Unsettling Research
Using Critical Praxis and Activism to Create Uncomfortable Spaces
Series:
Sherilyn Lennon
Chapter 6: Using Activist Dialogues to Unsettle and Transform Thinking
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USING ACTIVIST DIALOGUES TO UNSETTLE AND TRANSFORM THINKING
This chapter describes my activist journey as I moved beyond contemplating What could or should be? to address the What can I do about it? and How do others see me as a result of what I’ve done? questions from the cycle of inquiry, intervention, and self-discovery introduced in Chapter 3. Chapter 6 favors a more literary style than the other chapters. Adapting this style personalizes my experiences for the reader. I tell my story using a journal entry format which includes what I did, how others responded to me, and how this in turn made me feel, resee, and react. My critical and feminist lenses are foregrounded as I invoke autoethnographic techniques and critically reflective practices to deepen understandings of the risks and rewards of being an insider activist researcher.
Specifically, I set out to discover what transformative thinking or action was possible through a communal unsettling of phallocentric discourses of white male entitlement. Whilst others’ views are represented in this chapter—via a selection of media articles and interviews—the emphasis is on understanding how I positioned others and was positioned by others as a result of my social activism. This phase of the research act was informed by theories of public pedagogy, resistance, and radical feminism. As an activist researcher I drew on Butler’s (2004) work to combine theoretical knowledge with a ← 149 | 150 → practical process of intervention capable of inspiring social...
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