Known methods: De-ideologizing the everyday to restore, repair, and reclaim histories, identities, and memories

• In Event: Restorative Justice as Reparative Research: Conceptualizing RJ as Methodology

Abstract

In this paper, I de/center how we think of qualitative methods, not solely as researchers, but as human beings. I draw on conversations I have had with co-researchers over the past five years, centering the methods we have talked about in our inquiry collectives, illustrating how the truth and beauty of the everyday can work toward epistemic justice (de Sousa Santos, 2007; Fricker, 2007). As a knowledge democratization project (Hall & Tandon, 2017), this begins from a place I refer to as known methods – i.e., those I and community members, as co-researchers, already use in our daily lives. This idea draws on Martín-Baró’s (1994) liberation psychology, who called on researchers and practitioners to de-ideologize communities’ everyday experiences by working with them to co-construct data through routine practices. Accordingly, I demonstrate how I have worked alongside communities to learn their methods so we can ethically center their ways of knowing and being.

By applying various theories of justice – restorative justice (Zehr, 2015; Walker, 2006), reparation (Moffett, 2023; Verdeja, 2008; Walker, 2015), recognition theory (Fraser, 2005; Honneth 2005) – I demonstrate how I have challenged the notion of expertise, pushing against the machinery of method and the oppressive instruments of nonrecognition (re)produced by the academy (i.e., communities as subjects, rather than knowledge creators). More specifically, I explore how critical participatory inquiry collectives can be seen as spaces for restorative validity (Author et al., 2023; Author, 2024) – i.e., inquiry for the purpose of restoring and (re)humanizing researcher and researched alike. Through this restorative and reparative framing, I ask: (1) How can we democratically construct forms of qualitative inquiry that restore and heal, rather than reduce and steal? (2) How can inquiry push toward beneficence (doing good), not an overly evasive and legalistic attitude of non-maleficence (doing no harm)?

I then present various forms of (everyday) methods. Examples include teenagers in the United States using voice memos to address school violence and mental health, and Indigenous communities using oral tradition and sacred ceremonies to address erasure and genocide. I also compare the knowledge I came to value through my own academic socialization/indoctrination, and the familiar and familial forms of knowledge forgotten as they were (un)intentionally erased through academia.

Theoretically, in seeing doing no harm (negation) and doing good (affirmation) as two sides of the same coin, I relay the distinction between negative peace—or, an “absence of personal violence”—and, a positive peace—an “absence of structural violence” (Galtung, 1969, p. 183) in qualitative inquiry. By merging peace/conflict studies with critical qualitative theories, there comes a need to establish systems where scholar-activists think beyond negations (Fromm, 1941) and affirm if/how particular research approaches are violent and extractive. This reformulation of methods and relationships are needed to meet our critical and emancipatory aims (Cho & Trent, 2006; Freire, 1972; Lather, 1986). If we consider Bochner’s (2000) call for an imaginative social science, what methodological processes must we remedy and repair as we question “whether our work is useful, insightful, or meaningful – and to whom” (p. 267)?

Author

• Giovanni P. Dazzo, University of Georgia