Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2023
Journal / Book Title
Professing Education
Abstract
As researchers and educators, we are committed to engaging in critical participatory action research (CPAR) that raises our critical consciousness, disrupts colonial structures, and is responsible – epistemically and ethically – to the communities to which we belong (Ayala, et al., 2018; Guishard, 2009; Torre & Fine, 2011). In this manuscript, we write about the epistemological and theoretical reflections of our critical research collective, how we unpacked our colonial yokes, and how those reflections shaped our research and informed our collective praxis (see Figure 1). The evolution of our collective praxis is the central focus of this paper. We describe how we became aware of our complicity, and gave ourselves permission to disobey and disrupt the oppressive systems in which we were operating. Through continuous self-reflection we acknowledged our anger and collective trauma. This process allowed us to heal as a collective and dream radical dreams (Kelley, 2002).
In 2018, we formed a research collective driven by a desire for liberatory narratives (Kelley, 2002; Kumashiro, 2000; McGee & Stovall, 2015; Tuck & Yang, 2014) and a need to affirm one another’s experiences while contesting the dehumanizing portrayals of Muslims in the U.S. (Al-Sultany, 2012; Mogahed et al, 2017; Shaheen, 2003). As educators we have all experienced the doublebind of participating in institutions built on structural racism that maintain white supremacy (Ayala et al, 2020; Bajaj et al., 2016; Patel, 2016), while trying to resist the binaries of “good” vs. “bad” Muslims (Ghaffar-Kucher & El- Haj, 2018; Ghaffar-Kucher, et al. 2022; Mamdani, 2004) and the assimilationist expectations to disappear into the mainstream (Grande, 2015). Aware that Muslim educators were not included in the scholarship on teachers of color (Kohli, 2021), and that anti-Muslim and anti-Black tropes dominated the mainstream narratives about Muslims (Diouf, 2013), we were committed to disrupting the racial contract (Liou & Cutler, 2021) not for the sake of disruption itself but rather to offer a more inclusive representation of Muslim educators and the communities to which they belong.
Publisher
Society of Professors of Education
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Zaal, Mayida; Hoque, Nushrat J.; Hussein, Manar; Ayari, Chedia; Ahmad, Maheen; Billups, Amir; and Bedir, Nagla, "Theorizing Collective Praxis Rooted in Epistemic Disobedience and Responsibility" (2023). Department of Teaching and Learning Scholarship and Creative Works. 197.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/teaching-learning-facpubs/197
Comments
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.