Epistemologies of Family: Intentionally Centering Relationality, Mutuality and Care in Educational Research

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article resulted from an American Education Research Association (AERA) conference presentation that consisted of a dialogue between three scholar-siblings of color who use methodological pathways that intentionally center relationality, mutuality, and care in educational research. The authors do this work understanding that familial ways of knowing and being are resources that contribute to the survival and thriving of BIPOC communities in the face of white supremacist structures. The authors’ conversation discusses how they disrupt the white western gaze by relying on the critical mass of Black, Indigenous, and other scholars of color who refuse exploitive methods and, instead, charted new methodological pathways that (re)center cultural, familial, and tribal ways of knowing. Given the authors’ positionalities, the communities and families that collectively raised them, and the extended scholarly family who have nurtured and supported them in their efforts to push against extractive research practices, the authors attend to the ways knowledge is shaped at the intersections of race and gender. This dialogue contends that there are sophisticated knowledges, ways of knowing, and ways of being rooted in the experience of marginalized families caring for one another and fighting for each other’s rights.