Understanding and appreciating the experiences, perspective, and importance of the Black researcher

Posted on: 11 March 2025 in Posts

On Thursday, 6 March 2025, The University of Liverpool was lucky to welcome award-winning writer and psychologist Guilaine Kinouani to deliver a talk to staff, students, and researchers within the field on racial trauma.

Kinouani is the founder of the social enterprise Race Reflections and its Academy which provides workshops, advice and valuable information on anti-racism, racial trauma, and self-care. The author’s first book, Living While Black (2021) exposes the impact of racism on Black minds and bodies, whilst her second book White Minds (2023)is a psychosocial exploration of the quotidian workings of whiteness. The event “The Black Researcher as Living and Bodily Archive” organised by Dr Rebecca Loy (of National Museums Liverpool), Dr Stephen Kenny, Dr Leona Vaughn, and Phil Jones, began with a valuable networking opportunity and opened up insightful discussions on Black experiences of violence and trauma within archives and academia.

In the formal presentation on “Racial Trauma, Resistance, and Community Transformation,” Kinouani shared research on systemic and persistent race inequality in health. Kinouani’s research focuses on understanding consequent experiences of harm and trauma, through an Afro-analytics lens, a frame she is developing to rethink racial trauma, inheritance, transmission and associated issues of communication and embodiment within the Black diaspora.

Kinouani emphasised that understanding the re-traumatisation and internalisation, or indeed embodiment, of racial trauma is essential in combating the multitude of health issues that disproportionately impact the Black population in the UK. This issue is ongoingly urgent and is visible in Liverpool’s own history of racial health disparities.

The talk summarised how exposure to racism has been linked to a wide range of health conditions – such as obesity, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease – along with chronic illnesses and mental health conditions. Further, Kinouani drew attention to the suffering that derives from indirect racism, and creates vicarious harm. Kinouani highlighted how exposure to vicarious racism and ideologies such as white supremacy is gaining prevalence on online social media platforms for some groups.

Kinouani’s research on the generational transmission of trauma is a relatively new field of health research where the Black experience has often been underrepresented, and only now is research on the Caribbean experience emerging. The Congo basin’s dreadful history when it comes to the slave trade and colonialism, is another issue that requires the topic to be brought into collective consciousness, another issue that resonated strongly in the Liverpool context.

In her paper, Kinouani emphasised the ancestral beliefs which have led her to reframe racial trauma, inheritance and storytelling. Including rethinking intelligence and connecting with the heart, which have become integral and essential to her interpretation of data on racialised suffering.

This research prefaces her much anticipated co-edited collection: Creative Disruption: Psychosocial Scholarship as Praxis due to be released next month in April 2025.

It provides context for her creating the U.K.’s first depth Racial Trauma course. To find out more or get in touch with Guilaine, email contact@racereflections.co.uk.

Written by Holly Rhead (Third year student in History)