Where Research Takes Place: Investigating Culture, Labor, Borders, Solidarity, and Mapping Through Critical Place Inquiry

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Qualitative research often treats place as transparent geographic location or context; rarely asking questions ‘of’ or ‘about’ place. Through the lens of critical place inquiry, this session asks what happens when place is made central to the questions we ask in educational research. Panelists discuss research conducted in the Northern Alberta tar sands, New York’s Hudson Valley, Toronto’s “Neighbourhood Improvement Areas,” and along the Texas-Mexico border. The papers describe place-based analysis across a range of qualitative methods: reflexive and embodied approaches, document analysis, and interview and focus group strategies. Refusing colonial erasures of Indigenous relationships to land, this session builds critiques across places, fields, and sectors to demonstrate the significance of place for research in education.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 5: Place and Praxis (The Places of Curriculum)

Chair

• Michelle S. Bae-Dimitriadis, Pennsylvania State University

Papers

• Normalizing the Tar Sands: Place, Belonging, and Situated Learning - Samantha Spady, University of Toronto

• Making Urbs Nullius: Mobilizations of "the Local" in Arts-Led Urban Regeneration - Christy Guthrie, University of Toronto

• Mapping Youth Supports: A Systematic Appraisal of Services in the Mid-Hudson Valley - Deanna Del Vecchio, University of Toronto

• Solidarity Within the Margin: A Practice of Decolonization for Settlers of Color - Yi Chien Jade Ho, Simon Fraser University; Emilie-Andree Jabouin, Ryerson University; Alejandro Mayoral Baños, York University

• Border Logics: A Journey Along the Texas-Mexico Border - Nisha Toomey, University of Toronto

Discussant

• Marcia McKenzie, University of Saskatchewan