Abstract
De/colonizing epistemologies challenge the imperialistic understanding and practice of research. In this chapter, the author demonstrates the influence of de/colonizing epistemologies on qualitative inquiry grounded in transnational feminism. The author focuses on the approaches taken in designing, implementing, and analyzing an ethnographic case study which explores the experiences of two female Indian graduate students in higher education within their first years of migration to the United States. The author argues that there can never be a utopian space where qualitative inquiry can be free of imperialistic ways of knowing and documenting people’s lived experiences. Therefore, a call for reflexive autoethnographic gaze along with re-presentation of messy methodological spaces, tensions, and contradictions needs to be at the forefront of de/colonizing qualitative inquiry. It is within such messiness that the author frames de/colonizing approaches with the acknowledgement of being framed herself in the process.
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Bhattacharya, K. (2009). Othering Research, Researching the Other: De/Colonizing Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry. In: Smart, J.C. (eds) Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research. Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9628-0_3
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