Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous and Anti-oppressive Approaches

Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous and Anti-oppressive Approaches. Edited by Leslie Brown and Susan Strega. Toronto: Canadian Scholar's Press, 2005.

In a seminar room at the University of Victoria, Indigenous scholar Gale Cyr is passionately describing research from the four directions. The whiteboard is filling with words, illustrations, possibilities. Eventually there is no space left to write, so Cyr makes more, marking across the border, writing on the wall. The audience gasps and turns silent.

Research as Resistance is a response to that gasp, a way out ofthat silence: it offers inspiration and tools for (more) transgressive research theory and practice. Its intent is to provide accessible explanations of critical, Indigenous, and antioppressive research. All of the authors "exist in some way or another on 'the margins'" (p. 5), and each offers an articulation of research methodologies congruent with her or his language, history, identity, cultural traditions, and life experiences. Each also-more than is usual in texts of this sort-engages questions of knowledge: what constitutes it (and who gets to say), who can know, how we know.

Research as Resistance wholeheartedly rejects the (oft unstated) premise of most social science research, namely that an objective, neutral researcher exists and that, rigorously applying standardized procedures, he or she will produce verifiable truth. (Susan Strega's chapter offers a particularly thorough and cogent examination of the Enlightenment epistemology underpinning positivism, interpretivism, and critical social science.) In various voices, the book confirms that identities and social locations matter, in life and in research.

Like many of us, I enter discussions about researchers' identities and social locations with trepidation. Part of me anticipates a confession, or a call to confession. You know the one: "I write as a middle class urban currently able-bodied wholly overeducated White woman...." Such confessions ring of ritual and often of deceit: we confess our incapacity to know in the very moment of claiming territory as legitimate knowers. Also, they lack texture. They are attached to...