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Abstract
This collaborative essay seeks to chart new methodological pathways for intercultural scholars with a specific focus on Critical Race Theory and Decolonizing and Indigenous Research Methodologies; Activist/Engaged Methodologies; and Performative Methodologies. Each section begins from our own researcher subjectivity, then outlines the constellation within the development of Critical Intercultural Communication (CIC); identifies the constellation's methodological commitments, thematics, and concerns; highlights key exemplars; and raises key questions. At the end of the essay, we explore through a dialogic performance the larger implications that these methodological constellations hold for CIC as a field.
Notes
[1] Method and theory live in dynamic interplay in CIC, because our research methodologies are themselves cultural, i.e., underwritten by culturally driven ontological, epistemological, and axiological assumptions; they thus require constant reflection and renovation. As our discipline becomes more dedicated to problem-solving, social action, and social justice (Alexander et al., Citation2014a; Asante & Miike, Citation2013), we seek new methodological approaches that capture the cultural nuances within our work while also highlighting the cultural practices that emerge through the methods themselves.
[2] We made this choice because these constellations share a critical qualitative paradigm and because including the fourth constellation, Critical/Rhetorical Sensibilities and Culture, would expand this essay beyond what could be reasonably covered. We look forward to colleagues, who have been charting this area as it overlaps with critical rhetoric, elaborating the attendant research methodologies for CIC.
[3] I use the term “storytelling” broadly, to include counterstorytelling, personal narrative, autoethnography, etc., in an effort to ensure I do not mistakenly limit the reader's understanding of the scope of methods that do this work by simply using “narrative.’
[4] For examples on narrative, see Halualani (Citation2008), Herakova (Citation2009), and Witteborn (Citation2008).
[5] CRT examines issues of interest convergence, social construction, structural determinism, false empathy, and differential racialization. See Delgado and Stefancic (Citation2001).
[6] Other CRT methods include parables and narrative analysis (Love, Citation2004). See Twine and Warren (Citation2000) for a collection of critical essays where CRT scholars speak to the methodological approaches used to explore race and racism.
[7] Gonzalez, M. C. now goes by the name De la Garza, S.
[8] See Hill Collins’ (Citation2000) matrix of domination for another resource for understanding the intricacies and implications of intersectionality.
[9] Madison and Hamera (Citation2006) define performance as “a concept, method, event, and practice … variously envisioned and employed” (p. xi). Further, performance studies is focused on how human beings make culture, affect power, and reinvent ways of being in the world (p. xiii). Performance privileges the doing of acts by bodies while the performative is what/how the performance was/is done. Butler (Citation1988) explains the phenomenon of performativity in terms of gender identity as a “stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity” (p. 520).
[10] “Throughout this text, I spell Xicana and Xicano (Chicana and Chicano) with an X (the Nahuatl spelling of the “ch” sound) to indicate a re-emerging polítics, especially among young people, grounded in Indigenous American belief systems and identities” (Moraga, Citation2011, p. xxi).
[11] Throughout this section, I utilize the term “(auto)ethnography” to accomplish several tasks simultaneously: (1) I mark the interactive nature of autoethnography and ethnography (Alexander, Citation2005; De la Garza, Citation2004); (2) shorthand method to refer to both autoethnography and ethnography; (3) demonstrate the method of performative writing and remain true to my political leanings as a queer scholar of color by creating a multiplicity of meanings through creative language construction.
[12] Many performance studies scholars draw from Conquergood (Citation1985) to utilize this particular method of ethnography. In this work, Conquergood discusses ethical pitfalls that should guide the ethnographer as she/he interacts with, takes field notes on, and conducts interviews with their cultural community of interest.
[13] Madison and Hamera (Citation2006) explicate that cultural performances are “framed by cultural conventions” (p. xvii) in tension with everyday life and larger systems of power and privilege (i.e., the micro and the macro). Cultural performances are an intersectional and “interstitial process” (Pollock, Citation2006, p. 326) that embody class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ability, etc., and all the liminal spaces betwixt and between (Turner in Fassett & Warren, Citation2006, p. 3).
[14] Johnson (Citation2013) explains how “If one's sex identity matches her/his morphology, then s/he is cissexual. If one's gender identity aligns with sex morphology, s/he is said to be cisgender,” and the privileges afforded to such normalized identities create a form of “gender dominance” that “manifests in cissexism and transphobia” (p. 138).