Weaving an Otherwise

In-Relations Methodological Practice

Amanda Tachine, Z Nicolazzo, Amanda Tachine, Z Nicolazzo

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781642673357
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación superior

Who (and what) are you bearing witness to (and for) through your research? When you witness, what claims are you making about who and what matters? What does your research forget, and does it do it on purpose? This book reconceptualizes qualitative research as an in-relations process, one that is centered on, fully concerned with, and lifts up, those who have been and continue to be dispossessed, harmed, dehumanized, suffered, and erased because of white supremacy, settler colonialism, or other hegemonic world views.It prompts scholars to make connections between themselves as "researchers" and affect, ancestors, community, family and kinship, space and place, and the more than human beings with whom they are always already in community. What are the modes and ways of knowing through which we approach our research? How can the practice of research bring us closer to the peoples, places, more than human beings, histories, presents, and futures in which we are embedded and connected to? If we are the instruments of our research, then how must we be attentive to all of the affects and relations that make us who we are and what will become? These questions animate Weaving an Otherwise, providing a wellspring from which we think about our interconnections to the past, present, and future possibilities of research.After an opening chapter by the editors that explores the consequences and liberating opportunities of rejecting dominant qualitative methodologies that erase the voices of the subordinated and disdained, the contributors of nine chapters explore and enact approaches that uncover hidden connections and reveal unconscious value systems.

PART ONE

BEFORE

1

REFUSING NEOLIBERAL LOGICS IN RESEARCH DESIGN

Samuel D. Museus and Amy C. Wang

Like many people, I was seduced by the opportunity to pursue research with my communities to advocate positive change in society. The passion to advocate with these communities drove me into my doctoral program, eager to learn how to conduct research that could advance their cause. I took research methods courses in graduate school that were taught by prominent scholars in the field. I learned how to select methodological approaches to answer research questions, design rigorous empirical inquiries, utilize various data collection and analysis techniques, and of course navigate IRB processes. We were taught that these tools were what we needed to contribute to knowledge that would serve our communities.

Aspects of the research process with which I would grapple the most throughout my career were completely absent from the methods curriculum. After I became a faculty member, I would have to navigate the politics of competition in social justice scholarly circles and the complexities of working with diverse communities whose histories and political agendas heavily shaped the ways I could and did work with them through research processes. While we had courses that dealt with issues directly related to diverse communities, the curriculum did not provide space to learn about the moral issues that arise when researching with them. While graduate school served me in many ways, it left me ill-equipped to deal with these human dynamics of research, which were ignored so we could consume all of the tools and techniques necessary to carry out concrete tasks and maximize our “productivity” after graduation.

—Sam

Scholars at the margins have lived with tangible systemic violence that harms real lives in the communities that they love. The desire to disrupt the destruction of human lives and the environment, which we use to refer to Indigenous land and waterways, drives many to pursue academic careers, and it also sustains them. It should come as no surprise that many graduate programs fail to center these elements of the research process. After all, the academy is extremely effective and efficient at stripping people and things of their humanity (Museus, 2020). Within scholarly research, academic cultures bombard people with messages that they must focus on the rapid production of quantifiable things over what is best for people and environment (Gonzales & Núñez, 2014).

What does research design look like when human connections are central to, rather than stripped from, it? We invite you to imagine the possibilities with us. The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, we critique the ways in which the current culture of academia is a process of inculcating settler colonial and neoliberal logics that encourage scholars to dehumanize the research process. In addition, we discuss how we grapple with concepts of reflexivity, responsibility, and relationships. We believe that such critical questions might help infuse humanity throughout its research endeavors.

Settler Colonialism, Neoliberalism, and Academic Capitalism

Patrick Wolfe (1999) explains that settler colonialism is an existing and evolving structure founded upon the removal of Indigenous peoples from land as a precondition of settlement. In settler colonial states, settlers have aimed “to control space, resources, and people not only by occupying land but also by establishing an exclusionary private property regime and coercive labor systems, including chattel slavery to work the land, extract resources, and build infrastructure” (Glenn, 2015, p. 52). Therefore, settler colonialism is founded on the theft of Indigenous land and pervasive logics of Native erasure (la paperson, 2017).

Settler colonialism and neoliberalism are inextricably intertwined (Lloyd & Wolfe, 2016), and the latter makes the contours of the former more apparent (Grande, 2018). Settler colonialism is fueled by desires to steal, accumulate, and exploit Indigenous land for national economic gain. Neoliberalism has become the dominant political logic around the globe and demands an ever-expanding exploitation of people, land, and water to accumulate capital and redistribute it into the hands of the corporate elite (Lloyd & Wolfe, 2016). To realize this exploitation, neoliberalism seeks to individualize all communities, assimilate them into the neoliberal political economy, and remove Indigenous communities from the land.

Neoliberalism is a market-driven political logic that permeates societies in the United States and around the globe (Brown, 2006). There is no single definition of neoliberalism, but literature critiquing it consistently highlights several common elements (Museus & LePeau, 2019). First, neoliberalism infuses consumerism throughout society and fuels a culture where the potential revenue that people and things are capable of producing determines their value. Second, neoliberalism is grounded in values of hyper-competition and false meritocracy, encouraging people to prioritize their own individual self-interest to survive and maximize their accumulation of resources and eroding community. Third, neoliberal forces create and infuse systems of surveillance (e.g., monitoring and reporting) throughout society to guarantee people comply with neoliberal rationalities, which erode trust. Fourth, neoliberal systems provide people with limited resources and place fiscal responsibility on individuals, ensuring perpetual precarity that treats people as expendable and pressures them to fight for their own survival. Finally, neoliberal systems shift energy away from declining moral imperatives and pressure people to constantly focus their energies and efforts on capital accumulation (Museus & LePeau, 2019).

Neoliberalism is reshaping institutions of higher education into increasingly entrepreneurial organizations. Writing about academic capitalism, Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades (2004) detail the ways in which neoliberalism has influenced how institutions of higher education function, but they also underscore how colleges and universities have become active players in reinforcing neoliberal logics and reinscribing them throughout the higher education system. These processes also reinforce the universities’ continued occupation of Indigenous land, exploitation of human resources to work the land, and continued efforts to accumulate more stolen land and capital at the expense of Indigenous communities.

It is difficult to find spaces or environments on college campuses that are not infected with neoliberal rationalities in some way, shape, or form. As a result, scholars’ socialization into academia has largely become socialization into the neoliberal order (Harney & Moton, 2013). This socialization into the neoliberal knowledge economy also acts as a process of researchers becoming tools to be exploited by the settler state and university.

In the following sections, we utilize personal narratives to highlight how we grapple with becoming a tool of the neoliberal university, and therefore the settler state, and engage the reader in considering the implications of these stories. In doing so, we use the term we to refer to the authors and you to reference the reader. However, it is important to note that everything we say to “you,” we have said to ourselves, as we are all a part of this system.

The Neoliberal Machine and Socialization Into Academic Research

In one course, we devoted the entire term to writing drafts of a dissertation fellowship application for a large foundation. I remember having mixed emotions, ranging from excitement to dread. Initially, I was grateful for an opportunity to sit down and think through my proposal in ways that could lead to funding, which I so desperately need as a graduate student. The overwhelming fear of failure came over me. What if I am not good enough? What if they do not find it interesting? What if they think the topic is not important? Still, I was excited to spend our class preparing applications for a renowned award that this scholar and that scholar won. I began to wonder how I can make myself more enticing, my work more cutting-edge, and my problem statement more dramatic.

By the third iteration of the proposal, I realized I was not prioritizing my ideas or writing for myself. Instead, I absorbed the metrics put forth by the foundation and was spending a significant amount of time reading unrelated studies just to make sure that my proposal was as unique as I claimed it to be. For instance, I changed my explanation of why a particular method aligned with my study to an extensive soliloquy of how this method was cutting-edge to my field of study and no one was doing this work. What I had in front of me was not just a proposal, it was a manifestation of my fears and anxieties around academic precarity, competition, and market desires. When I realized I had lost my original train of thought, I saw my proposal got worse and was misaligned in several areas because I had been so concerned with showing off and trying to “win.”

—Amy

As you come into the academy with a primary emphasis on advocating with the oppressed and advancing moral causes, you are quickly socialized into shifting your energy toward generating external revenue, fighting for lead authorship for maximum credit, accumulating prestige through publishing a maximum number of articles in top-tier journals, and optimizing your visibility via social media branding and self-promotion measured through the number of likes and retweets. The desire to optimally perform according to these metrics is also supposed to shape the work you choose to pursue and the ways you design and execute research.

Your socialization into academic research has pressured you to adopt neoliberal logics. You are taught that it is ideal if you can meet the ever-increasing standards and expectations at warp speed to maximize output and return on your investments of time and energy, leaving little room for continuous reflection that is so important in your decolonizing and justice work. In turn, the combined rapid-fire pace and absence of reflection create conditions that are ripe for you to adopt hyper-competitive logics that you are taught will increase your marketability, maximize your professional mobility, and minimize your precarity.

You are also trained to think of research as primarily an individual endeavor, even if you sometimes work with other people. After all, you will be evaluated as an individual for jobs, performance, promotion, and tenure. Even when collaboration is encouraged, the neoliberal machine asserts that you should only engage if you see direct benefits to you that outweigh the additional time required to make collaboration deep and meaningful. The academy conditions you to believe that time and energy spent on things like building genuine relationships and community will undermine your professional goals. In some cases, the systemic pressures to play the neoliberal game and beat everyone in it might become so overwhelming that they reshape your perspectives and become the dominant force shaping your approaches and actions.

You cannot disentangle yourself from the academy while you are situated within it. You cannot divorce, excuse yourself from, or “resist” the neoliberal structures, discourse, and logics shaping your scholarly communities, constantly measuring you, and determining your futures in the academy. However, knowing that you are situated within the neoliberal machine can make it more possible to acknowledge that academic researchers can pursue equity while simultaneously reproducing the technologies that stem from the neoliberal apparatus. Acknowledging that the knowledge economy is an arm of the neoliberal regime within the settler state might make it more likely that you will refuse the neoliberal machine and its logics.

The Neoliberal Paradox and Refusing Neoliberal Logics

How many articles do you have now?

How many do you have in the pipeline?

How many does your institution require for tenure?

How many things are you presenting this year!?

You going to get that early career award?

When I began the tenure track, I began receiving pressures to think about metrics that never consumed my intellectual energy before. I recall being pressured to constantly think about numbers of publications, order of authorship and how much credit researchers were being given for their contributions, and the number of citations I had accrued. I also remember most of my conversations at national conferences revolving around how many papers we were presenting at the convention, how many articles we had produced, how many publications our institutions expected us to publish to get tenure, and who was receiving national awards for their scholarship. The general tone of the discourse was consistently that we all needed to be doing more, and everyone should be aiming for awards that will validate them and prove their worth.

During these pre-tenured years, almost never did I have the opportunity to participate in conversations about the ways in which we were pressured to shift our attention away from doing the most transformative work possible to maximizing our outputs and visibility. In this world, doing transformative work and maximizing outputs became one in the same. This context led to many of us deeply internalizing neoliberal rationalities and turning us into parts of the machine. If this happens, we continue to unapologetically reinforce and spread these logics until we confront them.

—Sam

This clash between neoliberal socialization and the moral values that propelled many of you to enter academia creates what we sometimes refer to as a neoliberal paradox. The notion of a paradox centers on how these forms of socialization reinforce the notion that you can do equity work, as long as you do it according to the neoliberal regime’s rules and help spread the same logics that have decimated and subjugated marginalized communities. You can advocate with your communities, but you must do so through hyper-competition with them. You can conduct research on issues most relevant to the communities you love, as long as you do so by standards that they did not define and publish the findings in journals they will never read. You can try to have a positive impact on your communities, as long as doing so does not shift your gaze too far from the superficial quantifiable metrics that your institution’s surveillance systems prioritize. At some point in your careers, some of you will question whether the positive impact you sought to have by entering the academy is even possible when it requires you to spend so much of your time feeding the systems that you seek to eradicate.

A silver lining to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Forward, or Rather, Toward
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Before
• Part Two: During
• Part Three: After
• Afterword: Before, After, During the 100-Year Weave
• About the Authors
• Index
• Also available from Stylus
• Backcover