Complicity: How Arts-Based Research Can Illuminate the Researcher's Role in Both Subverting and Sustaining Injustice

• In Event: 31.092 - Sheraton Roundtable Session Three - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 31.092-1 - Methodological, Critical, and Onto-Epistemic Challenges and Possibilities of Arts-Based Educational Research

Abstract

Educational researchers who write about their work with students of color in oppressed communities benefit professionally from their scholarship. For those the subjects of the research however, even if participant-researchers, the benefits of the research is far more dubious given the enduring and formidable structures of anti-blackness that circulate in American society. My arts-based research project explores how interrogating these challenges to research authenticity, visually and intuitively, can illuminate the researcher’s role in both sustaining and subverting a status quo infused with injustice. My particular project visually explores my own continuing reflexive journey in the wake of two-years of arts-based research with a young African-American student who withdrew from our research project after failing to be accepted into college.

Author

• Gene L. Fellner, College of Staten Island - CUNY