Decolonizing Interpretive Research: A critical Bicultural Methodology for Social Change

Abstract

This paper introduces a discussion of decolonizing interpretive research in a way that gives greater salience to and understanding of the theoretical efforts of critical bicultural education researchers over the years. Grounded in educational principles that have been derived from critical social theory, a decolonizing approach to theory building, as exercised by subaltern critical researchers must also be understood as also encompassing an underlying autoethnographic qualitative dimension; in that it is inextricably rooted in the histories and "authority of lived experience" (Teaching to Transgress, hooks, 1994) of the researcher. Hence, bodies of research produced within the context of hegemonic epistemologies and traditional research priorities are analyzed, deconstructed, and reinvented, as we say in the Freirian tradition, in ways that dialectically posit decolonizing meanings to support emancipatory praxis and social change.