Fugitive Methodologies: Small Stories and Community Spaces

• In Event: Seeking Routes to Freedom: Fugitive Methodologies for Rethinking Community Research, Literacies, and Engagement

Abstract

Researchers concerned with methodological forms of freedom find company among the educational researchers of color (Dillard, 2006; Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014; Paris & Winn, 2014; Patel, 2015; San Pedro & Kinloch, 2017; Smith, 2012; Tuck & Yang, 2014) who have discussed issues of reciprocity, relationship building, and responsible interactions with research participants; strategies for collaborative knowledge production and the collective ownership of knowledge; and humanizing ways to engage in projects of inquiry where both researchers and research participants are invested and essential. As we move away from research processes that marginalize, silence, and disempower communities of color, we need more examples of how to rethink community research, literacies, and engagement with methodologies that are decolonizing, humanizing, and fugitive.
The qualitative ethnographic study that undergirds this paper focuses on the stories and pedagogical practices of educators who work with immigrant and refugee youth in community-based educational settings. The observations and interviews for this study occurred in homes, offices, churches, cafés, and classrooms, yet there is a mostly untold story about how the community spaces we frequented during the study shaped the study itself. Research participants and I made intentional decisions about the use of community spaces, thereby creating a shared story about what it means to engage in community-based research. I will draw from the data corpus to describe these experiences and discuss 1) how research methodologies can support and reflect community values and 2) the importance of how and where educational researchers engage in community research.
Using small stories research (Georgakopoulou, 2006, 2007) as a theoretical framework, the concept of dialogic engagement in humanizing research (Kinloch and San Pedro, 2014), and the work of the scholars referenced above, this paper will allow me to discuss what it means to engage in community research using fugitive methodologies. I will identify how a small story about where to engage in community research relates to a larger discussion about fugitivity, humanizing and decolonizing methodologies, and the collaborative production of knowledge within and about communities of color.

Author

• Brooke Harris Garad, Indiana University - Bloomington