De/Centering De/Coloniality: A Dialectic Critique on the Ethics of Participation (Poster 6)

• In Event: Critical Participatory Inquiry in Transnational Research Contexts

Abstract

Through a critical participatory paradigm, inquirers privilege community participation to decenter their expertise and decolonize the research process. This includes challenging typical power structures, including inequities in data ownership, funding, and research duties. Yet, how do our values and ethical commitments around community participation decenter and decolonize, in theory and in actuality? Are there circumstances where our good intentions lead to further centering academic and authoritative knowledge systems, while maintaining a racialized and colonizing status quo? In this paper, I introduce the transnational context behind a CPI project in Guatemala, which includes co-researchers affiliated with universities, nonprofits, and an Indigenous Kaqchikel Maya community-based organization. After introducing the case, I briefly review discussions on decentering knowledge and decolonizing research and provide an overview of my methodology: dialectic critique as an analytic approach toward critical self-reflexivity.

To further engage in this dialectic critique, I draw on the work of Antonio Gramsci (1971), an Italian philosopher who wrote about the importance of the dialectic as an analytic methodology (Finocchiaro, 1988), as well as the concept of cultural hegemony, i.e., how the ruling class manipulates the culture of a society. In this case, the ruling class is one associated with knowledge production (academia), supporting a culture that Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva (2008) argue is derived from a white logic and white methods defined by an objectivity that legitimizes one’s beliefs in the views of elite white men, and neutrality (read: detachment from the researched). An important distinction in Gramsci’s (1971) conceptualization of cultural hegemony is not that it is forced upon the masses, but that it is passively promoted in our everyday institutions (e.g., school, work) in ways that individuals become passively assimilated into it. As an example of everyday passive assimilation, through our educational systems, many of us learn to privilege scholarly thought produced by academics, seeing this knowledge as authoritative.

This dialectic critique is not a wholesale criticism against our participatory processes. Rather, it is done to question how co-researchers’ interdependencies and relationalities—requisite parts within the CPI whole—offer a positive way to conceptually self-reflect on our values while examining the potential negative effects for the communities we work alongside and for ourselves, as CPI practitioners. Drawing on the concept of de/centering one’s expertise through transnational CPI, I demonstrate how a dialectic critique can be used to critically question how we communicate about community participation, further reflecting on our actions as human beings working within and across borders, sovereignties, and identities. Furthermore, by dialectically critiquing participation through analyses of the margin | center, as well as fear | confidence, I illustrate how our attempts to decenter expertise and decolonize research processes may correspond with or contradict our axiological and onto-epistemological commitments toward co-constructing knowledge and pursuing transformative change against oppressive realities. Through this dialectic, I argue it is not sufficient to speak of participation as an absolute good; rather, we are required to nuance the contradictions and tensions within our transnational projects if we are to move toward interdependence and solidarity as co-researchers.

Author

• Giovanni P. Dazzo, University of Georgia