Research As Resistance: Revisiting Critical, Indigenous And Anti Oppressive Approaches

by Leslie Brown (Editor), Susan Strega (Editor)

Intended as a senior undergraduate and graduate text, Research As Resistance brings together the theory and practice of critical, Indigenous, and anti-oppressive approaches to social science research. The book pursues some of the ontological and epistemological considerations involved in such research, including theorizing the self of the researcher, and offers exemplars across a range of methodologies, including institutional ethnography, narrative autobiography, storytelling, and participatory action research. This is a unique text in that it describes both theoretical foundations and practical applications, and because all of the featured researchers occupy marginalized locations. It is also firmly anchored in the Canadian context.

Genres: Research, Nonfiction, Education, Indigenous, Politics, Reference, Academic

276 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2015

About the author

For the webcomics creator, see Leslie Brown.

Reviews

[Jenina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reminds me of Umberto Eco’s concept of the “perfect object”. As my final book of 2021, it began assembling in totality all that has been ruminating from the margins to the center since I learned about HCD for my GPP 115 final paper on the sensitivities of power, positionality, epistemological privilege, knowledge production, and subjectivities with my role of the Researcher and Designer in different spaces, contexts, and situations. It nourished all of my reckonings on the politics of location and space, and why locating our reference points, intentions, investments, and stakes in the research matter. Annnnnd, served as a rigorous reminder (4 my personal + political headspace) that knowledge and the process of knowing is tentative, tenuous, and contested.

“Ultimately, we know that the meaning of our words will often be overlooked or misunderstood not only because there is no adequate way to express our meaning in English, but also because many people lack the epistemological framework to understand it.” ooooookay verrrrrrrrry niiiiiiiiiiiiice

It gave me a clear language on the research process that is surfacing in my practice and praxis: research defined as re-search, requiring all of us to look again and again and to pay microscopic attention to the emergent present. Maybe conduct a mapping exercise of what has been deliberately unmapped from the positivist way of producing and institutionalizing “knowledge”? Maybe.......

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

The chapters of this book are by different authors and have different interests. I was drawn to Chapter 2, "Situating Anti Oppressive Theories within Critical and Difference Centred Perspectives" by Mehmoona Moosa-Mitha, because it offered a very concise and (for me) valuable survey of different approaches to social theory, including a good range of criticisms of the mainstream, liberal ideology which dominates so much social thinking currently. She compares this with Marxism, white feminism, and postmodern and social identity theories to support her insistance on "the twin claims of critical and difference-centred perspectives that characterize anti-oppressive theories." For example, while liberal approaches defend the status quo, Marxist theory, which is critical of the status quo, is in danger of merely proposing a different status quo in its place, sharing similar defects. Both share a predilection for universal truths and all embracing priorities that can utterly crush the competing claims of different groups within society in the embrace of a needless and oppressive uniformity. Whether or not I have accurately captured that point, among many, this article (like others in the book) is well written and accessible, communicating its arguments far better than much writing in these fields.

[Jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good textbook to introduce the idea research as resistance.

[Chet Taranowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great articles in here. I particularly liked, Situating Anti-Oppressive Theories within Critical and Difference-Centred Perspectives, by Mehmoona Moosa-Mitha.