Research As Resistance

This book brings together the theory and practice of anti-oppressive approaches to social science research. It is a work that will have a place in the classroom, as well as on the desks of researchers in agencies, governments, and private consulting practice. The first section of the book is devoted to the ontological and epistemological considerations involved in such research, including theorizing the self of the researcher. The second section of the book offers exemplars across a range of methodologies, including institutional ethnography, narrative autobiography, storytelling and Indigenous research, and participatory action research. This is a unique text in that it describes both theoretical foundations and practical applications, and because all of the featured researchers occupy marginalized locations. It is also firmly anchored in the Canadian context.

Youth resistance has become a pressing global phenomenon, to which many educators and researchers have looked for inspiration and/or with chagrin. Although the topic of much discussion and debate, it remains dramatically under-theorized, particularly in terms of theories of change. Resistance has been a prominent concern of educational research for several decades, yet understandings of youth resistance frequently lack complexity, often seize upon convenient examples to confirm entrenched ideas about social change, and overly regulate what "counts" as progress. As this comprehensive volume illustrates, understanding and researching youth resistance requires much more than a one-dimensional theory. Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change provides readers with new ways to see and engage youth resistance to educational injustices. This volume features interviews with prominent theorists, including Signithia Fordham, James C. Scott, Michelle Fine, Robin D.G. Kelley, Gerald Vizenor, and Pedro Noguera, reflecting on their own work in light of contemporary uprisings, neoliberal crises, and the impact of new technologies globally. Chapters presenting new studies in youth resistance exemplify approaches which move beyond calcified theories of resistance. Essays on needed interventions to youth resistance research provide guidance for further study. As a whole, this rich volume challenges current thinking on resistance, and extends new trajectories for research, collaboration, and justice.

Indigenous Methodologies is a groundbreaking text. Since its original publication in 2009, it has become the most trusted guide used in the study of Indigenous methodologies and has been adopted in university courses around the world. It provides a conceptual framework for implementing Indigenous methodologies and serves as a useful entry point for those wishing to learn more broadly about Indigenous research. The second edition incorporates new literature along with substantial updates, including a thorough discussion of Indigenous theory and analysis, new chapters on community partnership and capacity building, an added focus on oracy and other forms of knowledge dissemination, and a renewed call to decolonize the academy. The second edition also includes discussion questions to enhance classroom interaction with the text. In a field that continues to grow and evolve, and as universities and researchers strive to learn and apply Indigenous-informed research, this important new edition introduces readers to the principles and practices of Indigenous methodologies.

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.

Persistence and Resistance: New Research in English Studies gathers together a selection of articles by members of the Association of Young Researchers in Anglophone Studies (ASYRAS). The volume covers a wide range of topics dealing with English literature and culture, language and linguistics. Varied in content and methodology, the articles here offer valuable insights into how young researchers approach the field of English Studies at a time of crisis when the very existence of the university is at risk. The work gathered here also shows that we need to reconsider the meaning of international research. Based mostly in Spanish universities, the researchers gathered here come from a variety of national backgrounds, mainly Spanish, but also British, American, Eastern European and Chinese. They are producing research in English Studies in a global Anglophone environment, contributing at the same time – with persistence and resistance – new approaches that enhance the research produced in the geographical areas where English is spoken.

"Research as Resistance brings together the theory and practice of anti-oppressive approaches to social science research. Emphasizing meaningful involvement of research subjects in the research processes and critical reflexivity, this book describes both theoretical foundations and practical applications of socially just research. The book covers some of the ontological and epistemological considerations involved in such research, including researcher positionality, and offers examples across a range of methodologies, including storytelling and Indigenous research. This is a unique text in that it is firmly anchored in the Canadian context, and the featured researchers occupy marginalized locations."--

More Will Sing Their Way to Freedom is about Indigenous resistance and resurgence across lands and waters claimed by Canada. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors describe and analyze struggles against contemporary colonialism by the Canadian state and, more broadly, against the global colonial-capitalist system. Resistance includes Indigenous survival against centuries of genocidal policies and the on-going dispossession and destruction of Indigenous lands and waters. Resurgence is the re-invention of diverse Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in politics, economics, the arts, research and all realms of life. The underlying argument of More Will Sing Their Way to Freedom is that colonial-capitalism is a historical fact but not an inevitability. By analyzing and detailing various forms of Indigenous resistance and resurgence, the authors here describe practices and visions that prefigure a possible world where there is justice for Indigenous peoples and renewed healthy relationships with “all our relations.”