What If I Just Cite Graciela? Working Toward Decolonizing Knowledge Through a Critical Ethnography

Abstract

Calls for decolonizing knowledge have been heard from multiple fronts for some time. At issue are questions regarding who gets to claim knowledge, how knowledge is claimed, and how is one to go about gaining knowledge. This article raises questions about the actual practice of decolonizing academic knowledge focusing on the implications of having to claim sanctioned intellectual traditions to be considered a legitimate player. The author wrestles with the fact that people like Graciela, a woman who became an actor in her ethnographic work and shared her reflections about social life, are among the many nonacademics who are typically the subject of research but are rarely considered worth citing as part of one's intellectual grounding. The author brings her own experience doing a critical ethnography with Graciela and other Mexican nonacademics, including issues they raised, as a way of anchoring her questions in praxis.

Results of a participatory needs assessment demonstrate an opportunity to involve people who use alcohol in drug user activism and harm reduction

“…Initial analytic work took place at daily debriefing meetings. While not a formal academic process, these initial reflections impacted data collection and helped develop ideas that were refined in a more traditional process of critical analysis using NVivo 7 [4]. …”

Decolonizing “Community” in Community Psychology

“…These recommendations are influenced by desire‐based frameworks (see Anzaldúa, ; Tuck, ) that seek to construct a fuller representation of people, issues, and communities; one that is geared toward capturing complexity and contradiction and “depathologizing the experiences of dispossessed and disenfranchised communities so that people are seen as more than broken and conquered” (Tuck, ; p. 419). Crucially, desire‐based frameworks open up epistemic possibilities for students who occupy subaltern locations that allow for the complexities and contradictions that characterize these relationships (Dutta, ; Reyes Cruz, ).…”

“…This is an example of what it means to read “against” canonical texts—deconstructing the perceived normalcy of dominant knowledge, exposing its historically and culturally specific character and inherent exclusions. Second, these critical framings must be combined with scholarship that foregrounds indigenous and other marginalized knowledges (e.g., Alexander, ; Battiste, Bell, & Findlay, ; Bulhan, ; Reyes Cruz, ; Reyes Cruz & Sonn, ; Smith, ; Tuck, ). Finally, it is as imperative to include readings and discussions that interrogate whiteness—as a structural advantage, as a worldview, and as a set of unmarked and unnamed cultural practices (e.g., Fine, Weis, Powell, & Wong, ; Frankenberg, ; Leonardo & Zembylas, ; Sonn, ).…”

“…The complex positionalities (both complicit and disruptive) that are salient to these experiences do not map on to presuppositions of uncomplicated, discrete, researcher identities that are embedded in the notion of community‐as‐Other. Often students are compelled to don the mantle of the disengaged and disembodied researcher within their own communities or risk their intellectual productions being labeled as “biased” or “particular” (see Reyes Cruz, ; Villenas, ). How do we then create spaces that allow for a blending of being and knowing that allow us (teachers and students) to write ourselves into resistance, to unapologetically go after structures of power that produce and sustain oppression?…”

Decolonial Pedagogy in Community Psychology: White Students Disrupting White Innocence via a Family Portrait Assignment

“…A decolonizing standpoint seeks to deconstruct and challenge the coloniality of power. The work of Dutta (), Montero (, ), Reyes Cruz (, ), Serrano‐García (), Seedat and Suffla (), and Sonn (, ), among other critical community psychologists from the Global South, asserts that a community psychology for liberation is possible through the deconstruction of racialized coloniality as it intertwines with systems of power that maintain the structures of whiteness.…”