Translation as Method: Decolonizing Inquiry in Transnational US Funded Research

• In Event: Methodological Reworlding: Working through (De)Colonial Entanglements

Abstract

Objectives
This paper critically examines how meanings, frameworks, and methodologies are unevenly negotiated when educational research, policy, and funding are translated across national, institutional, and epistemic boundaries. Using translation as a metaphor, I trace how U.S.-based educational grants, structured through neoliberal and neocolonial policy logics, shape and are affected by research priorities and relationships both abroad and at home. These grants universalize ideas like “democracy,” “gender equity,” “leadership,” and “social justice,” which are then operationalized in vastly different cultural and political contexts. This paper explores what happens when these frameworks are applied in post-apartheid South Africa, post-socialist Eastern Europe, or socialist Vietnam. What knowledge becomes untranslatable? How are methodological expectations contested, adapted, or resisted by local educators and collaborators? I argue that decolonizing inquiry, while constrained by funding structures, can foreground these disjunctures and use them as methodological sites of rupture and reflection.
Theoretical Framework
Grounded in decolonial theory (Smith, 1999, 2005; Santos, 2014), this paper approaches research as a political act shaped by geopolitics, institutional agendas, and personal/collective histories. I build on critiques of global education reform (Rizvi, 2009; Tikly, 1999) and the idea that translation both communicates and distorts context-specific epistemologies (Spivak, 1992; Rhee, 2021). My analytic is informed by over two decades of praxis: from anti-apartheid student activist in South Africa to navigating U.S. academia as an immigrant researcher and administrator of color. I have led and collaborated on grant-funded projects across South Africa, Nigeria, Senegal, Uruguay, Peru, India, Vietnam, Wales, Poland, and the Czech Republic—focusing on civic education, gender equity, and leadership development. These experiences ground my critique of how U.S. centric epistemology is reinterpreted, resisted, or reshaped locally and through transnational relationships.
Methods and Data
Using decolonial-critical discourse analysis (Maniglio & da Silva, 2021), I examine over 20 years of project materials including grant proposals, logic models, evaluator reports, fieldnotes, educator reflections, workshop transcripts, and government-NGO correspondence. My shifting positionalities as PI, evaluator, curriculum designer, field researcher, and academic leader enable a reflexive reading of methodological slippages.
Results
Findings show that U.S. grants often circulate narrow visions of democracy, citizenship, and justice, frequently tied to the depoliticized multiculturalism of U.S. empire and market individualism. Some local collaborators experience these frameworks as extractive or irrelevant. Yet within day-to-day practice such as co-designed curricula, educator exchanges, informal mentoring, partial and plural translations emerge. These may be messy or contradictory but open space for reimagining and performing research outside dominant logics (Swadener & Mutua,2008). Emergent, collaborative methodologies (see brown, 2017) grounded in a decolonial ethic can hold contradiction without forcing resolution.
Significance
This paper offers a longitudinal, praxis-based analysis of transnational research. It argues that decolonial inquiry must confront the structural complicities of U.S. frameworks while working relationally and reflexively across difference. Attending to translation as a methodological metaphor/concern enables more contextually attuned and ethically grounded knowledge production.

Author

• Sharon S. Subreenduth, Georgia Southern University