Revolutionary Love/Revolutionaries Love: Methodology as Epistemological Liberation and Praxis

• In Event: Inspired by Love: Revolutionary Love-Based Ontoepistemic and Ethical Possibilities for Transformative Methodology

Abstract

Purpose
Revolutionary love is a conscience effort to create tension, strife, and dissension for the purpose of self and community liberation. I seek to highlight the significance of revolutionary love in dismantling commonly held hegemonic beliefs and practices in educational research. I use a Critical Race Theory and Womanist/Black feminism lens to guide the key questions of this paper: How has education become an institution of violence and liberation? What is the role of revolutionaries/revolutionary love in challenging Eurocentric Western ideologies and research paradigms? How can areas of emotionality, such as love, disdain, and frustration create research relationships, contexts, and pedagogies of liberation and transformation?

Perspectives
Critical dialogue about the importance of dismantling structures of power and oppression with a historical context (Zamudio, Russell, Bridgeman, 2011), intersectionality and race-based perspective (Ladson-Billings & Tate, W., 1995; Crenshaw, 1991;), and critical consciousness (Hill-Collins, 2003) will guide the conceptualization of revolutionary love in this Womanist inquiry and praxis.

I posit that our place in the world shapes how we consume, produce, and disseminate knowledge. Both public schools--especially those in high density communities of color (Lipman, 2013) and academia (Darder, 2012) are confronted by neoliberalism. Consequently, research is also impacted by concerns of “rigor”, profitability, and quantification. Such institutional concerns have historically marginalized the ontoepistemological understandings of women and scholars of color.

Un/consciously we rely heavily on formal whiteness-centered academic training in research methods even when we are trying to play with data or be in conscience engagement in interpreting educational data (Author 2015; Author, 2016). We also consciously and subconsciously rely on cultural intuitions, childhood, and prior adult socialization within our primary culture(s) for our interpretations. Such programming puts us in tension with how we imagine our liberation while challenging the pervasiveness of Western research paradigms. To that end, we shuttle between needing compassionate approaches, revolutionary love paradigms that reject Western understanding of love, and a way to resist oppressive methods of inquiry.

Methods
I use three of my previously conducted qualitative studies to provide examples of the various ways revolutionary love informs research with Black girls and women. The three studies are titled as:
1. My Sisters Keepers: Black College-aged Women
2. Disciplined Bodies: Girls of Color and Harsh Discipline in Schools
3. Youth Participatory Action Research: Serving Youth in Care
Using a multilayered ethnographic text, I make continual methodological choices to provide a mosaic of Black women’s voice and experiences. I attempt to articulate my internal struggle with research on young people and question if I could ever really research with people within Western academia.

Significance
Education research can be used to expose, alleviate, and mitigate societal oppression and education marginalization. Using the research examples provided, I also put forth the argument that education research has the possibility to become more humanizing for the researcher and researched. In this dialogue, I grapple with how to shift between the often conflicting needs of educational institutions and the loving revolutionary act of using education research to unveil and mitigate hegemony.

Author

• Venus E. Evans-Winters, Illinois State University