Picturing Persistence: High-Achieving Black Undergraduate Women's Photographs of Community Cultural Wealth in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Few studies have focused on the pandemic experiences of Black collegiate women who have been successful amidst unprecedented health, economic, and racial crises in the COVID-19 pandemic. In this qualitative study, we utilized a community cultural wealth (CCW) framework to examine the key factors that seven high-achieving Black undergraduate women students at a Historically White University attributed to their persistence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Countering research that overemphasizes the role of individual factors in Black women's educational success, this study utilizes CCW to represent the multileveled and interrelated individual, relational, and institutional factors related to Black high-achieving undergraduate women's persistence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Guided by photo-elicitation methods, we created a photographic writing task to foreground the challenges that Black undergraduate women high achievers experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and the resources that nurtured their success. Through photographic and/or online imagery, written captions, and individual interviews, Black women participants illuminated the social, familial, aspirational, resistant, and navigational capital that they accessed and leveraged to persist beyond pandemic times. Recommendations for practice and future research are discussed.