How a Lifetime of Academic Administration Gave Me the Freedom to Write a Sisterlocking Academic Memoir

This interview stages an encounter between prominent life writing studies scholar and Emerita Professor of The Ohio State University, Julia Watson and Valerie Lee, also Emerita Professor The Ohio State University, whose memoir Sisterlocking Discoarse: Race, Gender and the 21 ^st Century Academy, reflects on decades of micro-aggressions she encountered as a black woman administrator in the US academy. In this conversation with Watson, Lee explores a new language of “sisterlocking discoarse” about black women in academia, “a mode of writing that binds coarse hair to the discourses and the sisterhood of African and African American women's narratives.”