Reimagining Backwards and Reflecting Forward: How Black and Indigenous Practices Expand Researchers’ Dialogic Reflexivity

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Transforming Systems: Reclaiming Knowledge and Practice for Collective Well-Being

Abstract

Engagement in Dialogic Reflexivity usually blends the researchers’ social and physical locations with Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981). Researchers are distantly encouraged to examine specific social locations to understand how identities and experiences can situate themselves amongst the data and in conversation with others. Incorporating Black and Indigenous practices invites researchers to critically examine their locations to indigenous “wholistic” worldviews of knowing (Pidgeon, 2016). Moreover, researchers are encouraged to comprehend “African-derived temporal frameworks of local, communal, and cultural frames of time and space. (Phillips, 2025). This paper explores theoretical wonderings on how researchers can engage in dialogic processes as informed by Black and Indigenous epistemologies to interpret data, construct meaning, and (re)shape identity as part of the research act.

Author

• Paige A Hicks, Loyola University Chicago