This blogpost complements two I have already published in the Understanding Race series on questions of methodology in doing research that works critically with and against race as an analytical tool. In The place of race in developing epistemologies and methodologies I work through the issues raised in the slides below in narrative form. The Power to Undo is more focused on the questions of ‘decolonizing methodologies.’ here are the slides I used to teach the works raised in these two posts, which you are free to use if they are helpful in conjunction with the longer blogposts.
Watch Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s full lecture here.
Critical Listening exercise. While watching Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s lecture, answer the questions above.
Smith explains that Kaupapa Maori research is ‘research for, by and with Maori’ (Tuhiwai Smith 2012: 183). It is ‘research which is ‘culturally safe’, which involves the ‘mentorship’ of elders, which is culturally relevant and appropriate while satisfying the rigour of research, and which is undertaken by a Maori researcher, not a researcher who happens to be Maori’ (ibid. 184).
Therefore, it is vital that research that is carried out within the Kaupapa Maori framework is done in the interests and under the guidance of the community concerned. Here there is no notion that the academy or ‘science’ knows best. Rather, she cites Russel Bishop who claims that ‘Maori people should regain control of investigations into Maori people’s lives’ (ibid.). So the ‘whanau‘, or the extended family, has a major role to play in deciding on what to research, how to research it and in carrying out the research.
So, the whanau acts as the research supervisors. Smith says that, in this way, research is part of the overall struggle for Maori self-determination. In that Indigenous people struggle to regain control over their lands, their culture and their languages, they are also engaged in a struggle over how knowledge about them is created and to what ends. Because, as has been made clear, knowledge about racialised and colonised peoples has been traditionally developed in order to better control them, and this continues in many ways (particularly in so-called problem areas such as crime, health and education), it is absolutely vital that minoritised people can determine what and how knowledge is produced about them.
In her discussion of Kaupapa Maori, Smith asks whether it is possible for non-Maori people to be involved in the research? She writes that while it is not possible for non-Maori to lead research, they can be involved as part of a team: ‘some non-indigenous researchers, who have a genuine desire to support the cause of Maori, ought to be included, because they can be useful allies and colleagues in research’ (Tuhiwai Smith 2012: 184).
This introduces questions about the relationship between doing research that contributes to the struggle for self-determination or liberation as described by Tuhiwai Smith and Hill Collins and doing research that is explicitly antiracist and/or seeks to uncover and challenge the workings of race. Clearly the two are interrelated but there are important discussions to be had about the role of the positionality of the researcher in the latter.
This raises important questions about who does research on race and why. There is an undeniably important connection here between lived experience of racism and what epistemologies are brought to the fore in doing research on what race does. However, at the same time, as Tuhiwai Smith says, this should not mean stepping away from the importance of rigour in research. Too often there has been an assumption that experiencing racism makes people too emotionally invested and unable to ably conduct research, a notion that has been debunked by Black feminist and Indigenous scholars.
Nevertheless, because race acts to compartmentalise, working to produce differences between peoples, understood as ‘populations’, there has also been a parallel division within research by and for racialised and Indigenous people. As Tuhiwai Smith points out in her talk at CUNY the reality of Indigenous peoples is not ‘neat and tidy’. The contemporary context in which Indigenous people live is in constant flux, it is dynamic. It is impossible, she says to simply ‘stop and Indigenize or decolonize’ in a way that doesn’t take account of the constantly changing and risk-laden terrain in which we all exist.
Additionally, she says, Maori people are intertwined with white/Pakeha people through intermarriage, and so while they know their Maori selves, their lives and histories have necessary been messily entangled with those of the colonisers. All of this, she says, means that we cannot go back, we can only move in one forward direction, but we do not have any certainty of what we will find in the future. Research, for Tuhiwai Smith, is mainly about building and sustaining relationships, but relationships should not only be forged for the purpose of carrying out research. As researchers, we need to be open to questions such as ‘who are you to be doing this research?’ ‘Research is not a short term relationship for an instrumental gain,’ she warns.
In my class, we make use of Padlet to brainstorm ideas or toe expand on questions raised during class. At the end of the semester, I can download the Padlet as a PDF for each student to be able to return to as a record of their thoughts.
Patricia Hill Collins introduces us to important questions of epistemology in her classic text, Black Feminist Thought. Chapter 11, Black Feminist Epistemology, is the source for this material.
A useful source to explain this terminology may be found here.
‘Epistemology constitutes an overarching theory of knowledge (Harding 1987). It investigates the standards used to assess knowledge or why we believe what we believe to be true. Far from being the apolitical study of truth, epistemology points to the ways in which power relations shape who is believed and why.’
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 252.
According to Collins, epistemology is important because it determines which questions get asked based on what is seen as important. In the Hemings/Jefferson example, asking questions about her relationship to Jefferson was not seen as important by those who denied that Black women’s voices should be listened to.
Ultimately this lead to which version of truth will prevail.
A paradigm is an interpretative framework such as intersectionality (Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 252).
Use these questions in your discussion:
Name other interpretive frameworks?
- Critical Race/Race critical theories
- Feminist theory
- Indigenous theory
According to Tuhiwai Smith, is Kaupapa Maori a paradigm? (Decolonizing Methodologies, p. 193)
How can we choose the method that is adequate for reflecting our vision of reality (ontology), our values (axiology) and how we understand knowledge (epistemology). Here is an interesting example of developing policies to address anti-Indigenous racism using visual policy analysis.
In their book, White Logic, White Methods, Bonilla Silva and Zuberi challenge the notion that it does not matter who is doing research. How research is approached, what questions are asked, who is doing the asking, what values guide the questions and the analysis and what knowledge is brought to bear on the research subject – these are all things that are influence by ‘white racial logic’ in a white supremacist society.
The denial of the significance of racialised frames is part of the white racial logic which posits that objectivity is possible and that people with no experience of someone else’s life experience can just as easily research them as someone within their own community, or worse, that they will be able to do so better because they can take ‘distance’ from the topic and be more ‘objective’
Epistemic racism and the coloniality of knowledge refer to the rejection of the knowledge of non-Europeans as deficient/non-existence and its subsequent erasure. In this regard, the Foreword by Ramon Grosfoguel to Marxism and Decolonisation in the 21st Century, is very interesting. he argues that notwithstanding the importance of decolonial theory, many of its principal scholars especially those working within the Global North, have operationalised epistemic racism by basing their work on the Black radical Tradition without acknowledging the genealogy of that work.
Black feminist thought is subjugated knowledge that is situated in political and economic reality, not divorced from it (Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 269).
Collins talks about the necessity of knowledge and wisdom for Black women’s survival. She argues that knowledge is adequate for the powerful but wisdom is necessary for this without power. Lived experience is a source of wisdom. Storywork and narrative are important sources and methodologies.
Collins recognises the importance of story work, as do Archibald et al in their book Decolonizing Research. The book describes research which gives voice to stories told by Indigenous elders that contain life lessons and from which we can derive meaning. These stories resist western positivist accounts ‘with an objective facade of research, and an assumed position of racial superiority’ (Archibald et al. 2019: 5).
Story work is a practice of giving voice in order to ‘rectify the damage and reclaim our ability to story-talk, story-listen, story-learn and story-teach’ (Decolonizing Research p. 7).
Dialogue is central for Collins, but this is not to be confused with debate.
- Call-and-response discourse mode common among African Americans.
- Recalls Indigenous yarning as used by Bargallie in her research.
- Everyone must participate, and so no one is left out.
Ethics of caring
- Each individual is listened to in her uniqueness
- We should not separate intellect from emotion
- Empathy – people will open up to the they feel are empathic towards them. This may come from shared lived experience though not necessarily.
Ethic of accountability
- Researchers must be accountable for their knowledge claims.
- It is not beyond the pale to question someone’s personal motives for doing research or their viewpoint as positivist epistemology would have it.
Black women as agents of knowledge
To exist in the academy many Black women have had to reject the principles of Black feminist epistemology. Black women had to prove that they could master white male epistemologies to survive Black feminists had to then grapple with competing epistemologies – their own realities vs. the worlds they worked in.
The emphasis is not on how Black women’s standpoint differs from other groups. Rather the emphasis is on how ‘Black women’s collective experiences serve as one specific social location for examining points of connection among multiple epistemologies’ (Collins, p. 270). So, it is not about Black women having a more accurate view than others.
‘Each group speaks from its own standpoint and shares its own partial, situated knowledge. But because each group perceives its own truth as partial, its knowledge is unfinished.’
Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 270.
The each group is able to consider others’ standpoints.
Aileen Moreton Robinson’s Indigenous Women’s standpoint theory mirrors many of the concerns and principles raised by PHC
Aileen Moreton-Robinson critiques first-world feminist standpoint theory such as that initiated by Sandra Harding. Feminist standpoint theory posts a body/earth split in which female humans are placed above other beings and the earth.
The approach to lived experience in Moreton Robinson is rather different to that of Collins. For Martin Nakata, it is an entry point to investigating how Indigenous experience sits within/against western knowledge. Indigenous standpoint ‘is not a social position but a discursive method.’ It recognises that everyone’s social position is discursively constituted within and constitutive of complex social relations (Nakata).
But, according to Moreton Robinson, Nakata does not account for gender differences. He ignores Collins’s point that who we are – or in this case how we are gendered – will inform how and what we know. He runs the risk of universalising Indigenous men’s experience as the experience of all Indigenous peoples.
Indigenous women’s standpoint is informed by:
Ontology (way of being):
- Derived from relations to country: ‘Knowledge and beliefs from the origin time inform the present and future’ (p. 340)
- Ontological relationship is created through the connections between Ancestral beings, humans and country: ‘Indigenous women’s bodies signify our sovereignty’ (p. 341). This ontological relationship to country was not destroyed by colonisation.
Epistemology (ways of knowing):
Coming to knowledge is constituted by relationality – ‘one experiences the self as part of others and others as part of the self’ (p. 341). It is the antithesis of being a privileged knower within the academy which emphasises disconnection and individualised pursuit of knowledge.
Because a person is worth no more than other living beings/the earth ‘respect and caution frame my approach to knowledge production; the more that I know the less that I know because there are other forms of knowledge that exist beyond us as humans. One cannot know everything and everything cannot be known’ (p. 341).
Indigenous women have shared experiences and knowledges – e.g. the common experience of living in a society that deprecates them (p. 341). This does not mean that there isn’t diversity within Indigenous women’s experiences.
Axiology (ways of doing)
Axiology is informed by ontology and epistemology and is an extension of communal responsibilities and sovereignties (p. 342). It is formed by relationality.
Like for Collins, for Moreton Robinson, dialogue is important, as well as contemplation. Thinking and reflection takes a long time and incorporates shared meanings as well as differences and contradictions. Producing research is a process of years, based on dialogue and reflection in that process.
Use Padlet again to think about how you are thinking through these dimensions in your own research.