The Wretched of the Research: Disenchanting Man2-as-Educational Researcher and Entering the 36th Chamber of Education Research

Abstract

Compulsory state-sanctioned schooling continues to be constructed as the “great equalizer,” and accordingly education research as a benevolent contributor to this material and ideological project of education. Following a Fanonian-Wynterian theoretical approach and cosmogonical-constellatory citation politics, I narrowed over 2,500 educational studies and reviewed approximately 150 articles and chapters that questioned the ways of knowing, being, and valuing which have naturalized these assumptions. Consequently, I theorize the cosmogony and development of the overrepresented genre-specific figure of educational researcher emerging from Man2-as-human, who has come to control the ways of knowing “education” and being an “educational researcher”: Man2-as-educational researcher. I examine how overlapping and interconnected African/Black, Asian, Latinx, Pacific Islander and Indigenous communities have engaged in modes of resistance, survivance, fugitivity/marronage, refusal and abolition to challenge this regime, and enact and imagine genres of being an educational researcher outside of the dominant order of Man2-as-educational researcher. In turn, I consider how these communities have affirmed, honored, fostered, sustained and revitalized ways of gathering, interpreting, and sharing educational knowledge for collective liberation, which have centered the wretched of the research and gaze from below. In so doing, I conceptualize and call forth the need to move toward what I am referring to as the 36th chamber of education research.