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In this article, the authors simultaneously examine how education scholars have taken up the call for (re)articulating Chicana feminist epistemological perspectives in their research and speak back to Dolores Delgado Bernal's 1998 Harvard Educational Review article, "Using a Chicana Feminist Epistemology in Educational Research." They address the ways in which Chicana scholars draw on their ways of knowing to unsettle dominant modes of analysis, create decolonizing methodologies, and build upon what it means to utilize Chicana feminist epistemology in educational research. Moreover, they demonstrate how such work provides new narratives that embody alternative paradigms in education research. These alternative paradigms are aligned with the scholarship of Gloria Anzaldúa, especially her theoretical concepts of nepantla, El Mundo Zurdo, and Coyolxauhqui. Finally, the authors offer researcher reflections that further explore the tensions and possibilities inherent in employing Chicana feminist epistemologies in educational research.
You examine the description handed to you of the world, picking holes in the paradigms currently constructing reality. You doubt that traditional western science is the best knowledge system, the only true, impartial arbiter of reality . . . You turn the established narrative on its head, seeing through, resisting, and subverting its assumptions. Again, it's not enough to denounce the culture's old account - you must provide new narratives embodying alternative potentials . . . Beliefs and values from the wisdom of past spiritual traditions of diverse cultures coupled with current scientific knowledge is the basis of the new synthesis. (Anzaldúa, 2002, pp. 561-562)
Gloria Anzaldúa's powerful insights speak directly to our work as Chicana1 education scholars committed to anti-oppressive social justice research and guided by Chicana feminist epistemological frameworks. She reveals not only that doing such work represents a critique of dominant research paradigms but, more importantly, that such work, being both spiritual and intellectual, also requires deep introspection and a vision for something different. Her comments remind us that as Chicana education scholars drawing from a Chicana feminist epistemology (CFE), we must collectively embark on a path of decolonization. We understand her to be suggesting that in doing this work we are not alone. Feminists of color in education have drawn on alternative systems of knowing that hold the potential to disrupt Western colonial assumptions (Delgado Bernal, 1998, 2002; Dillard,...