Against Extractive Research: Collective Biography as a Method of Relation and Refusal

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 1:45 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Decolonizing Research Methodology In Education

Abstract

Mass schooling and mainstream research often extract knowledge from land, bodies, and communities. We offer collective biography as a decolonial, feminist method that resists this by engaging memory as relational, embodied, and political. Grounded in transnational feminist and post-socialist collaborations, we share memory fragments from Argentina, Latvia, and Kazakhstan to trace how dominant research erases through speed, distance, and expertise. Using diffractive analysis, we show how collective biography fosters co-presence, slowness, and ethical relations. Remembering becomes a method of critique and renewal. This is not a search for solutions, but an invitation: to listen without taking over, to write with not about, and to reimagine research as refusal, reciprocity, and collective becoming.

Authors

• Dilraba Anayatova, Arizona State University

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University

• Victoria Desimoni, Arizona State University