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.

The Colonial Constitution ofPolyas a Racial and Linguistic Category through Policing, Gentrification, and an Ideology of Oppressionlessness

“…I also call upon the need for studies by means of raciolinguistic wayfinding in conversation with longstanding pedagogical theory. This pedagogical theory reveals the generative power relations that are developed when communities name the world on their own terms, especially the power to organize against White supremacy and systems of oppression (Freire 1970; Wong 2021).…”

“…Notably, decentering European‐descended academic traditions will also allow for the vision needed to honor, sustain, and revitalize ways of knowing, being, speaking, and valuing without romanticizing or tokenizing non‐European descended modes of existing (for more on de/centering from the vantage point of culturally sustaining pedagogy, see Alim, Paris, and Wong 2020; Wong 2021). When non‐European‐descended ways of existing are in alignment with White supremacy, scholars of neo‐coloniality like Thiong'o (1993) have pointed out how those ways of existing have been strengthened.…”

The Logic of Posthuman Inquiry: Affirmative Politics, Validity, and Futurities

“…These are studies that make claims about the activity of actor networks, the constitution and movement of sociomaterial assemblages, the ontological movement of nomadic subjects, the agentic behavior of nonhuman and material phenomena, and the complexity of intra-actions 3 between humans, our ways of knowing, and the materiality of things-for example, studies of neuron functions (Taguchi, 2016), curriculum content (Gleason, 2021;Gleason & Franklin-Phipps, 2019;S. L. Pratt, 2022;Sellers, 2013), health and disease (Andrews & Duff, 2019;Mol, 2002), marketing products (Ramaswamy & Ozcan, 2016), architecture (Dovey & Wood, 2015), the experience and function of gender (Huuki & Renold, 2016;Renold & Ringrose, 2019), racism (Dernikos, 2020;Dixon-Román, 2017;Guerrero-Arias, 2021;Rosiek, 2019;Rosiek & Kinslow, 2016), artificial intelligence and data science (Dixon-Román, 2020;Dixon-Román et al, 2020, mathematics education (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2014), educational research (Wong, 2021), and more. The focus on describing the movement of ontologically protean phenomena constitutes a novel unit of analysis in contemporary social inquiry, one that is more dynamic than those found in positivist social analysis, interpretive studies of social meaning, critical studies of ideology and material economic power, or genealogical studies of the discursive production of culture and institutional arrangements.…”

Cultivating collective praxis for scholarly transformation and racial justice: The Critical Race Theory collective’s introduction to the special issue

“…CRT-based library and information activists do this and more: we are also embedded in the praxes of working in service for the benefit of communities of resistance and and intellectual legacies (Davis, 2016;Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021;Rodney et al, 2019;Sivanandan, 1990;Taylor, 2017;Wong, 2021). As Dunbar puts it (2021, p. 131), this requires "courage of character and commitment" in the face of the "cowardliness of comfortable contentment" that dominates the majority of discourse and practice in the LIS field.…”

“…CRTc also seeks to follow in legacies and movements of restorative and transformative theory and practice (O'Reilly, 2019;Winn, 2018). This is particularly inspired by Wong's (2021) (Bell, 1980) 2 for transformative justice ends. Our shared vision was founded through forms of mutual recognition despite our differences; recognition that we shared the same values and determination to challenge and change the injustices in our respective knowledge domains.…”