Decolonial (Im)Possibilities in Dual-Sited Ethnography: Including Settler/Accumulation Along With Dispossession in the Research "Gaze"

• In Event: 29.023 - (De)Colonial Research: Space, Place, Memory, and Bodies in Un"settling" Narratives of Educational Opportunity

Abstract

This paper uses as a case study a design for research in which two high schools in Columbus, Ohio (one white, suburban, and affluent; the other Black/Latinx, urban, and poor), will be studied for one academic year. This paper explores the constraints and possibilities of employing comparative, critical ethnography as a “decolonizing methodology” (Smith, 1999). I argue that studies must include segments of society that benefit and privilege from oppression so as to more acutely understand the relationship between those who possess/enact educational opportunity and those who do not.
The main focus of this dual-sited ethnography of schools is to explore the practices and processes that occur with regard to citizenship—how citizenship get re(negotiated), taught, learned in two racially and economically different locations. Building off of Wolfe’s (1999) idea of studying settler society so as to uncover “invasion as structure” and not merely an event, this paper positions the high school as a contemporary settler site where invasion structures curriculum, pedagogy, and citizenship and where each space is located in relation to (im)material accumulation and dispossession of indigenous and black bodies.

This presentation will reflect on the use of dual-sited ethnography where one site is specifically selected for its properties of “accumulation.” Because the author endeavors to conduct research that “more fully considers the implications and significance of place in lived lives,” this presentation will also discuss the utility of Critical Place Inquiry (CPI) (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014). Because CPI examines “how places and our orientations to them are informed by, and determinants of, history, empire, and culture,” this is an appropriate tool to framing questions and situate analyses around the settler colonialism that gives rise to and maintains contemporary educational processes generally, but also how place affects the teaching and learning of citizenship specifically.

The author utilizes participant observation culled from school site and classroom visits, curriculum and pedagogical moves from each site, interviews of students and faculty, and data regarding demographics, test-scores, income disparities, and residential segregation. Further, this study occurs in/against the historical context of the city of Columbus—a city named after the progenitor of settler colonialism in the Americas—and thus, uses as data the city’s own history with regard to genocide and displacement of indigenous people and continual settling/accumulatory/displacing practices against its Black and non-white residents.

This study builds on the work of decolonial scholars by arguing for the importance of including a focus on the settler. While Wolfe (1999) makes clear the need to study “invasion as structure,” this presentation contributes to the field by exploring how this structure operates in education. By including sites and processes of accumulation in the data collection/analysis, the author hopes to contribute to concrete ways researchers can attend to uncovering this “invasion as structure.” By “shifting the gaze” unto the settler in comparative, ethnographic work, the author hopes to add to the conversation around methodologies in research that places the “gaze” where it is most needed if we hope to work toward dismantling systems of oppression.

Author

• Dinorah Sanchez Loza, The Ohio State University