Ethics and Methodology: Moving From Damage-Centered Research Through Unsettling Reflexivity

• In Event: Unsettling Ethics in the Curriculum: Research Praxis and Pedagogies

Abstract

As researchers committed to decolonial research in education, we must be vigilant of the ways we might unintentionally reify colonialist regimes of knowledge. Thus, we must move from decolonization as metaphor (Tuck and Yang 2012) towards a position that exposes the subjectivities of settler colonialism that allows researchers to embody an ethical practice together with community (Erickson 1996) that may result in refusal/non intervention of research (Patel 2015; Tuck and Yang 2014). To do this, one must understand how particular epistemic locations are produced by settler colonialism. As Tuck and Yang (2014) point out, “Social science disciplines have inherited the persistent drive to supersede the conditions of their operations from settler colonial logic, and it is this drive, a kind of unquestioning push forward, and not the origins of the disciplines that we attend to now” (229). Herein lies the problem.

To examine this, I turn to the theoretical framework of coloniality. I focus on settler colonialism as a way to uncover how we may internalize settler colonial subjectivities as researchers of color and what this means to an ethical research process that is committed to our communities as more than simply the object and/or subject of our research. To explore this ethical dilemma, I revisit a pilot project that relied on autoethnographic vignettes (Humphrey 2005)—short narratives reflecting memories of my transitions from home (a largely Mexican and Pueblo community) to undergraduate studies (Author, 2009)--that yielded important conceptual and methodological building blocks for a larger ethnographic study conducted with my research partner. We found traditional tropes of student success and support in higher education take as given deficit views marginalized communities; yet, the autoethnographic vignettes disrupted dominant deficit discourses around Chicana/o and Indigenous community roles in aiding in the retention and success of students of color in higher education. Responding to this binary and because our home community is typically framed in deficit ways we chose findings to refute these framings, unwittingly affirming what Tuck (2009) names a damage-centered approach --“research that operates, even benevolently, from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation” (413).

To unsettle these damage centered approaches, I propose using an unsettling reflexivity (Hamdan 2009; Pillow 2003; Tuck and Yang 2014;)-- an approach that foregrounds how knowledge and power informs the particular problematic/question one is examining-- to identify how settler colonial logics are incapable of rendering my home community in nuanced ways, disallowing for a rich picture of place and educational “success.” I look at these findings and “reread”/“reframe” (Smith 1999) my preliminary findings in ways that speak to the complex ways our home community enacted “educational sustenance”, a concept I identify that more appropriately captures how our home communities enabled us. I also look for the moments where I can enact a more ethical stance in relationship to the research process and to my community that allows for the refusal of the academic gaze, in order to ground my research in an ethics of solidarity.

Author

• Dolores Calderon, University of Utah