Decolonizing research methodology:

• goes beyond the naive view of “research” as an innocent pursuit of knowledge

• It underscores the fact that “re-searching” involves the activity of undressing other people so as to see them naked

• It is also a process of reducing some people to the level of micro-organism: putting them under a magnifying glass to peep into their private lives, secrets, taboos, thinking, and their sacred worlds

• The concern is the context in which re-search methodology is designed and deployed

• This concerns the relationship between methodology with power, the imperial/colonial project as well as the implications for those who happened to be the re-searched

• Broadly speaking, what is at issue is re-search as a terrain of pitting the interests of the “re-searcher” against those of the “re-searched”

• The core concern is about how re-search is still steeped in the Euro-North America-centric worldview

• Re-searching continues to give the “re-searcher” the power to define The “re-searched” as “specimens” rather than people

• Ndlovu-Gatsheni defines re-search methodology as a process of seeking to know the “Other” who becomes the object, rather than subject of re-search That is why methodology needs to be decolonised

Whose methodology is it anyway:

• It was during the “Voyages of discovery” that gave rise to colonialism, that European men began to encounter the “Other”

• They then assumed the position of a “knower” and a “re-searcher” who was thirsty to know the “Other”

• The “Other” emerged as the Indigenous, the African, the Aborigines and the other natives

• The Other had to be re-searched to establish whether they were actually human or not

From ‘ethnographic’ to ‘biometric’ state :

• Every colonial conqueror was preoccupied with the “native question”

• The conquered black “native” had to be known in minute detail by the white colonizer

• The European anthropologist became an important re-searcher, producing ethnographic data and knowledge that was desperately needed by colonialism to deal with the nagging “native question”

• The colonial ideologues such as Thomas Babington Macaulay in India, Lord Frederick Lugard in West and East Africa, Cecil John Rhodes in Southern Africa used this data to malevolent ends, both to invent the idea of the native and to control her

• With the rise of “global terrorism,” drug-trafficking and the problem of migration, new forms of surveillance, and state control have emerged

• Machines extract, capture, and store information about all people, but particularly “Muslims” and “blacks”, whose ways of worship, living and actions do not fit into the European template

Unmasking, rebelling, re-positioning and recasting :

• Decolonizing methodology must begin with unmasking the modern world system and the global order

• The critique of methodology is interpreted as being anti-re-search itself

• Fearing this label, we (modern scholars and intellectuals) have been responsible for forcing students to adhere religiously to existing ways of knowing and understanding the world

• No research proposal can pass without agreement on methodology

• Methodology has become the straitjacket that every new researcher has to wear if they are to discover knowledge

• Decolonizing methodology entails rebelling against it - shifting the identity of its object so as to re-position those who have been objects of research into questioners, critics, theorists, knowers, and communicators

How to decolonize African journalism and media research:

• There is need for a “radical dismantling of the existing hierarchies among different knowledge”

• This can be done by focusing on oral media and other small-scale media

• Researchers can focus on people living off the grid precisely because they have been neglected in existing journalism and media research endeavors

• In decolonising mainstream journalism and media research, insights from postmodern social theory are instructive

• African journalism and media researchers must consciously do research that disrupts and decenters the grand narratives and myths that propelled colonialism

• Researchers have the task of reconstituting and reconstructing

• In analyses of journalism and media texts, researchers must offer alternative constructions, ways of looking at Africans and the continent that were submerged in texts that they study

• Researchers must present multiple, diverse, and textured representations of the Other in their analyses

• The researcher is to re-build the trust that was broken during encounters between researchers servicing colonial agendas and local communities

• Working with audiences, researchers should be reflexive of the power they wield in the research process

• The vertical relationship between researcher and ‘research objects,’ the view from above, must be replaced by the view from below

• This practically means re-positioning those relegated to positions of research objects to be “questioners, critics, theorists, knowers, and communicators

• Researchers can explore the use of methodologies like digital storytelling and photovoice

• Beyond data collection, researchers ought to be attentive to the ways they represent participants and the participants’ engagements with journalism and media texts

• The critical race theory emanated out of a movement made up of lawyers, political activists, and legal scholars; challenging racism in society; started in the united states by people who were working around the legal system

• Long term goal is to make sure everyone in society was treated with dignity and equally; goal is to change the situation

• Traces from ideas in other movements that combine into critical race theory

• Kimberle crenshaw has been largely credited in coming up with intersectionality

What Is Critical Race Theory?

• The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power

• The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up

• CRT began as a movement in the law but rapidly spread beyond that discipline

• In the field of education, some scholars consider themselves critical race theorists

• They use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, controversies over curriculum and history, and IQ and achievement testing

• Unlike some academic disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension

• It not only tries to understand our social situation, but to change it

• CRT sets out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies, but to transform it for the better

Early Origins:

• Critical race theory sprang up in the mid-1970s

• A number of lawyers, activists, and legal scholars across the US realised advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled and, in many respects, were being rolled back

• They realised new theories and strategies were needed to combat the subtler forms of racism that were gaining ground

• Early writers: Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado

Relationship to Other Movements:

• Critical race theory builds on the insights of two previous movements, critical legal studies and radical feminism

• The American radical tradition exemplified by such figures as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Power and Chicano movements of the sixties and early seventies

Principal Figures:

• Derrick Bell, professor of law at New York University, is the movement’s intellectual father figure

• Other major figures: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Harris, Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia Williams

• Leading Asian scholars: Neil Gotanda, Eric Yamamoto, and Matsuda

• Top Indian critical scholar: Robert Williams

• Best-known Latinos/as: Richard Delgado, Kevin Johnson, Margaret Montoya, Juan Perea, and Francisco Valdes

Spin-off Movements:

• New subgroups: an emerging Asian American jurisprudence, a forceful Latino-critical (LatCrit) contingent, and a feisty queer-crit interest group

Basic tenets of critical race theory:

• Probably not every member would subscribe to every tenet set out below

• Racism is ordinary, not aberrational: it is the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country

• Racism is endemic/rampant/widespread to American life

• Liberal notions of objectivity, neutrality, colour-blindness and meritocracy that mask the invisible manifestations and workings of white power

• Critical race theory challenges ahistoricism and insists on a contextual/historical analysis

• CRT insists on recognition of the experiential knowledge of people of color

Basic tenets of critical race theory 2:

• The “social construction” thesis: race and races are products of social thought and relations

• Race has no scientific basis or biological reality

• Race as a way to differentiate human beings is a product of human thought that is innately hierarchical

• This does not mean that there are no physical or phenotypical differences between people

• These differences make up a fraction of our genetic endowment

• The differences do not tell us anything about a person's intelligence, behavior, or moral capacity

• There is no behavior or personality that is inherent to white, black, or Asian people

• While "race" as a notion is a social construction and not rooted in biology, it has had real, tangible effects on people of color

• Black, Latino, and indigenous people have for centuries been thought of as less intelligent and rational than white people

• The notion of intersectionality and anti-essentialism: No person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity

What is Orientalism?

• Orientalism: a term widely used and expanded in the fields of representation of the non-European territories to the European world

• Edward Said is acknowledged for coining the term

• His book Orientalism (1978) elaborated the concept

• Said argues that Orientalism was and is a discourse in which the West’s knowledge about the Orient are inextricably bound up with its domination over it

• Constituting someone/thing as an object of knowledge is to assume power over it; Representations of the Orient and the East as different and inferior legitimized Western intervention and rule

• The Occident is textually marked as the superior one, and the Orient as textually marked as the inferior one

• It is the Occident that defines the Orient as less powerful and maverick/dissident setting a direct contrast between two cultures

What is Orientalism 2?

• The way the Europe dresses, speak, eats, and thinks is considered the ideal ones and anything that goes opposite of these actions and manners is considered imperfect

• Europeans define Africa and the Arabia as the continents that do not know how to act and react according to the rules of sophistry and soberness

• This sort of aversive views are not directly presented but indirectly injected with scholarly presentations

• Shakespeare’s Othello defines black man’s sexual desire and unbound jealousy toward the white society

• Orientalism is also a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. marking that ‘there are Westerners, and there are Orientals

• The former dominate and the latter must be dominated

• It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous

What is Orientalism 3?

• Orientalism provided a rationalization for European colonialism

• This was based on a self-serving history in which “the West” constructed “the East” as extremely different and inferior, and therefore in need of Western intervention or “rescue”

• Examples of early Orientalism: Seen in European paintings and photographs and also in images from the World’s Fair in the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries

• The paintings, created by European artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, depict the Arab World as an exotic and mysterious place of sand, harems and belly dancers

• They reflect a long history of Orientalist fantasies which have continued to permeate our contemporary popular culture

• By placing all of the ‘other’ countries and by other meaning any countries outside of the western civilisation into a single form of the Orient, it automatically makes a situation of us versus them; This is problematic to thinking because the Orient will never be seen as ‘upper class’ as the west

• Putting together a large group of people into one single category leaves no room for differences between those people

• For travellers who leave from the west to go into an Orient country, they already have a preconceived notion of what they will be seeing

What is Orientalism 4?

• The Orient was never allowed to speak for themselves, they always had someone else describing them

• This has within it a power of naming, western men where the people who wrote about the Orient because they held the power

• There can be many different discourses that are viewed through Orientalism:

• The Occident is seen as developed and the Orient is seen as backwards

• The occident is viewed as being scientific and the Orient is seen as superstitions which is traditions that have been passed down between generations

• There can be many different discourses that are viewed through Orientalism:

• The Occident is seen as having morals and goals to aspire to, as were the Orients do not have morals hence pictures of naked women flaunting themselves in front of men, or also why there is a notion of Orients as just lazing around not doing any work

• There can be many different discourses that are viewed through Orientalism:

• Occident’s are seen as having accepted Christianity as religion, as were the Orients have not accepted it and the Occident’s believed that the Orients should convert to Christianity

• The Orientals divided the world in to two parts by using the concept of ours and theirs

• Qualities such as lazy, irrational, uncivilized, crudeness were related to the Orientals and Europeans became active, rational, civilized, sophisticated

• In order to achieve this goal, it was very necessary for the orientalists to generalize the culture of the Orients