Critical Reflexive Research Methodologies

While all oppressions are equal, some are more equal than others.

This statement, borrowed from George Orwell's Animal Farm and written and marinated to fit within and without our call for ethical research, helps us to see how contemporary research processes are singular and fail to account for the complex histories, realities and values of marginalized communities. Such a failure to account and re/member has had massive symbolic and material consequences on marginalized communities, illustrated by the number of deaths we continue to witness everyday. Those deaths have been sanctioned and authorized by the ways in which we come to know what we know and how that is imprinted in our policies and everyday existence. This book looks at knowledge production as a process of giving an account of those losses, in ways that help knowledge production to be a mechanism of remembering (cognitive) and re/membering (communi/ity or bring together/solidarity/ a form of epistemological and ontological demonstration).

Ethical knowledge production becomes a process of relationship that remembers the histories, values and realities of people in ways that are transformative and political. Such an expression fails to arrive at an end, and rather recognizes knowledge production as endless production of knowledge. Such a process goes against the neoliberal mechanism of commodifying knowledge for sale in the market.

This edited collection attempts to engage with current qualitative research methodologies and approaches from a critically and ethically reflexive standpoint. Critical Reflexive Research Methodologies seeks to unravel colonial practices that continue to hide within qualitative approaches in ways that invite a new reimagining of working within and without qualitative method/ologies. The collection therefore seeks to bring to the fore the lived experiences of the studied to their storied life in ways that are ethically and politically congruent. This work therefore seeks to bring forth Foucault's subterranean narratives steeped in contexts and experiences that can critically invert the dominant (colonial, capitalist, state) practices in existing research.