Reflexivity in History of Education Research: Complicating Oral History, Archive, and Black and Indigenous Voices

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session brings together historians of education who research African and Indigenous peoples to discuss their engagement of oral history and archival research methodologies via reflexivity. Presenters consider how reflexivity helps them examine their respective approach to data collection and analysis. Interrogating the challenges they regularly confront when the past presents difficult, unwilling, fragile, secondary, silenced, or reluctant perspectives, these historians of education work, nonetheless, to foreground silenced or under-documented pasts. This task often complicates their data collection and analysis processes. This panel, therefore, explores how historians of education reflect upon their subjectivity relative to historical methodologies. Ultimately, panelists demonstrate how historians’ reflections on their own position can challenge and enhance methodological practice and knowledge production.

Sub Unit

• Division F - History and Historiography

Chair

• Eric Sourie, University of Oklahoma

Participants

• ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, Texas A&M University

• Funke Aladejebi, University of Toronto

• Kimberly C. Ransom, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Jennifer Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Papers

• Methodological Rememory of Home: Reflexivity, Oral History of Black Education, and Black Geographies - ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, Texas A&M University

• Reconsidering Diasporic Memories: A Case for Black Women’s Orality and Knowings in Canada - Funke Aladejebi, University of Toronto

• Pieces of Me: A Reflexive Account of Researcher Insider-Outsider Status in Historical Educational Research - Kimberly C. Ransom, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• On Writing Indigenous Educational Histories: Oral Histories as Indigenous Repositories - Jennifer Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Discussant

• Michelle A. Purdy, Washington University in St. Louis