Challenging power and epistemological tensions in CIE research: A photovoice study of schooling post-pregnancy in Malawi

• In Event: Decolonizing research methodologies to explore gendered knowledge production : Opportunities and challenges for Comparative and International Education (CIE) research

Proposal

In her book Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2022) posits, “Knowledge and the power to define what counts as real knowledge lie at the epistemic core of colonialism” (p. xii). As a way of unsettling coloniality in the knowledge-making process, various scholars (Chilisa, 2012; Smith, 2022) have and continue to recognize and locate research as a non-neutral relational project that has, “for centuries, been situated within and animated settler colonial logics” (Patel, 2016, p. 48). Such dominant locations have long perpetuated the marginalization of the non-European “Other” in research, (re)presenting them through damage-centered lenses (Smith, 2022; Tuck, 2009). Disrupting colonial logics that continue to marginalize, feminize, and objectify the non-Western Other in gender research within Comparative and International Education (CIE), this study centers on how photovoice, a participatory visual methodology, can serve as a tool for resistance to epistemic coloniality. I draw from a photovoice study conducted in the summer of 2023 with 25 pregnant learners and school-aged mothers in Mangochi, southern Malawi, examining how they navigated and negotiated schooling post-pregnancy amidst complex social and institutional barriers. The pregnant learners and school-aged mothers in the study shared their lived experiences through photovoice workshops, participant-led photography, focus group discussions, and semi-structured interviews.

This research project sought to “make visible, open up, and advance radically distinct perspectives…that displace Western rationality as the only framework and possibility of existence, analysis, and thought” (Walsh, 2018, p.17) in CIE gender research. As part of interrogating and challenging Euro-hegemonic dominance in the knowledge-making process, I focus this paper on power imbalances between “researchers” and “participants,” recognizing that even in participatory designs, navigating one’s positionality as well as (re)presentation of voice can present tensions. Furthermore, I also center on my experience navigating indigenous ethics as a way of validating traditional knowledge-seeking and knowledge-making processes within African contexts. With this, I pause on the question: how do you share power in practice without romanticizing participation in participatory approaches to inquiry in CIE?

Lastly, grounding my scholarship in Ubuntu and Afro-feminist epistemologies enabled me to center on relational accountability, community knowledge, and women’s agential power in communitarian spaces (Chilisa, 2012; Chilisa & Ntseane, 2010; Wilson, 2001). Together, these core elements framed this research not as an individual, detached activity, but as a web of relationships and responsibilities with my research community—connecting to the Ubuntucentric approach (Chinkondenji, 2022) to inquiry in this study. However, bringing these frameworks into Western academic spaces required constant negotiation. For example, Ubuntu’s emphasis on collective well-being conflicted with IRB protocols that prioritize individual consent in static, one-time forms. My experience in this research process taught me that ethics are ongoing, not a one-time approval. Consent, interpretation, and dissemination are part of a continuous, reciprocal process that is shared with my community of co-researchers within the Mangochi context, thus my intentional engagement with indigenous ethical structures. Learning from such Afrocentric relational perspectives offers culturally grounded models for ethical engagement in gender research within CIE that go beyond institutional checklists—contributing towards a decolonial praxis in Southern-based research processes.

Author

• Pempho Chinkondenji, University of North Dakota