Our Spatial Orientations: The Case for Unearthing Where We Know from through Anti-Displacement Epistemologies

• In Event: Reflections on Positionality: A Call Toward Reimagining Roles, Responsibilities, and Relationships in Research

Abstract

In this paper, I aim to center the mapping of self in space as a qualitative method (Powell, 2010). I position Black geographies and a Black sense of place as a methodological and analytical framework to deepen understanding of learning and identity development as parallel processes (McKittrick 2020, 2011; Nasir, 2011). McKittrick (2020, p. 106) illustrates the components of a Black sense of place as “... not a standpoint or a situated knowledge; it is a location of difficult encounter and relationality…it is collaborative praxis. It assumes that our collective assertions of life are always in tandem with other ways of being... it reframes what we know by reorienting and honoring where we know from”. In this conceptual paper, I center and build with the contributions of Black geographies as both a theoretical and methodological shift to consider spatial orientations and the spatial knowledge we bring to qualitative inquiry, connecting our prior time in spaces to our current approaches. Authors 4 and 5 (2022) provide an approach to positioning attending to “(1) the onto-epistemic that recognizes how embodied experiences shape understandings of intersectional oppressions, (2) the sociohistorical that engages historicity, and (3) the sociocultural that concedes whiteness and ability as property” (p. 310). My experience is framed through these theories by adding an explicit spatial dimension to detailed qualitative inquiry guided by Blackness, decoloniality, and disability justice. Ribeiro (2017) states that “embodied ethnography involves the use of the body as an actual research tool, that is, one’s own body becomes the/one of the medium(s) through which experiences are lived, catalogued, and analyzed” (p.142). This is useful to connect the frame of Black Geographies to education as a means to understand where we know from through learning our body and the places we carry with us to research. As Black Geographies holds space and place as sociocultural processes and products, the body then serves as a form of culture that is “the embodied and enacted result of continually coming to terms with the world in which one lives” (Turner, 2000, p. 53). Culture is sociospatial. The spaces I/we carry with us into our research provide a site of knowledge, data, and analysis. Components of place and where we know from are pertinent to positionality, particularly in its importance for education research with and for communities. However, conversations discussing relations of place a researcher brings to their work are limited. Relations to space through Black spatial knowledge, imagination, futures, and carceralities are core features to how we come to understand where we know from (McKittrick, 2020). This approach also provides a perspective that centers Blackness as a means of disrupting coloniality through identifying the role of place (and spatial beliefs) in pedagogy and learning (Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017). I argue cultivating spatial relations and knowledge - core to community research and qualitative inquiry - provides new possibilities for disrupting geographical power dynamics and emplacing knowledge of place in our research process, allowing us to heal through spatial learning (Author 3, 2022).

Author

• Kaleb Germinaro, University of Illinois at Chicago