Breaking the Fourth Wall of Colonial Knowledge Production: How Researched Youth Reorganize Meaning

• In Event: The Necessity of Seeing Anew: Dreaming Up New Possibilities for Research on Nondominant Communities

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how non-dominant communities break from the researcher’s script to engage in their own knowledge production. We aim to challenge the researcher’s script while attending to how our own work risks reinforcing it. We focus on instances in our video data where youth break the fourth wall and highlight how they choose what knowledge to share by repurposing the researcher’s camera.

Framework: In film, breaking the fourth wall refers to instances when convention is broken and the characters directly address the camera (Auter & Davis, 1991). Here, we explore the fourth wall in research contexts using theories of settler colonialism and colonial modernity. Coloniality sustains racial hierarchies through a matrix of power (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2009) that includes the “control of knowledge and subjectivity through education and colonizing existing knowledges” (p. 135). The settler dictates what is knowledge, centering the goals of the modern colonial state. The academy houses this knowledge and is sanctioned as the arbiter of knowledge production and dissemination. When the academic conducts research, then, they represent the colonial state (Tuck & Yang, 2014). They enter the homes of the researched with an agenda, extending colonial knowledge production into the home; this becomes part of the process of knowledge (and thereby colonial) reproduction.

In this light, (1) What does it mean for the researched to break the fourth wall and diverge from the researcher’s script? What meaning do they choose to share, and thus produce themselves? (2) Methodologically, as researchers, how do we reproduce this lens rather than a colonial lens?

Methods: The analysis reported here developed within a larger multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995; Vossoughi & Author, 2015) that followed youth across everyday activities in their after-school program, homes, and community. A total of 14 families participated (12 Latino, 2 White); each self-identified as working class. Here, we focus on two families (1 Latino, 1 White).

Data: We draw from qualitative data sources: 175+ hours of video-recorded observations, surveys, interviews, and family-documented photos/videos. Units of analysis included family home practices (Level 1) and instances of ingenuity (Level II). Subcodes (Level III) were developed inductively.

Findings: Our analysis suggests that youth changed the script by taking control of the video camera for their own interests and learning. It also highlights a distinction between instances when they took the camera with researcher permission versus on their own accord. Our findings suggest that youth purposely broke from the researchers’ script to organize meaning for their own goals.

Significance: The moments when the researched breaks the researcher’s script are moments of significance. By breaking the fourth wall, the youth determine which pieces of their lives to share with the academy, thus making moves to take command of the knowledge that is produced about them. What can we learn from these moments that might otherwise be dismissed as moments of exception rather than exceptionality? Applying theories of settler colonial knowledge production, what would it look like for us, methodologically, not to reproduce that lens?

Authors

• Karen Villegas, University of California - Berkeley

• Bryce Larkin Chessell Becker, University of California - Berkeley

• Kris Gutierrez, University of California - Berkeley