Research sustainability and the struggle for solidarity

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VI)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Building sustainable relationships in the practice of comparative & international education research

Proposal

This paper is set to explore the notion of research “sustainability” in the context of social (in)justice. Researchers who commit to practice research with an underlying anti-oppression intent often find ourselves deeply embedded in what sociologist Mary Louis Pratt (1991) called “contact zones” - “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relation of power” (p. 4). Maria Torre et al. (2008) further apply “contact zone” to caution simplified binary conceptualization such as oppressor/oppressed, or colonizer/colonized. They advocate for a more textured and nuanced understanding of how power seeps through research relationships and processes in the forms of intersecting identities, social and economic locality, and material disparities. But this can’t be just an abstract rhetoric or intellectual exercise but a form of praxis (Freire, 1968) that authentically connects our knowing, doing and being as a researcher and a citizen. This also means that researchers build solidarity with others especially those who are most vulnerable to social and political exclusions. Research sustainability in this sense foregrounds questions about solidarity and recognition: how can researchers genuinely engage in solidarity with vulnerable others while occupying various privileged positionalities and ways of being? What are the conditions that facilitate mutual recognition without glossing over vast differences in locality, access, experience, and possessions? Situating in two concrete research scenarios, a community-based research endeavor and an ethnographic study of consciousness raising, we invite audience to wrestle with those questions in dialogue.

Author

• Peiwei Li, Springfield College