Edited by Andrew J. Jolivette

METHODOLOGIES FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

RESEARCH JUSTICE

Methodologies for social change

Edited by Andrew J. Jolivétte

in collaboration with

DataCenter: Research for Justice

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

Policy Press North America office: University of Bristol Policy Press 1-9 Old Park Hill c/o The University of Chicago Press Bristol 1427 East 60th Street BS2 8BB Chicago, IL 60637, USA UK t: +1 773 702 7700 +44 (0)117 954 5940 f: +1 773 702 9756 pp-info@bristol.ac.uk sales@press.uchicago.edu www.policypress.co.uk www.press.uchicago.edu © Policy Press 2015

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In loving memory of my mother

Annetta Donan Foster-Jolivétte

(January 16, 1944—September 5, 2012)

To all our ancestor spirits

who have fought, and who continue to fight, for justice

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Contents

Notes on contributors viiAcknowledgments xvForeword by Miho Kim Lee xvii

Part One: Research Justice: Strategies for knowledge construction and 1 self-determinationone Research Justice: Radical love as a strategy for social transformation 5

Andrew J. Jolivéttetwo Imagining justice: Politics, pedagogy, and dissent 13

Antonia Darderthree Blurred lines: Creating and crossing boundaries between 27

interviewer and subjectAmanda Freeman

four Ethnography as a Research Justice strategy 33Liam Martin

five Queered by the archive: No More Potlucks and the 43 activist potential of archival theoryAndrea Zeffiro and Mél Hogan

six More than me 57Nicole Blalock

Part Two: Research Justice: Strategies for community mobilization 63seven The socio-psychological stress of ‘justice denied’: 69

Alan Crotzer’s storyAkeem T. Ray and Phyllis A.Gray

eight Formerly incarcerated women: Returning home to family and 81 communityMarta López-Garza

nine Disaster justice: Mobilizing grassroots knowledge against 95 disaster nationalism in JapanHaruki Eda

ten A health justice journey: Documenting our stories and speaking for 109 ourselvesAlma Leyva, Imelda S. Plascencia, and Mayra Yoana Jaimes Pena

eleven By us, not for us: Black women researching pregnancy and 117 childbirthJulia Chinyere Oparah, Fatimah Salahuddin, Ronnesha Cato, Linda Jones, Talita Oseguera, and Shanelle Matthews

twelve Actos del corazón: Las sabias—bridging the digital divide, and 139 redefining historical preservationCathryn Josefina Merla-Watson with the Corazones del Westside

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Part Three: Research Justice: Strategies for social transformation and 151 policy reformthirteen Everyday justice: Tactics for navigating micro, macro, and structural 157

discriminations from the intersection of Jim Crow and Hurricane KatrinaSandra E. Weissinger

fourteen The revolutionary, non-violent action of Danilo Dolci and his 171 maieutic approachDomenica Maviglia

fifteen Telling to reclaim, not to sell: Resistance narratives and the 185 marketing of justiceAmrah Salomón J.

sixteen Decolonizing knowledge: Toward a critical Research Justice praxis 199 in the urban sphereMichelle Fine

seventeen Decolonizing knowledge: Toward a critical indigenous Research 205 Justice praxisLinda Tuhiwai Smith

Index 211

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Notes on contributors

Nicole Blalock is a mixed-heritage activist scholar and artist whose work applies Native American Studies to the examination of education, schooling, and the development of culturally sustaining pedagogies. Dr. Blalock is currently serving as a Fulton Postdoctoral Fellow for educational equity in diverse schools with the Mary Lou Fulton Teacher’s College at Arizona State University. Her research is largely interdisciplinary and incorporates her interests in contemporary society and how its policies and practices influence learning and achievement. She is also interested in issues of representation, identity, and sovereignty as related to the tensions of tribal memberships, nation-to-nation politics, and decolonization. Although distinct activities, Dr. Blalock’s research and art run a parallel course, developing and enriching her understanding of critical issues in society. Both are the result of archiving experience and thought and draw from her own rich academic, professional, and personal history. www.nicole-renee.com

Ronnesha Cato is an African American woman, community doula, mother, and activist who lives in East Oakland, California. She is currently a student majoring in history, with aspirations of becoming a history teacher in addition to a midwife. Ronnesha’s interest in birthing justice stems from her own experiences with childbirth. In 2010, while pregnant, she studied the different techniques and procedures associated with birth, but grew increasingly dissatisfied with western scientific medicine. This led her to look deeper into women’s holistic health and educating women on their rights to control their birth experiences. Ronnesha believes that, if more women of color approached the mainstream medical system with the perspective that women should have support, encouragement, and birth education, the infant mortality and high C-section rate in African American women would drop.

Antonia Darder holds the Leavey Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Leadership at Loyola Marymount University and Professor Emerita of Education Policy Studies at University of Illinois. She has authored numerous books and publications, including Culture and power in the classroom; A dissident voice; and Freire and education.

Haruki Eda is a member of Eclipse Rising, a U.S.-based Zainichi Korean community organization working for social justice and peaceful unification of Korea. He is also a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. His research focuses on diaspora, queer theory, and social movements, with an emphasis on Asia/Pacific. An earlier version of his chapter received the Phillips G. Davies Graduate Student Paper Award by the National Association for Ethnic Studies. He holds a BA in sociology from San Francisco State University, an MSc in gender, development

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and globalisation from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an MA in sociology from Rutgers University. He has received a fellowship from the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University for a graduate seminar on archipelagic studies in 2015-16. His doctoral dissertation explores how diasporic Korean community organizers envision unification from a feminist, queer, anti-imperialist, and decolonial perspective.

Michelle Fine is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Urban Education at the City University of New York. She is a founding faculty member of the Public Science Project, which produces critical scholarship for use in social policy debates and organizing movements for educational equity and human rights. Fine is a recipient of honorary degrees from Bank Street College and Lewis and Clark University, and is a much sought-after commencement speaker. A sampling of her most cited books and policy monographs includes: The changing landscape of public education (2013), with Michael Fabricant; Charter schools and the corporate makeover of public education (2012), with Michael Fabricant; Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion (2008), with Julio Cammarota; Muslim-American youth (2008), with Selcuk Sirin; and her classic Framing dropouts: Notes on the politics of an urban high school (1991). Fine has received the 2013 American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy, the 2012 Henry Murray Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology of the APA, the 2010 Social Justice and Higher Education Award from the College and Community Fellowship for her work in prison, and the 2011 Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award for her mentoring legacy over the past 25 years.

Amanda Freeman is a writer, professor and researcher based in Connecticut. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Central Connecticut State University, working to complete her PhD in sociology at Boston College. Amanda writes about the challenges facing low-income families in America. She wrote a six-part series of news articles about women and poverty for the Women in the World Foundation and the Ford Foundation, which appeared on the Newsweek Women in the World website. In 2013, she received the Dentler Award from the public sociology section of the American Sociological Association in recognition of “exceptional research and writing on the challenges facing low-income single mother-headed families and communication of research and its policy implications to a broader audience.”

Phyllis A. Gray is Professor of Sociology/Social Psychology and Criminology at Florida A&M University. She has published in national and international journals, and is the recipient of many honors and awards including induction into the prestigious Sigma Xi National Scientific Research Society. Her research has been funded by The National Science Foundation, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the

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Mississippi Department of Mental Health, the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, and the U.S. Department of Education. She is the author of two books: From imagining to understanding the African American experience and The disparate treatment of black youth in the juvenile justice system. She received her BSc degree in psychology from South Carolina State University, and the MSc degree and PhD in sociology from Iowa State University.

Mél Hogan is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Illinois Institute of Technology. Her research is at the intersection of media, archives, and the environment. Her most recent publications revolve around media and their ecological impacts, data storage centers, and server farms. As a practitioner, aspects of these same issues are addressed through media arts interventions and research design projects. Hogan is also a co-curator of online and p.o.d. journal of arts and politics, nomorepotlucks.org and a design consultant for mat3rial.org. mel@nomorepotlucks.org • www.nomorepotlucks.org • @nomorepotlucks

Amrah Salomón J. is a PhD candidate in ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her community work is focused on environmental justice, gender, sexuality, youth organizing, migrant rights, indigenous struggles, worker-owned cooperatives, and the creation of economic and environmental autonomy as an alternative to displacement and globalization. Her master’s thesis examines the Partido Liberal Mexicano as a transnational and internationalist movement that organized on both sides of the border to further the Mexican revolution. In her doctoral research she explores decolonial theory and epistemology, as well as engaging with cultural and gender studies to develop a more nuanced theoretical framework for analyzing grassroots counter-hegemonic projects and transformative cross-border organizing.

Andrew J. Jolivétte, chair of the American Indian Studies Department at San Francisco State University, is an accomplished educator, writer, speaker, and sociocultural critic. He is the author of three books: Cultural representation in Native America (AltaMira Press, 2006); Louisiana Creoles: Cultural recovery and mixed-race Native American identity (Lexington Books, 2007); and Obama and the biracial factor: The battle for a new American majority (Policy Press, 2012). He is currently completing work on his fifth book, Indian blood: Two-spirit return, mixed-race identity and HIV (University of Washington Press, 2016). Jolivétte’s writing has been featured in the American Indian Cultural and Research Journal, the Ethnic Studies Review Journal, The Yellow Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, as well as several anthologies. He is the former Vice-Chair of DataCenter: Research for Justice board of directors. He currently serves as a new board member with the African American Art and Culture Complex in San Francisco, and is the book series editor of Critical Indigenous and American Indian Studies at Peter Lang Publishing in New York. Professor Jolivétte recently served as scholar in residence in Native Sexualities and Public Health at the

Notes on contributors

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University of California, Santa Cruz in fall 2013. He was the Indigenous Peoples’ Representative at the United Nations Forum on HIV and the Law in 2011 during his two-year fellowship as an IHART (Indigenous HIV/AIDS Research Training Program) Fellow at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle. As a national speaker he has spoken to thousands of college students, educators, government employees, and private-sector organizations over the past decade across the United States and Australia.

Linda Jones is a birth and postpartum doula and mother of two who lives in Oakland, CA. She founded and owned Waddle and Swaddle Baby Boutique and Resource Center in Berkeley, CA, and has been a part of the natural birth advocacy community in the Bay Area for more than two decades. She belongs to Sistahs of the Good Birth, a group of black doulas who work with low-income mothers. She was one of the founders of a volunteer doula group that provided services for low-income, uninsured, and teen mothers who birthed at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley.

Alma Leyva is a Project Coordinator at the Dream Resource Center of the UCLA Labor Center. As a queer and undocumented woman, Alma has dedicated her work to advancing the rights and protections of undocumented communities and the identities that intersect them. Alma’s work is centered on developing leaders at the intersection of immigrant rights and healthcare access as a project coordinator of the Dream Resource Center. Alma is a lead researcher and author of the report Undocumented and Uninsured: Immigrant Youth and the Struggle to Access Health Care in California, the first statewide study by and about immigrant youth in California.

Marta López-Garza holds a joint position in Gender & Women’s Studies and Chicana/o Studies Departments at California State University, Northridge. Her current research is on formerly incarcerated women, the subject of her documentary, When will the punishment end?, which can be viewed at www.whenwillpunishmentend.net/. Recent publications include Betita Martinez: Compañera y Mentora in Social Justice.

Liam Martin is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at Boston College. His work draws on a range of approaches for engaging with the people and communities most affected by the prison system. Liam’s doctoral research, funded by the National Science Foundation, has involved nine months living in a halfway house for men leaving prison and jail—spread over three separate stays—and life history interviews with a network of former prisoners established while living at the house. Using this ethnographic approach, he examines how the prison experience follows people after they leave, the forces and processes that push people back toward prison, and the strategies of former prisoners rebuilding their lives while facing often extreme forms of social exclusion. Liam also teaches

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college courses inside Framingham and Norfolk state prisons through the Boston University prison education program.

Shanelle Matthews is a journalist, blogger, and all-round digital enthusiast. She is the communications strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, where she is tasked with creating visibility for the legal and programmatic work happening on the ground. A former journalist, she leads the communications and digital strategy for the ACLU-NC’s reproductive justice and LGBT rights work. She writes on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and has been published in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including Women’s eNews, The root, Feministing, RH reality check, and The frisky. Shanelle is a Progressive Women’s Voices alumnae from the Women’s Media Center, a Core Align Generative Fellow, and was recently awarded the Ida B. Wells Award for her commitment to communications by Black Women for Wellness. She studied new and online media at the Manship School of Mass Communications and is on the board of directors of the National Network of Abortion Funds.

Domenica Maviglia is Doctor of Philosophy in intercultural pedagogy at the Department of Cognitive Science, Education, and Cultural Studies, University of Messina (Italy). Her work focuses mainly on critical pedagogy and the theoretical and historical research in the field of pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of education, the history of pedagogy, and the history of education. In her career, she has worked with different educational and training institutions, taking part in educational research projects carried out in several schools.

Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Mexican American Studies Program at the University of Texas-Pan American, and a former recipient of the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. She co-edited, with Bill Mullen, Crossing the world color line: W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings on Asia (University Press of Mississippi, 2005), has authored chapters in The un/making of Latino citizenship: Culture, politics, and aesthetics (Palgrave, 2014), and has published in ACME—An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies. Her current book project, tentatively entitled Coloniality, the mission city, and queer Tejan@ sensibilities, examines the role of affect and embodied epistemologies in queer Tejan@ cultural production. She has also co-curated with B.V. Olguín a dossier focused on the Latin@ speculative arts in the journal Aztlán (forthcoming, fall 2015).

Julia Chinyere Oparah is an activist scholar, social justice educator, and experienced community organizer, who is dedicated to producing critical scholarship in the service of progressive social movements. Oparah is an African diaspora specialist, whose interests span a number of different social concerns, including activism by women of color, violence against women, women and the prison-industrial complex, restorative justice, queer and transgender liberation,

Notes on contributors

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race and adoption, Research Justice and birth activism. Oparah is Professor and Department Chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She is author of Other kinds of dreams: Black women’s organizations and the politics of organization, the only comprehensive history of the black women’s movement in Britain. She is editor of Global lockdown: Race, gender and the prison-industrial complex, a seminal work that mapped the connections between globalization, gender, and mass incarceration. She is also co-editor of three books: Activist scholarship: Antiracism, feminism and social change; Color of Violence: The incite! anthology; and Outsiders within: Writing on transracial adoption. She is currently working with the grassroots community organization Black Women Birthing Justice on a participatory action research project about black women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, and editing an anthology on black women in the birth justice movement.

Talita Oseguera is a twentysomething black woman whose passion is to increase access to healthcare. She works as Program Director of a non-profit adult day healthcare program with persons living with Alzheimer’s disease and other related dementias, in Berkeley, California. She is in the process of applying for a master’s degree in nursing programs and pursuing a career as a nurse practitioner. Talita has a three-year-old daughter. Her husband is away for six to nine months at a time pursuing his dream as a professional baseball player, and her life is parallel to that of a single mother. She feels incredibly blessed to have people, mostly women, around her who support her emotionally and physically, and believes that there is true power in women supporting women. Talita attended a Black Women Birthing Justice sharing circle, and found it a powerful experience to hear the stories of other women around the circle and liberating to share her own story.

Mayra Yoana Jaimes Pena is a Research/Project Coordinator at the Dream Resource Center (DRC) of the UCLA Labor Center. She has over seven years in organizing in Queer/Undocumented and student organizing. Her years of working with various communities has developed in her a strong passion for an intersectional approach to social justice. Her passion for justice has led her to work with the CIRCLE Project of the DRC to intentionally address intersectional immigrant issues through a health and restorative justice framework. Mayra Yoana is a lead researcher and co-author of the report Undocumented and Uninsured: Immigrant Youth and the Struggle to Access Health Care in California, the first statewide study in California by and about immigrant youth.

Imelda S. Plascencia is the Project Manager of Health Initiatives at the Dream Resource Center of the UCLA Labor Center, addressing the lack of access and healthcare for undocumented Californians. For the past 12 years, Imelda has organized with the immigrant rights movement as a Queer Undocumented activist. Her work centers on health justice and health access for immigrant communities, and intersectional organizing for LGBTQ immigrants.

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Akeem T. Ray received his Bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in communications from Florida State University. He has conducted research on youth-related issues and wrongful convictions. He is the co-author of Black Youth and the Juvenile Justice System, published in The disparate treatment of black youth in the juvenile justice system. His plans are to attend graduate school and further his interest in psychology. His goal is to become a college professor and a researcher.

Fatimah Salahuddin is a first-generation African American undergraduate student at Mills College, majoring in ethnic studies and education, and she has a long history of social justice activism and equity advocacy within her community. During her first semester at Mills College she was one of three students nominated for the Harry S. Truman Scholarship for students who possess a commitment to a career in public service. In addition, she became the first (and only) Half the Sky Movement Campus Ambassador for the PBS documentary series Half the Sky: Turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide, where she organized and hosted more than six screenings of the documentary throughout the Bay Area while spreading awareness of women’s rights. She has also been accepted into the accelerated dual-degree, Bachelors-to-Masters Program in Education with an Emphasis in Teaching, at Mills.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou) has a professional background in Māori and indigenous education. She currently serves as Pro Vice-Chancellor Māori at the University of Waikato. Her research interests are wide ranging and collaborative, and include Marsden-funded research on the Native Schools system and on New Zealand youth. She is known internationally for her work on research methodology, and Māori and indigenous education. Her book, Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples, has been translated into various languages and is highly regarded as a research text in indigenous and other research and educational institutes around the world. Many of her publications are credited with having helped to create the academic field of Māori and indigenous education.

Sandra E. Weissinger is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Her research focuses on resistance and resiliency strategies engaged in by groups facing a range of inequalities. She does this through qualitative, often ethnographic, research studies. Weissinger is the author of A Sociology of black clergy in the state of Illinois: Activism and acquiescence in the post-civil rights generation. Recent selections of her work can also be found in Race, class & gender: An anthology (8th edn.) and Beginning a career in academia: A guide for graduate students of color.

Andrea Zeffiro is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University (Canada). Her research intersects the cultural politics of emerging technologies, contemporary

Notes on contributors

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media histories, art activism and social justice, with a particular focus on the practices and processes of experimental digital media production. Zeffiro is co-curator of No More Potlucks, the Canadian journal of arts and politics. andrea@nomorepotlucks.org • www.nomorepotlucks.org • @nomorepotlucks

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Acknowledgments

Research Justice calls upon all community experts and witnesses to violence, legal violations, education and health disparities, and other social inequities to be active participants in processes for change and policy reform at local, regional, national, and global levels. The contributors to this volume are anchored with community organizations and non-profits, as well as with academic institutions. What the authors have in common is an understanding of the power associated with the knowledge production process as an outcome of research. I am deeply grateful to Miho Kim, former Executive Director of DataCenter: Research for Justice, for coining the phrase in 2006 and for envisioning the framework for the type of work that this group of university and community scholars are producing to make this book a reality. Kim’s voice and articulation of the concept of Research Justice call upon all marginalized population groups to place themselves at the center of their own healing in research as an act of ceremonial recovery. DataCenter: Research for Justice continues to be represented by a powerful team of dedicated staff members who contribute enormously to the ongoing work of articulating a Research Justice methodological framework: Celia Davis, Jay Donahue, and Bill Hogan. DataCenter: Research for Justice is also fortunate to be represented by amazing group of board members who lead with great vision and reciprocity in ensuring the success of the organizational mission. Many thanks to Marla, Aspen, Carolyn, Margaret, Aspen, Jill, Sujata, Miloney, Neil, and Max.

I also offer my thanks to Haruki Eda, who has been instrumental in thinking through some of the complexities of crafting a book of this nature. We have done our best to construct a project that includes the voices and methodologies of those living on the margins, as well as those who come from communities facing sociocultural and economic disparities. Andrew Millspaugh was extremely generous with his time in volunteering to provide crucial transcriptions of remarks delivered by prominent practitioners of Research Justice, Dr. Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Dr. Michelle Fine. The inclusion of these leading scholars in the manuscript is possible only because of Andrew’s fine work. I am also indebted to the Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at San Francisco State University, Dr. Su Rosser. The SFSU Office of Academic Affairs granted a sabbatical leave during the fall of 2013, which allowed me to compete the writing and editing for this first ever anthology on the foundations and possibilities for Research Justice as a new socially engaged form of methodological inquiry and action.

My department colleagues in American Indian Studies—Joanne Barker, Robert Keith Collins, Melissa Nelson, John-Carlos Perea, Gabriela Segovia-McGahan, Amy Lonetree, Clayton Dumont, Jacob Perea, Esther Lucero, Sara Sutler-Cohen, Phil Klasky, Kathy Wallace, Amy Casselman, Jessica Hope LePak, and Eddie Madril—have also been a wonderful resource for many years and I am very appreciative of their encouragement of my work for the past 13 years. I am, above all, most thankful to my family. They have seen me through so many difficult life

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challenges over the years. My siblings continue to inspire me with their love of life. They, along with their children, are a constant source of joy. In particular, I want to offer my love and appreciation to my uncle Charlie, my brothers Eric, Derick, Kevin, Nathan, and Charles, and my sister Makeba. I have also found in Melissa Attia, Justin Bernard, Ruben Moreno, and Nassima new family members who shine a light of joy so bright that I have a renewed commitment to social justice, to human rights, and to liberation as a daily practice of radical love and responsibility to leave the world in a better place for the seven generations that will follow us. My heart is always with you my Creole Bandits. Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza of Dignidad Rebelde truly personify Research Justice in their daily work, and commitment to arts activism and community experts as research leaders. Much love and appreciation to Melanie and Jesus for allowing us the rights to use the image they created for the 42nd annual National Association for Ethnic Studies Conference, ‘Research as ceremony: Decolonizing ethnic studies,’ for the cover of this book. To my dear friends and warriors in the movement for justice and light in all of our communities, Corrina Gould and Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu thank you for your compassion, your courage, and friendship. I love you both dearly.

Puleiaava Basil Thomsen your spirit and love has brought abundant joy and light that will forever change the way I view the world and my purpose in it. You are my most beautiful friend, partner, and the brightest gift creator could have ever bestowed upon me. May our journey continue to bring us profound happiness and a magical, honest love. My parents have always demonstrated through their actions how deeply they love me, and how much they want me to succeed and contribute something meaningful. Even in death, my mother taught me to keep fighting and working to be the best person I can be. And, since her recent death in 2012, my father has taught me how to hold on to faith and to those you love. My parents were my first teachers when it came to Research Justice, for they knew that education coupled with love and an active commitment to equality would not only make my life better but would also add to the circle of individuals from marginalized communities who are working to transform the social order of power relations for the betterment of our world. Annetta and Kenneth Jolivétte, you are my hope and my inspiration for this work.

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Foreword

Miho Kim Lee, former Executive Director, DataCenter: Research for Justice

Approaching its 30th anniversary, in 2006, we at DataCenter began to ask ourselves how we could strengthen the impact of community-led campaigns and organizing by actively putting strategic information in the hands of communities leading change. As an organization with a long-standing mission of supporting the social justice movement through research, we observed that very few communities had the capacity to craft the ‘right’ research question, let alone harness the power of information to take calculated, purposeful action. In fact, organizing approaches that integrated research were few and far between. Community leaders who were neither social scientists nor policy makers possessed unique insights into genuine solutions to issues they addressed, from experiencing those issues firsthand. But theirs was a ‘talkstory,’ then there was ‘real’ research, done by ‘smart people’ in the Sciences, the currency at the policy-making table.

Many of our efforts to shift policies impacting disenfranchised populations have led to key victories. Yet, there was a palpable trepidation in embracing research among grassroots organizations and their constituents. The statement by Dr. Linda Tuhiwai-Smith that ‘research’ is “one of the dirtiest words” rang true for us and our own communities here in the United States, having been scrutinized and de-legitimized through outsider-led ‘research.’ And so, we began to feel the need for a powerful strategy to reverse the role of the passive ‘research subject’ we’ve been conditioned to assume as oppressed peoples, and to proactively redefine ‘research’ as nothing short of an emancipatory concept on our journey towards making change.

Here we were, at DataCenter and the Environmental Justice movement I served as researcher, claiming that “people who experience injustices firsthand are the experts.” The irony was not lost on us.

Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples by Dr. Linda Tuhiwai-Smith ignited an irreversible momentum towards our Research Justice mission by helping us find our voice in our critique of research as we knew it. We launched a two-year movement assessment on Research Oppression in an attempt to unpack the hidden barriers to grassroots ownership of research. During this process, I articulated what I had observed as ways in which inequity prevailed in research, perpetrating a sense of exclusion and disempowerment in marginalized populations:

1. lack of access to (accurate) data about themselves and their experiences in mainstream sources (for example, census, and so on);

2. mis/underrepresentation of those communities in the mainstream data sources;

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3. assault(s) on/violation of individual political and collective cultural rights, justified by data-backed allegation of criminality and immorality;

4. lack of community control over production, documentation, possession, and use of their own data;

5. lack of mainstream political legitimacy as valid, credible producers of data.

The systemic change agenda underlying these challenges is the very fact that western science dominates the world of ‘valid’ knowledge production in policy making. This assumption implies that communities that did not practice western science historically lack a legitimate means of knowledge production worthy of recognition in decision making that impacts their own lives. In other words, Research Justice acknowledges that traditional western science operates from a paternalistic position of assumed superiority that has been unsuccessful in producing meaningful reforms and social justice for indigenous nations and communities of color. We knew that the social sciences nor other investigative research methods DataCenter employed in and of themselves would not deliver the long-term solutions necessary to obtain the political empowerment and cultural sovereignty of peoples and nations most impacted by Research Oppression.

The framework of Research Justice situated community-driven research as a vehicle for the community to reclaim, own and wield all forms of knowledge and information as political ammunition in their own hands, in ways that are consistent with the community’s unique cultural and spiritual identity, and values and traditions. All methods of producing the building blocks of our own worldview and realities must be recognized as equally valuable and relevant, if not critical, on a par with those validated and accepted in dominant institutions.

In order for this to become reality, I argued, communities must achieve:

• access to information (not just misinformation and outside expert research but what they truly seek and deserve) that impacts their lives;

• ability to define what is valid ‘knowledge,’ as well as methods to produce this

• capacity to produce their own knowledge;• capacity to use all forms of knowledge; and• control over all stages of the ‘knowledge lifecycle’—from producing, analyzing,

interpreting, packaging and deploying knowledge—on an equal footing with all other institutions in society.

Although Research Justice did not become DataCenter’s explicit mission until 2010, by 2007, DataCenter had begun to argue publicly that Research Justice is in itself a part of a racial, economic, and social justice agenda that insists on the right of communities for their independent and autonomous capacity to not only effect policies that impact their lives, but to transform the notion of who has the right to determine research questions, designs, and methodologies on their own terms. We began to shape processes of community-led inquiry based on

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whether they centered indigenous and community of color knowledge systems as legitimate, truth-telling experts who have the power, agency, and their ability to shape the research process from the beginning and completion of the research process, and the outcomes of deploying their own research. By 2013, DataCenter’s programs were restructured under these three complementary frameworks: (1) Community’s Right to recognized and authoritative community expertise, (2) Community’s ‘Right to Know,’ and (3) Community’s ‘Right to be Heard.’ The staff and board teamed up to build the field of Research Justice, to galvanize the support and solidarity of allies across sectors, issues, discipline, and geography, because Research Oppression impacted everyone.

The first time DataCenter formally introduced ‘Research Justice’ publicly was in October 2007, when we convened a community forum, hosted by our long-time funder, San Francisco Foundation, with much thanks going to Ron Rowell, Program Officer of the then Social Justice Program. Much to our pleasant surprise, more than 50 people packed the room, representing county departments, foundations, community-based organizations, intermediaries, organizers, and journalists. Everyone came to discuss: how is research going to help us build a sustainable movement? What is the right model and approach of ‘research’ to pursue this goal, if different from existing academic or journalistic investigative models, if at all? And how should it be used in the context of grassroots organizing? And, ultimately, for those of us identifying as research allies for communities, what does all this mean for how we do our research?

Among some popular needs expressed were “best practices, so organizations have a guide on how to do this type of participatory research as an active reference to help implement projects step by step;” “multi-disciplinary approach that brings policy advocates, academics, and communities; not just one or the other;” and “case studies” .1

Armed with a brand new Research Justice mission, DataCenter’s 2010-14 strategic priorities plan provided a clear trajectory, based on the mandate from our allies in the social justice movement and convenings such as this, as well as our Board of Directors, for our programs to tackle all of these needs. Board members including Max Weintraub and Neil Tangri strongly advocated for publishing Research Justice, and helped successfully recruit Dr. Andrew Jolivétte to join the board as a key leadership figure to make this happen. It is in this context that this publication project was given life.

In 2012, Dr. Rachel Pfeffer, long-time DataCenter advisor, introduced us to Dr. Michelle Fine, founder of the Public Science Project at CUNY, who in turn introduced us to her “good friend,” Dr. Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, and together, we all envisioned a gathering of kindred spirits from near and far, to which Dr. Fine referred as a “bi-coastal sauna” in conjunction with the east coast celebration

1 Miho Kim, ‘Research Justice initiative: How it began,’ DataCenter website, 2012, www.datacenter.org/wp-content/uploads/Research_Justice.pdf

Foreword

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of the 15th anniversary of ‘Decolonizing methodologies’ she was organizing at CUNY. The result was DataCenter’s 35th anniversary event in Oakland, CA, the following year, titled ‘Decolonizing Knowledge: Towards a Research Justice Praxis,’ in partnership with the American Educational Research Association in time for its annual meeting, transcripts of which are included in this book.

As DataCenter’s five-year plan draws to a close, we are proud to have published groundbreaking Research Justice resource guides for grassroots communities ready to strengthen their organizing through their own research (www.datacenter.org/research-tools/research/). Complementing these works, The Research Justice Handbook: Strategies for Sacred Methodologies opens up the intellectual ‘sauna’ about the importance and power of transforming research methodologies and practices from the margin to the center, to ensure that all voices, especially those most impacted by social science research, are not only counted and heard, but also repositioned from subjects to genuine, recognized experts.

Genuine multiculturalism in research methods is the vision DataCenter seeks to advance as a Research Justice organization. If this were achieved, community members would be recognized by default to be the ‘real experts’ in the issues they face every day, not only among their families and sympathizers, but also the policy makers and other institutions participating in decision making at the table. Research Justice praxis continues to thrive. It is our hope that this book project help advance this important work, towards our collective vision of a beautiful paradigm shift.

1

Part One Research Justice: Strategies for knowledge

construction and self-determination

Chapter One examines the history and genealogy of Research Justice as both a theory and a method developed by the DataCenter: Research for Justice organization in Oakland, California. In this chapter, I explore the importance of Research Justice as a methodological intervention strategy to produce policy reform at local, regional and national levels. A comparative analysis of different types of knowledge (experiential, cultural/spiritual, and mainstream) and their forms of utilization demonstrate the power of centering community members as experts in the research process. The chapter also introduces two new innovative terms, radical love and Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness to frame the transformational approaches being taken on by each of the contributors to the volume. Building upon Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR), Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness (CCRR) in a Research Justice model contains three fundamental aspects: (1) it defines research processes as a collective endeavor and a shared knowledge creation process between academic and community researchers; (2) it creates, maintains, and engages with the knowledge that is produced by community experts, traditional knowledge keepers, as well as cultural leaders in ways that envision research as a ceremonial act of mutual respect and co-sharing; and (3) only research that is responsive to the social, legal, economic, cultural, and political policy needs as identified by community experts should be conducted.

The Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness model takes Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Participatory Action Research (PAR) models a step further by shifting more dramatically the distribution of power in the research process by seeking to build ceremonial relationships and by yielding to the specific needs of community experts and community researchers. Chapter Two by Antonia Darder builds on Chapter One by offering a much needed contextual discussion regarding the political and pedagogical significance of dissent in the process of producing various forms of knowledge and self-determination within a democratic society. Important here in this work is the author’s ability to highlight the struggle to move away from the hegemonic domestication of traditional schooling within the context of neoliberal reforms and toward a critical pedagogy of imagination, grounded in a humanizing and emancipatory ethics of everyday life.

Darder’s essay is a call to other education researchers to shift the pedagogical narratives that miss the importance of building relationships with all participants in education reform from the student and parent to the teacher and administrator. Ultimately, her essay is about mutual respect and understanding within the context

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Research Justice

of a multicultural, democratic society where majority-minority relationships must be deconstructed and replaced with transformative acts of justice in the policy agendas of education officials at all levels of education in the United States. Her contribution, like the others in this section, attempts to link sacred methodologies with critical pedagogy and political dissent as tools of Research Justice in the contestation of hegemonic models of schooling that too often marginalizes students of color and indigenous peoples.

Building on the notion of a pedagogy of dissent, Chapter Three examines the importance of single mothers as agents of change within political systems that often render women invisible. Like Darder, Freeman argues that it is crucial that researchers, policy makers, and community stakeholders build relationships that involve as many people as possible in the process of understanding contemporary social problems.

Amanda Freeman’s chapter, similar to the other chapters in Part One, asserts that knowledge construction and self-determination in a Research Justice framework can be accomplished by building relationships based on solidarity, transformative justice, and radical love. Freeman acknowledges both the gains and pitfalls of sharing an identity with the research participants in her study on poor single mothers. Rather than place these women into a deficit pathology model, the author asserts that, by encouraging the women to tell their own stories and to define their own forms of knowledge, they are achieving a certain level of self-determination and transformative justice.

This chapter, as with the others in this section, calls upon researchers to consider the sacred obligations and responsibilities of scholars and activists to create a space for mutual respect in defining research goals and questions. Ultimately Freeman’s scholarship is a call to other academics to understand their own subject position, and how it impacts their level of vulnerability in developing a relationship of solidarity and justice, without assuming that justice is the same thing as equality. Indeed, her chapter is a reflection on the power of Research Justice and sacred methodologies to build community knowledge and self-determination through an active engagement with participants as ‘family members,’ not simply as ‘human subjects.’

The prison industrial complex as a social and political system of oppression has existed for generations. Liam Martin explores the intricacies of positioning the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated at the center of research dealing with prison reform.

In Chapter Four Liam Martin suggests a new, sacred methodology for conducting ethnographic research within the context of the Prison Industrial Complex. His deep connection and intention is to build a co-researcher relationship with Joe Badillo (a formerly incarcerated prisoner and co-investigator with Martin). Martin’s discussion reveals a high-level of commitment to the principles of Research Justice as a tool for shifting the power of academics as the sole researchers to one that places participants at the center of their own lives and research questions. By forging a relationship based on solidarity, mutual respect,

3

and transformative justice, Martin connects indigenous methodological practices with western methodologies to demonstrate the importance of knowledge construction and self-determination among incarcerated and formerly incarcerated peoples seeking justice and policy reform. This chapter, together with the others in this section, asserts that old research paradigms based on unequal relationships and outsider knowledge construction are no longer sufficient for working with populations that have traditionally been oppressed.

Traditionally oppressed populations are often marginalized to such a degree that members of these populations often become invisible. Over the past decade there has been a growing amount of attention globally on the rights of LGBT individuals, particularly related to same-sex marriage. Not unlike the prison reform movement, the Gay rights movement is often anchored in local and regional activist organizations that fight to bring greater attention to the disparities in the law that prevent queer people and the incarcerated from gaining greater social mobility.

Mél Hogan and Andrea Zeffiro (Chapter Five) posit that archival work within the context of queer movements and social science research has the potential to create new sacred methodological frameworks for creating community knowledge and self-determination among activist LGBTQI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersexed) organizations and individuals. Building on the work in previous chapters in Part One, Hogan and Zeffiro offer innovative strategies to respond to the needs of traditionally marginalized queer populations vis-à-vis arts activism in Canada and beyond. Their work complements the other chapters in this volume by demonstrating the ways that communities that share marginal identities can come together to articulate, document, and disseminate important archival records that have the potential to shift traditional western approaches to conducting research where the knowledge of outsiders is often valued as more objective than that of the insiders who belong to the communities that are the subject of scientific study.

By claiming a space for queer organizers, artists, and activists, the co-authors are laying important groundwork for future studies within queer communities that seek to prioritize the sacred knowledge of research participants and community advocates who seek changes in public policies that have a tremendous impact on people who identify as LGBTQI. Moving the voices of queer people from the position of observer to participant provides crucial new strategies for bridging the divides between academia and the community as a space where sacred methodologies can produce social change at local, regional, and national levels.

Academics who come from communities of color or from other marginalized populations often feel torn when working within academia as a result of possibly having an activist and/or political organizing background. Making a commitment to academia that does not compromise one’s commitment to issues of social justice for the sake of tenure and promotion at the university level is a difficult act to balance, especially when it comes to maintaining researcher ethics and responsibilities to the communities where many of us have our origins.

Part One

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Research Justice

According to Nicole Blalock, author of Chapter Six, ‘Committing oneself to the career path of an academic requires spending a lot of time thinking about “me.”’ She continues, ‘Decisions on performance, promotion, and tenure are based on what each of us can prove we accomplished, particularly on measures valued in academe—publishing in highly ranked journals, securing large grants, positive teaching reviews—and decisions inevitably include at least a little bit of politics. Sometimes, it can feel like the things that draw us to research in the first place are lost in the milieu.’ Written from the perspective a mixed-heritage scholar, her chapter, ‘More than me,’ is a reflective essay about maintaining the complex purposes and goals of choosing a career in educational research. In writing this, Blalock uses her own historicities (as she personally understands them) to ‘develop the narrative; in a voice that exists at the intersections of memory, narrative, and academic prose.’ It explores personal influences on the decision to engage in research meant to strengthen communities through their active involvement. By examining the role of self-development and scholar identity exploration during her graduate school experience, readers are shown the impact of interactions with faculty and peers during these formative years. Part story, part analysis, this chapter calls attention to the struggle to persist in community-centric research, where self-definition/determination and academic expectations often clash.

While embedded in her own experiences, this chapter highlights a historical way of knowing, understanding, and being in this world as elements impacting the practices of self as not just human, but as researcher as well. According Blalock, ‘It is a manifestation of my own radical love—vulnerable in its revealing of the many ways which colonization has broken down the manifest Indigeneity of myself and my family, but also hopeful that my contribution to the conversation of identity and reclamation prompts further exploration for how to build strategic alliances among all Indigenous Peoples for our collective push towards self-determination.’ Her chapter speaks to the profound ways by which academics are bridging the divide between indigenous methodologies that concern themselves with the sacred as a relationship of mutual respect, self-determination, and community-based knowledge construction. In many ways, Blalock’s chapter personifies that tenets of radical love by exposing the author’s own vulnerabilities and struggles with auto-ethnography, oral history, and Research Justice in her work as an indigenous researcher and activist.

5

ONE

Research Justice: Radical love as a strategy for social

transformation

Andrew J. Jolivétte

Research Justice: Methodologies for social change builds upon the methodological frameworks developed by the national non-profit organization, DataCenter: Research for Justice (DCRJ). Research Justice is a strategic framework and methodological intervention that seeks to transform structural inequities in research. Research Justice centralizes community voices and leadership in an effort to facilitate genuine, lasting social change, and seeks to foster critical engagement with communities of color, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups to use research as an empowering intervention and active disruption of colonial policies and institutional practices that contribute to the (re)production of social inequalities in research and public policy.

DataCenter believes that Research Justice is achieved when marginalized communities are recognized as experts, and reclaim, own and wield all forms of knowledge and information. With strategic support, the knowledge and information generated by these communities can be used as political leverage to advance their own agendas for change. (DCRJ website, 2014)

Research Justice calls upon all community experts and witnesses to violence, legal violations, education and health disparities, and other social inequities to be active participants in processes for change and policy reform at local, regional, national, and global levels.

Research Justice1 examines the relationships and intersections between research, knowledge construction, and political power/legitimacy in society. Research Justice as an intervention centers community experts as vital partners in contributing to the emergence of Research Justice as a powerful, transdisciplinary set of methodologies that envision the coexistence of three forms of knowledge production (experiential, cultural/spiritual, and mainstream; see Figure 1.1).

1 When italicized Research Justice refers to contents of this volume, while Research Justice in regular font refers to the concept.

6

Research Justice

Research Justice examines how the coexistence of these various form of knowledge can lead to greater equality in public policies and laws that rely on data and research to produce social change.

Building on the tools and visions articulated by DCRJ, the contributors to this historic collection write from three fundamental perspectives of Research Justice as a movement-building strategy: (1) strategies for knowledge construction and self-determination; (2) strategies for community mobilization; and (3) strategies for social transformation and policy reform. Accordingly, each chapter is divided into one of the three foundational perspectives of Research Justice as articulated by the DCRJ organization, which is based in Oakland, California. Each of these chapters, along with community/university research intervention models, provides students at undergraduate and graduate levels, faculty, and community researchers with new and unique sets of tools to produce social transformation and justice in the research processes they will undertake throughout their lives.

The production of knowledge in the world today is typically constructed, transmitted, and maintained by those with the most power and privilege in society. The poor, indigenous peoples, and people of color, along with women, those with physical and mental disabilities, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized groups are seldom in a position to produce or control nor own the system of mainstream knowledge production that is generally used to create policies that impact these often under-served populations (DCRJ website, 2014). In the DCRJ model above (Figure 1.1), Research Justice as both a theory and a method envisions equal political power and legitimacy for different forms of knowledge including the cultural/spiritual and experiential. By centering knowledge production and research projects based on cultural, spiritual, and experiential frameworks, we as academics attempt to share power and in many cases surrender our own power ‘over’ research subjects. Research Justice also attempts to put indigenous theory in conversation with the Research Justice movement as crafted by DCRJ and

More

Less

Polit

ical

pow

erToday

Mainstreamknowledge

Experiental, cultural and

spiritualknowledge

Our visionToday

Experientialknowledge

Cultural and spiritual

knowledge

Mainstreamknowledge

Equal political power and legitimacy

Knowledge in the world

Source: Data Center: Research for Justice © 2010

Figure 1.1: Knowledge production

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Radical love as a strategy for social transformation

explicated by each of the book’s contributors. By turning to notions of sacred methodologies we do not necessarily imply a religious meaning, but rather a reciprocal relationship between researcher, participant, and community. It is our hope that, by pushing the boundaries of how we define justice to include the sacred, we might radically transform not only the ways that researchers are defined, but how the research process is practiced within the social and behavioral sciences. When we redefine methodologies within the context of the sacred we shift the fundamental relationship of the research process from one based upon unequal power relationships to one based upon mutual respect and reverence for all those impacted by the focus of our studies, documentation, and efforts to reform public policy. Furthermore the sacred pushes us to reconsider justice as more than simple equality. Equality suggests sameness, without regard to fairness. Simply having the same things does not necessarily mean that justice has been achieved. Sacred methodologies include at least three important components: radical love, transformative justice, and collective action.

I contend that radical love as a fundamental aspect of a sacred Research Justice agenda requires that we see research participants as members of our family and not as a group of study participants or as sets of data to study and simply write about for our own career advancement. We have to invest in what I call Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness (CCRR). CCRR responds to both the need for transformative justice and collective action as outlined by a sacred responsibility to take our role as researchers as seriously as possible when we work with individuals and communities to produce social change.

CCRR in a Research Justice model contains three fundamental aspects: (1) it defines research processes as a collective endeavor and a shared knowledge creation process between academic and community researchers; (2) it creates, maintains, and engages with the knowledge that is produced by community experts, traditional knowledge keepers, as well as cultural leaders in ways that envision research as a ceremonial act of mutual respect and co-sharing; and (3) only research that is responsive to the social, legal, economic, cultural, and political policy needs as identified by community experts should be conducted. The Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness model takes Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Participatory Action Research (PAR) models a step further by shifting more dramatically the distribution of power in the research process by seeking to build ceremonial relationships and by yielding to the specific needs of community experts and community researchers. An example of CCRR in action would entail the creation of cultural protocols and IRB (Institutional Review Board) procedures controlled not by universities alone, but in a separate review process controlled by community groups.

This Research Justice anthology also acknowledges and documents the many ways in which Research Justice functions as a daily ceremonial process of resistance, revitalization, and cultural autonomy that supports the knowledge production, design, dissemination, and stewardship of critical research practices by and from the communities most impacted by the negative consequences of globalization

8

Research Justice

and capitalism. The anthology recognizes the positive and innumerable ways that people on the margins utilize research to transform their communities with the ultimate goal of liberation, self-determination, and self-actualized freedom. The most fundamental goal of Research Justice is the development of global citizens who actively work to transform the structures of power and privilege to engage everyday people as research leaders, change agents, and visionary leaders equipped with the necessary tools to build community infrastructures that will support the healthy development of self-sustaining, grassroots, and CCRR approaches that will support the advancement of human rights in all fields, disciplines, and social sectors where research/knowledge is produced.

This project also centers a concept that I have worked on for the past four years: radical love. Radical love, as I discuss above, is an important aspect of conducting sacred methodologies. I argue that, as we re-center community members, tribal experts, and marginalized populations as leaders in research, we must also center radical love as a primary and foundational component of our research agendas both within and outside of academia. Radical love may be defined as ‘the activation of a deeply embedded and reciprocal devotion to holistic and ethnic specific self and community care through a balance of human feelings, emotions, and practices that reduce egocentrism while centering a symbiotic relationship between the physical and spiritual as co-constitutive factors of health promotion among indigenous peoples and communities of color.’ When it is defined in this way, radical love in sacred research is also about speaking individual and collective truths, no matter how painful. Radical love in these collective essays requires that each author ask important questions about who will benefit from their research and how we learn from past mistakes to ensure that we are building respectful research relationships today. In some of my previous writing, I define radical love within the context of vulnerability:

Radical love is about being vulnerable. It is about being unafraid to speak out about issues that may not have a direct impact on us on a daily basis. Radical love is about caring enough to admit when we are wrong and to admit to mistakes. Radical love should ask how the work in which we are engaged helps to build respectful relationships between ourselves and others involved in social justice movements. Radical love asks if we are each being responsible in fulfilling our individual roles and obligations to the other participants in the struggle for social justice and human rights. Finally, radical love in critical mixed race studies, means asking ourselves if what we are contributing is giving back to the community and if it is strengthening the relationship of all of those involved in the process. Is what is being shared adding to the growth of the community and is this sharing reciprocal? Is what we are working toward leading to a more peaceful and equitable society? (Jolivétte, 2012)

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Radical love as a strategy for social transformation

As researchers both in academia and in the community we must be willing to constantly ask ourselves if we are being ‘responsible in fulfilling our individual roles and obligations to the other participants in the struggle for social justice and human rights’ (Jolivétte, 2012). Each of the contributors to this volume was asked to address this precise question. Chapters Two through Seven begin by examining how Research Justice can be used as a strategy for knowledge construction and self-determination. In Chapter Two Antonia Darder examines the uses of critical pedagogy in education research and reform within the context of international and neo-liberal articulations of terrorism and fear that lead to a silencing of those most marginalized within educational institutions. In a compelling manner Darder asserts that critical pedagogy as an act of dissent must ‘forge a socially just pedagogy that supports political dissent in the face of persistent inequalities [that] requires educators to remain thoughtful about the manner in which neoconservative values and neoliberal policies can easily conflate to protect profits and a hegemonic stronghold on the economy,’ while leaving those most marginalized in a state of social, cultural, political, and economic disadvantage. In Chapter Three Amanda Freeman’s provocative essay addresses her experiences as both an insider and an outsider in a research project dealing with single mothers from low-income backgrounds, an essay in which she examines the blurred lines between being a researcher who is unexpectedly impacted by the same issues facing her research participants.

Similar to Darder’s chapter, Freeman’s claims that, ultimately, it is the voices of the marginalized—in this case poor, single women—that become central to understanding issues of gender inequality, economic disparities, and mothering because of their own efforts in starting a support group to chronicle their experiences and empower one another through their daily challenges in a society that treats the women like second-class citizens. Darder and Freeman both articulate a framework for using Research Justice as a strategy for knowledge construction and self-determination. Students and single mothers know better than anyone else the challenges they face and what types of information, knowledge systems, and practices will best support access to services while reducing social stigmas in education, health, and employment. In Chapter Four, ‘Ethnography as a Research Justice strategy,’ Liam Martin is even more specific in his discussion of ethnography as a Research Justice methodological tactic for defining and documenting the knowledge and acts of self-determination utilized by both the incarcerated and the formerly incarcerated. Martin’s chapter deals with his strong commitment to centering the subject as researcher. In this case, Joe—who resides in a halfway house—is also a co-researcher and a participant in Martin’s ethnographic study. By moving Joe’s voice to the center of the research, as an expert, Martin underscores DCRJ’s first principle of Research Justice: research as a strategy for knowledge construction and self-determination.

What better method of transformation than to center the formerly incarcerated as the experts when it comes to understanding life in prison as well as life after prison? Similar to Freeman’s chapter on centering single mothers as experts

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Research Justice

who produce useful knowledge in thinking through difficult questions of policy reform, Martin’s project also removes the stigma of ‘research subject,’ or ‘victim’ to be ‘saved,’ to a role that gives those most impacted by research a mechanism to contribute to their own empowerment and self-determination. Chapter Five, by Andrea Zeffiro and Mél Hogan, documents how NMP (No More Potlucks) supports marginalized voices and modes of knowledge production and dissemination, which facilitate acts of self-determination and cultural autonomy among queer writers, artists, and activists in Canada. These collective writings are put together in a journal to document the possibilities of new media publishing venues and a sense of urgency around the dissemination of underspoken voices and underappreciated perspectives. Zeffiro and Hogan offer practical methods for understanding the importance of archives in documenting often invisible histories. Using archival and oral history approaches, the authors unveil a uniquely postmodern method of Research Justice that supplies communities with their own knowledge systems that will support greater self-determination and international visibility. The first five chapters of this reader, along with the final contribution to the first section of the book, are in many ways not just statements about the role of researchers and subjects in the making of the research project, but are also interventions into areas that I would align with a human rights agenda. Nicole Blalock’s ‘More than me’ (Chapter Six) perhaps speaks most specifically to the issues of cultural recovery, invisibility, and knowledge construction/self-determination as human rights issues, as she interweaves poetry and prose to tell the story of her own family with that of indigenous peoples throughout history who have struggled with trauma, poverty, and the very essence of research as a tool for self-determination and knowledge construction as necessary steps towards justice and liberation.

In Part Two, ‘Research Justice: strategies for community mobilization,’ we learn the story of Alan Crotzer through the work of Akeem Ray and Phyllis Gray, who enact Research Justice as a strategy for mobilization through teaching. Ray and Gray explain the pressures that students undertake in studying wrongful convictions and the limits of the criminal justice system when it comes to those most marginalized in society. Continuing with the theme of prison incarceration, Chapter Eight, ‘Formerly incarcerated women: returning home to family and community,’ also examines the impact of the prison industrial complex on the lived daily experiences of women and mothers who were formerly incarcerated. Marta López-Garza asks critical questions about the role that these formerly incarcerated women play in their own healing processes in the face of societal inequalities. Again, López-Garza, like Ray and Gray, reveals how issues of solidarity, collective action, and resistance to unfair policies can lead to mobilization as well as new forms of knowledge production. The Belmont Report, which was created by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in 1978, not addressed key guiding principles for conducting research, but also identifies vulnerable populations. The incarcerated and formerly incarcerated are among the groups identified as vulnerable, at-risk populations because of the exploitation that has taken place within this segment

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Radical love as a strategy for social transformation

of society. These chapter contributions go along way toward reimagining how we can better support those who are at risk or already living within prisons. While Zainichi Koreans (Koreans residing in Japan) are not physically incarcerated, they are politically, socially, and ideologically displaced and removed from conversations about equity and social justice in the face of natural disaster. In an effort to understand how these processes work, one must consider the history and representation of Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation. The displacement of Koreans, according to Haruki Eda, in the face of Japanese disaster nationalism functions in both structural and social mechanisms that rob Zainichi of true liberation as a result of imperialism and ongoing colonial acts during natural disasters. In Chapter Nine Haruki Eda demonstrates how utilizing Research Justice arms Zainichi people with effective mobilization strategies to respond to Japanese colonial rule in the face of natural disasters that scapegoat and ignore the material and physical losses of a minority population in an imperialist nation. Chapter Ten, ‘Undocumented research and researchers: a collective journey to document our stories and speak for ourselves,’ similar to Eda’s chapter, takes up the issues of mobilization through direct participatory research. Alma Leyva, together with Imelda Plascencia and Mayra Jaimes Pena, demonstrates how placing the power of constructing a research agenda into the hands of those being researched can bring about powerful changes at both the micro and macro levels of policy reform in disenfranchised populations such as those fighting for legal status in the United States. Chapter Eleven by Oparah and her co-authors, examines the politics of birthing within the context of public space, racial representation, and gendered politics. Chapter Twelve by Merla-Watson with the Corazones del Westside, takes up the question of the digital divide in Latina/o communities by making use of Research Justice methodologies that focus on access to technology as a tool for empowerment, historical preservation and as a strategy for community mobilization.

Part Three, ‘Research Justice: strategies for social transformation and policy reform,’ examines the ways in which Research Justice as a strategy for social transformation and policy reform can re-center the political, economic, legal, and cultural concerns of indigenous nations and across different communities of color. Chapter Thirteen, by Sandra Weissinger, begins the final section of the book with a look at discrimination in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and what mobilization tactics are most useful when we consider the need for policy reforms that disproportionately impact communities of color and other marginalized population demographics. Chapter Fourteen, ‘The revolutionary, non-violent action of Danilo Dolci and his maieutic approach,’ offers an important overview of a key figure in revolutionary theory, Danilo Dolci, and presents the maieutic approach as a tactic for achieving social and political reforms by shifting the modes of knowledge production and power. Amrah Salomon uses oral tradition and storytelling as a methodological intervention in documenting the stories of resistance and survival among marginalized populations both in Mexico and across the Mexican diaspora. The final chapters are transcribed written

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Research Justice

remarks from leading international scholars Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Michelle Fine, who were both invited to deliver keynote lectures to an audience of nearly 600 people for the 35th anniversary of DCRJ and to also celebrate the 15th anniversary of the groundbreaking publication, Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. This event, ‘Decolonizing knowledge: Toward a critical Research Justice praxis,’ brings together many of the central themes of this book. Issues of power, knowledge, and policy are covered by each of the speakers, along with remarks that will inform, inspire, and motivate students and academics alike to study the foundations of Research Justice as a new methodological framework that can shift the balance of power in not only producing knowledge, but also in disseminating that knowledge and cultivating a generation of leaders who will focus more on research as a relationship of solidarity and reciprocity to achieve liberation, democracy, and justice for those global citizens who are most often marginalized by traditional western research practices that render them invisible and/or powerless.

ReferencesJolivétte, A., 2012, Obama and the biracial factor: The battle for a new American majority. Bristol: Policy Press

DataCenter: Research for Justice website, www.datacenter.org

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TWO

Imagining justice: Politics, pedagogy, and dissent1

Antonia Darder

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. (Frederick Douglas)

Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it. (Howard Zinn)

The current international landscape leaves little doubt that we are living in a tumultuous era. Steeped in the lingering political fears of the culture of terror, dissenting voices are still discouraged or silenced altogether, while neoliberal policies of greed and destruction seem rendered impenetrable in the face of massive global protests. Xenophobic pundits of the last decade denounced the Muslim world, the poor, and the foreign, exploiting the fear of both material scarcity and military invasion as clear and present dangers. The threat of terrorists, immigrants, and the impoverished vividly commingle in our historical psyches. Yet, U.S. acts of aggression persist in the Middle East and other parts of the world, while overwhelming economic, political, and military violence at home are made invisible by distorted notions of patriotism and speculative schemes of corporate greed.

During the last decade, the political ramifications of conservative zeal were not only responsible for the passage of the Patriot Act, the war in Iraq, and the invasion of Afghanistan, but also numerous mean-spirited political antics dramatically enacted in Congress, as well as state capitals. On the domestic scene, the rampant incarceration of more than two million people has been justified through a flood of media stereotypes that parade as news, reality cop shows, and pseudo criminal documentaries, such as American Justice and Cold Case Files. Whether at home or in the international arena, U.S. citizens are systematically conditioned to perceive the impoverished and undocumented as ignorant or criminal—two major sectors

1 A slightly different version of this chapter (‘Imagining justice in a culture of terror: pedagogy, politics, and dissent’) appeared in Sheila Macrine’s Critical pedagogy in uncertain times: Hope and possibilities. Education, politics and public life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Many thanks to Antonia Darder for granting permission to print this revised version here.

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Research Justice

of the population that are rapidly expanding, given the hardening structures of economic inequality in the United States and abroad.

The fear of uncertainty generated by the tragedy of 9/11 led to the formation of Homeland Security, which deeply shifted our perceptions of safety on both city streets and in the air. Over the past two decades, civil liberties seem to have been vastly compromised in the name of protecting our borders. Through a variety of politically induced media campaigns, U.S. citizens are warned repeatedly of ‘orange alerts’ and aroused to question the safety of our own homes. In turn, this has inspired nativist sentiments, giving rise to a variety of local, state, and federal legislative actions geared toward ridding the country of ‘illegal’ immigrants. Simultaneously, widespread efforts to militarize the border by both official border patrol agents and border vigilantes prevail, as unemployment continues to rise for every income group, but particularly those in the poorest sector (Darder, 2007).

In the new millennium, Muslims and other immigrants became the scapegoats of the culture of terror, shrouding America’s political and economic improprieties at home and abroad. A Newsweek poll, although fairly positive, reported that 25% of Americans would consider putting Muslims in U.S. detention camps if another 9/11-style attack were to occur (Braiker, 2007). Meanwhile, obvious and long-standing determinants of inequality—poor job security, insufficient income, lack of healthcare, substandard education, and the wholesale incarceration of the deeply impoverished—are ignored or dismissed as secondary to issues of national protection or economic exigencies. As a consequence, trillions of dollars have being poured into Homeland Security and military actions at the border and overseas, while social justice is conveniently redefined in ways that abdicate the state of any responsibility to its distressed citizenry. Instead, the free market continues to be touted as the great equalizer of the 21st century, leaving those outside the field of its neoliberal global order to fend for themselves or suffer the bitter consequences.

A leading proponent of neoliberal policies on the international arena, the U.S. remains the world’s wealthiest nation, yet one of the most economically unequal. ‘We live in a society in which 1 percent of the population owns 60 percent of stock and 40 percent of total wealth. The top 10 percent of Americans own over 80 percent of the total wealth’ (Noury and Smith, 2004). At the same time, the poor are ‘nickel and dimed’ into subsistence by the increasing cost of substandard housing and food products, the lack of healthcare benefits, expensive transportation and commuting costs, poor childcare options, low-wage employment, and increasing job insecurities tied to persistent outsourcing of well-paying jobs and plant shutdowns (Ehrenreich, 2002). It is disturbing to note that neoliberals often claim that such actions are good for the world because they redistribute the wealth, while remaining close-mouthed about the staggering profits gained from employing low-wage workers and operating their enterprises in environmentally deregulated zones.

To forge a socially just pedagogy that supports political dissent in the face of persistent inequalities requires educators to remain thoughtful about the manner

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in which neoconservative values and neoliberal policies can easily conflate to protect profits and a hegemonic stronghold on the economy. As such, dissenting voices that clamor against current national policies or persistently demand greater democratization of institutional structures are often perceived as a danger to the unity of our ‘American’ identity as a nation, justifying the silencing of protestors and dissenters. This is even more disturbing when the politics of neoliberalism, couched in alarmist rhetoric, is enacted on the both the domestic and international arena in the name of democratic life. Often, such rhetoric functions well to conceal the inseparability of racism and class inequalities, in ways that perpetuate the underlying social injustices at work within schools and society.

The hidden inseparability of racism and class inequality

What tends to disappear from view is the relations of exploitation and domination that irreducibly constitute civil society, not just as some alien and correctable disorder but as its very essence, the particular structure of domination and coercion that is specific to capitalism as a systemic totality—and which also determines the coercive function of the state (Meiksins Wood, 1995).

Contemporary struggles for democratic schooling do not arise in a vacuum. They are, instead, historically on a continuum with the dissent and struggles of workers at the turn of the 20th century and the antiwar, feminist, and civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. However, unlike earlier political protests, the civil rights movement incorporated a liberal politics of rights, which prevailed as the common orthodoxy for dissent. Notwithstanding, a small cadre of political dissenters argued adamantly that any movement for social justice in the United States should be linked to a larger international anti-imperialist agenda, one that clearly challenged the inequalities and social exclusions intrinsic to a capitalist political economy. In concert with the times, however, the decision was made to retain a civil rights approach, firmly anchored in a strategy of litigation to wage dissent and organize communities. This direction in the movement was to represent a significant political juncture that, unwittingly, left unchallenged the unfettered advancement of globalization in the final decades of the 20th century.

As a result of court gains, movement efforts in schools were driven chiefly by repeated demands for a multicultural curriculum, bilingual education, ethnic studies programs, and affirmative action efforts that were principally founded upon identity politics, which pushed aggressively against traditional institutional boundaries linked to ‘race’ and other forms of inequality. Although this approach to dissent most certainly served to initiate and marshal a new population of ‘minority’ professionals and elites into a variety of fields and professions, it did little to transform the larger structural conditions of inequality that prevailed in poor, working-class, and racialized communities. Moreover, despite its contribution to debates on ‘race’ inequalities, the ‘race relations’ paradigm, unfortunately, also failed to challenge the fundamental contradictions of capitalism that misinformed

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Research Justice

policies and practices within schools and society—contradictions that inadvertently conserved and disguised asymmetrical relations of power.

Necessary, then, to this discussion is an understanding of racism that acknowledges the totalizing logic of capitalism as inextricably linked in ways that do not apply to other categories of exclusion. Class inequalities encompass the state’s cultural and political-economic apparatus, which functions systematically to retain widespread control and governance over material wealth and resources. As such, racism operates in conjunction with other ideologies of exclusion (whether cultural, political, class, gendered, sexual, or