This set is for researchers, practitioners, and thinkers who find themselves disillusioned with dominant knowledge systems — yet still hungry for truth, justice, and a more ethical relationship to inquiry. We explore what it means to do research that is embodied, accountable, and rooted in lived complexity. Autoethnography, narrative inquiry, and testimonial methods are offered not as neutral tools, but as ways of reclaiming knowledge as relational, partial, and politically alive.
5-Week Course Outline
We begin by questioning our inherited assumptions about research: Who gets to know? Who gets known? Who gets erased? We trace the histories of objectivity, detachment, and control — and what they’ve cost us.
This week explores research not as data collection but as encounter — a meeting of lives, stories, and wounds. We reflect on positionality, voice, power, and the ethics of witnessing. Who speaks, and who listens? What does it mean to be accountable?
We dive into narrative, memory, and embodied writing practices — including autoethnography — not as indulgence, but as rigorous, radical acts of epistemic repair. Writing becomes a site of resistance, relation, and revelation.
We close by looking at what research becomes when it’s not extractive. What does care look like in inquiry? How do we hold risk, intimacy, and imperfection? Participants are invited to begin crafting practices of ethical research they can carry forward.
