Decolonizing Research With Children and Persons With Disabilities: Critical Reflections on North/South Collaborations

• In Event: 44.052 - Decolonizing and Indigenous Cross-Cultural Research Methodologies

Abstract

Young children and individuals with disabilities constitute vulnerable research populations in terms of the ease with which their voices and perspectives can be masked, obscured, negated or even silenced in representations of them. Nowhere more than the Global South do these two subpopulations stand the distinct possibility of being rendered voiceless research subjects. Drawing from nearly 20 years of critical collaborative work, the co-authors of this paper reflect on the challenges in “decolonizing” disability and early childhood research drawing upon Kaomea’s (2004; 2013) use of a detective metaphor for their understanding of social and cultural constructions of disability and early childhood in Kenya. As we reflect upon our North/South collaborations in research on disability and early childhood pedagogies and epistemologies, we are conscious of Tuhiwai-Smith’s (1999) call to decolonize methodologies as we make recommendations for the production of research that is more relevant in the Global South.

In light of our work on decolonizing cross-cultural research (Mutua & Swadener, 2014) and with marginalized groups, including people with disabilities (Swadener & Mutua, 2006; Mutua & Swadener, 2009; 2011; 2013; in press) and orphaned and vulnerable children (Swadener & Wachira, 2001; Swadener, 2005; Swadener, Wachira, Kaabiru & Njenga, 2007) we have come into more nuanced and humble insights about the lives of those we seek to learn from. We have become more aware of the complexities of the lives of the participants in our various studies and collaborators in our various projects.

With a growing number of postcolonial scholars (e.g., Young, 2003), we have become increasingly critical of postmodern portrayals of nomadism or the Global South, in general, in ways that emphasize, at times romanticize, the creative performativity of the migrant identity as the most productive form of cultural identity, ignoring its brutal genesis for many nomads. Such a celebratory impulse cannot be sustained at many of the sites that have informed some of our research: in the city streets of Nairobi (Swadener & Mutua, 2001), segregated classrooms and slums of Kibera and Mathare Valley in Nairobi (Swadener & Mutua, 2001), and the townships of South Africa (Ndimande & Swadener, 2012, 2013).

As we reflect upon decolonizing research now more than ever, in looking back at the collective body of work we have produced together or separately around this possibility, we are more aware of the ways that our enacting of decolonization has carried with it a strong element of activism. Decolonization is not merely the production of theories, but of action. Colonization can be defined in many ways and has been the focus of extensive scholarship – as well as persistent material life experience for many global majorities. We adapt Brayboy’s, (2014, January) definition that colonization is the operationalization of imperialism. Brayboy and others (e.g. Young, 2003) question the possibility for “decolonizing” larger and persistent structures of oppression, and advocate smaller, more localized moments of resistance and disruptions of colonization – or anticolonial actions and sensibilities rooted in community needs, drawing from Indigenous knowledge systems emphasizing reciprocity and sharing an emancipatory agenda that builds local capacity (Brayboy, 2014).

Authors

• Kagendo Mutua, The University of Alabama

• Beth Blue Swadener, Arizona State University