Researching and Resisting Ourselves: A (Re)conceptualization of the “Critical” and “the White Man’s Burden” in Comparative International Education Scholarship

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Education for underserved populations around the world

Proposal

Abstract
Reflecting on the academic industrial complex, the Euro-American university and its scholars, and the discipline of comparative international education studies within the academy, this paper addresses the need for a critical approach to the study of comparative international education. As students, academics and journalists have shown us, the 2015-2016 “Must Fall” protests at South African universities have provided optimal opportunities, serving as “laboratories” or “playgrounds” for many to study and report on activist-related phenomena within the higher education space. As a challenge to all of us “researchers” in, of, and outside the academy, this ongoing study questions the “researcher-researched” relationship, identifying if and how academics/scholars are defining, understanding, and “responding” to calls for justice, inclusion, equity, “transformation,” and “decolonization” through protests within (and beyond) the trope of victimhood. Adapting a conceptual dialogical framework of critical, anti-colonial theories, this study—via interviews, participant observation, and critical discourse analysis—explores researchers’ and protestors’ appeals and resistances to “victimize” rather than “humanize.”



Objective/Purpose
Sometimes, the lines between “researcher” and “researched” are blurred, especially in instances which academics and/or researchers also identify themselves as “social justice”-oriented in their work—a case that is not unique to comparative international education when Euro-American-based scholars study those in the “Global South,” for example. Research on the 2015-2016 “Must Fall” student protests (e.g., “Rhodes Must Fall,” “Fees Must Fall,” “Patriarchy Must Fall,” etc.) that have taken place (and are still ongoing to varying degrees) across several public South African universities, calling for the “decolonization” of universities and access to affordable, quality higher education, for example, is a recent, exemplary case for consideration. Similarly, the history and current manifestations of apartheid within the South African academy have also been popularly deconstructed and interrogated, especially during the post-apartheid, democratic South Africa era.

Within the context of scholarship on “Must Fall” protests, sometimes, discerning who the “researchers” and who the “researched” are is unclear—so much so that the lines between “resistance”/“protest” and “research” are also blurred. This is not to imply that research cannot be designed and implemented as a form of resistance in itself, but some “research” (even despite being well-intentioned) (re)produces injustice and inequity, and therefore, it is better off “refused” (Tuck and Yang 2014). This refusal and an accompanying call for the humanization of research is significant to consider, especially since the predominantly visible ethos and narratives of this particular generation of student protestors (and the scholarship it inspires) are damage-centered, particularly around “Black pain.”

As a challenge to all of us CIE researchers within the academy, therefore, this study calls into question the “researcher-researched” relationship—as adapted in the contemporary South African university protest context, identifying if and how we are (re)defining, understanding, and “responding” to calls for justice, inclusion, equity, “transformation,” and “decolonization” within (and beyond) the trope of victimhood. The following questions are posed and engaged with: What is the relationship between the researcher and the academy? And its knowledge(s)? And student protests/protestors? What is the relationship between the researched/student protestors and the academy? And its knowledge(s)? What does this research “do”? Why does it do it? And how can it be transformed/different? How is “power” understood within the context of the researcher and the researched? Reflecting upon and responding to such questions help explore how the positionality and reflexivity of researchers influence their research of “the researched other” and their complicities with and resistances to the inherent “power” of the academy. Thus, propositions are made to consider researching/re-searching ourselves by humanizing research of student protests as a counter-narrative or even an “alternarrative” to the dominant victim-centered representations of the “researcher” and “researched.”

Conceptual/Theoretical Framework
This study adopts an integrated conceptual framework of concepts and theories that engage with each other in a “conversation” or “dialogue” on critical and anti-colonial studies of self, “others,” knowledge(s), and research(er) (please refer to Figure 1 below). Relying upon the relationship between Tuck and Yang’s (2014) analyses of “settler colonialism” of the academy and the “refusal” of research, Said’s (1994) notions of the “native intellectual and the “intellectual exile and outsider,” Keet’s (2011) concept of “shared complicities,” Wynter’s “unsettling [of] the coloniality of being,” and Couzens Hoy’s “critical resistance,” this study highlights the diverse modes of participation and absence of scholars/researchers in progressing and regressing the “transformation”/“decolonization” agenda at South African universities through various depictions of student protestors—the researched.

Tuck and Yang (2014) argue that humanizing research(ers) entails a “refusal” of and/or within research. Research is just one way of knowing, but in the Western academy (and its epistemic reproductions in other parts of the world), “eclipses others.” The academy and its research are described within the context of settler colonialism, which is not to be mistaken as merely an “event,” but a structure. Within this structure, the “settler” merely adopts and embodies the perpetuation of settler colonialism, regardless of ethnic, racial, class, etc. because “as fraught as research is in its complicity with power, it is one of the last places for legitimated inquiry” (Tuck and Yang 2014: 223).
Refusal is an echoed theme in Said’s (1994) analysis of representations of the intellectual. The character of the researcher/academic as intellectual is underutilized. He argues that the “native intellectual” must not simply look within an institution to replace a White position with its native counterpart, but rather, borrowing from Aimé Césaire, it demands “the invention of new souls” (Said 1994: 41). Regarding the “intellectual in exile,” the academic/researcher/intellectual can become complicit, a yea-sayer with all that exists within the settler colonial structure, or he/she can represent a “different set of values,” raising moral obligations even in the face of ceaseless resistance, remaining on the outside similar to the metaphor in Spivak’s (1993) Outside in the Teaching Machine.
Although there is no way getting around power and authority and the intellectual’s/researcher’s relationship to them, the intellectual must distinguish him/her/self as
an amateur, someone who considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of a society one is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized activity as it involves one’s country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens as well as with other societies (Said 1994: 82-83).
As complicity is a key concept in reconciliation and social cohesion discourses, Keet (2011) argues that the “little perpetrator” referenced in the Truth and Reconciliation Report of South Africa is a shared complicity within each of us, in which at any given time, we can likewise be complicit in the wrongdoing of others (and self, I add). Complicity, Keet (2011) argues, is not intended to mean guilt or culpability in this context. Researchers and other academics likewise share a complicity with the power-privilege dynamics of research and their position in relation to the researched.
Likewise, Tuck and Yang (2014: 243) remind us: “Another way to think about refusal is to consider using strategies of social science research to further expose the complicity of social science disciplines and research in the project of settler colonialism.”
Along the lines of refusal and complicity, in his analysis of critical resistance, Couzens Hoy (2004) reminds us that it is not limited to an external notion. Rather, he argues: “Resistance is thus thought to be more effective if it is not only critical but also self-critical” (Couzens Hoy 2004: 191). Thus, notions of resistance and revolutionary within research and scholarship/the academy can very well be characterized by humility and justice, via transformation of mind and heart, helping one to discern whether some modes of research are acceptable or not.
This criticality of self is also expressed in Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” In this piece, Wynter (2003: 263) calls for a “redescription of the human” in order to disentangle from the “coloniality of being,” which is adapted from Quijano’s (2000) concept of the “coloniality of power.” To humanize or reimagine the human, disentangling from dehumanizing colonial postures and impositions of power becomes the ultimate aim.
Methodology
This conceptual dialogical framework of critical, anti-colonial theories frames a multimodal methodology, including interviews, participant observation, and critical discourse analysis. The author’s position within an institution at a South African academy that served as a resource for student protestors provided meaningful opportunities for informal and formal engagement in mutually reinforcing “protest” and “academic” spaces.

Consequently, data collected was based on convenient sampling due to a significant number of impromptu, open-ended conversational interviews with students, protestors, researchers, and academics; participation in student protest dialogues, academics’/researchers’ meetings on student protests, and conferences focusing on the theme of “decolonization” within the context of “Must Fall” student protests. Continuous critical discourse analysis of conversations, lectures, presentations, blogs, and academic publications, therefore, are also adding value to the investigation of the “researcher-researched” relationship regarding victimization and humanization of student protestors and the researchers themselves.

Author

• Sahar D. Sattarzadeh, University of the Free State