From ‘what is’ toward ‘what if’ through intersectionality: problematizing ableist erasures and coloniality in racially just research

ABSTRACT

Drawing from critical theory and intersectionality, we speak with and through racially just methodologies and epistemologies to problematize who is being centred, for what purpose, and encourage the visibilizing of identities not explicitly engaged within this work. We argue that for racially just research to challenge how whiteness and ableism are embodied by traditional research design approaches it needs to problematize the coloniality wedded in such commitments and bear witness to the importance that disability identities, culture, justice, and freedom have in this endeavour. We first unpack what racially just methodologies and epistemologies have enquired from the late 1990s-2020, as well as where disability and coloniality have been represented (erased) in this work. Then, we engage with Mignolo’s seminal theorization of epistemic disobedience and its importance in the generation of our thesis. Finally, we make visible the need to conceptualize the margins within racially just enquiries that seek to disrupt whiteness in educational research by problematizing the ontological erasure of disability among these justice-oriented projects. We end by shifting from ‘what is’ toward ‘what if’ to envision radical possibilities for the future that disrupt mono-categorical enquiries seeking to challenge racism but invariably leave Othered identity nexuses undertheorized by design.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• epistemic disobedience
• ontological erasure
• disability studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This list of terms (Self, Other, authority, and truth) draws from broader notions of justice-oriented research that advocates for the re-writing of rights within classrooms to broach the subject of justice as a negotiation of identity held by researchers, teachers, and students such that more traditional approaches to research are deconstructed for their commitments to (post-)positivist centers that deny stakeholders in education the space to disrupt hierarchical values of research validity (Calabrese Barton and Tan 2020).

2 We use the term ‘racially-just methodologies/epistemologies/research’ as encompassing constructs that draw from the tradition of incorporating critical race theory into educational research such that we do not rely on ‘static conceptions of equality’ or ‘specific institutional dynamics’; instead, to embody and embolden an intersectional paradigmatic shift (Collins 2019), we draw on Donnor and Ladson-Billings (2018) to argue that we de-settle the normative construction of how these injustices operate to invariably disrupt the world how it ‘actually exists’ – aligning with our pursuits from ‘what is’ toward ‘what if.’