Friday, June 4
9:00am-11:00am EST
Qualitative Track
Title: Critical, De/colonial and Contemplative Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry
Abstract: Qualitative research has a history and currency of being primarily produced from countries that are predominantly white. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to ignore the embedded nature of oppressive, dominant sensibilities that have been rendered ubiquitous, ahistorical, acultural, and value neutral. Within such context critical and de/colonial qualitative researchers interrogate the entangled-oppressive effects of multiple power structures as well as colonialism. While there are divergent discourses about criticality and de/coloniality, I present them as separate, yet entangled. Grounded in the works of Smith (1999/2012, 2005), Mohanty (2004), Spivak (1993), Anzaldúa (2015), and Global South scholars (Narayan, 1997; Visweswaran, 1994), de/colonial work refers to the continuous movement between decolonial desires and praxis and colonial indoctrination and oppression. While colonialism is understood as invasion of land, it can take many forms including settling in invaded land and/or leaving invaded land after destroying its infrastructures, stealing resources, and imprinting the ways of the colonizer as the better and more desired. Through such imprinting, various cultural narratives situate indigenous ways of knowing and being as inferior to the colonizer and images of the savage and uncivilized native are created. De/coloniality, then, in this context, is a shuttling, a movement between multiple states of desire and resistance, an unsettledness, and an anchoring in certain transient moments and relations (Bhattacharya, 2009, 2015, 2017).
Criticality, while entangled with de/coloniality points to understanding differences in power relations due to various social structures of oppression. These social structures include, but not limited to racism, ableism, patriarchy, Islamophobia, transphobia, homophobia, etc. Often one’s own orientation of inquiry could be informed by their intersected relationship with these structures. This is where contemplative approaches become helpful. Contemplative approaches reflect a set of practices that are focused on stillness, deep inner-journeys, and a triggering of insights and clarity that come from accepting that the process of inquiry is an excavating journey into self, understanding the relationship between self and other, and cultivating insights that stem from a state of expansive and critical awareness.
Often in qualitative research scholars engage in criticality or de/coloniality through analysis or theoretical framing, however, they do not engage these perspectives methodologically. Yet, multiple methodological possibilities still remain oppressive and culturally incongruent. In this session we will explore the ways in which to create expansive and generative methodological possibilities informed by critical or de/colonial approaches to qualitative inquiry. Of specific attention will be:
1. What does methodology look like when one engages with criticality or de/coloniality?
2. In what ways does one disrupt traditional approaches to qualitative inquiry to infuse criticality and de/coloniality?
3. How might one apply these approaches in relation to their individual research interests and projects?
By engaging in generative and expansive methodological possibilities, we would be working with non-traditional methods of inquiry and justifying such approaches being congruent with our ontoepistemic and theoretical orientation. Thus, this session is interactive, dialogical, and invitation, allowing one to journey beyond the stuck places in qualitative inquiry, into places of possibilities previously unimagined and unthought.
Presenter:
Dr. Kakali Bhattacharya
Professor, Qualitative Methods
University of Florida
Biography:
Kakali Bhattacharya, PhD (she/her) is a multiple award-winning professor at the University of Florida. Housed in the Research, Evaluation, and Measurement program, she serves as a qualitative methodologist for the College of Education. For the last fifteen years, Dr. Bhattacharya has explored qualitative research through critical, de/colonial, creative, transnational, and contemplative perspectives. She is the 2018 winner of AERA’s Mid-Career Scholar of Color Award and the 2018 winner of AERA’s Mentoring Award from Division G: Social Context of Education. Her co-authored text with Kent Gillen, Power, Race, and Higher Education: A Cross-Cultural Parallel Narrative has won a 2017 Outstanding Publication Award from AERA (SIG 168) and a 2018 Outstanding Book Award from International Congress of Qualitative Research. She was recognized as one of the top 25 women in higher education by Diverse magazine for her significant contribution to social justice work and efforts to de/colonize qualitative research. Additionally, she was one of the six distinguished scholars invited by the Association of Studies in Higher Education as a featured speaker for their 2018 Inaugural Woke Methodology Series.
Dr. Bhattacharya has also been recognized for her innovative qualitative pedagogy and teaching when she won the 2018 Summer Institute of Distance Learning and Instructional Technology Award. She has over 80 publications including refereed articles, books, and book chapters, in addition to editorial responsibilities with a Routledge Book Series entitled Futures of Data Analysis in Qualitative Research. She is also the guest editor of several special issues of journals such as Qualitative Inquiry, International Review of Qualitative Research, and International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Her work has opened up new spaces in interdisciplinary de/colonizing work and qualitative research where creativity and contemplative approaches are legitimized and seen as necessary gateways for cultivating depth, integrity, expansive inquiry, and discovering critical insights.
For more information visit Dr. Bhattacharya’s website, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @drkakaliqueenb.
