Challenging Dominant Paradigms: Culturally Relevant Research Methods

• In Event: Reorienting Method: Counter-Story, Embodiment, and Refusal as Currency in Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Historically, European and Global North perspectives have dominated dance, education, and human research while ignoring, erasing, oppressing, and exoticizing the Afro-Indigenous-Latinx dancing body. Drawing from my positionality as a “half” Puertorriqueña, this paper challenges epistemological hierarchies by proposing culturally relevant research methodologies grounded in Afro-Indigenous-Latinx experiences. Developed through my dissertation, these methods respond to a calling for ethical research practices rooted in community customs.
The study employed an ethnographic approach that included plática to gather data while building rapport, embodied testimonio by interweaving Latina/Chicana feminism theories in the flesh with testimonio, and magical realism to contest Eurocentric ontologies and foreground Afro-Indigenous-Latinx perspectives. These innovative methods center Afro-Indigenous-Latinx epistemologies while transgressing the historical dominance of Eurocentric paradigms.

Author

• Michelle Parkins, University of Wisconsin - Madison