RESEARCH & I: a bonfire conversation
7 May 2024 / 18:00 CET / via zoom
Open to all
How and why do we inscribe the self in research? How much is too much of the self in our writing?
Locating one’s positionality is a reflexive practice central to critical and interpretive methodologies in social and political sciences. Because knowledges are always embodied, claims to knowing the social and political world are necessarily generated from somewhere. Hence, the need to be transparent about how the researcher is positioned.
In decolonial thought, we know that, in the politics of knowledge, “[n]obody escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system” (Grosfoguel 2007, 213).
Yet in what ways does the methodological insistence on positionality end up centering the self and releasing responsibility at the expense of questioning colonial/modern power structures and hierarchies?
To think through this problem, we are having a bonfire conversation on the following text:
Positionality Statements as a Function of Coloniality: Interrogating Reflexive Methodologies
by Jasmine K. Gani and Rabea M. Khan (2024)
This conversation is open to all academic and non-academic fellow travellers. We encourage that you read the text beforehand, although you are also welcome to join and listen in even if you have not read the text.
This event is co-organized by our Countering the Colonial Project and {Method}ology Otherwise Research Group.
Registration:
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The reference image above is Paul Gauguin’s 1889 oil painting entitled “Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake”, available via the National Gallery of Art.