Roots/Routes

Abstract

Part 1 This narrative and poetic rendering acts as an articulation of a journey of many routes. It is a storying of critical research issues and events as performances of lived experience. It is a métissage of hybrid, but interrelated, themes that find cohesion through fragmentation and coalescence, severance, and regrowth. These themes are invoked by the (inter)relationship of the metaphors of roots/routes and the play on meaning through the play on words. The storying is a journey of seeking that calls forth, highlights, and attempts to dislodge, or “root out,” the dilemmas and contradictions in discourses and practices that emerge through the choices we make as we search or “root”—like a wild sow in the sod—for routes toward transcendence. This ethical seeking occurs as we reflexively unearth our understandings of the histories, epistemologies, practices, and prejudices of ours and others' roots/routes and routedness/rootedness. Part II of “Roots/Routes” follows Part I. Part II This narrative acts as an articulation of a journey of many routes. Following Part I of the same research journey of rootedness/routedness, it debates the nature of transformation and transcendence beyond personal and political paradoxes informed by neoliberalism and related repressive globalizing discourses. Through a more personal, descriptive, and philosophical approach, the author seeks to move, in a reflexive manner, beyond the delimiting roots of deficit discourse and its unrootedness with the daily, local, and lived. Through the use of a nontraditional writing–research approach, the author explores other, less objectifying, ways of being in research and attempts to provide alternative pedagogies of possibility away from dichotomous and positivist research engagement. By confronting socially constructed knowledges and identities, and “(re)sourcing” these through “humble togetherness” (Ubuntu), the storying seeks to find a transcendent spirituality through the routes/roots of research and achieve the emergence of transformative possibilities through pedagogies of hope!