Seeing the Unknown, Sensing the Possible: Unhobbling & CritQuant, A Critical, Creative Literacy Design

• In Event: Knowing Otherwise: Methods, Archives and Educational Research Reimagined through Black Radical Traditions

Abstract

This paper explores the question: “How can Q-methodology informed by critical quantitative inquiry unearth patterns for innovative unlearning?” Toni Morrison’s 2004 lecture, The War on Error, parallels contemporary oppression methods with 15th-century institutionalized persecution, illuminating medieval curricula of “cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies” (Morrison, 2019, p. 29)- a “...fully fledged apparatus of persecution and an intellectual tradition that justifies killing in the name of God” (p. 28). Morrison calls for a new curriculum that rejects “faults deeply embedded in the imagination” (p. 30) by urging a non-utopian pursuit to “imagine work in a world worthy of life [that] can operate in a context increasingly dangerous…” (p. 29).

An oft muted yet organizing logic in contemporary education is the historical relevance that, “Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fisher, who are credited with establishing behavioral genetics, mathematical statistics, and modern statistical science were eugenicists (Tabron & Thomas 2023a, p. 1). The enforced silence around their statistical contributions allows continued weaponization of quantitative analysis as a key feature in the colonial project of quantifying oppression, exclusion, and erasure under the guise of objectivity. Such violence remains pervasive in education systems where Black youth learners are tracked and educatively displaced through biased data construction, dissemination, and/or censorship—data-driven methods that deceptively justify remedial curricula and exclusion from equitable access to learning experiences and opportunities.

Accordingly, this paper draws upon an exploratory and conceptual research design to bridge critical approaches to quantitative inquiry (CritQuant) and Toni Morrison’s (1992) concept of "Unhobbl[ing]” to take seriously unlearning oppressive ways of knowing through critical, creative methodologies. CritQuant as conceptualized by Lolita A. Tabron and Amanda K. Thomas center convergent historicism– “a form of restorative praxis intended to counter historical erasure and the perpetuation of racist ideologies…” (Tabron & Thomas 2023b, p. 409) “to imagine new possibilities and ways of knowing with quantitative inquiry” (p 402). Similarly, to address imaginative debt in a racialized society, Toni Morrison (1992) detailed in Playing in the Dark, “the work writers do to unhobble the imagination [...] is complicated, interesting, and definitive (Morrison, 1992, p. 13).

To contribute to the growing body of education research that reconceptualizes quantitative possibilities while disrupting eugenic functions within statistical analysis, this paper merges quantitative reasoning with cultural conceptions of the literary, specifically Morrison’s visions of imagination unhobbled, with Black feminist cultural critique and critical theories to explore unlearning within critical literacy framework that centers how Black youth see, sense, and practice critical, creative literacies.

Author

• ParKer Bryant, Syracuse University