Theory of Change: Thesis Excerpt

Visualization: An Impetus for Change

The purpose of Urban Beauty is to increase the visibility of black female entrepreneurialism and their urban ecosystem that is presently afflicted with unequal access to capital and productive inputs due to racial and gender inequities. Furthermore, this thesis aims to showcase black women’s role as major contributors to American enterprise by articulating the historical and present-day discourse surrounding their exclusion. It is through this articulation, that the atlas serves as medium for stakeholders to not only uniformly express their exclusion but to also realize their power and capacity to mobilize and demand the standards that they deserve, serving as an entry way into actualizing new systemic manipulations through a firm understanding of the landscape they occupy.

Articulation and Visibility: Building a Foundation

Present-day black, female entrepreneurs are facing real life consequences as a result of their continued rejection, surfacing as impediments to capital access, and general discrimination in the entrepreneurial space. To better improve their placement within the realm of enterprise and change the way in which they are categorically described, an understanding of their ecological territory must be vocalized and understood not only by those external to the ecosystem but also by those within.

The concept of articulation is rooted in the theory of enacting change explained by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Radical Thinkers). The theory posits this:

· Words are empty signifiers, meaning they do not have one specifically defined meaning. Their meaning can have many different unique associations that vary person to person based on lived experiences and interpretations of the systems in which the person belongs.

· Systems are put in place to attempt to articulate words and force mass meanings of words in order to create the hegemony or status quo.

· The first step in understanding the system that has created the representation of the signifier is through constructing a chain of equivalence which is essentially a discourse analysis; finding all the different phrases and terms that make-up the understanding and the experience of a word.

· Through the chain of equivalence, one can then begin to create dislocations. Dislocations are breaks in the chain that occur through disproving the need for a component of the chain to be present and an articulation of a new component that could fit the chain in place of the dislocated component. Essentially, developing new associations for the signifier by proving its cohesiveness with the rest of the chain.

· A dislocation is a threat to a system because it provides an opening for change.

· Change happens through the incremental dislocation of items in the chain of equivalence and their incremental replacement with components that occupy the new value system which you are trying to change too, but the first and most crucial step in the process is articulation.

· This articulation can happen by creating uniform vocabulary and visibility to form a base understanding.

Through actualizing this theory of articulation by visually conveying the chain of equivalence surrounding black female entrepreneurship in the black hair industry, a basis for further exploration of the creation of dislocations and re-articulations will be produced and yield a lexicon for understanding the industry and serve as a guide for further articulatory processes for understanding black female entrepreneurialism in a multitude of sectors.

Consequently, in an effort to dismantle the narrative that has dominated the majority of study surrounding black women in business and to call attention to the universal ramifications that stem from their constant rejection from life-sustaining economic activities. Seeing Black will provide a means of sharing experience, forming community through shared values and creating a foundation of communal knowledge to catalyze organizational development, transformative agency and institutional tools to work towards a means for tangibly uplifting black women, all with the power of visibility.