Toward Justice-Oriented Encounters With Human/More-Than-Human Relationalities in Critical Place Inquiry

• In Event: 34.046 - Inhabiting the Tensions and Potentials of Decentering the Human in Anticolonial Educational Research

Abstract

This paper discusses the interferences, convergences, divergences and unexpected lines of flight that emerged from methodological attunements to critical place inquiry in a qualitative research methods class. The purpose of this paper is to inquire into possibilities for attending to both the uneven political geographies and the vibrant more-than-human materialities of the places and spaces of qualitative educational research. We situate this paper within calls to center place as much more than a backdrop to research events. In particular, we take inspiration from work in Black geographies, Indigenous studies and Chicana feminisms that has brought critical perspectives to the universalisms, absences, presences and flattened ontologies of place in some social science research. For example, Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie’s (2015) work has provided a salient critique of the ways in which at times an emphasis on the ontological and more-than-human materiality of social life can result in a flattening of “the agency of people and politics” in particular places and their attendant social contexts (p. 633). This work has foregrounded the ways in which land is always-already vibrant, storied, thought-full and relational despite the violent onto-epistemological erasures enacted by settler colonial, anti-black and neoliberal capitalist assemblages. In addition, Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) seminal borderlands work makes visible both the embodied and geographically situated ways in which marginalized Chicana subjectivities come to matter within pastpresent histories of colonial dispossession. Black geographies scholars have also provided invaluable insights into the specific ways in which both anti-blackness and Black resistance to dispossession are inherently emplaced (McKittrick, 2011).

In response to this compelling work, we collectively engage with the potentials and tensions that emerged from foregrounding critical place inquiry and materiality in a research methods course that was focused on thinking with data alongside theoretical concepts (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). We consider the following questions: How might qualitative research orientations be put to work in justice-oriented ways that make visible and critically respond to situated uneven human and more-than-human geographies? What are some pedagogical strategies that make such orientations possible? What tensions and productive interferences emerge from thinking with theory alongside an intentional focus on critical place inquiry?

In considering the methodological potentials of putting critical place inquiry to work in research, in this course students were invited to select a theoretical concept from the readings that they wanted to put to work alongside a place attuned research study. The concepts that emerged as productive for the students to think with alongside data and critical place inquiry, included refusal (Simpson, 2007; Tuck & Yang, 2014); deconstruction (Derrida, 1976), power/knowledge (Foucault, 1980), Indigenous futurity (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2014), and Black feminist fugitivity (Campt, 2017; Gumbs, 2016). The significance of this work is discussed in relation to why critical place inquiry matters for post-qualitative education research that is oriented towards anti-oppressive futures.

Authors

• Fikile Nxumalo, The University of Texas at Austin

• Fatima del Rocio Valdivia, The University of Texas at Austin

• Denise Fernandez, The University of Texas at Austin

• Pablo Montes, The University of Texas at Austin

• Lakeya Omogun, The University of Texas at Austin

• Aaron Pyle, The University of Texas at Austin

• Jessica Linet Sanchez Flores, The University of Texas at Austin