Towards a (strategic) sensibility of unbelonging: full participation revisited

Abstract

Using a data fragment from drama-anchored mishritata (mixedness) research with Queer Desis/South Asian young adults, I mobilize Desi ontoepistemologies to offer unbelonging to enrich empirical understandings of what it means to advance fuller participation for those who are multiply minoritized. I conclude with implications for placemaking in education and beyond. (50 words)

Keywords:

• Queer South Asian
• applied drama methods
• desi ontoepistemologies

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 .Also see Urvashi Sahni’s (2016), Reaching for the Sky: Empowering Girls through Education.

2 .Within the Desi/South Asian community, Queer women face discrimination based on their gender and sexual orientation (Gopinath, 2005; Ludhra & Jones, 2009). Furthermore, Desi/South Asian women are rendered marginal in white lesbian organizations, in part, because their sexual identities are not necessarily their most salient (Alimohamed, 2010). Desi/South Asian Queer women also experience further marginalization from the Desi/South Asian gay men due to patriarchy (Alimohamed, 2010).

3 .Generation 1.5 refers to individuals who immigrate to a new country before or during their early teen years. For Kanagala (2011), Generation 1.5ers “straddle between several conflicting and diverse worlds of home vs. college, family vs. community and peers, and between innumerable identities—some imposed by others and some self-imposed” (p. viii–ix).

4 .None of the applied drama activities used in this project required a public performance or presentation of the creative work. Any performances or presentations were made in-group to participants already involved in the sharing and receiving of story.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dirk J. Rodricks

Dirk J. Rodricks is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning (CT L) at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and Associate Director of The FLOURISH Collective – an interdisciplinary designated-Research Cluster of Scholarly Prominence at the University of Toronto Scarborough. With almost 20 years of experience as a university administrator in Canada and the United States, Dr. Rodricks identifies firmly as a scholar-practitioner. Committed to critical, creative, anti-racist, and de/colonial pedagogies, his award-winning dissertation research has birthed a multi-modal research program that is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Dr. Rodricks’ research examines multiply minoritized young adult identity formations and negotiations of social wellness in formal and nonformal sites of learning, intergenerational ethnoracial and queer inheritances across transnational contexts, using de/colonizing qualitative methodologies anchored by applied drama. With two co-edited volumes published with Routledge and Springer Nature, Dr. Rodricks’ scholarship can be found in the ASHE Higher Education Report Series, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Youth Theatre Journal, Qualitative Inquiry, and now the International Journal for Qualitative Studies in Education.