Healing Methodological Wounds: A Critical Race Feminista Quantitative Praxis

• In Event: Innovating Educational Research Methods to Disrupt Oppressive Systems and Promote Healing

Abstract

In the field of education, statistical evidence often serves to describe the educational experiences of marginalized populations, yet frequently overlooks critical examinations of how race, racism, and white supremacy shape these narratives (Garcia & Mayorga, 2018). Central to this discourse are issues of epistemic violence, power dynamics, and the perpetuation of inequities among marginalized communities within U.S. society and beyond (Garcia et al., 2018). Amid the ongoing societal upheaval, there is a pressing need to interrogate how researchers engage with their own positionalities as integral methodological processes.

This paper explores the positionality of this author, a QuantCrit (Gillborn et al., 2018; Garcia et al., 2018) and Chicana/Latina feminista scholar, as she navigates and interprets the emerging field of Quantitative Ethnography. Employing an epistolary approach (Escobedo & Camargo Gonzalez, 2022), the research is grounded in storytelling, resistance, and community within a framework of Critical Race Feminista Quantitative Praxis, utilizing Epistemic Network Analysis (Garcia et al., 2022). Epistemic Network Analysis, a tool employed in Quantitative Ethnography (QE) (Shaffer, 2017), facilitates the identification and quantification of qualitative data through principles of social network and discourse analysis, constructing network models that illustrate connection structures and measure association strengths among elements for direct comparison and summary statistics.

Grounded in oral and literary traditions of storytelling and letter writing, I will delve deeply into the methodological rigor of Critical Race and Women of Color Feminisms within educational research. The use of epistolary forms in data collection, analysis, and representation embodies reflexivity for scholars of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color as they affirm their intersecting identities. Within this paper, three distinct epistolary offerings are presented: (1) storying focused not solely on methods but on achieving epistemological wholeness, (2) storying as resistance akin to Angela Harris’s concept of “writing back,” which involves unraveling dominant narratives, reframing historical events, and questioning race and liberation concepts, and (3) the transformative potential of "writing back" to reshape discourses surrounding Students of Color, policy outcomes, and educational practices.

As a scholar-activist, I use these epistolary offerings to challenge the erasure of mathematical wisdom and genius within Black, Indigenous, and People of Color families and communities. They aim to empower students interested in using quantitative methods to narrate their community stories, shifting the discourse away from deficit-based and racist interpretations of our cultures that justify educational disparities and limited opportunities. By telling stories with numbers, I strive for a holistic understanding of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities' nuanced experiences towards healing. Emphasizing the lives of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color as cultural texts where stories are written and told (de la Garza, 2004), this paper attends to these wounds by posing critical questions about narrative choice and self-representation. Engaging in a Critical Race Feminista QE praxis towards restoration, I end by asking: How can methodological wounds be healed while ensuring the inclusion of stories and histories? What potential lies in visual storytelling for knowledge dissemination?

Author

• Nichole M. Garcia, Rutgers University