“Re-Hooking” in the Field: Negotiating Power, Privilege, and Whiteness in Qualitative Inquiry

This paper outlines my experience as an early career researcher engaging with my power and privilege embedded in my white, English-speaking identity while working with Mexican American male-identifying research participants. Utilizing critical race theory as a framework, this paper chronicles my reflections on un/hooking from whiteness within the context of scholarly inquiry. Specifically, I draw inspiration from a qualitative research project to anchor the discussion of privileged epistemologies and power structures embedded in the inquiry process and academia more broadly, and how race can intersect with how we negotiate our roles, methods, and subjectivities as qualitative scholars. More broadly, this paper explores notions of knowledge and agency in educational inquiry against the question of whose stories are told, how, for whom, and by whom. This paper contributes to the conversation and efforts toward disentangling from whiteness and the epistemologies around which research, higher education, and society are structured to instead magnify the voices and experiences of participants through more egalitarian inquiry practices.