Decolonizing Citational Practices Since the Ontological Turn: Honoring Indigenous Ontologies as Our Philosophical Roots

• In Event: Posthumanism, Postmodernism, and Philosophy

Abstract

New materialism and posthumanism has gained prominence in in qualitative educational research due to its novel approach to studying the agency of “things” like classroom computers (Bigum, 1997), reading chairs (Boldt, 2020), and Legos (Boldt & Leander, 2017) and the socio-material arrangements that objects create with humans. This scholarship has been popularized by white, Western scholars like Bruno Latour (2005), Karen Barad (2007), and Jane Bennett (2010) while overlooking generations of Indigenous philosophers who pre-dated the ontological turn. This project takes up the calls to remedy citational practices by offering a “cite this, not that cheat sheet” (Todd, 2016) by translating landmark pieces from Indigenous scholars to serve as an entry point for those invested in decolonizing new ontological thought.

Authors

• William J. Fassbender, Montana State University

• Robert Leo Shane, Montana State University