From silence to stillness: decolonial feminist ontologies and the mattering of history in educational research

Abstract

This paper explores undocumented adolescent Latina becomings that move beyond Western, white dominant cultural values and recognize egalitarian entanglements of difference. I begin by recognizing my positionality in this work that speaks to my own feminist theoretical entanglements of this project that draw upon new materialist and post-qualitative embodied, inspirited, affective becomings. In the second half of this paper, I resituate this project within a decolonizing framework that parallels discussions of feminist new materialist and post-qualitative work in an effort to begin thinking differently about educational research, schooling, and the impact of oppressive and colonizing practices on undocumented immigrant youth in this country. Finally, I do not offer this research project in the conventional qualitative structure, but am not claiming this research as post-qualitative either - as it lies somewhere in between - and resides in a liminal methodological space.

Keywords:

• Feminist new materialism
• decolonialism
• undocumented immigrants
• adolescent Latina ontologies

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Italic words and phrases are taken directly from conversations with the four Latina adolescents who participated in this project. Sometimes the phrase is the lone words of one girl and other times I have provided a composite of multiple conversations from multiple participants to exemplify the ambiguity, the messiness, the contradictions, the in-between spaces, and the intra-actions of the girls’ experiences. All conversations are interwoven within theoretical and conceptual frameworks in an effort to think with (and in some cases against) theory.

2 In our fourth meeting I suggested the girls decide what they wanted to talk about the next time we meet. They collectively agreed they wanted to share their border-crossing experiences with one another. None of the girls had shared their stories outside of their immediate family.

3 At the beginning of our first session the girls were given the opportunity to create a piece of art, blog, drawing, book, etc. that answers the prompt, ‘What I know now and would share with my younger sister….’ I focused solely on the advice they chose to share with younger girls because I was interested in how they recognized their gendered understandings and experiences in their lives thus far. In particular, I was interested in their embodied conversations with one another, such as laughter, silences, and just generally watching how they interacted with one another.

4 (Patel, 2016, p. 95).

5 This quotation is referenced again within the specific context of which it was made. Earlier in the paper, the full communication is situated within theoretical conceptualizations.