Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T02:37:19.897Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Doing Decoloniality in the Writing Borderlands of the PhD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2017

Ailie McDowall  and
Fabiane Ramos
Ailie McDowall*
Affiliation:
School of Education, The University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4072, Australia
Fabiane Ramos
Affiliation:
School of Education, The University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4072, Australia
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE: Ailie McDowall, School of Education, The University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4072, Australia. Email: a.mcdowall1@uq.edu.au.
Get access

Abstract

This paper takes us into the Writing Borderlands, an ambiguous in-between space borrowed from Anzaldúa's concept of Borderlands, where we as PhD students are in a constant state of transition. We argue that theorising from a decolonial position consists of not merely using concepts around coloniality/decoloniality, but also putting its core ideas into practice in the ‘doing’ aspect of research. The writing is a major part of this doing. We enact epistemic disobedience by challenging taken-for-granted conventions of what ‘proper’ academic writing looks like. Writing from a universal standpoint — the type of writing prescribed in theses formats, positivist research methods and ‘proper’ academic writing — has been instrumental in promoting the zero-point epistemologies that prevail through Northern artefacts of knowledge. In other words, we write to de-link from the epistemological assumption of a neutral and detached observational location from which the world is interpreted. In this paper, we discuss the journey we take as PhD students as we attempt to delink and decolonise our writing. Traversing the landscape of the Writing Borderlands, different features arise and fall. Along the way, we come across forks in the road between academic training and the new way we imagine writing decolonially.

Keywords

decolonialitywritingfeminismBorderlandsdoctoral research
Type
Research Article
Information
The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education , Volume 47 , Special Issue 1: South-South Dialogues: Global Approaches to Decolonial Pedagogies , August 2018 , pp. 54 - 63
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams St Pierre, E. (2014). A brief and personal history of post qualitative research: Toward “post inquiry”. Journal of Curriculum and Theorizing, 30 (2), 2–19.Google Scholar
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). La frontera/borderlands: The new mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.Google Scholar
Anzaldúa, G. (1990). Making face, making soul/haciendo caras: Creative and critical perspectives by feminists of color. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.Google Scholar
Anzaldúa, G. (2002). (Un)natural bridges, (Un)safe spaces. In Anzaldúa, G. E. & Keating, A. L. (Eds.), This bridge we call home: Radical visions for transformation (pp. 1–5). New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Anzaldúa, G. (2009a). En rapport, in opposition: Cobrando cuentas a las nuestras. In Keating, A. L. (Ed.), The Gloria Anzaldúa reader (pp. 111–118). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anzaldúa, G. (2009b). On the process of writing borderlands/la frontera. In Keating, A. L. (Ed.), The Gloria Anzaldúa reader (pp. 187–197). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anzaldúa, G. (2015). Light in the dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Brayboy, B.M.J. (2005). Towards a tribal critical race theory in education. The Urban Review, 37 (5), 425–446. doi: 10.1007/s11256-005-008-yGoogle Scholar
Christian, B. (1988). The race for theory. Feminist Studies, 14 (1), 67–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cixous, H. (1976). The laugh of the medusa (K. Cohen & P. Cohen, Trans.). Signs, 1 (4), 875–893.Google Scholar
Cixous, H. (1991). Coming to writing and other essays (D. Jensen, Ed., & S. Cornell, D. Jensen, A. Liddle & S. Sellers, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social sciences. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Grosfoguel, R. (2008). Transmodernity, border thinking, and global coloniality. Decolonizing Political Economy and Postcolnial Studies. Retrieved from www.humandee.orgGoogle Scholar
Haraway, D. (1992). The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In Grossberg, L., Nelson, C., & Treichler, P. (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 295–337). London, UK: RoutledgeGoogle Scholar
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. London, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
hooks, b. (1997). Wounds of passion: A writing life. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.Google Scholar
Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2014). Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kovach, M. (2009). Indigenous methodologies: Characteristics, conversations, and contexts. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Levine, D.N. (1985). The flight from ambiguity: Essays in social and cultural theory. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lugones, M. (2003). Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Oxford, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Mackinlay, E. (2015). In danger of writing: Performing the poetics and politics of autoenthnography with Hélène Cixous and Virginia Woolf. Qualititative Research Jounal, 15 (2), 189–201. doi: 10.1108/QRJ-01-2015-0010Google Scholar
Mackinlay, E., & Bartleet, B.-L. (2012). Friendship as research: Exploring the potential of sisterhood and personal relationships as the foundations of musicological and ethnographic fieldwork. Qualitative Research Journal, 12 (1), 75–87. doi: 10.1108/14439881211222741.Google Scholar
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies, 21 (2), 240–270. doi: 10.1080/09502380601162548CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2011). Thinking through the decolonial turn: post-continental interventions in theory, philosophy and critique - an introduction. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1 (2), 1–15.Google Scholar
Mignolo, W. (2009). Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, 26 (7–8), 159–181. doi: 10.1177/0263276409349275Google Scholar
Mignolo, W. (2011). Decolonizing western epistemology: Building decolonial epistemologies. In Isasi-Diaz, A. M. (Ed.), Decolonizing epistemologies: Latina/o theology and philosophy (pp. 19–43). New York, NY: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In Lewis, R. & Mills, S. (Eds.), Feminist postcolonial theory: A reader (pp. 49–74). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Nakata, M. (2010). The cultural interface of islander and scientific knowledge. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 39s, 53–57.Google Scholar
Nakata, N.M., Nakata, V., Keech, S., & Bolt, R. (2012). Decolonial goals and pedagogies for Indigenous studies. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1 (1), 120–140.Google Scholar
Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21 (2–3), 168–178. doi: 10.1080/09502380601164353Google Scholar
Richardson, L. (1990). Narrative and sociology. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 19 (1), 116–135. doi: 10.1177/089124190019001006Google Scholar
Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of play: Constructing an academic life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Richardson, L. (2001). Poetic representation of interviews. In Gubrium, J.F. & Holstein, J.A. (Eds.), Handbook of interview research (pp. 876–892). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Richardson, L., & St Pierre, E.A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed. pp. 959–978). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage PublicationsGoogle Scholar
Saavedra, C.M., & Nymark, E.D. (2008). Borderland-mestisaje feminism: The new tribalism. In Denzin, N., Lincoln, Y. & Smith, L. T. (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 255–276). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Sium, A., & Ritskes, E. (2013). Speaking truth to power: Indigenous storytelling as an act of living resistance. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2 (1), i–x.Google Scholar
Smith, L.T. (2009). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). London: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Tillmann-Healy, L.M. (2003). Friendship as method. Qualitative Inquiry, 9 (5), 729–749. doi: 10.1177/1077800403254894Google Scholar
Tlostanova, M.V., & Mignolo, W.D. (2012). Learning to unlearn: Decolonial reflections from Eurasia and the Americas. Colombus, OH: Ohio State University Press.Google Scholar
Trinh, M.-H. (1989). Women, native, other: Writing, postcoloniality and feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Tuck, E., & Yang, K.W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1 (1), 1–40.Google Scholar