Reflections on Borders, Binaries, and Democratizing Evidence in Educational Research Today

• In Event: 67.025 - Contested Liminalities, Erasures, Invisibility, and Hypervisibility: Global South Perspectives on De/Colonizing Social Context of Education

Abstract

Purpose
Polarizing, splintering exchanges are occurring in the larger context of the U.S. and beyond, fueled by push from powerful elected leaders to reinforce borders and binaries related to immigration, globalization, race, and gender. Such issues, along with daily occurrences of silencing, segregation, and reinforcing hierarchies in educational and social contexts, compel me to ask:
• What hegemonic devices are operating to reify binaries in present-day multicultural, global context?
• How might educational researchers imagine and work towards new solidarities and integration?
• Concretely – what possibilities for transformative work, contributing to a culture of democratizing evidence are within my/one’s reach?
In this paper, I explore the possibilities of responses for these questions from the perspective of a Brown, South Asian academic in the U.S.

Perspectives
I “became” “Brown,” a “Person of Color,” only after coming to U.S. from India, three decades ago. As a postcolonial, feminist, anti-oppressionist scholar, engaging with Fanon’s (1952/1986) discussion of “the fact of blackness,” which illuminates how the white man’s gaze rendered the Black man into an object, has informed my thoughts on multicultural education (Author, 2***).

Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) urged us to cultivate a mestiza consciousness, to be free to be on “both shores at once” (p. 78), rather than being split and contained by binaries (here/there, female/male, of color/white). Today, debates/battles continue to rage in academic and social spheres around national identity, postcolonialism and decolonization; race and culture; feminism and gender, etc. Witness, for instance, the exchanges following Third World Quarterly’s (TWQ) publication of an article titled “The case for colonialism” (Denskus, 2017). After TWQ’s retraction, the National Association of Scholars re-published it “in support of academic freedom” (NAS, 2018). An op-ed (Biggar, 2017) in the U.K. supporting this work unleashed another furor. Similarly, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy is contending with controversy after publishing an article linking “transracial” and “transgender” identities and representations (Zamudio-Suaréz, 2017).

Methods
“Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 87).

Recent work in the public sphere emphasizes civic revival and integration (Brooks, 2018), emotional health and meditation (Murthy, 2017), and social change. Thus, meditating on and tracing autoethnographic experiences from three decades, while juxtaposing them within discourses of postcolonialism, gender, and decoloniality from Global South perspectives, I analyze, interrogate, and renew my commitment to working through borders and binaries. I highlight the difficult work of engaging specificities of race, gender, nation, class, culture and, simultaneously, fostering a culture that allows us to realize our shared human future – in every classroom, through every piece of writing, every day.

Conclusion/Significance
As exchanges in social and academic spheres occur with bewildering rapidity in today’s hyper-digitized context, evoking Friere’s (1982) concept of internalized oppression and hooks’ (1994) assertion of education as a practice of freedom, it becomes critical to examine the issues/questions, theories, and approaches central to decoloniality and equity driven intersected agendas in education, and recursively consider the implications on race, class, gender, nation, religion, and more within our schooling.

Author

• Nina Asher, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities