Resisting Epistemic Blackout: Illustrating Afrocentric Methodology in a Kenyan Classroom

Abstract

AbstractThis article is based on the assumption that indigenous communities have a capacity to generate knowledge, and this capacity is largely underutilized or peripheralized in mainstream research. In this empirical qualitative study, the author makes a case for employing local non‐Western analytic tools, in addition to Western analytic tools, to develop a fuller understanding of literacy practices in non‐Western spaces. Through an interepistemic synergy approach, the author employed indexicality and interactional sociolinguistics on the one hand and Afrocentric methodology on the other hand in analyzing data produced in a grades 5 and 9 literacy collaboration in Nairobi, Kenya. This study illustrates deeper understandings of data on language use that scholars of language and literacy might derive through taking up an interepistemic synergy approach. Such understandings include tracking how multilingual speakers in postcolonial spaces modulate power imbalance and navigate layers of cross linguistic coevocation informed by contested ideologies and worldviews. The analysis also spotlights how local fingerprints of multilingualism and multiethnicity endure in written text in spite of language surveillance in a Standard Kenyan English–dominated classroom space. Taken together, these understandings cast a unique local aspect on language and literacy practices that goes beyond an emic‐etic approach. Most crucially, this article is an illustrative resource for scholars and other stakeholders to address the existing epistemic imbalance that manifests through overrepresentation of Western(ized) analytic tools in constituting the metalanguage for analyzing data on language and literacy.