Stephanie Lynn Daza

The possibilities of postcolonial praxis in education

This introduction to the special issue explores the possibilities of postcolonial praxis in the field of education. The local/global focus of postcolonial perspectives invites alternative ways of theorizing question of pedagogy, curriculum and research. Postcolonial praxis similarly highlights how questions of differences and identity need to be critically reexamined and how cross racial/ethnic solidarity against dominant ways of being requires new ways of theorizing anti‐oppressive struggles. By critically highlighting issues of gender, we examine three themes relevant in postcolonial praxis: (1) discrepant identities; (2) critical global perspectives; and (3) racialization and ethnic postcolonial discourse.

Promiscuous (use of) feminist methodologies: the dirty theory and messy practice of educational research beyond gender

This editor’s introduction narrates how we as researchers trained in qualitative and feminist methodology came to read our own work as promiscuous and interpret the terms “feminist” and “feminism” through both practice and theory. It marks the circulation of the term “promiscuous feminist methodology” and registers its salience for educational researchers who risk blundering feminist theories and methodologies in chaotic and unbridled ways. The use of the phrase “promiscuous feminist” to describe methodology is not merely an attention-seeking oxymoron, though we hope that its irony is not lost. The sexism embedded in language is what makes the notion of “feminists gone wild” tantalizing, though what we put forth is how the messy practice of inquiry transgresses any imposed boundaries or assumptions about what counts as research and feminism. Because the theories we put to work “get dirty” as they are contaminated and re-appropriated by other ways of thinking and doing through (con)texts of messy practices, promiscuous feminist methodologies are always in-the-making and already ahead of what we think they are. Set in motion by anxieties, disappointments, and frustrations of feeling out of place in the academy and in feminism, we examine our personal, academic, and political engagement with these contradictions that became the springboard for this special issue.

Complicity as infiltration: the (im)possibilities of research with/in NSF engineering grants in the age of neoliberal scientism

In this article, I use a Spivakian decolonizing perspective to take simplification to task in two ways—the simplification of methodology with/in grants and the simplification of critique that skirts the impossibility of noncomplicitous research and researchers. I posit that neoliberal scientism’s grants culture is colonizing research—narrowly defining what is and is not knowledge production and who are and are not researchers. I argue that qualitative research/ers might infiltrate grants culture and then work from within to make the messiness of science visible in a way that makes neoliberal scientism’s “(ab)-use” of science its own undoing (Spivak, 1999). In this sense, I reframe complicity as infiltration, but recognize that complicities are neither equal nor uniform across researchers, projects, or contexts.

Decolonizing researcher authenticity

This article examines the ways in which researcher authenticity is negotiated along three axes of difference, ethno‐linguistic affiliation, sexual orientation and race/skin color. Ultimately, it analyzes how researcher authenticity is produced and played out within research, via interactions between participants, researchers and others who influence the research project, especially when researchers and research are transnational. Yoshinos Covering, a new addition to critical legal studies, provides a theoretical framework for analysis. Namely, what society comes to imagine as ‘normal’ and ‘mainstream’ are myths that limit us by forcing us to play‐up favored traits and downplay disfavored ones. In order to be considered authentic, researchers often are pressed into playing roles – fitting norms – produced by narratives that limit and give way to how the researcher can be imagined. The analysis suggests that researcher authenticity, however, is not completely fixed, but discursively shaped during research. The ambivalence inherent in inscribing imaginary subjects that are inadequate and unattainable unfixes the subject and provides a gap where the possibility for producing new narratives exists. This work has implications for the narrow view of science that quickly is becoming the norm in this era of research.

Beyond Ocular Inquiry Sound, Silence, and Sonification

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Qualitative Inquiry (QI), we write about the ongoing hegemony of the ocular in research and toward a more multisensory, and aural, embodied inquiry. Sonic inquiry is attention and intention as meta/physical and socially embodied processes without ignoring the body or separating the mind from body or material-physical and social worlds. This article is about acknowledging that sounds and silences have always shaped (research/er) possibilities, as well as what hearing research futures might offer.

A promiscuous (feminist) look at grant-science: how colliding imaginaries shape the practice of NSF policy

There is nothing new about a federal focus on investing in science in US higher education (often through contracts and grants), but there is a new intimacy between grants and science. Increasingly, what happens and is valued in the name of research and knowledge production in universities is grant-science. In this article, I provide insight into grant-science by analyzing aspects of the proposal writing process on one of my own National Science Foundation (NSF) grants. This article provides a context-specific look at how broader impacts criteria (BIC) and ethics are re/produced through relations of power and consequently mis/interpreted and mitigated in the proposal writing process. Grant work may not seem explicitly feminist, but as a woman of color who is part of a generation of research/ers trained in feminist methodology by second- and third-wave feminist research/ers, I approach research with a feminist of color imaginary. I take up promiscuous feminism through the theoretical perspectives of Spivak to discuss how my feminist of color imaginary shapes my take on research and grant work. This analytical lens helps make visible how my interpretation and practice of NSF policies of BIC and ethics collide with the more technical ways that some other investigators on the grant projects interpret them.

Terra Incognita Em-Bodied Data Analysis

In this article, the authors recuperate the mind–body connection lost in procedural and theoretical forms of qualitative analysis. They offer a glimpse into their em-bodied data analysis practice—movement, travel, and dreaming/meditation—as modes of analysis post-coding that respect the physical (body, movement, space, and time) and the metaphysical (dreams, mediation, creative acts) simultaneously. Daza describes her process as percolating, while Huckaby frames hers as trekking.

Funding Re/De/Form in Higher Education

In trying to navigate the politics and policy of difference and contemporary school reform, we have experienced how competition for funding has become a policy practice that is re/de/forming higher education. Competition for funding knowledge production is never simply a meritocratic or linear activity but a political process.