The Undefining Margin: Repairing, Remedying, Renewing Healing-Centered Qualitative Inquiry

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

Abstract

Purpose
Honoring the division call, I explore the anatomy of holistic qualitative inquiry to create frameworks for culturally and spiritually responsive remedies centering on long-held communal knowledge and practices. By tracing historical harms and freedom-driven moves, I propose the heuristic of creating frameworks based on discerning internal resource allocation. This discernment helps decide how much of one’s internal resources should be invested in oppositional activities versus building possibilities. These frameworks rest on the idea that the margins define the center and aim to disrupt such relationalities. By definition, a center cannot exist without a periphery. Thus, when those located forcefully at the margins stop defining the center, it automatically becomes unsettled. This shift can lead to transformative changes in how we approach qualitative inquiry.

Perspectives
Utilizing transnational, de/colonizing (Author, 2019), and spirit-integrated (Anzaldúa, 2015; Palmer, 2014) perspectives, I utilize a Global South metaphor of Parikrama (an act of circling a sacred center) to demonstrate how that which is tyrannically centered, and fueled by oppositional energies, resources of the oppressed, and their resistance maintain its dominance. Leveraging transnational and de/colonizing perspectives, I access the global history of oppression, freedom, resistance, repair, and remedy, offering lessons for collective strategizing in the Global North. Focusing on communal healing as a priority, I employ post-oppositional thinking (Keating, 2013) to create an expansive terrain of possibility that allows for culturally and spiritually aligned holistic frameworks of qualitative inquiry. Integrating spirit in this work is essential because spirit-killing is a primary agenda of intersected systems of oppression (Anzadúa, 2015). Any repair, remedy, and neutralization of an oppressive agenda must include various forms of spiritual and material activism.

Methods
Since this paper focuses on theoretical and methodological frameworks to create culturally and spiritually contextualized healing-centered qualitative inquiry, no direct empirical work is presented. Instead, by using historical evidence of those who built repair- and remedy-centered strategies and frameworks, I will discuss the process of creating our own contextualized holistic and healing-centered frameworks of inquiry that center, repair, and remedy. This work requires awareness of the energetic and resource-draining aspects of our actions when we privilege and define our existence primarily in relation to dominant, oppressive, interconnected systems of oppression. Thus, I explore expansive methodological possibilities by presenting evidence from various points in our global history where the oppressed neutralized the oppressor through art, creativity, humor, subversive strategies, a refusal to use their marginality to define the center, and covert organized acts.

Conclusion/Significance
This paper highlights the anatomy of repair and remedy to create holistic frameworks for qualitative inquiry, integrating global, culturally, and spiritually responsive perspectives. Focusing on community-based knowledge and practices, I align with the AERA President’s guiding questions to expand how we conceptualize, expand, and execute qualitative inquiry. This approach calls for the marginalized to unsubscribe their relationship with the center or at least become mindful of resource investment. The outcome is a transformative healing-centered inquiry that prioritizes holistic ways of knowing, focusing on renewal, repair, and remedy beyond traditional frameworks and assumptions.

Author

• Kakali Bhattacharya, University of Florida