Implicated in All of It: Positionality and Epistemology in Educational Research

• In Event: 14.044 - Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: 14.044-22 - Epistemological Frontiers: Disrupting Curriculum Theory

Abstract

What kind of research do you want to do? is often asked in a graduate student’s life. I argue that we have to reframe the question. Which communities will you do research with and how and why? is a more appropriate way to interrogate our current positionality in the exploitative and objectifying history of colonizing research. As long as we’re participating in all this we must resist supremacy and dismantle colonizing institutions and ideologies. Our research should humanize our participants, our communities, and ourselves. Our work must not be neutral or claim to be neutral. Our work takes sides, and we must choose to amplify voices and stories of “survivance” from non-dominant communities (Tuck, 2009, p. 422).

Author

• Adam Musser, University of California - Davis