Refusing the Mandates of the Academy: Toward Methodological Arts of the Contact Zone

• In Event: 15.061 - MTCC Roundtable Session Two
  In Roundtable Session: 15.061-7 - Critical Approaches to Research

Abstract

This conceptual paper suggests conceiving of anticolonial/decolonizing, humanizing, and critical-transformative research within autonomous frameworks: as methodological arts of the contact zone. The lineage of these methodological arts can be traced to Pratt’s (1991) arts of the contact zone. I outline this lineage and its connections to educational research in settler colonial contexts (e.g. U.S. and Canada), provide an outline of some such methodological arts, and offer an example of a methodological framework for research that emerges from these arts. This methodological framework is called interlapping participatory research projects and grew out of the necessities of multiple participatory projects enacted by youth, teachers, and academic researchers occurring within schooling spaces, beyond schools, and connected to / autonomous from the academy.

Author

• Jenna Cushing-Leubner, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater