Crocheting Refusal: Weaving Rhizomatic Pedagogies and Diasporic-making in Inquiry

• In Event: Discourses and Issues in International Education

Proposal

We are two diasporic scholars from South Asia who have spent nearly a decade in the field of education as teachers, practitioners, and scholars. The precarities of international studenthood have shaped our journeys during the Trump era, the ruptures of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the uncertainties of completing doctoral degrees amid higher education funding cuts and the growing criminalization of critical scholarship. We continue to navigate this terrain as attacks on democracy and freedoms of expression intensify, often marked by racist and xenophobic discourse. Simultaneously, we live in the in-betweenness of our diasporic identities, navigating both the geopolitical tensions between our homelands, India and Pakistan, and the everyday dissonance of finding our home away from home. These experiences have led us to deeply (re)consider inquiry itself, recognizing how our work remains entangled with colonial and hegemonic logics that demand total comprehension and complete knowledge of the Other (Glissant 1997).

In this dialogic piece, we weave our stories, cultural memory, and lived experiences to ask what it means to be answerable (Patel 2015) rather than merely observant and to resist productivity-driven logic that values knowing over being. Under constant pressure to produce writing, measurable outputs, and containable outcomes of inquiry, we collectively consider how to deterritorialize qualitative inquiry from its habitual ways of thinking and practicing, making space for relational practices and subjectivities (Lenz Taguchi 2013). Our inquiry emerges from our sociocultural location, co-temporality, and coevalness (Fabian 1983; Duncan 2005; Vavrus 2021). Situated in Silicon Valley, we are immersed in a landscape lauded for its technological innovation, yet complicit in exporting scalable, privatized models of education and development through extractive, dehumanizing practices. As artificial intelligence increasingly reshapes the fabric of society in the service of speed and productivity, we use our proximity to this global hub to pause, assess, resist, and protest these shifting material realities in our inquiry.

Critical and decolonial scholars across disciplines have long challenged the presumed neutrality of method and the separation of the knower from the known. They have questioned dominant modes of knowledge production that rest on positivist assumptions and universalize Western epistemologies (Takayama, Sriprakash, and Connell 2017; Stein 2017). These critiques have ushered in ontological, epistemological, and posthuman turns, which not only expand the terrain of qualitative inquiry but also affirm knowledge systems and lived experiences historically marginalized in academic research. The methodological innovations that have emerged from transdisciplinary, dialogic scholarship are both creative and politically engaged. Cann and DeMeulenaere's (2012) co-constructed autoethnography demonstrates how dialogic writing (San Pedro and Kinloch 2017), rooted in the rhythms of friendship, challenges extractive models of knowledge production. Their framing of "friendship as method" foregrounds relational, situated, and embodied knowledge, emphasizing the decolonial potential of co-creating meaning across differences. Similarly, Khoja-Moolji's (2017) autoethnographic writing speaks to unpacking "gendered, raced, classed, religionized, and migrant experiences" (154) as a transformative, politically engaged endeavor. Inspired by this work, our inquiry considers how cultural and embodied practices, such as crocheting, might serve as storytelling, offering openings for theorizing diasporic subjectivities and collective memory.

Throughout the paper, we explore the tensions and possibilities involved in the dichotomies and the in-betweens, to engage in practices of refusal as we navigate the uncertainties and contradictions as diasporic scholars (Rashid 2024). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) rhizomes and assemblages, the theoretical underpinnings of "friendship as a method" (Tillmann-Healy 2003, 731) and "weaving an otherwise" (Tachine and Nicolazzo 2022, 2), we take up crocheting as both a metaphor and a craftwork of refusal to Eurocentric knowledge canons and coloniality of power. This shared aesthetic practice helped us rework our relational, situated, and entangled conditions of knowledge-building. Through crocheting, we lean on our geographic relationships, colonial histories, divergent cultures, and our transitional, layered identities as immigrants.

Our dialogic writing echoes the pedagogical rhythm of the crocheting, and we use its vocabulary to articulate the rhizomatic pedagogies, storytelling, and friendship-as-a-method. Yarn over symbolizes our rejection of academic and institutional constraints and movement towards new possibilities. Pull through speaks to our resilience, resistance, and refusal to systems of harm (Nxumalo 2024). The slip knot names the complex, messy ties between us and our material-discursive world that are called "collective enunciations" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 80). Through the slow labor of stitching, we engaged in storytelling that was both autoethnographic and autopoietic. Autoethnography provides the space to situate self within culture. Yet, as Wynter (2015) prompts, autopoiesis takes us further. It demands we ask whether our stories reproduce the very logics we wish to disrupt, or whether they catalyze rupture and re-creation. In doing so, we advocate for the continued expansion of what counts as legitimate knowledge production, who counts as a knower, and for a reimagined future of educational research grounded in equity, relationality, and care.

As we guided yarn into loops with small hooks, the stitches led us to unexpected paths of collective memory, connection, and becoming, deepening our capacity to become hunarmand (Khoja-Moolji 2017, 164). With each twist and stitch, crocheting gave form to the unravelling of ourselves as we traced the messy, raw, and tangled contours of our worlds through dialogue, embodied learning, and aesthetic expression. We revisited the parts of ourselves that are silenced, erased, or forgotten in everyday relations of power and colonial legacies, (re)learning how to resist the erasure of our humanness. Borrowing Wynter's language, we call our braided, embodied moments autopoietic overturns, refusing inherited scripts and breaching the loops of dominant logics toward otherwise ways of knowing. We argue how our crafting became an epistemic rupture (Alagraa 2023), a remaking of meaning through thread, tension, and touch. This recursive practice, we argue, demands that we continually (re)work with provocations, cutting loose from our sedimented habits as qualitative scholars. It taught us that creative practice in qualitative research is not an indulgence but a vital force for reworking identities, relationships, and epistemologies (Jocson et al. 2022).

Authors

• Mariam Parvez Sheikh, Stanford University

• Shruti Sheshadri, University of San Francisco