Small Acts of Sabotage: Unraveling "Expertise" to Push for Restorative Forms of Inquiry

• In Event: "Disruption, Interruption, Change...It's Not Enough. What We Need Is Sabotage": Critical Participatory Inquiry as Sabotage in/of the Academy

Abstract

Objectives and Perspectives: In this manuscript, the author challenges the notion of expertise and demonstrates how small acts of sabotage can be used to push against the machinery of method and the oppressive instruments of the academy. Examples are discussed of how the citizen-scholar can accept their educational responsibility by unraveling their expertise to create a shared space for learning and action with the communities they seek to work alongside. More specifically, the author explores how critical participatory inquiry must not only be about a commitment to praxis and social change (Erickson, 2001), but that it must also be “about the rendering visible of the excluded knowledges of our remarkable planet” (Hall & Tandon, 2017, p. 6). Through an exploration of the methods utilized and the community relationships cultivated, the author shows how traditional research can be sabotaged to co-construct a responsible inquiry process that can potentially serve a restorative function for those who have experienced human rights violations.

Materials: This project takes place within the context of a participatory inquiry project in Guatemala, located on the land of a Maya Kaqchikel community. The specific site is a community memorial, which honors the victims of the 36-year internal armed conflict. The author highlights the work done here to show how participatory approaches were utilized as sites of resistance and refusal (Tuck & Yang, 2014) to what is normalized in scholarly work. The practice of acknowledging local knowledge while questioning traditional citation practices is also considered, as a way to push against the parsimonious language that citizen-scholars are forced to use—a small act of sabotage (Barney, 2018) to the way that academese and citation habits (un)intentionally silence entire populations. In line with the conference theme, we cite the words and experiences of Maya Kaqchikel community members and nonprofit staff who have acted as co-researchers in this process.

Significance: After demonstrating these small acts of sabotage, the theoretical and practical possibilities of reframing inquiry as restorative practice are presented. In seeing doing no harm (negation) and doing good (affirmation) as two sides of the same coin, we relay the distinction between negative peace—or, an “absence of personal violence”—and, a positive peace—an “absence of structural violence” (Galtung, 1969, p. 183) in inquiry. By merging theoretical notions of conflict studies with critical theory, there comes a need to establish systems where citizen-scholars think beyond negations (Fromm, 1941) and affirm that particular forms of research are violent and extractive for those who have experienced trauma. The reformulation of methods and relationships are needed within participatory inquiry, in an effort to meet our critical and emancipatory aims (Cho & Trent, 2006; Freire, 1972; Lather, 1986). As we explore how research must be sabotaged to transform into an inquiry that serves as restorative practice, there is the possibility of understanding the potential for “transformative social and psychosocial praxis” and the responsibility to engage with a “process of change to promote social justice and inclusion” (Sonn et al., 2010, p. 298).

Author

• Giovanni P Dazzo, George Mason University