Research that Challenges Traditonal Paradgirams of Power 

Week 11 

• Housekeeping  
   
  - Discussion about exam next week 

EXAM REVIEW- What will be important on the EXAMM!!!!!! 

Review 8 

• Who’s knowledge is ignored, and who’s is celebrated  

• Technology controls us, not the other way around. 

• AI- reflects on the values, biases, and privileges of those who do the coding of the AI. 

• Lots of coders are men, and have many privileges and lack the training.  

• Ursula Franklin- highlights how privileges is in AI  

Books- relate to week 8 

• Algorithms of Opressions, How search engines ref in force racism  

• Highlights the form of data opression 

• Biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discrimate people of color particularly women of color, i.e sexual, big bum, why are they angry. 

• Data discrimation- private interest i.e Elon musk, promoting presidential elections. 

• Searched engines- and the companies that own are importance, because it’s a way of spreading knowledge,  

WK 9: Indigeous ways of knowing: Redressing Colonization, Bias, and Invisbility  

• Smudging: to open our Mind and eyes; to see the best in all; hear the truth; have contact with Mother Earth 

• Indigenous people haven’t been able to tell their own stories  

Myths:  

• Indigeous people were never conquered  

• Indigeous people are not just another equity- seeking group. They are nations with long history of their own governance  

• Colonization begins  hundreds of years ago and continues.  

 
Video: Challenging colonial retelling of Canadian History  

• Highlights how colonalism is used thhrouhgout history, 

• Assimilation: to be the same as the majority group, in the context of North American to be more white.  

• And indigeous  prespective, assimilated to become “right”. 

• Take the indian out of the child.  

• Histories were given orally.  

• How was indigeous sknowledge captured? What library’s hold this knowledge.  

• Indian acts- was one of the worse acts, as it removed the identities of indigeous persons.  

Wk 10. 

• Memories is a form of knowledge production  

• Difference between official and unofficial memories  

• Q’s about power, who wants who to forget what  

• What remains absent? What is forgotten 

• What histories do colonialist not what us to see 

•  Feminist counter- Memorializaing: a form of critical rememeberance/taking about things that are often suppressed  (zines) 

• How memeories of those who are marginalized are displaced by dominant narratives  

• Feelings can be used as an introduction to theorizing to knowledge production. 

Week 11: Participatory Action Research 

Definition: A form of community- based research that attempts to democratize the research process by taking a critical approach and working with as opposed to on marginalized and oppressed groups to improve and empower their position within society/ 

• Highlights the power imbalances, issues,  within knowledge production,  

• Indigeous framework- does the people benefit from this research, does it help.  

PAR background 

• Emerged in th e1960s and 1970s in response to critiques of international development practices that fostered unequal relationships in research  

• Such practices focused in integrating marginalized people into the existing political, economic, and social structures which maintained the status quo  

• Such practices enchanted cultural depdency rather than independence  

• Such practices gave the illusions of objectivity but duplicated the status quo  

• Research was conducted “On” rather than with” 

Paulo Freire: 1921-1997, Author, “Pedagogy of the Opressed  

• Believed Education is never neutral  

• Knowledge should be put to good changing societies  

• Knowledge= action  

• Belief that people bring their own knowledge and experience into the process leading to Participatory Action Research.’ 

• Critical Consciousness: Education should help people develop a critical understanding their social reality  

• Dialogical approach: Power of dialogue- as a means of learning and liberation  

• Action and transformation: Empowerment and Social justice: he believed in transforming the world through collective action and that education was a tool for liberation  

• Knowledge cocreation  

 
GOALS OF PAR  

• A qualities research mythology that addresses opression- with the goal of empowering marginalized communities for change.  

Feminist Participatory Action research  

• As with research FPAR is a Polotivla choice that knowledge has been constructed to create privileged authorities  

• Purpose: Change systems and structures to improve th elites of marginalized people, women in particular.  

• Process of conversation- 

Example of FPAR women’s community safety audit  

• FPAR approach to asses the safety and security concerns of women in public spaces  

• How does it work:  5-6 women get together to identify the area that they want to asses based on factors affecting their sense of safety  

• Personal safety  

• Men, unwanted advances, sexual/no sexual  

• Lack of safety in city neighbourhoods.  

• They are the experts of own experience.  

• They identities problems and develop solutions  

• Work with stakeholders to make those changes.  

• Interseconality of a classmate: Targeted for her gender on the streets so had to dress like a bum and if their in a store, they are targeted because of their race. 

Film:  Safer for women, safer for everyone  

• Audits create and highlight concerns. 

• Trans masc: for their safety, they had to be hyper masculinity.  

• How are our space is organized  

• “To be safe, or to feel safe= you try to present as masculine as cishet because they are not as targeted.  
   

• It is GENDERIZED!  

Exam  

Exam: 2 hours 9:00-11:00 
Tuesday , December 10, Room  128 
3-5  questions - short and longer answers  

• ■What is research 

• ■Gender and racial bias in research 

• ■What is the scientific method?  

• ■Feminist approaches to research 

• ■Steps in the research process 

• ■Critical reading/ identifying expertise 

• ■Qualitative /quantitative 

• ■Types of interviews 

• ■Meaning of decolonizing methodology 

• ■Indigenous ways of knowing 

• ■Ethical considerations in research 

• ■Positionality 

• ■Reflexivity 

• ■How are memories an important tool for knowledge production? 

• ■Zine as an alternative form of knowledge production 

• ■Participatory Action Research  

• How is knowledge producted, orally, how knowledge is produce, i.e indigeous knowedlge is kept.  

• Who can produce knowledge.  

• Power that controls research.  

• Ethics  

• Intersectionality of knowledge.  

• STRONGEST answer brings the reference to the reading.  

Audre Lorde: the uses of anger: women responding to Racims  

• 1934-1992 

• Lorde argues: to effectively address racial injustice, we must first acknowledge the anger that racism gives rise to- whether we are experiencing it personally or simply witnessing its effect on others – and then harness that anger as a tool. Anger transformed into action “is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.” 

• ■… “to tap the anger as an important source of empowerment”