Decolonizing+Methodologies

=Whats Colonization Got to do with Methodologies?=

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Colonizing discourses are those that emerged from the post-Enlightenment European discourses (Smith, 1999) and currently represent imperialistic discourses forcing polarized relations between people, their locations, their categories of identification, and their ways of knowing and understanding the world. These imperialistic discourses continue to create grand narratives that exoticize non-White narratives or push them to the periphery. In other words, research, historically, has been written from mostly White male perspectives and therefore has not always been sensitive to the ways of knowing and everyday lives of the researched, especially the non-whites. Hence, non-Whites got written "about" instead of having research tools that allow multiple ways of voices to emerge so that the telling of a non-White culture can be executed by non-Whites effectively in ways that respond to their everyday existence. However, de/colonizing epistemologies are not just about race. It can be about gender, sexuality, or any kind of marginal categorization of people where polarized divisions are created. Hence, De/colonizing epistemologies represent collective and varied ways of knowing the hegemonic effects of colonizing discourses and their foundational assumptions. Since de/colonizing epistemologies function in spaces invaded by colonizing and decolonizing discourses, de/colonizing epistemologies represent the interactions of these discourses in challenging imperialism. Accordingly, resistances can occur on a small or large scale, at the personal or political level.

=Working with/against de/colonizing epistemologies= Many activists have taken on de/colonizing epistemology and methodology differently. However, at the onset, it is important to challenge our minds to the colonized ways of thinking about personal power against the empire building that creates various inequalities among people in the world. For example, political activist Arundhati Roy critiques Western[|[1]] Empire building:

> If we look at this conflict as a straightforward eyeball to eyeball confrontation between Empire and those of us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing. But there is another way of looking at it. We, all of us gathered here, have, each in our own way, laid siege to Empire. We may not have stopped it in its tracks--yet--but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world's stage in all its brutish, iniquitous nakedness. (Roy 2003, p. 122) > Roy’s criticism challenges Western Empire building by blurring the margin/center borders and privileging alternate conceptualization of resistance strategies. She criticizes, encourages and acknowledges small and large-scale resistances against Empire building. Such acknowledgement is aimed at creating alternate discourses that can generate different understandings of struggle, oppression, resistance, and liberation than what has been previously established by the rhetoric of the Empire. Imagining alternate possibilities, Roy concedes: > Our strategy should be not only to confront empire[|[2]] but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness--and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling--their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. (Roy 2003, p. 142) Such arguments create the thrust for de/colonizing discourses where world orders are questioned, re-imagined, and nations are blurred onto each other to resist the oppressive effects of globalization on multiple groups of people.

=De/colonizing disciplines= There are many disciplines in and outside of qualitative inquiry that have taken up de/colonizing ways of looking at their theorization, methods, and practice. The understanding, practice, and representation of such work is fluid, responsive and varied based on the topic, researcher, and blurring of the boundaries between the researcher and the researched. Such disciplines are (and not limited to):
 * anthropology
 * linguistics
 * english
 * various fields of social science
 * critical theorists
 * social foundation of education
 * postmodernism
 * poststructuralism
 * postcolonialism
 * various fields in education
 * various fields of feminism such as transnational feminism, Black feminism, global feminism, etc.
 * cultural history

=Methodological Influences= Since de/colonizing epistemologies are taken up in diverse ways in multiple disciplines, I will limit the discussion of de/colonizing methodologies within the theoretical framework of transnational feminism. Mostly the work I am going to re-present here would be work done from my dissertation on exploring the experiences of two transnational female Indian graduate students who had been in the U.S. for less than 1.5 years. Just when you thought that you did not have to learn yet another new term eh?

At the rudimentary level, transnationalism refers to the practices of migrants who live their lives across multiple nation-states if not at least in two nation-states. Riccio (2001, p. 583) states that “transnationalism is a term commonly used to contextualize and define such migrants’ cultural, economic, political, and social experiences (p. 583). Transnationalism and transnational migrants are highly contested terms as borders between worlds permeate and technological advancements emerge. With the ease of travel and the birth of second and third generation children of migrants, the concept of the transnational, a sense of origin and home become problematic. Additionally, Grewal and Kaplan (1994) situate transnationalism in political opposition to hegemonic social structures, noting that the transnationalization of people promotes shifts “that challenge the older, conventional boundaries of national economies, identities, and cultures” (p. 9).

Grewal and Kaplan (1994b) further state that feminist interests are often absent from transnational discourses. They urge feminist political practices to acknowledge transnational cultural flows in order to “understand the material conditions that structure women’s lives in diverse locations. If feminist movements cannot understand the dynamics of these material conditions, then they will be unable to construct an effective opposition to current economic and cultural hegemonies that are taking new global forms” (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994b, p. 17). Thus, questions about the production of a female transnational migrant’s experiences of her diasporic location and home can highlight the contesting and complimentary relationships between the multiple social structures that continue to inform, challenge, and influence her.

In other words de/colonizing methodologies try to depart from what is assumed to be known and create alternate possibilties from voices and sites that have not been authored before in dignified and honored manners. This could be indigenous research, race research, gender research, transnational research, just about anything that could use a fresh pair of eyes to break apart the old and make room for a hybridization of what used to be and what can be.

=Theoretical Assumptions= Transnational feminist methodologies acknowledge that this research is never complete. I do not have complete access to the participants’ lives, making this research only a frozen frame of collective moments. As a transnational feminist, I was data hungry and could not turn off my researcher self during any interaction with the participants. Using conversations as a form of inquiry, all interactions became data to me. Sensing such hunger, Neerada, one of the participants, cautioned me that, “You would never finish your dissertation, because the subjects are still speaking.” Thus, conceding that the data are never real, true, complete, or holistic despite my attempts to “capture ‘em all,” this research is a negotiation of my effort to abandon authority and privilege participants’ critical agencies and voices, all the while recognizing the inevitable failure.
 * From my dissertation**

From transnational feminist perspectives, abandoning questions that analyze, interpret, or re-present women as defined by their object status creates a space for examining the production of gendered subject positions like, victims of male violence, colonialism, familial systems, economic developments, and universal dependents (Mohanty, 2004, p. 23). Therefore, methodologically, I worked with an autoethnographical gaze that continuously interrogated the objectified subject positions through which I authored the participants. I collaborated with other transnational feminist scholars, qualitative scholars, and the participants to continuously challenge and re-construct my understandings. Consequently, I re-presented findings in their own tension-filled spaces where suffering and resistance occurred simultaneously, describing such tensions with one eye on the material consequences of such lived experiences and another on the discursive gaze of decolonizing feminist discourses that attend to the impossibilities of such construction.

Giving up the will to know
What right do we have as researchers to know what we want to know? Are there things that we cannot know even though we ask the appropriate questions with the appropriate techniques and probes? What happens when you give up that will to know and enter a space of saliency of information?With this realization I question the “presumptive agency” with which I would otherwise enter the research space. I use the term “presumptive” here to describe some of my colonial assumptions which might lead me to expect the participants to answer my questions in a way that is helpful towards my research questions. I might further assume that if they do not, then with appropriate techniques of questioning and probing I would be able to “extract” the data I need from my participants, positioning my research agenda at the center of our conversations. My agency is presumptive because although I am aware of the fluid nature of the co-construction of meaning in the interview process and the participant’s right to exercise her agency, I may not identify my desire to know and understand the participant’s experiences in a way that informs my research as a colonizing gesture.

Does Silence Indicate an Absence?
I argue that giving voice to the unvoiced leaves her/him open to being served up as an exotic dish to be consumed or to being viewed as one would view a performing animal in the zoo. By deciding to give voice, the researcher decides to expose communal secrets. So what communal secrets can one choose to disclose? What can be told with participants’ silences? While feminism advocates giving voice to those who have historically been silenced, Visweswaran (1994) questions how one is given voice, while Adrienne Rich promotes silence as a site of analysis and resistance:

Silence can be a plan rigorously executed The blueprint to a life It is a presence It has a history a form Do not confuse it With any kind of absence. (Rich 1978, p. 17)

What is so de/colonizing about plotting silence? The silences discussed are not always imposed silences, but may be purposeful and chosen. These silences emerge from a space of marginality, of not belonging, and of knowing the limits and possibilities of certain subject positions. Those with a voice have been associated with power and representation, thus creating a dualism of power and oppression between the voiced and the unvoiced. Disrupting this binary would mean asking the one with a voice to unlearn his/her privilege, listen, and interrogate silence in a way that has not been done before. What is the compulsion to speak? What are the consequences for feminism of privileging speech and rendering silence invisible, passive, and without agency? Questions that are of interest to this study involve exploring how silence functions in the participant’s life; what does it do for the participant? How does silence expand or restrict possibilities?

Imagining different audience
If you are working from the margins, what kind of audience do you imagine as you work in mainstream academia seeking legitimization from mainstream academic gatekeepers? Well to minimize exoticization of the researcher and her participant, the primary audience imagined must be those who are participants and similarly situated researchers. How does construction of knowledge change when one shifts the re-presentation of data from mainstream audience to those who are on the margins?

=Data Management and Analysis= Here I present some ideas that informed me in my dissertation where I combined colonizing and decolonizing epistemologies together to create methodological possibilities that were always already suspect.

Inability to conduct typical inductive analysis
Reading through the data, I could not separate one-word or phrased codes into their discrete boxes without acknowledging that they were all intertwined in complex ways. The participants negotiated their experiences in messy spaces, in contradictory ways. I wanted to capture some aspect of the messiness it would resonate with transnational feminism, which advocates developing an understanding that starts from a site of multiplicity. If the world exists in multiplicity, if people process information in multiple interconnected ways, then sorting, managing, analyzing, and re-presenting the messiness would be commensurable with ways of knowing that remain closer to the participants. Through this process, I continued to question the theoretical influences in my reading of the data to break apart my established ways of knowing in order to discover some alternate forms of knowing.

Alternate forms of knowing
One such alternate way of knowing came from an Indian Vedic mantra, //Om tat sat,// whose literal translation is: //Om// the vital force is the key element //tat// in all existence //sat// which is culturally understood as that which exists beyond all categorizations. //Om// //tat sat// is used sometimes in meditation, sometimes as a philosophy, and sometimes as a way to understand the world as it transcends any fixed forms of categorization. Invoking the same philosophy, the participants’ racialized experiences were not always separable from their gendered or cultural experiences. These codes existed in ways that were inseparable, creating vital experiences for the participants. For example, the code “racialized experiences” functioned differently in different spaces, held different meanings, and was negotiated differently by the participants across time and space. Each of those negotiations interacted intricately with other aspects of the participants’ experiences, legitimizing that which exists, exists in all its riddles. Thus to understand such intertwined aspect of negotiations and productions of experience, I needed additional ways of knowing to better capture the multiplicity of interactions between time, space, events, negotiations, and contradictions, with room for permanently deferring meaning.

I listened to the conversation tapes closely to obtain a sense of more than the textual representation of data, a reminder of how some of those tacit data sources shaped understanding. Then, just as Neerada or Yamini would finish discussing an idea and proceed to talk about something else, I would begin to write about the idea. As I wrote, I began to connect to multiple points in the data either from memory, by searching through the data sources, or by re-reading portions of the data. I developed these ideas based on connections to similar and contradictory ideas, changes in their lives including turning points and epiphanies, and intense reactions to events, people, and circumstances. This process, represented in a single electronic document, became a space for developing ideas while remaining intimately connected to the data.

My initial analytic focus was loosely structured to explore how the participants negotiated their experiences, and to examine the contexts in which those experiences were produced. I was hoping that this focus would provide a starting point that would help me stay close to the data and open up possibilities through writing. I went through the entire data set and began writing every time a different topic came up in the conversations. As I continued with this process I came up with several written pieces linking to multiple pieces within the data. The pieces did not exist independently. Instead, they were connected to each other, almost creating a network feeding into and out of one another, mostly because I was influenced by the philosophy of that which exists, exists in all its inseparable complexities.

Ethnodrama as a Re-presentation Strategy
Recognizing that there was a performative element in the participants’ acts, I looked at ethnodrama as a potential analytical and re-presentational strategy. However, nothing mentioned in ethnodrama connected participants’ stories to each other, showing that they existed in relations of accommodation, resistance, contradiction, tension, or support for each other, until I came across a figuration of front and back stage in the writings of Erving Goffman (1997). This figuration of front and back stage became most useful for me in conceptualizing and interpreting the data. Goffman’s theoretical framework is not used when implementing the front and back stage idea in this study. Phrases like “in front of the curtains” and “behind the curtains” could serve similar purposes, but seemed clunky to me, so I moved instead towards Goffman’s elegant figuration of front and back stages.

Front and Back-Staged Re-presentation of Data
Armed with a compatibility with performance ethnography I began to examine the front and back stage figuration closely. These front and back stages could become the spaces where the participants experience certain events, topics, and epiphanies. Sometimes these spaces were physical (i.e., a classroom) and sometimes they were imagined (i.e., memories of India) or temporal. Realizing that the front and back stages each have separate audiences (see Figure 4) and that each audience is privy to different kinds of performances, I began to develop the idea of front and back stage further, concluding that front and back stages are relational terms and are not fixed in their performative spaces. This means that what is back stage for one audience could be front stage for another audience who is observing performances at the back stage.

The general argument is that there is always a performative aspect to our acts and actions and depending on who the audience is, these acts and actions vary. Front and back stage are useful constructs in relation to each other, but they do not hold on to their absoluteness for too long. One can move within multiple back and front stages depending on one’s acts of accommodation, resistance, and reworking of multiple subject positions and spaces. These front and back stages can become a labyrinthine structure through which the participants navigate in their everyday lives.

= = =For more information on de/colonizing methodologies=

Bhattacharya, K. (2005). //Border Crossings and Imagined Nations: A case study of socio-cultural negotiations of two female Indian graduate students in the U.S.// Unpublished Dissertation, University of Georgia, Athens, GA. [|Chapter 3]

Chaudhry, L., Nazir. (1997). Researching "my people," researching myself: fragments of a reflexive tale. //Qualitative Studies in Education, 10//(4), 441-453.

Mohanty, C. T. (2004). //Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity//. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mutua, K., & Swadener, B. B. (Eds.). (2004). //Decolonizing research in cross-cultural contexts//. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Smith, L. T. (1999). //Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples//. New York: Zed Books.

Visweswaran, K. (1994). //Fictions of feminist ethnography//. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

[|[1]] My use of Western is not an untroubled monolithic one. Rather, I use this term to resonate with Spivak, Bhaba, and Roy to denote the kind of ordering of the world where certain groups of people and certain locations are systematically and consistently privileged with economic, military, and social control to create and monitor forces of globalization. [|[2]] I present Roy’s discussion of the Empire. “When we speak of confronting ‘Empire,’ we need to identify what "Empire" means. Does it mean the U.S. Government (and its European satellites), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that? In many countries, Empire has sprouted other subsidiary heads, some dangerous byproducts nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism and, of course terrorism. All these march arm in arm with the project of corporate globalization. Corporate Globalization - or shall we call it by its name? - Imperialism - needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice. Meanwhile, the countries of the North harden their borders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. After all they have to make sure that it is only money, goods, patents and services that are globalized. Not the free movement of people. Not a respect for human rights… So this - all this - is "empire." This loyal confederation, this obscene accumulation of power, this greatly increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who have to suffer them.” Roy, A. (2003). __War Talk__. Cambridge, MA, Southend Press.

I read Empire as the network of globalized world structures that continue to maintain power relations in their favor and create world orders to reinforce imperialistic understanding of the world, its people, and knowledge that can be considered legitimate.

[|[3]] Spivak and other postcolonial scholars use worlding as a way to describe the Empire’s efforts to define the world in terms of First and Third World, developing nations, progressive and backwards, where the world is divided into categories according to the Empire’s perspectives.