Course Description: World-Ending and World-Making: Researching to Decolonize and Heal. How can our research help us heal from the piling-up wreckage of colonization that is our disastrous present? We will study decolonial artists and scholars who guide our research practices toward answering the question Robyn Maynard poses: "What does it mean to try to build worlds that affirm, rather than destroy, life?" We will undertake research methods that emphasize alternative ways of knowing and being, dismantle colonial power, and seek to heal, unite, and liberate.
“In a methodological context, the four principles of respect, responsibility, reverence, and reciprocity act as an ethical guide for the researcher to work with Indigenous people, their Indigenous knowledges, and stories.
Archibald, Lee-Morgan, and Santolo. Introduction. Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology, p.1.
“Decolonizing research methodologies do not totally dismiss Western methodological approaches; they encourage us as Indigenous researchers to connect research to our own worldview and to theorize based on own cultural notions in order to engage in more meaningful and useful research for our people.”
Archibald, Lee-Morgan, and Santolo, p. 6.
“’[S]cholars engaged in decolonizing research remain constantly mindful of the ways in which the process or outcomes of their research endeavors might reify hegemonic power structures, thereby creating marginality.’”
Swadener and Mutua (2008), quoted in Archibald, Lee-Morgan, and Santolo, p.6.
Sample Search Terminology:
[Name of a Native People]
Epistemology
Indigenous peoples
Knowledge
Myth
Native people
Oral history
Oral literature
Stories
Tales
