Stirring vulnerability, (un)certainty, and (dis)trust in humanizing research: duoethnographically re-membering unsettling racialized encounters in social justice teacher education

^†While author order is required by publications and used as a signaling device in the academy, we wish to assert that we collaborate equally on our work and genuinely consider our writing to be fully co-authored. As such, we choose to alternate authorship order on our publications.

Abstract

This article details how the embodied underpinnings of engaging in a duoethnographic collaboration were generative for theorizing and operationalizing humanization in a qualitative inquiry on social justice teacher education. We begin this exploring of humanization by presenting a poetic duoethnographic rendering of memories illustrative of affectively unsettling, racialized encounters re-membered from our lived experiences as two Black teacher educators in the hegemonically White field of teacher education. Then, we consider how our dialogic approach to the methodological labor of collaboratively seeing, hearing, and feeling allowed us to first, actualize a (Black) feminist conceptualization of humanizing research that accounted for memory and embodiment; and second, grapple with the mixture of vulnerability, (un)certainty, and (dis)trust that was stirred. We conclude by illuminating the liberatory affordances of duoethnography as a methodological device capable of containing the inherent indeterminacy of research concerned with noticing and nurturing the human(e) in education.

Keywords:

• Social justice teacher education
• humanization
• duoethnography
• qualitative research

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Following the conventions of Theater of the Oppressed (Boal, 1993), we would role play the scene with some acting out the scenario, while others would be invited to stop the action and suggest alternatives or take the place of those involved in the role play to try out different actions. The intention with Theater of the Oppressed is that it allows ‘actors’ and ‘spectators’ to work through oppressive situations, trying out liberatory alternatives as a rehearsal for promoting liberation in their regular lives.

2 Esther identifies racially as Black and Sherry as Black-biracial (see Williams & Ware, 2019). We name this here to acknowledge the diversity among Black, as a racialized category, which is often approached as a uniform or settled category.

3 Through our joint inquiry, we also came to share a Black feminist theorizing of the human that veers away from the White, Western, Judeo-Christian man as the prototype for the ideal human (Wynter, 2003). This conceptual move away from the dominant definition of the human was caused by our awareness that Women of Color are especially vulnerable to the material and discursive effects of dehumanization. For example, as Ritchie (2017) remarks, the ‘gendered process of dehumanization drives police violence against unarmed women and girls’ (p. 236). Additionally, ‘controlling narratives developed in service of colonialism and White supremacy transform women of color into a caricature, an implicit threat justifying violent response’ (Ritche, 2017, p. 216). As a corrective, we privilege the knowledges of Women of Color when engaged in the thinking and doing of humanizing research. Specifically, our work is oriented to primarily Black feminist theorizing of racialized memories, affect, and embodiment. Our engagement with Black and White as racial categories builds upon Wynter’s (2003) core argument, which is that human as commonly conceptualized is actually a hierarchized construct. This marked category privileges the ‘Western bourgeois’ conception of the human (i.e. Man), ‘which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself’ (p. 260). Ergo, humanizing research that does not explicitly visibilize and carefully deconstruct these markers risks inadvertently forwarding hegemonic or white supremacist constructions of human universality. Given that, we posit that critical theorizing of the human in humanizing research is not devoid of acknowledgement of race and gender as markers but rather that such thinking should produce more expansive conceptualizations that irradiate the complexity of humans as raced beyond White and gendered beyond man. Like poet Margaret Walker, we recognize that ‘[t]here are many strands in the family of man—many races. The world has yet to learn to appreciate the deep reservoirs of humanism in all races, and particularly in the Black race’ (Rowell, 1975, p. 12). Thus, the human is inherently plural; however, not all humans are equally valued in a society that privileges whiteness, and Black humans are especially devalued. As Freire (1970/2000) posits, ‘the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind’s central problem’ (p. 43). This ‘problem’ is central to this study, which takes as fundamental the idea that humanization involves highlighting and valuing the racialized and gendered dimensions of the human, thereby troubling the dominant colonialist conflation of one type of man with the human (Wynter, 2003, p. 206). Stated otherwise, we understand Western Man as a singular type of human. We forward a conceptualization of humanization that departs from this ‘white model of humanity’ (Allen, 2004, p. 124), and therefore, that refuses the naturalization of Man as human. This refusal informs the intentionality with which we turn to Black feminist knowledges and research practices (see Mullings, 2000) while engaging in ‘dialogic consciousness‐raising and the building of relationships of dignity and care for both researchers and participants’ (Paris, 2011, p. 137) with regard to our enactment of humanizing research.

4 Toni Morrison’s oeuvre is a prime example of this (see Ivory, 2003; McKay, 1988).

5 Readers may hear our poem by accessing this link: https://sherrydeckman.commons.gc.cuny.edu/research/.

6 The re-storying is based on theme, not chronology.

7 Personal communication, 20 January 2011.

8 Personal communication, 18 January 2012.

9 Personal communication, 4 November 2010.

10 Personal communication, 18 January 2012.

11 See Goodwin et al. (2014).

12 See DiAngelo (2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sherry L. Deckman

Sherry L. Deckman is an assistant professor in the Department of Middle and High School Education at Lehman College, City University of New York. Dr. Deckman researches how teachers are formally prepared to work with students of diverse race, gender, and sexuality backgrounds.

Esther O. Ohito

Esther O. Ohito is Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Ohito researches Blackness, race, and gender at the nexus of curriculum, pedagogy, embodiment, and emotion.