RESEARCH AS RESISTANCE: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-Oppressive Approaches

Abstract

RESEARCH AS RESISTANCE: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-Oppressive Approaches Leslie Brown and Susan Strega, eds. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 2005; 303 pp. This edited collection is a lively and grounded compilation that disrupts many of frameworks and methodologies that organize and authorize research endeavour. Books on qualitative research often lay out mechanics of research without attending to their political currency, while other offerings debate theoretical or political potential of particular perspectives without locating them in actual projects. This collection, however, interrogates specific methods employed in research projects (institutional ethnography, narrative autobiography, storytelling, participatory action research) in a variety of locations/sites (disability, Aboriginal, Queer, youth from care) as political acts. In addition, each chapter engages with and challenges ontological and epistemological assumptions that underlie dominant forms of knowledge making. Research from the margins is privileged here, in authors' various elucidations of subjugated knowledge(s), role of reflexivity, politics of location, and subjectivity. Each chapter provides a different critique of racialized and gendered foundation of Enlightenment epistemologies. The dangerous effects and limitations of positivist research and interpretive stance in qualitative research are set against authors' elaboration of critical, Indigenous, and anti-oppressive approaches to knowledge production. Theoretical chapters are interwoven with sections devoted to more descriptive accounts of specific research projects. This arrangement encourages reader to move from theory to praxis in ways intended by editors. Indeed, that is point. Each decision we make as researchers is tied to a theoretical construct/ ideology that illuminates how we know what we know. Efforts to make these power relations a central feature of knowledge-making are completely necessary to Research as Resistance. Yet, as this collection demonstrates, there are multiple and complex issues at work in implementation of emancipatory research. By including critical, Indigenous, and anti-oppressive approaches in this edition, one sees tensions that exist between their different formulations of location, storytelling, subjectivity, authenticity, and complicity. Anti-oppressive theories, research, and practices are outlined in three chapters. Moosa-Mitha argues that anti-oppressive theories are best understood in contrast to liberalism, Marxism, white feminism, and postmodernism. Her extensive argument shows how anti-oppressive theories are difference-centred and critical, and akin to social identity theories. She contends that anti-oppressive theories are interested in knowledge-making as dialogical, partial, situated, and subjugated. Potts and Brown similarly turn their attention to anti-oppressive approaches yet detail principles and actions required to become an anti-oppressive researcher. They lay out how these approaches put into action and influence way we ask questions, collect data, create meaning, and reclaim notions of validity and reliability in social sciences. One can see how these principles are applied in a chapter on participatory action research with youth from care. Rutman, Hubberstey, Barlow and Brown outline funding, institutional, and personal challenges of PAR, and emphasize need to continuously review principles of anti-oppressive practice at an individual/team level. These chapters are each enriched by presence of others, allowing readers to see how antioppressive ontologies and practice inform one another. Scholars similarly expound upon theoretical frameworks and methodologies of Indigenous research. Margaret Kovack describes emancipatory potential of Indigenous epistemologies (knowledge as fluid, experiential, generational, alive, verb-based, intuitive) and methodologies (i. …