The Limits of Justice-Informed Research and Teaching in the Presence of Antiblackness and Black Suffering: Surplus of Transformation or (Un)Just Traumatic Returns?

Abstract

In this conceptual article, I examine the turn of justice-oriented research and teaching from transformative to traumatic and its relationship to antiblackness. I consider the affordances and limits of research and teaching that makes antiblackness visible while simultaneously citing potentially traumatizing portraits of Black suffering. Drawing from critical multicultural education and social justice scholarship, alongside Black intellectual thought in literary studies, visual studies, Eastern philosophy, and participatory and ethnographic research, I ask whether and how researchers should engage justice-informed research and teaching. I offer insights to consider when seeking either to capture antiblack injustice or to share it as curriculum.

Conducting Case Study Research to Address the Continued Crises: A Process of Learning to Employ Decolonial Perspectives to Produce a Flourishing Academic Lifeworld

“…Or, as Webber-Ritchey et al (2021) noted, we can seek to produce work that provides “vulnerable populations a voice so that they are no longer silenced” within the current and historical understandings of such crises as the COVID-19 pandemic (p. 17). No matter the direction they choose to follow in their work, I seek to help them recognize that addressing crises is challenging work; it is physically and psychosocially challenging (e.g., K. D. Brown, 2021), conceptually challenging (Ritchie, 2016), and methodologically challenging (e.g., Cannella & Viruru, 2004).…”

“…Ignoring these vulnerabilities, be it in the researching of crises or the sharing of work, only adds to rather than addresses the physical and psychosocial pain created by these crises. To move forward, K. D. Brown (2021) suggests that as researchers and/or instructors, we must recognize and, using the work of Crawley (2017), “sit with,” or “tarry” the suffering of those we research/study.…”

“…Furthermore, we must demand for and act for change, which I tell the students must be a part of their critical case studies. Finally, K. D. Brown (2021) notes that “Black liberation,” or the liberation of any colonized group, “will necessarily mean a death to whiteness and its weighty significance in integrated social life” (p. 1176).…”

Liminal relationalities: on collaborative writing with/in and against race in the study of early childhood

“…The sharing of Simon's prototype research proposal on whiteness in ELC provides an entry point for us to develop the conversations we had started around broader anti-racist commitments. The theoretical nature of this writing excites me, for an emergent affinity is felt in the relation of our commitments towards thinkingotherwise, away from the stasis of critique in certain strands of scholarship on racism (Brown, 2021;McKittrick, 2021). Critique, as I have come to learn and have engaged in myself (Tembo, 2020b(Tembo, , 2020a…”