Decolonial Research Research Articles

Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities by Mariana Mora

Reviewed by: Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities by Mariana Mora Lindsay Naylor Mariana Mora Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, University of Texas Press, 2017. ix + 288 pp. Photographs, maps, charts, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95 paper (ISBN: 978-1-4773-1447-0). Using an approach that combines participatory, feminist, and decolonial theories, Mariana Mora analyzes the politics of Zapatista autonomy in this innovative book. While the Zapatistas are often romanticized or drawn on to compare vastly different forms of resistance in academic writing, Kuxlejal Politics instead offers a grounded portrait of their everyday lives. Drawing on more than a decade of solidarity work and research in a Zapatista municipality, Mora demonstrates the possibilities of community-engaged research. The text deftly approaches the lineage of the movement, past and present racialization of indigenous peoples, and the vicissitudes of resisting the neoliberal political-economic project of the state of Mexico. While the book is focused on analyzing three pervasive racialized tropes and demonstrating that they contribute to past and present exploitation of indigenous peoples in Chiapas, I especially want to emphasize how Mora is simultaneously provoking scholars in a profound way to deeply reconsider their research practices. There is a bevy of academic work on the Zapatista movement, and Mora acknowledges that Chiapas receives more anthropological inquiry than any other state in Mexico. One goal of the book is to unravel this anthropological genealogy, by directly addressing the colonial-imperial and racist legacies of anthropological research. Kuxlejal Politics is not just "another book about Chiapas" to be shelved alongside accounts of resistance in Latin America and rebellion in Mexico more broadly; rather, it represents a feminist decolonial approach to research with indigenous peoples that breaks with long-standing practice by making the research itself a key component of the analytical work being done. In eight chapters, Kuxlejal Politics makes evident that knowledge production is a concrete and collective act. Chapter Two forms the backbone of this text, where Mora provides an in-depth discussion of the research approach. Using a feminist decolonial framework, Mora argues for situating academic research as a dialogue and suggests that her own fieldwork became subject to the processes of autonomy and political debates that were being studied. In three succinct subsections Mora unpacks "democratizing knowledge production" (pp. 50–55), the "power between the written and the oral" (pp. 55–62), and "the interview as testimony on the knowing-doing of history" (pp. 62–68), and demonstrates the power of a project that has active participation. Mora describes the processes and practices of dialogic research in a way that challenges basic concepts of researcher reflexivity and transforms the way that we as scholars might consider the tensions and power relations at work in the development and deployment of research. [End Page 235] The book takes its title from the indigenous Mayan Tseltal word for "life" or "life-existence" (kuxlejal) (p.19). In using this framing of "life politics" as a starting point, Mora weaves a narrative that is infused with stories of struggle and radical possibility. The analytical foundations of the book are three racialized tropes that Mora presents in the introduction; the enunciation of these tropes in the following chapters illuminates the processes and practices of exploitation of indigenous peoples in and before the neoliberal period. The first trope identified is "infantilization," which casts indigenous people as subjects in need of constant care by outsiders (p.16). The second is the trope of the "mozo," the servant identity that normalizes power hierarchies, which place indigenous people in the service of the non-indigenous (p.16). And finally, Mora offers a third trope, in which an early golden age of the ancient Maya is contrasted with their so-called "degenerate and biologically deficient" counterparts in the present (p.16). Together these ideas operationalize what Mora discusses as "racialized disciplinary mechanisms" that function in historical and contemporary Chiapas, and which shape the struggle of the Zapatistas (p. 17). To ground the reader, Mora opens up the book with a historical backdrop regarding Zapatista organizing and focuses on the site of fieldwork, the community of...

Complex Accountabilities: Deconstructing “the Community” and Engaging Indigenous Feminist Research Methods

Scholars have focused significant attention on the need for relational conceptions of “accountability” as alternatives to Western modes of knowledge production. This article suggests that conceptualizing accountability through the normative frame of the “community” can narrow the breadth of possible ways of realizing ethical and accountable research relationships and that critical analytical strategies to help ensure researcher accountability to diverse perspectives and experiences within Indigenous communities also demand our attention. The need for research to be driven by and for Indigenous communities has been emphasized, yet within colonial heteropatriarchy, deference to collective units has historically functioned to homogenize and/or erase the knowledge and experience of Indigenous women, girls, and GLBTQ2 peoples. Researchers and academics have the potential to either challenge or reproduce these tendencies in our own works; thus, a decolonial research and activist agenda must be informed by a commitment to address patriarchal and heteronormative structures both internal and external to Indigenous communities. To this end, I propose a turn to Indigenous feminist methodologies as a means of informing broader notions of responsibility and accountability.

Postcolonial, decolonial research dilemmas: fieldwork in Australian Indigenous contexts

We come to this article as non-Indigenous teacher educators working as qualitative researchers in postcolonial/decolonial (Mignolo, 2000) times. We explore matters related to schooling in remote Australian Indigenous communities. In this article, we respond to Delamont’s invitation for qualitative researchers to revisit (Delamont and Hamilton, 1984) and think reflexively (Delamont, 2009) about our field work research methods. In doing so, attention is drawn to research processes involved with observing, narrating and writing lives and experiences. We highlight matters related to sequencing dilemmas (Delamont, 2009), the need to locate the self-as-researcher in the social (Delamont, 2007), and calling out ethical tensions associated with the ‘catch 22’ of confidentiality and acknowledgement (Delamont, 2007). Two separate researcher recounts of field notes are used to render visible our reflexive thinking as we attempt to negotiate Western educational research ethics policies and procedures and ways of knowing and being in Indigenous contexts.

Theories of femicide and their significance for social research

Almost four decades have passed since the term femicide was coined in 1976. This new word had a political purpose, in that it intended to produce changes in the social order which tolerated the violent death of women. Since that time, the word has generated a theoretical concept that encompasses the killing of a woman as a specific social phenomenon. Femicide is an effort in sociological imagination that has been successful in transforming conventional perception, public awareness, scientific research and policy making. This article undertakes to review how femicide has evolved in social research. It analyses the most important theories explaining femicide: the feminist, sociological, criminological, human rights and decolonial research approaches and their theoretical significance. It discusses Mexico as a case study, exemplifying how a new English term was then translated into another language and applied in a very specific socio-political context, so that it became instrumental in changing reality and improving the lives of women. Finally, the article proposes a framework where femicide is understood as a social phenomenon that demands an interdisciplinary approach. The authors recommend a systemic, multifaceted model in order to improve both scientific analysis and prevention.

Working With Embroideries and Counter-Maps: Engaging Memory and Imagination Within Decolonizing Frameworks

As people around the world continue to have their voices, desires, and movements restricted, and their pasts and futures told on their behalf, we are interested in the critical project of decolonizing, which involves contesting dominant narratives and hegemonic representations. Ignacio Martín-Baró called these the “collective lies” told about people and politics. This essay reflects within and across two sites of injustice, located in Israel/Palestine and in South Africa, to excavate the circuits of structural violence, internalized colonization and possible reworking of those toward resistance that can be revealed within the stubborn particulars of place, history, and culture. The projects presented here are locally rooted, site-specific inquiries into contexts that bear the brunt of colonialism, dispossession, and occupation. Using visual research methodologies such as embroideries that produce counter-narratives and counter-maps that divulge the complexity of land-struggles, we search for fitting research practices that amplify unheard voices and excavate the social psychological soil that grows critical analysis and resistance. We discuss here the practices and dilemmas of doing decolonial research and highlight the need for research that excavates the specifics of a historical material context and produces evidence of previously silenced narratives.

“Because we have really unique art”: Decolonizing Research with Indigenous Youth Using the Arts

Indigenous communities in Canada share a common history of colonial oppression. As a result, many Indigenous populations are disproportionately burdened with poor health outcomes, including HIV. Conventional public health approaches have not yet been successful in reversing this trend. For this study, a team of community- and university-based researchers came together to imagine new possibilities for health promotion with Indigenous youth. A strengths-based approach was taken that relied on using the energies and talents of Indigenous youth as a leadership resource. Art-making workshops were held in six different Indigenous communities across Canada in which youth could explore the links between community, culture, colonization, and HIV. Twenty artists and more than 85 youth participated in the workshops. Afterwards, youth participants reflected on their experiences in individual in-depth interviews. Youth participants viewed the process of making art as fun, participatory, and empowering; they felt that their art pieces instilled pride, conveyed information, raised awareness, and constituted a tangible achievement. Youth participants found that both the process and products of arts-based methods were important. Findings from this project support the notion that arts-based approaches to the development of HIV-prevention knowledge and Indigenous youth leadership are helping to involve a diverse cross-section of youth in a critical dialogue about health. Arts-based approaches represent one way to assist with decolonization for future generations.

Studying Agaciro: Moving Beyond Wilsonian Interventionist Knowledge Production on Rwanda

Twenty years after the end of the Rwandan genocide, knowledge production on the small country of a thousand hills remains a clamorous battle ground of post- and decolonial power and influence. This essay critically engages with the knowledge production on Rwanda in the West by conceptualizing it as a Wilsonian intervention in the post-colony: paternalistically well-intended at the service of the peace, democracy and free trade liberal triad, while at the same time silencing, self-contradictory and potentially counterproductive. The Wilsonian interventionist form of knowledge production is coated in a language of critical engagement and care. At the same time it is and allows for a continuous external engagement in view of this Wilsonian triad—a highly particularist view on the good life, cast in universal terms. As a former journalist and a researcher from the Belgian Rwandan diaspora and building on a decolonial research strategy, in this essay I reflect on potentially different avenues to produce and consume knowledge on the country. I do this by discussing the challenges and creative opportunities of a recently started research project on Agaciro (self-worth): a philosophy and public policy in post-genocide Rwanda rooted in its precolonial past, centred on the ideals of self-determination, dignity and self-reliance. Rather than inscribing itself firmly into the canon that aims at informing on Rwanda, this research project seeks to contribute to a different mode of imagining, studying and enacting sovereignty in today's academic and political world, both permeated by the hegemonic principle of the responsibility to protect (R2P).