Abstract
Spoken Word, presented here, is an embodiment of critical theory, where discourse centered on the intersections of race, class, identity, lived experiences, and critical consciousness are named, analyzed, and interpreted in critical performance narratives. Merging the social sciences and the humanities—blending narrative, radical performance text, and popular culture, the power of Spoken Word moves qualitative research methodologies forward to include the voices of a new generation of scholars. In reflecting the author’s “spoken soul,” this piece pushes the boundaries for envisioning the possibilities of storytelling as research, while also expanding the foci of ethnopoetics interpretative potential. In addition, this piece, in form and content, illustrates the possibility of Spoken Word as a radical, “literocratic” research practice for 21st-century scholars—those who wish to demarginalize local and cultural epistemologies.