educations
Uncovering Black Girlhood(s)
Uncovering Black Girlhood(s):Black Girl Pleasures as Anti-respectability Methodology Porshé R. Garner (bio), Dominique C. Hill (bio), Jessica L. Robinson (bio), and Durell M. Callier (bio) Black girlhood is a site of pleasure, often overlooked, yet visible to those committed to allowing Black girls to just be. It is through our varied work and training in Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) that we, the authors, are reminded and understand…
Desirable and disposable
we are drowning here still in the difficulty as if the faces in the images hold all the consequences and the fiction of the facts assumes randomness and indeterminacy He said, I don't know what the water wanted.It wanted to show you no one would come.(Rankine, 2014, p. 85) We are drowning, in the global and local aftermaths of natural disasters, man-made atrocities, historic and unrelenting in the lessons of citizenship denied, conferred, obscure…
Answering the Call
The organizers of the Autoethnography Special Interest Group for the 12th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry brought together various autoethnographers to meditate on the theme of “manifesting” autoethnography. Taking up the challenge, the authors use reflexive narrative, poetry, music, and movement to offer one manifestation of autoethnography in the future. We, Hill L. Waters, write into the future, auto\ethnography as a Black, queer…
Years of Black Girlhood Celebration
People often ask, “What is Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT)?” Sometimes the answer is it's a poem, sometimes it's a dance, sometimes it's an art installation in a local gallery, sometimes it's a song, sometimes it's a rhyme, sometimes it's a book, sometimes it's a lesson on theory and praxis, sometimes it's an article, sometimes it's an editorial, sometimes it's a performance, and sometimes it's a one-word answer. The answer however, no…
Towards an Interdisciplinary Field of Black Girlhood Studies
Scholarly interest in the experiences of Black girls has grown significantly. Although many scholars, activists, and artists have completed substantial scholarship and creative works that constitute the foundation of Black girlhood studies, their body of work and names are oftentimes omitted from recent scholarship on Black girlhood. In this collectively authored essay, scholars, artists, and activists present an annotated bibliography of histori…
Still, nobody mean more
Still, Nobody Mean More explores how Black youth constructed as queer subjects by state apparatuses and sociocultural institutions encounter, survive, and resist premature death. Engaging with women and queer of color theories this paper interrogates how the queerness of Blackness works to erase certain subjects from contemporary political campaigns eliding claims to the status option or protection of the citizen and/or human. Specifically, this …
Living in C Minor
This autoethnographic performance interrogates the centrality of music to queering Black masculinity. Theorizing from my lived experience, I highlight how Black girl hand games, countertenor performances in Soul music, and male vocalist performances in Gospel music intervene and provide alternative entryways to understanding Black masculinity. Three pivotal moments from the authors' life, which span the aforementioned genres of music, are explore…
Staging Black Girl Utopias
This performative text places in conversation the work of Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a practice of black girlhood celebration, with Robin M. Boylorn's Sweetwater. Both SOLHOT's archive of original poetry, movement, and music and Boylorn's Sweetwater document the power and potential of listening to and being transformed by black women and girls' truths. Building on the legacy of black feminist writing traditions, this piece celebra…
Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths
Created by scholar, artist, and activist Ruth Nicole Brown in 2006, Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) collectively brings together Black girls and women from all walks of life to answer the central question: What does a space that focuses on the freedom of Black girls look like? Since its inception SOLHOT has served as a key means to do the following:Approaching its tenth year, SOLHOT continues to provide a space for creative performance…
Snip, Snip
Hill L. Waters (HLW), a partnership birthed by two artist scholars, Dominique C. Hill and Durell M. Callier, is an intentional social justice venture. As two queer, black educators interested in co
Still Political
“Still Political” explores the politics of hair. Through interdisciplinary exploration and diverse methodologies that interweave and span personal narrative, autoethnography, performative writing, and collaborative performance, the pieces in this forum meditate on and question body/hair politics. Individually and collectively, through the sites of their bodies and experiences, the authors probe themes that include history, the academy, intimate a…
Love, Peace, and Soooooul
The Fire This Time (TFTT), a Black writers' collaboration which uses multiple genres of writing as our method is grounded in what Don Cornelius used to call Love, Peace, and Soul. Love, because our love for writing and the complexities and challenges of the Black experience, coupled with a passion for connecting with other Black scholars in ways that have the potential for making a difference in the world, is at the heart of this work. Peace, bec…
But Where Were They? Race, Era(c)sure, and the Imaginary American West
Deeply embedded within the myth of the settlement of the American frontier is a systematically conscious project of era(c)sure. This imperial project necessitates and indeed perpetuates a cultural amnesia, disappearing the lives, stories, and histories of not only native and indigenous people but that of all other racial and ethnically marginalized peoples. Through a series of autoethnographic confessions interspersed with historic/academic texts…
A Call to Love ‐ In Remembrance of Our Quare Saints
In lieu of recent violent acts and the deaths of quare individuals‐queers of colour (e.g. Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, Carl Walker‐Hoover, Jaheem Herrera, Sakia Gunn, etc.) this piece remembers their lives, while reimagining our current sociopolitical landscape (Johnson, 2006). Recognising the spiritual as political (Jacqui Alexander, 2005), this work calls upon our collective memories‐psychological, bodily and sacred‐to remember the tragedies and…
Longing to be Langston
This article is an autoethnodrama, which originally began as a workshop piece coming to fruition as an enacted staged reading at the University of Illinois during Fall 2011. As an ethnodrama, the article explores the author's educational journey, pivoting around one of his fondest childhood memories reciting a Langston Hughes poem. Interwoven throughout the piece are other notable local, and global events, which occurred throughout the author's l…
Uncovering Black Girlhood(s)
Uncovering Black Girlhood(s):Black Girl Pleasures as Anti-respectability Methodology Porshé R. Garner (bio), Dominique C. Hill (bio), Jessica L. Robinson (bio), and Durell M. Callier (bio) Black girlhood is a site of pleasure, often overlooked, yet visible to those committed to allowing Black girls to just be. It is through our varied work and training in Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) that we, the authors, are reminded and understand…
Still, nobody mean more
Still, Nobody Mean More explores how Black youth constructed as queer subjects by state apparatuses and sociocultural institutions encounter, survive, and resist premature death. Engaging with women and queer of color theories this paper interrogates how the queerness of Blackness works to erase certain subjects from contemporary political campaigns eliding claims to the status option or protection of the citizen and/or human. Specifically, this …
Notes on Terrible Educations
Desirable and disposable
we are drowning here still in the difficulty as if the faces in the images hold all the consequences and the fiction of the facts assumes randomness and indeterminacy He said, I don't know what the water wanted.It wanted to show you no one would come.(Rankine, 2014, p. 85) We are drowning, in the global and local aftermaths of natural disasters, man-made atrocities, historic and unrelenting in the lessons of citizenship denied, conferred, obscure…
Living in C Minor
This autoethnographic performance interrogates the centrality of music to queering Black masculinity. Theorizing from my lived experience, I highlight how Black girl hand games, countertenor performances in Soul music, and male vocalist performances in Gospel music intervene and provide alternative entryways to understanding Black masculinity. Three pivotal moments from the authors' life, which span the aforementioned genres of music, are explore…
Taking a Moment for Life
This essay foregrounds Black and queer youth stories of encountering and surviving violence, as reenacted through Tell It!: A Contemporary Chorale for Black Youth Voices. A performance ethnography, Tell It! draws from narratives on the bullying experienced inside and outside K-12 schooling contexts, and narratives of anti-Black and anti-queer violence. Throughout the essay, I argue for the reframing of anti-Black and anti-queer violence as mutual…
But Where Were They? Race, Era(c)sure, and the Imaginary American West
Deeply embedded within the myth of the settlement of the American frontier is a systematically conscious project of era(c)sure. This imperial project necessitates and indeed perpetuates a cultural amnesia, disappearing the lives, stories, and histories of not only native and indigenous people but that of all other racial and ethnically marginalized peoples. Through a series of autoethnographic confessions interspersed with historic/academic texts…
Still Political
“Still Political” explores the politics of hair. Through interdisciplinary exploration and diverse methodologies that interweave and span personal narrative, autoethnography, performative writing, and collaborative performance, the pieces in this forum meditate on and question body/hair politics. Individually and collectively, through the sites of their bodies and experiences, the authors probe themes that include history, the academy, intimate a…
Love, Peace, and Soooooul
The Fire This Time (TFTT), a Black writers' collaboration which uses multiple genres of writing as our method is grounded in what Don Cornelius used to call Love, Peace, and Soul. Love, because our love for writing and the complexities and challenges of the Black experience, coupled with a passion for connecting with other Black scholars in ways that have the potential for making a difference in the world, is at the heart of this work. Peace, bec…
A Call to Love ‐ In Remembrance of Our Quare Saints
In lieu of recent violent acts and the deaths of quare individuals‐queers of colour (e.g. Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, Carl Walker‐Hoover, Jaheem Herrera, Sakia Gunn, etc.) this piece remembers their lives, while reimagining our current sociopolitical landscape (Johnson, 2006). Recognising the spiritual as political (Jacqui Alexander, 2005), this work calls upon our collective memories‐psychological, bodily and sacred‐to remember the tragedies and…
Longing to be Langston
This article is an autoethnodrama, which originally began as a workshop piece coming to fruition as an enacted staged reading at the University of Illinois during Fall 2011. As an ethnodrama, the article explores the author's educational journey, pivoting around one of his fondest childhood memories reciting a Langston Hughes poem. Interwoven throughout the piece are other notable local, and global events, which occurred throughout the author's l…
Epistemological Groundings
Epistemological Groundings: Searchin' for the Words" is an explorative journey toward mapping, understanding, and staking the authors ways of knowing. Taking up the charge, as Madison (2005), outlays to start where you are, and answer the deeply personal, spiritual, and political questions of (a) Who are you? and (b) What work do you need to do to feed your soul? The author through a series of short poems/thoughts seeks to make sense of the resea…
But Where Were They? Race, Era(c)sure, and the Imaginary American West
Deeply embedded within the myth of the settlement of the American frontier is a systematically conscious project of era(c)sure. This imperial project necessitates and indeed perpetuates a cultural amnesia, disappearing the lives, stories, and histories of not only native and indigenous people but that of all other racial and ethnically marginalized peoples. Through a series of autoethnographic confessions interspersed with historic/academic texts…
Snip, Snip
Hill L. Waters (HLW), a partnership birthed by two artist scholars, Dominique C. Hill and Durell M. Callier, is an intentional social justice venture. As two queer, black educators interested in co
Still Political
“Still Political” explores the politics of hair. Through interdisciplinary exploration and diverse methodologies that interweave and span personal narrative, autoethnography, performative writing, and collaborative performance, the pieces in this forum meditate on and question body/hair politics. Individually and collectively, through the sites of their bodies and experiences, the authors probe themes that include history, the academy, intimate a…
Love, Peace, and Soooooul
The Fire This Time (TFTT), a Black writers' collaboration which uses multiple genres of writing as our method is grounded in what Don Cornelius used to call Love, Peace, and Soul. Love, because our love for writing and the complexities and challenges of the Black experience, coupled with a passion for connecting with other Black scholars in ways that have the potential for making a difference in the world, is at the heart of this work. Peace, bec…
Staging Black Girl Utopias
This performative text places in conversation the work of Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a practice of black girlhood celebration, with Robin M. Boylorn's Sweetwater. Both SOLHOT's archive of original poetry, movement, and music and Boylorn's Sweetwater document the power and potential of listening to and being transformed by black women and girls' truths. Building on the legacy of black feminist writing traditions, this piece celebra…
Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths
Created by scholar, artist, and activist Ruth Nicole Brown in 2006, Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) collectively brings together Black girls and women from all walks of life to answer the central question: What does a space that focuses on the freedom of Black girls look like? Since its inception SOLHOT has served as a key means to do the following:Approaching its tenth year, SOLHOT continues to provide a space for creative performance…
Living in C Minor
This autoethnographic performance interrogates the centrality of music to queering Black masculinity. Theorizing from my lived experience, I highlight how Black girl hand games, countertenor performances in Soul music, and male vocalist performances in Gospel music intervene and provide alternative entryways to understanding Black masculinity. Three pivotal moments from the authors' life, which span the aforementioned genres of music, are explore…
Answering the Call
The organizers of the Autoethnography Special Interest Group for the 12th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry brought together various autoethnographers to meditate on the theme of “manifesting” autoethnography. Taking up the challenge, the authors use reflexive narrative, poetry, music, and movement to offer one manifestation of autoethnography in the future. We, Hill L. Waters, write into the future, auto\ethnography as a Black, queer…
Years of Black Girlhood Celebration
People often ask, “What is Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT)?” Sometimes the answer is it's a poem, sometimes it's a dance, sometimes it's an art installation in a local gallery, sometimes it's a song, sometimes it's a rhyme, sometimes it's a book, sometimes it's a lesson on theory and praxis, sometimes it's an article, sometimes it's an editorial, sometimes it's a performance, and sometimes it's a one-word answer. The answer however, no…
Towards an Interdisciplinary Field of Black Girlhood Studies
Scholarly interest in the experiences of Black girls has grown significantly. Although many scholars, activists, and artists have completed substantial scholarship and creative works that constitute the foundation of Black girlhood studies, their body of work and names are oftentimes omitted from recent scholarship on Black girlhood. In this collectively authored essay, scholars, artists, and activists present an annotated bibliography of histori…
Still, nobody mean more
Still, Nobody Mean More explores how Black youth constructed as queer subjects by state apparatuses and sociocultural institutions encounter, survive, and resist premature death. Engaging with women and queer of color theories this paper interrogates how the queerness of Blackness works to erase certain subjects from contemporary political campaigns eliding claims to the status option or protection of the citizen and/or human. Specifically, this …
Desirable and disposable
we are drowning here still in the difficulty as if the faces in the images hold all the consequences and the fiction of the facts assumes randomness and indeterminacy He said, I don't know what the water wanted.It wanted to show you no one would come.(Rankine, 2014, p. 85) We are drowning, in the global and local aftermaths of natural disasters, man-made atrocities, historic and unrelenting in the lessons of citizenship denied, conferred, obscure…
Notes on Terrible Educations
Uncovering Black Girlhood(s)
Uncovering Black Girlhood(s):Black Girl Pleasures as Anti-respectability Methodology Porshé R. Garner (bio), Dominique C. Hill (bio), Jessica L. Robinson (bio), and Durell M. Callier (bio) Black girlhood is a site of pleasure, often overlooked, yet visible to those committed to allowing Black girls to just be. It is through our varied work and training in Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) that we, the authors, are reminded and understand…
Surviving (Black) Together
How do Black feminism and womanism foster interconnectedness to one another and the sacred? What knowledges manifest through collective practices of wondering and wandering together? This essay provides reflections on our own engagements with creative-relational inquiry, manifested through our collective practice, Hill L. Waters, a scholar–artist collective rooted in love, Black queer resistance, and art as activism. Organized around and through …
Taking a Moment for Life
This essay foregrounds Black and queer youth stories of encountering and surviving violence, as reenacted through Tell It!: A Contemporary Chorale for Black Youth Voices. A performance ethnography, Tell It! draws from narratives on the bullying experienced inside and outside K-12 schooling contexts, and narratives of anti-Black and anti-queer violence. Throughout the essay, I argue for the reframing of anti-Black and anti-queer violence as mutual…
Autoethnography That Moves the Soul
This essay uses autopoetic narrative and reflexivity to unpack the possibilities of autoethnographic research and writing rooted in the spirit of collaboration. We reflect on the experience of a workshop centering collaborative autoethnography. Specifically, our reflection attunes to the affective and viscerality generated during and after collective exploration of the stakes within the moment. Overall, the essay explores (re)membering contentiou…
Feelin’ Real/Unbroken
This autopoetic inquiry offers insights into and critiques of public education. The author specifically interrogates the absence of curricula, which focuses on the fullness of Black LGBTQ+ representation. Through the usage of pivotal artists, lyrics, poetry, and reflection, the author centers a Blackqueer analysis to argue for a reparative educational experience for Black LGBTQ+ youth. Mirrored within the essay is the reality that Black and queer…
Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet
Autoethnographies of Precarity
This article serves as the introduction to the special issue “Risky Business, Uncertain Futures, and ... the Work Continues.” The special issue emerged from the preconference of the Autoethnography Special Interest Group of the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry meeting in 2025. The article presents autoethnography as inherently risky and as a methodology that can sustain us through uncertain times and events that call us to reflect…
Presencing Particulars and Possibilities Across Time
Part autoethnographic reflection, and performance this essay describes the opening performance to the 20 th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Autoethnography SIG Day. The Autoethnography SIG is a special interest group of the larger conference, providing a home-space and community for those who do or are interested in various forms of autoethnography. Accordingly, this essay marks the convening of the event, describing the material a…
Introduction to Presence Tense
This introductory essay introduces the themes of the gathering at the 20th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry that gave rise to this special issue, and frames the ten contributed articles with four intersecting themes related to autoethnographic inquiry: autoethnography as making space , embodied futurity , intergenerational responsibility, and resistance
Sociology (19 works) · Art (18 works) · Aesthetics (15 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Political science (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Literature (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Autoethnography (8 works) · Law (8 works)