Fostering a Racially-Just Collaborative Endeavor: Building Black epiSTEMologies

• In Event: Black epiSTEMologies: A Multidimensional-Multiplicative Approach to Examining Blackness in STEM

Abstract

Within educational research, these exists a body of scholarship dedicated to exploring partnerships and collaborations within the research enterprise. Scholars discuss concepts such as research-practice partnerships (e.g., Farrell et al., 2019) outlining strategies for collaboration when power dynamics are inequitable given professional responsibilities and access to resources. Scholars also discuss community partnerships (e.g., Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), articulating strategies for engaging research with communities from marginalized groups in ways that do not reinforce oppression but rather equitably distribute resources and decision-making power. Across this body of research, scholars note the need for researchers to be intentional with how they make decisions, who is involved in the decision-making process, how they allocate resources, and how they ensure that their research intentions, actions, and outcomes do not recreate or perpetuate oppression.
Additionally, there is a body of scholarship that specifically attends to researching race in equitable and just ways (Milner, 2007; Parsons, 2008; Tillman 2002). These scholars note the role positionality plays when seeking to interrogate racism and race within research. This insight includes specific considerations for Black scholars engaging race-focused research on Black communities given systemic racism and its impact on Black scholars and their scholarship production (Parsons, 2008). It also accounts for the need for Black scholars to nuance their perspectives given variations of Black onto-epistemologies (Beoku-Betts, 1994) Among this body of research include the need for Black scholars exploring race-focused research to both recognize their positions as legitimate while also probing to ensure that they do not reinforce oppression on other Black people. This body of research also implicates the need for Black scholars to take a structural, cultural, ecological purview when engaging race-focused research as this lens presents opportunities for critical, high-quality research.
Given both considerations—attending to power and privilege within research collaborations and the distinct positioning Black scholars are encouraged to maintain when engaging race-focused research on Black populations—this presentation discusses how a group of Black scholars from various institutions came together to employ a national study on Blackness in postsecondary STEM. More specifically, this presentation discusses team formation, the purpose and structure of the project, how the team collaborates with one another, and manages conceptual differences that corresponds with individual positionalities. By providing insight into the inner workings of the team, this presentation offers a model for a racially-just research collaboration specific to exploring race-focused research in STEM education. Implications for how to design and enact a large-scale research project that spans different ideological positions and geographic locations are provided. This includes insights on how to conduct this research amid a sociopolitical context that continues to target and reject equity and justice-focused endeavors.

Authors

• Terrell R Morton, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Paula Groves Price, North Carolina A&T State University