Power of the Preposition: Researching With/for/About Young Women of Color

• In Event: 52.084 - Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: 52.084-7 - Putting the Work to Work: Getting Smart, Messy, and Lost With the Work of Patti Lather

Abstract

In this presentation, I take up the phrase “researching with” as a discursive practice deployed often in inquiry with “emancipatory” aims. Here, I include a wide universe of methodologies (critical, feminist, queer, indigenous, PAR, etc.,) that epistemologically assume systemic inequalities and institutionalized asymmetrical relations as social facts. While other researchers have variously named and described similar practices (Michelle Fine’s “working the hyphen” and Fred Erickson’s “studying side-by-side” to name a few), I am particularly interested in how Lather’s unpublished term “the power of the preposition” can offer a three-dimensional conceptual tool for thinking through power, difference and representation through a distinctly queer, feminist and decolonial perspective on situated knowledge, place and embodied subjectivity. I utilize my previous and current inquiry with young women of color as a case to explore the power of the preposition.

Author

• Lisa Weems, Miami University