Critical Research Methodologies: Ethics and Responsibilities

This expansive volume challenges the conventional approach to research by arguing for the recentering of local and marginalized knowledges

We live in a society that promotes the universal process of producing knowledge and truth as a fundamental social process. Such promotion of universality seems to subjugate others forms of knowing, rendering them invisible, unintelligible, and ineligible and subsequently outside the community of knowing. This has material and symbolic consequences in terms of how research informs policy and subsequent victimization of those who live, and experience subjugation meted out by Western truth making universalism. In the words of Foucault, this book is an insurrection of subterranean and clandestine knowledges in the ways it provides not just an alternative process of knowledge production but also affirms local knowledge as necessary in production of a just society.

Critical Research Methodologies looks at research as a social justice and transformational process that should speak of people's ways of living without necessarily streamlining them into numbers. The book is a critically reflexive project in terms of returning processes of knowledge production to the local space rather than imagining them as entirely centred in the structure. To imagine this book as a reflexive exercise is to break boundaries of knowledge in ways that come to imagine how the local performs the global in very complicated and complex ways. This book is a resurrection of local knowledges, steeped in creative and imaginative reflexive methodologies that come to reorient how we know what we know, the values and realities that mark what we know, and the how of knowledge production. It centres subjugated voices and knowledges as fundamental in production of knowledge.

Contributors include: Katie Bannon, Elizabeth Charles, Khulood Agha Khan, Dionisio Nyaga, Fritz Pino, and Rose Ann Torres.