Critical Participatory Inquiry: Fostering Imagination, Commitment, and Resistance Toward Radical Validity

• In Event: Explicitly Antiracist Research: Exploring Possibility and Necessity

Abstract

Critical participatory inquiry (CPI) is a process of upending traditional - often White, colonial, and patriarchal - processes of knowledge production. CPI is not a method, nor is it a methodology: It is an epistemological proposition. A total reorientation. A complete revisioning of social science inquiry as we know it. In this paper, we present CPI as an opportunity to think broadly about research methodology across disciplines, fields, and geographies, to hopefully transcend the supposed and entrenched qualitative/quantitative divide, and to consider social science research methodology from the perspective of what we all share: our epistemologies, our values, and our ethics.
We seek to move away from essentialized notions of validity and to transcend the various languages that have been built up to suggest a total separation between methodological approaches. In critical forms of inquiry, validity is frequently associated with the notion of praxis, or the interaction between theory and action, and how each continuously informs and refines the other (Kincheloe et al., 2017). We often ask ourselves: When we conduct research with those who we define as oppressed / marginalized / colonized, have we considered their views of validity and ethics; or are we simply stuck in our elite forms of educational socialization?
In this paper, we offer a radical reconceptualization of validity that exposes, encompasses, and builds on the values, ethics, and epistemological commitments we share (Guishard et al., 2018; Zhao et al., 2021). We draw inspiration from critical philosophers – including Gramsci (1978), Freire (1970), Fanon (1963), and more recently, de Sousa Santos (2008), Tuhiwai Smith (2012), and Collins (2010) – who question the structure and root of our knowledge systems and argue that the radical nature of valid and ethical inquiry is dependent on the viewpoints of the communities with whom we work.
We examine this concept of validity by centering it in epistemological imagination, commitment, and resistance and provide examples from each of our ongoing CPI projects in the United States, Turkey, and Guatemala to illustrate how these three practices anchor CPI as anti-racist, counter-hegemonic, and humanistic. This perspective on validity is more than an onto-epistemological lens; it is a commitment grounded in respect for the knowledge systems of those we work alongside. It is resistance to the self-perpetuating cycle that disposes of and dispossesses local knowledge, replacing it with an intellectual elitism that becomes authoritative and valid (Hall & Tandon, 2017); or what de Sousa Santos (2008) calls epistemicide.
We close with considerations of the tensions we have encountered in living out this praxis and a discussion with participants guided by several questions that can be used for personal reflection or dialogue with a CPI project group. Participants will gain tools to assess how their projects can be anchored in the principles of radical validity or how the project actively rejects traditional, colonial notions of whose knowledge counts. These questions are offered as opportunities to begin conversations around epistemological imagination, commitment, and resistance and to decide what is necessary and appropriate to their own contexts, positionalities, and goals.

Authors

• Giovanni P. Dazzo, University of Georgia

• Meagan Call-Cummings, Johns Hopkins University

• Melissa Hauber-Özer, University of Missouri