Decolonizing qualitative research through transformative community engagement: critical investigation of resilience with Palestinian refugees in the West Bank

ABSTRACT

Histories of violence and ongoing settler-colonialism impacting Palestinian communities living under Israeli occupation require unique, critical enactments of psychology research. The current article reflects on community engagement strategies used in a qualitative study of resilience with Palestinian refugees entitled: Palestinian Refugee Family Trees of Resilience (PRFTR). In realizing PRFTR, the authors developed partnerships between University of Massachusetts Boston’s clinical psychology program and a Community-Based Organization in a United Nations refugee camp in the West Bank, completing in-depth interviews (N=30) with families surviving complex histories of settler-colonial violence. Participatory engagement, decolonial theories, and grounded theory situational analysis, together helped generate understandings of resilience from indigenous perspectives. This article analyzes PRFTR’s power dynamics and investigative processes, highlighting seven transformative community engagement strategies implemented Before and During research activities, outlined in a step-wise “A to G” framework. These seven strategies contribute to understandings of decolonizing enactments of qualitative methods within a Middle Eastern context.

KEYWORDS:

• Community engagement
• critical research
• decolonizing qualitative methods
• family resilience
• Palestinian refugees
• settler-colonialism

Notes

1. The “Nakba” connotes the occurrences that led to approximately 750 000 Palestinians being forcibly displaced from their lands, which amounted to about half of the total Palestinian population at the time (Pappe 2006). The government of Israel refers to these events as the War of Independence (Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013).

2. For example, Sumoud, which can also be spelled as Sumud or Sumūd, directly translates to English as perseverance or steadfastness, and has been used for decades in association with Palestinian experiences and anti-colonial struggle, such as during the 1978 Pan-Arab conference where Sumoud was used to highlight grassroots organizing and the plight of Palestinians who were determined to maintain a presence on the land despite continuous Israeli polices to uproot and displace them (Teeffelen 2011). In many ways and examples, Sumoud can be understood as connoting linked resilience processes that are political and psychological, rooting back more than half a century while branching into an unpredictable future (e.g., Atallah 2017; Malik 2013; Musleh 2011). However, more complete explorations of the meanings of, and previous research on, Sumoud, Muqawama, and Awda are beyond the scope of this article.

3. Sansei (三世) means that I am a third-generation Japanese American, counting from the immigrant (first generation)—meaning I am the second generation born in the United States. Because of legal barriers to immigration and citizenship (e.g., Japan was not open to immigration prior to the mid 1800s, the “Gentlemen’s agreement” in 1907 limiting Japanese immigration, the Asian exclusion in the Immigration Act of 1924, WWII) Japanese immigrants had a limited window prior to 1965. This created unusually clear generational distinctions, with different generations sharing particular historical experiences. Most Sansei were born after WWII and are highly acculturated. Sansei were also instrumental in breaking the silence about the camp experience and advocating for redress for the WWII imprisonment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Devin G. Atallah

Devin G. Atallah, PhD, is a clinical assistant professor of counseling psychology and applied human development at Boston University, and a research fellow at the National Research Center for Integrated Natural Disaster Management (CIGIDEN) at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, in Santiago, Chile.

Ester R. Shapiro

Ester R. Shapiro, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology, research associate of the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Public Policy Research, and core faculty of the Transnational, Cultural, and Community Studies Program, University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Nidal Al-Azraq

Nidal Al-Azraq, BA, is the executive director of 1for3, a Boston-based nonprofit organization empowering underserved Palestinian communities in the West Bank to address environmental health and quality of life issues, and is co-founder of the Community-Based Organization (CBO) in the United Nations refugee camp in the West Bank that partnered with the Psychology Department of the University of Massachusetts Boston in the completion of a research project on resilience (the identity of this CBO will remain anonymous in this article to protect the privacy of research participants).

Yaser Qaisi

Yaser Qaisi, MA, is an independent, Boston-based, certified Arabic-English medical interpreter and translator, and is a member of Boston Interpreters Collective.

Karen L. Suyemoto

Karen L. Suyemoto, PhD, is the director of the Transnational, Cultural, and Community Studies Program and a professor of psychology and Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.