Decolonizing Ethnography

In August 2011, ethnographers Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Daniel M. Goldstein began a research project on undocumented immigration in the United States by volunteering at a center for migrant workers in New Jersey. Two years later, Lucia López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos García—two local immigrant workers from Latin America—joined Alonso Bejarano and Goldstein as research assistants and quickly became equal partners for whom ethnographic practice was inseparable from activism. In Decolonizing Ethnography the four coauthors offer a methodological and theoretical reassessment of social science research, showing how it can function as a vehicle for activism and as a tool for marginalized people to theorize their lives. Tacking between personal narratives, ethnographic field notes, an original bilingual play about workers' rights, and examinations of anthropology as a discipline, the coauthors show how the participation of Mijangos García and López Juárez transformed the project's activist and academic dimensions. In so doing, they offer a guide for those wishing to expand the potential of ethnography to serve as a means for social transformation and decolonization.

Decolonizing Anthropology is part of a broader effort that aims to advance the critical reconstruction of the discipline devoted to understanding humankind in all its diversity and commonality. The utility and power of a decolonized anthropology must continue to be tested and developed. May the results of ethnographic probes--the data, the social and cultural analysis, the theorizing, and the strategies for knowledge application--help scholars envision clearer paths toincreased understanding, a heightened sense of intercultural and international solidarity, and last, but certainly not least, world transformation.

In Decolonizing Extinction Juno Salazar Parreñas ethnographically traces the ways in which colonialism, decolonization, and indigeneity shape relations that form more-than-human worlds at orangutan rehabilitation centers on Borneo. Parreñas tells the interweaving stories of wildlife workers and the centers' endangered animals while demonstrating the inseparability of risk and futurity from orangutan care. Drawing on anthropology, primatology, Southeast Asian history, gender studies, queer theory, and science and technology studies, Parreñas suggests that examining workers’ care for these semi-wild apes can serve as a basis for cultivating mutual but unequal vulnerability in an era of annihilation. Only by considering rehabilitation from perspectives thus far ignored, Parreñas contends, could conservation biology turn away from ultimately violent investments in population growth and embrace a feminist sense of welfare, even if it means experiencing loss and pain.

'A landmark in the process of decolonizing imperial Western knowledge.' Walter Mignolo, Duke University To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory. This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being. Now in its eagerly awaited second edition, this bestselling book has been substantially revised, with new case-studies and examples and important additions on new indigenous literature, the role of research in indigenous struggles for social justice, which brings this essential volume urgently up-to-date.

To expand the possibilities of “doing arts thinking” from a non-Eurocentric view, Artistic Mentoring as a Decolonizing Methodology: An Evolving Collaborative Painting Ethnography with Maya Artists Pedro Rafael González Chavajay and Paula Nicho Cúmez is grounded in Indigenous perspectives on arts practice, arts research, and art education. Mentored in painting for eighteen years by two Guatemalan Maya artists, Kryssi Staikidis, a North American painter and art education professor, uses both Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies, which involve respectful collaboration, and continuously reexamines her positions as student, artist, and ethnographer searching to redefine and transform the roles of the artist as mentor, historian/activist, ethnographer, and teacher. The primary purpose of the book is to illuminate the Maya artists as mentors, the collaborative and holistic processes underlying their painting, and the teaching and insights from their studios. These include Imagined Realism, a process excluding rendering from observation, and the fusion of pedagogy and curriculum into a holistic paradigm of decentralized teaching, negotiated curriculum, personal and cultural narrative as thematic content, and the surrounding visual culture and community as text. The Maya artist as cultural historian creates paintings as platforms of protest and vehicles of cultural transmission, for example, genocide witnessed in paintings as historical evidence. The mentored artist as ethnographer cedes the traditional ethnographic authority of the colonizing stance to the Indigenous expert as partner and mentor, and under this mentorship analyzes its possibilities as decolonizing arts-based qualitative inquiry. For the teacher, Maya world views broaden and integrate arts practice and arts research, inaugurating possibilities to transform arts education.

What does it mean to conduct research for justice with youth and communities who are marginalized by systems of inequality based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, citizenship status, gender, and other categories of difference? In this collection, editors Django Paris and Maisha Winn have selected essays written by top scholars in education on humanizing approaches to qualitative and ethnographic inquiry with youth and their communities. Vignettes, portraits, narratives, personal and collaborative explorations, photographs, and additional data excerpts bring the findings to life for a better understanding of how to use research for positive social change.

Decolonizing and Indigenizing Education in Canada thinks boldly about how to make space for Indigenous knowledges and have an honest discourse on truth and reconciliation. By engaging with Indigenous epistemologies and strategies, the contributors navigate the complexities of the decolonization and indigenization of post-secondary institutions. What is needed in this field is less theorizing and more action: the contributors offer practical steps on how one might positively transform the Canadian academy. Through this lens of action-based solutions, each of the fifteen chapters advances critical scholarship on issues of pedagogy, curriculum, shifting power dynamics, and challenging Eurocentric perspectives in higher education. With contributions from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics from across Canada and in varying academic positions, Decolonizing and Indigenizing Education in Canada provides a unique perspective specific to the Canadian education system. Featuring discussion questions, further reading lists, and practical examples of how to engage in decolonization work within the academy, this text is an essential resource for students and scholars studying Indigenous knowledges, education and pedagogies, and curriculum studies.

In Eastern Europe and Eurasia, LGBT+ individuals face repression by state forces and non-state actors who attempt to reinforce their vision of traditional social values. Decolonizing Queer Experience moves beyond discourses of oppression and repression to explore the resistance and resilience of LGBT+ communities who are remaking the post-socialist world; they refuse domination from local heteronormative expectations and from global LGBT+ movements that create and suggest limitations on possible LGBT+ futures. The chapters in this collection feature a multiplicity of LGBT+ voices, suggesting that no single narrative of LGBT+ experience in post-socialism is more representative or informative than another. This collection highlights the globally flexible, infinitely malleable notion of LGBT+ that counters Western hegemony in queer activism and communities.