Doing Research in Solidarity With Diverse Communities

• In Event: Dreaming of Solidarities Through Collaborative Learning

Abstract

Academic institutions across the US are prioritizing initiatives to increase racial diversity and retain students who have been historically underrepresented in academia following the public outcry to decenter the eurocentric, white, male-dominated forms of knowledge production in education. However, many of these initiatives continue to perpetuate damage-centered research that promotes deficit views of marginalized communities or communities traditionally excluded from academia (Calderon, 2016; Tuck, 2009). There is also less discussion about how covert forms of racism, exclusion, and oppression of the “other” (non-western, non-white, non-male) persist in every aspect of the research process and exist in the classrooms.

The lack of diversity and acknowledgment of positionality within academia has led to one dominant form of knowledge production driving research activities such as funding allocated for projects, sample selection, measures, methodologies, data analysis, and dissemination of results. Against the backdrop of hyper-individualism and dehumanizing practices that still exist in research (ibid, 2009), we explore ways of doing research in solidarity with participants and communities, especially historically marginalized groups. As such, the goal of the second part of the workshop is to generate a discussion about the need for research scholars and educators to reflect on how their own positionality informs their research and how they can create opportunities to actively resist contributing to upholding the construction of “the other” within academia through creating and maintain solidarities with participants and communities.

The audience is invited to engage in discussions about how to move away from rigid, exclusive, quantitatively-focused, deficit perspective approaches and move towards building positive relationships with research participants and communities through the production of knowledge committed to their humanization (Wynter, 2002; Stetsenko, 2016). In groups, participants will be asked to brainstorm and create a cartography of ways in which they can actively resist perpetuating harmful practices and deficit views of marginalized communities in their research, teaching, and other academic activities.

Rather than focusing on the psychopathology of marginalized communities, we invite participants to examine the ways in which these communities thrive, survive, and what is our responsibility as researchers (who are we accountable to?).

Author

• Marjorine Henriquez-Castillo, Lehman College - CUNY