Performing to/Against Anti-Intellectual Discourses in Higher Education in the U.S.

Abstract

In this paper the author critiques the ways in which anti-intellectual discourses discipline qualitative inquiry in higher education in the U.S. Written through multiple embodied performative narratives, the author presents de/colonizing possibilities informed by transnational feminism and critical pedagogy. By focusing on the historicity of particular moments, the author demonstrates how she works and plays with methodological and substantive implications to identify spaces beyond victim narrative that are complicit in and complicated with de/colonizing possibilities. Moreover, the author demonstrates her own de/colonizing moves and the ways in which she attempts to negotiate subversive moves and resist co-optation. The author offers methodological, substantive, and praxis-oriented suggestions to work with/against/at the boundaries of colonial and hegemonic discourses in higher education that discipline knowledge.