Cultivating Culturally Situated Theorizing Voice in Qualitative Research: Challenging Imperialistic Curriculum and Training

• In Event: "It's Not Just Theory": Toward Theory as Method in Critical Theoretical Research Methods in 21st Century Equitable Education

Abstract

Purpose
Aligning with AERA’s call to interrogate our educational responsibility, this paper traces the ways in I, a transnational, Brown scholar, in predominantly white spaces in education, negotiated academic terrains devoid of culturally-situated ontoepistemologies within practices and philosophies of inquiry in qualitative research. I argue that to disrupt the whiteness embedded in qualitative research compels certain scholars of color to forge culturally-situated theoretical voices to cultivate a place of inquiry that is congruent with one’s own ways of being and knowing. This paper highlights how a curation of culturally-situated ontoepistemologies and theoretical tenets in qualitative inquiry can become a method of inquiry itself creating its own analytical framework.

Perspectives
Qualitative research is produced in countries that are predominantly white with the most privileged texts written by white authors. Understanding qualitative research from transnational and decolonial perspectives required tracing my roots to multiple nation states, the liminalities within which transnationals reside, and the ways in which effects of colonialism continuously pervade once-colonized nations and its diaspora.

In Global North discourses of decolonization (Anzaldúa, 2015; Patel, 2016; Smith, 1999/2012; Tuck & Yang, 2012), the focus has been on disrupting settler colonialism that erases other contemporary and historical agendas of decoloniality. Thus, I focused on integrating constructs involving colonization of land, infrastructure, border crossings, distribution of resources, infrastructure, hybrid consciousness, returning and reclaiming that which was and still is lost in colonial invasion. Such work compelled me to conceptualize de/colonizing as a slash, as an ongoing agenda that focused on shuttling between desires for a utopian freedom, without having to be in relationship with colonizing forces, and the resistance to and accommodation of colonizing and other interconnected structures of oppression (Author, 2009). The slash indicated a movement, a shuttling, a sense of un/settling and findings relations and practices within such shuttling as moments of anchoring.

I crafted an ontoepistemic framework (Author, 2020) grounded in South Asian sensibilities, which I termed as Par/Des(i) to denote the movement, tension, and fluidity between one’s relationship to the parochial home state (Des, or Desh) and the migrated land (Pardes). I created six tenets to explore the (im)possibilities of Par/Des(i) ontoepistemologies, which are: i) Re-membering desh (or des), ii) Par/Des(i): The more desirable Other?, iii) Home as permanently deferred, iv) Beloved and problematic communities, v) Commodification of multiculturalism and diversity, and vi) Communal healing as our priority.

Methods
Using the Par/Des(i) ontoepistemologies and tenets, I re-read/analyzed ethnographic data that I collected working with international graduate students that encompassed over 16 months of fieldwork, including conversational interviews, observations, photo- and object-elicitations, and document analysis. I construct non-fictional composite narratives as representation of findings.

Conclusion/Significance
Par/Des(i) framework was created out of a hunger for constructing culturally-situated theorized inquiry that represented the lived conditions of those who might find themselves as transnationals due to in/voluntary migrations. Using Par/Des(i) theory as method allow for handling messy complexities and complicities that traditional empiricist methods can neither recognize nor engage with and western philosophies of inquiry or Global North discourses of decoloniality miss.

Author

• Kakali Bhattacharya, University of Florida