Decolonizing research imagination: A journey of reshaping research epistemology and ontology

• In Event: Revisiting "Asia as Method": Toward ontologies and epistemologies of difference

Proposal

Epistemology has long been recognized as a useful conceptual tool to explore how knowledge has been produced and/or reproduced in higher education research and its linkages to hidden global geopolitics and historical forces. However, this topic has received inadequate attention in the research literature. Equally, there appears to be a gap in utilizing the self as a lens in research through which it carves out complex trajectories of researcher’s ontology and epistemology. This especially applies to those researchers who have crossed the border, lived and worked abroad for a while. “Educators working in international contexts encounter these ontological and epistemological borders daily and are brought to grapple with the role of Otherness in their scholarly practices ”, accentuates Kester (2021). Drawing on autoethnography as a research methodology, the paper rises to answer two key questions in alignment with this special issue: “What sorts of ontological and epistemological transformations might educators experience during long-term periods abroad? How might these transformations initiate decolonial moves in regard to educational pedagogy, policy and practice?” It critically reflects on and thus manifests the journeys of Dr Nguyen and Dr Chia - two diaspora academia in Australia; in this journey these scholars shed light on how they decolonize their research imagination, regain their research agency and thereby transform their research epistemology and ontology and put forward implications for shaping a defiant research imagination for novice researchers.

Authors

• THI NHAI NGUYEN, Monash College

• Yeow-Tong Chia, University of Sydney