Heart Ethnography: Creating Collaborative Community Relationships at the Margins of Academia

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Bearing Witness as Research Methodology: Critical Strategies for Transformative Praxis

Abstract

What are the challenges and possibilities of conducting research at the margins of academia? While women of color face multiple forms of structural oppressions in academia, being at the margins also offers new ways of knowing that can advance community interests and affect social change. Through an autoethnography of my research at a non-profit serving Black and Latina girls in New York City, this paper theorizes the margins as a space for the radical transformation of the ethnographic method. Through my theorizing of “heart ethnography” I argue that women of color’s positionality allow us to carve out a space where we can challenge academia’s white heteronormative metrics and norms while working towards the liberation of the communities we work with.

Author

• Jomaira Salas Pujols, Rutgers University