You Can't Handle the (Post-)Truth! Understanding Mothering/Daughtering Through De/Colonial and Transnational Feminist Moves

• In Event: 25.085 - Sheraton Roundtable One - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 25.085-4 - Mothering and Daughtering as Methodological Framing: Black and Transnational Feminist Interrogations of Curricular Inquiry

Abstract

Purpose
A de/colonial and transnational feminist reading of the 2019 AERA call renews my commitment to blur borders and binaries (e.g. facts and emotion, inside and outside academia, empirical and non-empirical). These binaries have never served minoritized communities well; their truths have never been centered, and discourses of evidence have been used to delegitimize and dehumanize the ways in which many minoritized scholars know, live, negotiate, and exist in this world. Thus, in this paper, I blur boundaries and disrupt how we can understand, interrogate, and expand truth-making and evidence by returning to a primary relationship – mother/daughter – and trace its influence on survivance, curriculum building, ethicality, communal and democratic practices, and lived experiences of dislocation, displacement, and dis/trust.

Perspectives
Grounded in de/coloniality and transnational feminism, I conceptualize my experiences of mothering and daughtering within and outside academia. How we learn and enact survivance is ancestral, cultural, historical, and sociopolitical. Thus, I frame mothering and daughtering as reciprocal and non-reciprocal biological, social, and academic relationships. Since such relationships are contextual, I explore how formal and hidden curriculum embedded in colonial education system shape these relationships and are shaped by them. De/coloniality allows me to explore the ways in which colonialism invades education, and constructs liminal spaces where we move between resistance, accommodation, and imagination of freedom (Asher, 2009; Rhee & Subreenduth, 2006). Identified as a transnational, Brown academic, my body and being are always already sites of boundary crossing, blurring (Falcón, 2016; Rhee, 2006), and being stuck. Tracing my entangled, embodied experiences and trajectories of mothering and daughtering within and outside academia, I challenge the restrictive boundaries of educational research as they relate to truth, evidence, emotions, beliefs, empiricism, knowledge-making, and being.

Methods
Using de/colonial autoethnography (Chawla & Rodriguez, 2011), I author my experiences of biological daughtering in a turbulent home and its aftermath via escaping to a foreign land. I reflect on the presence/absence of biological mothering. I analyze how mothering/daughtering influences my actions as a mothering figure in academic spaces in relation to curriculum building, space-making, and mentoring. Through methodological framing of mothering/daughtering, I explore how I enact survivance against inequities and work with students who experience daily violence of academic curriculum and practices. These practices enact and normalize epistemicide, erase/denigrate cultural heritage, and reinforce deficit narratives. I argue that our academic and the relationalities in which we engage have direct influence on the ontoepistemic orientations we privilege/silence, ethical benchmarks we set for ourselves, and conditions of dis/trust we cultivate.

Significance
The notion of (post)truth bypasses the absence of any era of truth for minoritized people. Conscientious methodology, as noted in AERA’s 2019 call, does not recognize what has been erased, forgotten, or silenced in documenting evidence-based narratives. Educational research is not free of its oppressive structures and its discourses have long history of oppressing minoritized scholars. Using mothering/daughtering as a methodological move, this paper centers culturally situated ontoepistemic orientations that challenge and expand how we engage with truth, lived experiences, and evidence in educational research and curriculum building.

Author

• Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University