Transformative Visions for Qualitative Inquiry

Norman K. Denzin, Michael D. Giardina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000590968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Transformative Visions for Qualitative Inquiry takes as its central theme the idea of transformation, transformative action, transformative possibilities, and potentialities for the future for qualitative inquiry. In a present moment defined by a pandemic of meanings over COVID-19, climate change, political upheaval, inequality, and oppression of all kinds, contributors to this volume seek a new way forward—to reimagine a post-pandemic pedagogy of hope and compassion both for qualitative research and for the communities in which we inhabit. Empathy. Healing. Collaboration. Survival. Discomfort. Protection. Justice. Creative agency. The arts. These are the watchwords for the road ahead.

In these uncertain times, leading international scholars from the United States, Canada, and Australia look ahead with a renewed sense of hope, but remain grounded in the reality that much work lies ahead—that our inquiry must meet the demands of our hopeful but evolving future. More specifically, contributors focus on such topics as: academic healing; environmental justice; the hegemony of higher education and challenges to critical education; arts-based research such as songwriting, participatory workshops, and autopoetics; disruptions to conventional humanist and Western modes of thought; and questions of empathy and spirit-writing.

Transformative Visions for Qualitative Inquiry is a must-read for faculty and students alike who are interested in imagining new ways to restore healing from the pandemic—to push back, resist, heal, share, laugh, and live.

SECTION III Artistic Transformations

8 Allying Arts-Based and Indigenous Approaches for Environmental Protection and Social Justice

Geo Takach

DOI: 10.4324/9781003254010-11

This exploratory work allies two compatible modes of inquiry situated beyond dominant, “Western” research paradigms in pursuit of sustaining a healthier planet and a more just society. The first is arts-based research, drawing on methods of information-gathering, synthesis, analysis, and presentation from disciplines in the arts to engage and inspire our hearts as well as our minds (Leavy, 2020). The second is Indigenous research (Wilson, 2007, 2008), which follows guiding principles that may be compatible with arts-based and environmentalist thought.

I am a privileged, non-Indigenous “person of pallor” and an uninvited visitor to the traditional lands of the Xwsepsum and Lekwungen ancestors and families, in what’s often called the capital regional district on the southwest shore of Vancouver Island, Canada. As such, I seek to respond to and connect aspects of those two approaches respectfully, synergistically, and without continuing colonialist practices, in service of addressing and redressing environmental and social injustices.

Rooted in communication studies, this multimodal adventure aims to build an analytical foundation for such an alliance by exploring causes and challenges common to both of those forms of injustice that have led to ongoing global crises. Working from that foundation, I investigate how aspects of arts-based and Indigenous research perspectives can be interwoven to create evocative communications about the urgent need for greater environmental protection—while hopefully also building and maintaining more respectful relationships with Indigenous Peoples and their ways of knowing and being. I share my initial findings through a short film, Environmental Relations (Takach, 2021b) and reflect on these methods of inquiry.

The Calamitous Coin

It’s no secret that two of the most complex, wicked, and horrifying crimes visited by humanity on the Earth and its renters are, first, environmental devastation in the form of climate change, biodiversity loss and species extinction, razed forests, air pollution, islands of plastic in the oceans, overpopulation, overproduction of waste, etc., and second, the continuing dispossession, and attempted eradication and erasure of the planet’s First Peoples.

For example, Canada ranks as the world’s best country (U.S. News and World Report, 2021), enjoyed a once-glowing international reputation for environmental leadership (Skene, 2018), and placed fourteenth on the UN’s Human Development Index (United Nations Development Programme, 2020). Yet it ranks ninth in the world in total emissions of greenhouse gases and fifth in per-capita emissions (World Population Review, 2020); second to Saudi Arabia in subsidies per GDP to the fossil-fuel industry (International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2020); and very poorly in protecting biodiversity (World Wildlife Fund-Canada, 2020). Meanwhile, our federal government has led a cultural genocide (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada [TRC], 2015), a protracted, systemic effort to displace Indigenous Peoples from their traditional territories and ways of living, confine them to reserves and dishonor their most fundamental human rights (Coulthard, 2014; Ladner & Tait, 2017). This genocide included removing Indigenous children from their homes and placing them in residential schools, where they suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and thousands died. Many of these children ended up in unmarked graves, some recent “discoveries” of which were featured in popular media (although mentioned earlier in the TRC’s report), causing widespread trauma (Honderich, 2021). In Canada, Indigenous women and girls continue to disappear and be murdered in great numbers (National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, 2019). And 32 Indigenous communities still lacked clean drinking water in 2021 (Cecco, 2021).

Although these two crises—environmental and Indigenous—may seem separate, both enrich elites from industry and the state at the expense of the Earth and local communities (Berkes, 2015). So we can see harmful achievements like the unbridled commodification of what we call “natural resources” and the subjugation and destruction of Indigenous Peoples as two sides of the same calamitous coin: colonization. Inflicting harm on other things and people to suit acquisitive impulses.

So why do we colonize?

Environmentally, the so-called Enlightenment, hatching the grandly ironically named Age of Reason and its signature project, the Industrial Revolution, has artificially severed people from the natural ecosystems that sustain all life on Earth (Forbes, 2008; Umeek/Atleo, 2005). We have built and migrated to humongous conglomerations of concrete in growing numbers: 55% of the world’s population now lives in cities, with 68% projected by 2050 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2018). That aside, our cultural products suggest that our rising use of technology and ever-expanding indoor-recreation options have contributed to a psychic detachment from nature (Kesebir & Kesebir, 2017).

We spend growing hunks of our lives hunched over flickering screens, focusing on “social” media, cryptocurrencies, “tourist” space travel and other dazzling diversions from the physical world. Meanwhile, life-sustaining gifts like air, water and trees offer appreciably less entertainment value, which is exalted in societies hopped up in the rat race of the moment. In particular, stress, anxiety, and depression have been found to be ubiquitous internationally in the age of COVID-19 (Morin et al., 2021).

In “Western” society, we valorize the rights of the individual over the wellbeing of the greater commonwealth, in a condition that the seminal Indigenous- rights advocate Jack D. Forbes (2008) called egocentric psychosis and framed as cannibalistic, suicidal and therefore illogical and even ridiculous. The Apalech scholar Tyson Yunkaporta (2020) refers to this human hubris as malignant narcissism. In two frightening examples at this writing, demonstrators harassed hospital workers and disrupted an annual ceremony honoring war veterans (Cranston, 2021) to protest state-supported COVID-19 vaccinations based on the demonstrators’ “rights” and “freedoms.” To my mind, this epitomizes an ethos so far up its righteous armpit as to achieve freedom from any responsibilities to others—or in rights lingo, other people’s right to avoid being exposed to unvaccinated folks who are more likely to spread the coronavirus.

One could argue that 200,000 years of evolution have hardwired us for present-mindedness: acquisition and consumption (Akpan, 2019). Often we seem more prone to meeting our immediate needs (What’s for lunch?) than to taking a longer view of the impacts of our bootprint on what or whomever we tread or bulldoze. Contemplating the future may be a relatively recent phenomenon in societies built on the European model, but Indigenous practice on this differs, as noted below.

Another reason that we colonize: human history shows that dominating nature and others is apparently something that some of us need or maybe even like to do. Beyond the aforesaid ecological crises, take the Punic Wars, Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia and schoolyard bullying. Please! The Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith observes that imperialism is a product of the same Enlightenment thinking that relegated non-Europeans to the status of the Other, primitives and somehow less than human (2021, p. 35).

So why don’t we stop colonizing? Apparently, it’s not that easy. Compounding our twin crises are at least four latent but formidable dragons.

Inertia and the status quo feed our deep-seated desire for everything to be okay, so we create the illusion that it is. When nature responds to our cannibalistic shenanigans with record-setting, scorching heatwaves, and cataclysmic flooding, we start calling it “the new normal” (e.g., Bokat-Lindell, 2021; U.S. Small Business Administration, 2018). And when the dictates of the workplace overwhelm what’s left of our personal lives, we console ourselves with Darwinist bromides like “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (e.g., Ruschen, 2016) and then we get on with it. Because time is money, and under most existing societal structures, we seem to need that to live.

We swirl in a toxic tornado of consumerism that never stops for lunch—although it does serve it up and spit it out, along with every other product or service conceivable and inconceivable. A century ago, the PR pioneer Edward Bernays (1928/2016) channeled his uncle, Sigmund Freud, to deduce that although we may never become complete human beings in control of our destinies, we could be made to feel that way by buying things to satisfy our needs. The global ad industry remains heavily invested in this principle: it’s estimated to earn $690 billion USD in 2022 (Statista, 2021). Business as usual is good business—for some. And it doesn’t stop there, as a feature of consumer culture is that what you buy can become part of your very identity (Mathur, 2013).

Another barrier to breaking free from entrenched patterns of extractivism is that our lives have become embedded in a petroculture (Wilson, Carlson, & Szeman, 2017). So much that we consume comes from fossil fuels, quintessentially gasoline burned and belched into the atmosphere, but also in the form of petrochemicals found in less obvious products like pain relievers, chewing gum, shampoo, clothing, and most items made of plastic (Goodluck, 2019), like heart valves, computers, and kayaks. Economic imperatives continue to clash with and overrun environmental and human-rights concerns, no matter how cannibalistic and suicidal business-as-usual may be (Forbes, 2008).

A fourth reason for our colonization of planet and people is that in relatively well-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Transformative Visions for Qualitative Inquiry
• Section I Performative Transformations
• Section II Philosophical Transformations
• Section III Artistic Transformations
• Coda: Trumpism and the Challenge of Critical Education
• Editor Bios
• Index