As researchers in the field of education continue to expand the use of theatre as a device for inquiry-related purposes, increased attention is being paid to important methodological and ethical implications related to performatively representing and disseminating research findings.
This article examines some of these issues within the context of a research project that used theatre to fictionalize the inner voices of educators in an attempt to reveal the multiple perspectives and loyalties that significantly characterize interpersonal dynamics within educational settings.
The article begins with a scene from an ethnotheatre play that was designed by the researchers to serve as a site of inquiry that would enable researcher-participants, performers and audience members to performatively explore these inner voices. Who these inner voices belong to and the ethical
implications involved in fictionalizing them are issues that are explored in some detail by the authors as these attempt to bring greater clarity to the process of theatricalizing and performing research.
Given the often tokenistic, ahistorical and apolitical approach to mainstream multiculturalism employed in schools, this paper theorizes transculturalism and decolonial thinking from a pedagogical perspective while also considering its potential as a transformative method of inquiry. Of particular interest to the authors is how employing transcultural narrative has the capacity to explore colonialism outside and beyond a conventional historical context in order to understand its impact on the present day. To this end, the authors discuss transcultural narrative as a form of decolonial pedagogy and inquiry, one that invites messy and often uncomfortable intro/trans-spective reflections where conflicting cultural, social and historical locations come into contact. This contact zone effectively compels unsettling dialogue between the colonizer/settler and the colonized, whiteness and color, privilege and marginalization, obstructionist and agency/ally work etc, locations which the authors argue are best understood collectively, relationally, and along a continuum rather than as a fixed binary. The authors present an example of this form of engagement (in the form of a transcultural narrative between an instructor and guest speaker), including the rationale through which it was actualized as well as some of the new inner/understandings that emerged from the inquiry experience. The potential to employ transcultural narrative as a pedagogical process of inquiry is also discussed.
Transculturalism and the colonial matrix of powerIn an effort to disharmonize -multiculturalism,‖ the term transculturalism (Mignolo, 2001) has received considerable attention in the area of Subaltern Studies over the last decade As part of this important work, Mignolo demands a move away from the concept of celebrating cultural diversity to raise awareness of colonial difference. In this manner, as Delgado and Romero (2001) highlight, Mignolo's transculturalism is always performed in power structures between hegemony and subalternity. Such decolonial thinking (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012) recognizes not just colonialism, but rather a -colonial matrix of power‖ (p. 18) as part of the existing global design and world order. Mignolo critiques the conventional use of the term -colonialism‖ that distantly and comfortably situates it within a historical context. Conversely, he draws our attention to the concept of -coloniality,‖ one that is consistent with the Peruvian liberation theologist, Anibal Quijano's notion of the -coloniality of power‖. This compels an understanding
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