Disrupting Foundational Truths: Student Organizing as Chosen Space

• In Event: Pursuing Truths and Enacting Change: Educational Research in Chosen Spaces

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
The paper explores taken-for-granted, persistent “truths” that are challenged and refused through organizing. Persistent “truths” are orders of knowledge that structure and arrange our worlds, like land constructed as commodity and naturalized constructions of race. These “truths” are cemented into facts and reproduced by universities. The author examines how student organizers are radicalized through educational resistance and confront persistent “truths” as constructions. Chosen spaces of learning, designed within and beyond universities, uncover where these constructions come from and how we might break free from them.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The paper draws on the theoretical contributions of Black studies - particularly Wynter’s (2003) theorization of orders of knowledge onset by conquest and colonialism - Indigenous theories of land as a living ancestor (Kimmerer, 2013; Simpson, 2017), and critical university studies (Harney and Moten, 2013).

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
The study followed Brinkmann and Kvale’s (2015) approach to semi-structured life world interviews, which combine a phenomenological and hermeneutical approach to research interviews that are neither overly structured nor entirely unstructured. The co-author conducted interviews and focus groups with Black student organizers at post-secondary institutions in Canada and the United States.

Photo elicitation refers to a research technique that uses photographs in interviews to facilitate dialogue (Harper, 2002; Tinkler, 2013). Participants were instructed to bring a printed or digital photograph with them to the interview. The prompt invited participants to choose an image that tells a story about their relationship to a place or a land. The image was used to lead into conversations about how their understandings of land shifted or expanded through organizing and how this shapes their theories of change.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
The paper draws on data from interviews and focus groups with Black student organizers, and photos shared by participants.

Results substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
The author finds that critical analyses of existing institutions emerge from chosen spaces. These critical analyses are developed in response to the shortcomings of the university, and lead to imagining ways of being and relating. More specifically, the author proposes different conceptualizations of land are learned in chosen spaces. This de-centers the institution as the arbiter of change, and considers what becomes possible through land-centered Black student organizing.

Scientific or scholarly significance
The paper invites the field of education to pursue research that deeply examines the epistemological shifts needed to reframe property as land and to undo the “unbearable wrongness of being” that define Black and Indigenous peoples (Wynter, 2006). Paying attention to theorists calling for a complete break from prevailing orders of knowledge rooted in colonialism (Alagraa, 2018; McKittrick, 2015; Wynter, 2003), educational research in collaboration with chosen spaces can disrupt persistent “truths” that will otherwise continue to reproduce social hierarchies that place Black and Indigenous people at the lowest rungs.

Author

• Sefanit Habtom, University of Washington
  Presenting Author