F**K Promises: Activist Scholarship and Maroon Sites for Demonstrative Decolonial Research Ethics

• In Event: 66.016 - Resisting Regressive Notions of Opportunity: Participatory Scholarship in Action

Abstract

In an interview entitled: The Pain of Being Black, Bonnie Angelo and Toni Morrison discuss the relationship between “the racial climate in America”, our education system, education leadership, and Black on Black violence in schools (Angelo & Morrison, 1994 p. 258). Dr. Morrison’s oft cited response was, “Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence…None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city” (p. 258). This paper will respond to and repudiate the AERA theme knowledge to action, achieving the promise of equal education as a manifestation of epistemological violence (Teo, 2008; Vandana, 1988). To be clear, this paper’s author takes issue with the framing of equality (and not equity) in education as a promise without acknowledgement that this assurance was never intended to be fulfilled for nonwhite, poor and working class, non-binary, trans*, LGBTQIA, dis/abled, neuro-atypical people(s). Promises are extended as recompense, to temporarily assuage, and/or subdue the experience of injustice/wrongdoing. Promises set intentions that largely remain speculative; they are not demonstrable. Research ethics education and training offer similar promises and commit similar epistemic violence by proffering protections that do more to protect institutions from liability than serve as meaningful touchstones to assist with conducting critical, humanizing, social justice research (Tuck & Guishard, 2013; Tuck & Yang, 2014). This paper will juxtapose participatory action researchers’ reflections on their ethical praxis, from three testimonios, with the work of a community research review board. These differently positioned maroon sites (Harney & Moten, 2013; Price, 1996) disrupt circuits of Black dehumanization, the subtle and overt ways narrow unidimensional conceptions of Black peoples’ realities are used as justifications for hyper-surveillance, over-policing, and hyper suspension, among other forms of unequal treatment (Moore, Robinson, & Adedoyin, 2016; Tolliver, Hadden, Snowden, & Brown-Manning, 2016), and can teach us much about demonstrable research ethics.

Author

• Monique Antoinette Guishard, Bronx Community College - CUNY