Literacy Research in Postcolonial Spaces: A Look at Gambians' Digital Political Protest Through Decolonizing Methodologies

• In Event: 43.042 - Reexamining Teacher Efficacy and Politicized Curriculums Through Postcolonial and Decolonizing Lenses

Abstract

Objectives
As the colonized struggles with the effects of colonial violence which result in living in a zone of “psycho-existential complex” (Fanon, 2005), Ph.D. students live through socialization into the Academy that may discourage their self-actualization, based upon ontological convictions. Epistemic totality (Noroozi, 2015) encourages an exclusionary ideology (Sharpe, 2009) and condemns thinking differently and oppositionally (Fanon, 2008). This paper aims at resisting socialization into a research world where Western scholars possess exclusive rights to knowledge. The author shares her resistance to intellectual colonialism through the adoption and use of decolonizing methodologies.

Theoretical Framework
Work focused on the Gambian diaspora’s political activism through translocal digital literacies from the perspective of the colonized (Smith, 2012). An epistemic antidotal theoretical lens that combines methods such as beginnings, ruptures, and self-combusting inquiries into meanings is employed (Noroozi, 2015).

Method
Highly oratorical and rebellious methods are embraced to “reclaim, reformulate, reconstitute (participants’) cultures and languages” (Smith, 2012, p. 143) by extending the notion of “the native intellectual” (p. 73) to include participants typically labeled as illiterate, and redefining them as intellectuals who call out half-truths in the public sphere and refuse to be steered along (Said, 1996, p. 23). For example, sexagenarian grandmothers with limited school training are highlighted as influential intellectuals who lead the movement against of tyranny and lead political reform through digital literacy activism on virtual networks.

Data Sources
Following the example of decolonizing indigenous projects, methods such as testimonies, storytelling, representing, reframing, and discovering the beauty of our knowledge (Smith, 2012) are adopted and collected through sensory-oriented literary practices represented in participants’ cultural ways of making meaning of the world.

Results
The author conceptualizes decolonizing methodologies through profound critical reflexivity, by allowing herself to look closer at her literacy research practices in post-colonial spaces. Findings of how the Gambian diaspora resist through digital literacies are viewed through the community’s high level of intellectualism and capacity to transcend distance between their countries of residency by using African languages and linguistic practices. For example, a heightened sense of community and advocacy through information sharing are no longer solely credited to the accessibility to modern technology, but rather to the diaspora’s cultural and linguistic assets the diaspora’s innate ability to identify and connect with one’s village through storytelling, sampling from a rich tradition of African oral traditions.

Scholarly Significance
For the critical researcher, decolonizing methodologies constitute a powerful self-defense tool against epistemic totality. In allowing herself to write from a colonized perspective, the author regained the freedom to research as it is intended for her ontological and epistemological stance, thus creating more equitable, democratic, collaborative, and inclusive research in post-colonial spaces. The perspective shared in this paper has the potential to liberate researchers who identify as the others in their field and can create more trusting and productive researcher-participant relationships. (468 words)

Author

• Madji Fall, Rowan University