A Political Ontological Approach to Decolonization of Ethnographic Research in Education

Decolonising Global (Public) Health: from Western universalism to Global pluriversalities

“…Since the coloniality of being and the coloniality of knowledge are both central to decolonial theory and integral to the arguments that follow, 14 the decolonisation of the concept of Global (Public) Health must take place at the epistemic AND ontological levels. Doing this requires addressing the lack of ontological pluralisms in the conceptualisation of humanity (that underpins the concept), redefining what is and what it means to be human and reimagining humanity in the pluriverse.…”

Back to the Source: Moving Upstream in the Curricular Rivers of Coloniality

“…Modernism/coloniality and the decolonial turn are now creating a theoretical upheaval most notably in such academic departments as Environmental Studies (Domanska, 2015; Singh, 2018), Education (Funes-Flores and Phillion, 2019), Geography (Stanek, 2019; Vannini, 2015), Ethnic Studies (Sandoval, 2000; Maldonado-Torres, 2016; Wynter, 2003), Sociology (Grosfoguel, 2008) and Women’s and Gender Studies (Braidotti, 2018: Haraway, 2016a), but spilling out across academia judging by the number of conferences and workshops currently being offered internationally. The authors of this article have been involved with the decolonial turn in their lives, teaching, and scholarship for years, and during the last 5 years have revised our teaching approaches given the flood of new papers and books on the subject of coloniality and decoloniality.…”

“…Analytic coding is introduced as a general theme, with attention to the assignment of rational and irrational codes of thought and behavior based on race (Wynter, 2003). We discuss the investigative practices of colonialism and early ethnography, where colonized people’s lives were portrayed through “traveler’s tales” and narrative documentation of encounters with the “other” (Fúnez-Flores & Phillion, 2019). These beginnings incorporating a supposed rational zero-point epistemology of the researcher paved the way for the proliferation of damage-centered narratives and later, hyper-survelliance of communities of color.…”

“…This strategy is a departure from standardization, allowing local participatory research collaboration with professional researchers through solidarity, witness, and shared analysis. According to Fúnez-Flores and Phillion (2019),The researcher’s responsibility is not to come up with transformative practices but to serve as a megaphone for the political enactments, narrations, ontological-epistemological conflicts people intersubjectively engage in to recreate meanings of their social, political, economic, and educational environment. By making “other” ways of being, becoming, and knowing as well as the alternative political practices and stories of resistance more visible, the field of education opens knowledge to multiplicity, diversity and change.…”

Anibal Quijano: (Dis)entangling the geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum

“…In curriculum studies, the emerging scholarship drawing on decolonial theory usually does not maintain a sustained dialogue with Quijano's extensive work (which begins in the 1960s), with the exception of those who adopt materialist perspectives (e.g. Fúnez‐Flores, 2020, 2022a, 2023; Fúnez‐Flores & Phillion, 2019; Díaz Beltrán, 2018; Jaramillo & McLaren, 2008; Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Paraskeva, 2016a; Rose, 2019; Streck & Adams, 2012). Despite having articulated decolonial theory's primary analytical concept, which has informed the social sciences and humanities for the past three decades, Quijano's work surprisingly remains marginal in the broad field of education and curriculum studies iii .…”