Vocational Homeplace: A Critical Womanist Sensory Autoethnography of Black Clergywomen in Chaplaincy

This dissertation examines how chaplaincy in higher education functions as a homeplace for Black clergywomen who have experienced marginalization, exclusion, and otherization within the Black Church. While the Black Church has historically served as a site of refuge, resistance, and communal formation, it has also often limited the vocational flourishing of Black women called to ministry through gendered expectations, patriarchal structures, and constrained pathways to leadership. As a result, many Black clergywomen find themselves negotiating a tension between deep ecclesial commitment and persistent institutional exclusion. This study explores how chaplaincy offers an alternative vocational context in which Black clergywomen can more fully embody their ministerial identities and leadership gifts.

Drawing on bell hooks’s concept of homeplace as a site of affirmation, healing, resistance, and self-definition, this dissertation develops the concept of vocational homeplace to describe the ways chaplaincy creates spaces where Black clergywomen can thrive professionally, spiritually, and personally. Employing a Critical Womanist Sensory Autoethnographic methodology, the study centers embodied experience, memory, place, emotion, and spiritual knowing as legitimate sources of knowledge. Through critical reflection on the author’s vocational journey and experiences in higher education chaplaincy, the dissertation examines how chaplaincy functions as a liberatory space that resists the exclusionary dynamics often encountered in congregational settings.

The project further engages womanist thought, Black feminist theory, and sociological understandings of institutional adaptation to analyze why chaplaincy has become an increasingly significant vocational pathway for Black clergywomen. Rather than framing chaplaincy merely as an alternative ministry setting, this dissertation argues that it can serve as a vocational homeplace—a context in which Black clergywomen find belonging, agency, authenticity, and opportunities for leadership that may be unavailable within traditional ecclesial structures.

Ultimately, this study contributes to scholarship on chaplaincy, womanist theology, vocational formation, and Black religious life by offering a new framework for understanding the migration of Black clergywomen into chaplaincy and the transformative possibilities that emerge when ministry is practiced in spaces capable of sustaining their full humanity. Through the concept of vocational homeplace, the dissertation illuminates how chaplaincy can function not only as a site of professional employment but also as a place of restoration, resistance, and flourishing.