Reconciling the "Hybrid" and "Authentic" in Indigenous Research Through Anticolonial Thought: The African Scholar's Perspective

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Discomforts Toward Reconciliations in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives

Abstract

This paper discusses ‘hybridity’ and ‘authenticity’ as important, yet confounding the Indigenous African scholar and their research agenda. Acknowledging the contestations of applying indigeneity to Africans, this conceptual paper indulges questions that interrogate how the Indigenous African scholar who lives in the Diaspora conceptualizes, navigates, and employs indigeneity, hybridity, and authenticity as tools of resistance in their scholarship and the academy. In addressing these questions, the paper explores themes of ‘self-exploration’, ‘self-actualization’, and ‘critical and positive transformation’ using the anti-colonial theoretical lens. It recommends transformative authenticity as providing avenues for the Indigenous African scholar to do scholarship and to thrive in the academy.

Author

• Phyllis Kyei Mensah, Miami University