Re/membering our Desires in Research: Methods for writing and researching the future

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 7:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Re/membering Beyond the Settler Colonial Academy: Methods Rooted in and for Ancestral Knowledges

Abstract

Objective

Higher education (HE) has continued to make status quo impositions of deviance, violence, and captivity on racialized/gendered populations (Patel, 2021; Wilder, 2010) – particularly Women of Color. They represent the fastest growing population held captive in this settler-state’s prisons and jails, while having low points of access to education before, during, and after incarceration (Budd, 2024; Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2022; Ernst, 2023). In refusal of contributing to “data of dispossession", (McKittrick, 2021, p. 49) this study uses Black Feminist Dialogues and Epistolary Methods (Collins, 2000; Maynard & Simpson, 2022) to explore the experiences Women of Color with Incarceration History have pursuing HE following their release, and their desires for its future.

Framing/Methodology

I operate from Decolonial Feminists framings (Arvin et al., 2013; Baldwin, 2021; Ritchie, 2017) by 1) starting from an understanding of how which HE has instituted the epistemic status quo that has rendered Women of Color as targets for violence and incarceration and 2) researching through a concern for how their experiences/desires surrounding HE can rupture that very status quo. I center desire-based frameworks (Tuck, 2009) to document the “painful elements” of Women of Color with Incarceration History’s realities, but also center their desires for a better-lived future.

I engage Women of Color with Incarceration History in one-on-one dialogues rooted in a Black Feminist ethos (Collins, 2000; Evans-Winters, 2019), and prompted letter-writing aimed at post-apocalyptic world-making (Maynard & Simpson, 2022). I theorize Epistolary Refusal (ER) and Daughter/ed Coding (DC) as analytic methodologies that refuse a colonial gaze in research and orient research toward word-making praxis rooted in ancestrally held knowledge (Evans-Winters, 2019; Simpson, 2014; Sharpe, 2016). ER urges researchers toward answering their outlined research questions through a refusal to include details that stand to be sensationalized by the nature of colonial research. DC urges for analysis and the conjuring of codes with an emphasis on our ancestral nature of the knowledge of those we research with/for.

Early Findings

Early findings indicate 1) Women of Color with Incarceration History experience HE through familial/community impacts as they understood their academic pursuits to be seeding better-lived futures for those around them, and 2) they desire a postsecondary future where institutions do not cosplay parole boards through conduct board hearings during admissions. These two findings echo Tuck’s (2009) paradox of damage in that they name aloud how impositions of damage have affected them , but also what they desire in and against that reality.

Scholarly Significance

The methods of analysis I theorize are meant to re/inscribe the sacred nature that can be conjured within research that is aimed at building future worlds rooted in the desires of those we research with/for. Ultimately, I hope for these methods to inform future research that renders the relationships evoked in research as sacred in that they are a living representation of ancestral knowledges meeting at our research sites, and can seed better-lived futures centered in the desires of those at the heart of our research.

Author

• Cydney Y. Caradonna, University of Utah