Racially-just epistemologies and methodologies that disrupt whiteness (part II)

Abstract

In part two of this special issue, we continue to explore Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ (2014) clarion call to embrace ‘ecologies of knowledges’ as educational researchers. Santos (2014) reminds us that as educational researchers who are committed to social justice, we cannot draw boundaries between ‘inquiries into ways of knowing’ from ‘inquiries into ways of intervening in the world with the purpose of attenuating or eliminating the oppression, domination, and discrimination caused by global capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy’ (p. 238). For Santos, epistemologies which stem from the Global South are born out of struggle against oppressive systems, and hence it is little wonder that Eurocentric critical theorists do not recognize or comprehend the practices, ways of knowing, and values that stem from the Global South. Critics of pursuing racial justice within educational research may argue that such epistemologies, methodologies, methods and reflections are not only deeply political and ill-placed in a field such as educational research, but that they also fall short of conventional standards of rigour and validity. However, issues of legitimacy are neither new nor specific to racially-just epistemologies and methodologies. As Evans-Winters (2019) suggests, ‘our “truths” must be validated from within, with less concern for how outsiders legitimate (or receive and perceive) our assertions’ (p. 23). Moreover, national organizations such as the American Educational Research Association (AERA) have not only acknowledged the legitimacy of theories such as Critical Race Theory (CRT) within educational research, but also issued a memorandum in 2009 to honour the contribution of CRT as ‘humanities-oriented research’ (Matias 2021, p. 4). Scholars such as Cheryl Matias and Venus Evans-Winters and others engaging in racially-just epistemologies and methodologies have also challenged this imposed gatekeeping and exclusion by traditional empiricists (not to be confused with empirical), which not only undermine methods such as counter stories but also continue to reinforce deficit narratives of marginalized communities. The papers in this special issue confront this history of gatekeeping as well as revealing the cost of adopting theories, methodologies, methods and positionalities that are ‘consistently swimming against the current’ (Ladson-Billings 1998, p. 28), so that they may expose racism within education and educational research and propose radical solutions. These papers are consciously political because historically, educational research has problematized many minoritized communities to construct the dominant political discourse. They also speak to the dangers of co-optation and the intellectual erasure of scholars of colour from within educational research, when mainstream scholars are eager to utilize racially-just methods without careful reflection.