Transgressive Decolonial Hermeneutics as a Plurivocal Interpretive Educational Research Praxis

• In Event: "It's Not Just Theory": Toward Theory as Method in Critical Theoretical Research Methods in 21st Century Equitable Education

Abstract

Objectives
This study parallels Freire’s (1985) reading the world metaphor, and advances transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH) as a theoretical approach to interpret university student activism vis-à-vis neoliberal higher education reform in Honduras. This study unsettles the positivist/textualist interpretative practices extant in research by extending the notion of texts to collective action. The aim is to reach a plurivocal interpretive praxis that enables researchers to interpret with and alongside their interlocutors’ interpretations, thus shifting the individualistic notions of analysis/interpretation toward a co-constructed research praxis.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
This study draws from Dussel’s (1994) and Quijano’s (2000) notion of totality, constituted as a modern/colonial world system simultaneously demarcating a Eurocentric geography of reason and a wretched colonized space of non-being and ignorance (Fanon, 1963). In this study, I conceptualize coloniality as an enduring violent pedagogical act which systematically subjugates and destroys other interpretations to the degree in which the colonized Other views and interprets the world through the colonizer’s conceptual networks, theoretical/interpretive frameworks, and ontological assumptions.

Methods/Data Sources
TDH extends the interpretation of written texts to the insurgent plays, acts, texts, and pedagogies of resistance situated in places, contexts, and institutions. It uses university student activists’ written texts, spoken discourses, and collective actions as meaningful expressions/texts implicated in the sociopolitical context. The movement from text to context and vice versa is a recursive process.
Questions I discuss are the following: How does collective action influence the way student activists read the world, society, and its institutions? How does collective action signal and unveil social/institutional relations of power? What alternative meanings and practices have student activists inscribed to the university?

Results/Significance
One of the more significant findings of this study is that student activists, through collective action, recovered silenced texts, insurgent interpretations, histories, collective memories, and democratic practices. This demonstrates that hermeneutics is no longer a knowledge practice belonging to academics; it is rather a praxis situated in social struggles unfolding in higher education institutions. Collective memories express the oral histories, the intertextuality, left unwritten yet remembered, retold, reread, and reenacted by student movements. These stories, moreover, compose the unread “books” narrated in social struggles by those who choose to interpret the past and present to effect institutional change. This study demonstrates that student activists’ knowledge practices of resistance are able to counter neoliberal discourses and reforms. The application of TDH suggests that texts and collective actions are not data/information but instead are knowledge practices born in social struggles.
TDH enhances our understanding of the implications of student activism in resisting neoliberal higher education reform. The findings from this study make several contributions to the current literature, which falls short in interpreting the epistemological dimensions and contribution of university student activism in Latin America. By extending the notion of texts to human action, the applicability/potential of using TDH is also extended to other educational settings where teacher/student interactions may be interpreted vis-à-vis a broader social context and political economic conjuncture in which a wide range of social movements are emerging.

Author

• Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, Texas Tech University