Proceedings of the 8th World Conference on Qualitative Research

Introduction: The purpose of this article is to disrupt methodological thinking, doing, and learning, not solely in our roles as researchers and practitioners, but as people. Drawing from conversations with co-researchers, I center the methods we have talked about in several critical participatory inquiry collectives to illustrate how honoring the beauty of/in the everyday can push inquiry toward restorative and epistemic justice.
Goals and Method: As a knowledge democratization project, this work begins from a place I refer to as known methods – i.e., those I and community members, as co-researchers, already use in our daily lives. In this manuscript, I demonstrate how I have worked alongside various communities to conduct critical participatory inquiry in just and ethical ways, learning about their methods so we can properly center them in our collaborations. Through critical narrative inquiry, I speak to various forms of method: Those dictated to me by co-researchers in various places around the world. The knowledge I came to value as a researcher. The familiar and familial forms of knowledge I forgot.
Results: Using dialectic analysis, I illustrate how these various systems of knowing, doing, and learning are (un)intentionally (il)legitimated through systems of power and cultural hegemony.
Conclusions:This article is not meant to romanticize the “traditional” as done through colonial ethnological accounts. Nor is it meant to demonstrate a slew of methods people use in their everyday lives, which we should then co-opt for our own purposes (e.g., sharing circles). The intent is to speak more to how individuals, both researcher and researched, make sense of their everyday, as (everyday) researchers of their lived experiences. I conclude by discussing how and why we, as “trained” researchers, forget our everyday systems of knowing, doing, and learning as our minds are filled with the façades of academic rigor, trustworthiness, and validity.