The Critical Race Theory collective (CRTc) calls for contributions to a special issue of the international peer-reviewed journal Education for Information (IOS Press Interdisciplinary Journal of Information Studies). Responding authors are being called to respond to the theme of engaging with and generating resistant knowledges with a fully articulated intention of unmasking coloniality. This call welcomes works with discipline specific, interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary approaches within (or focused on) “communities” related to library, information and/or education praxes.
THE PREVAILING CONTEXT
In these divisive times of social, cultural, political, informational, and economic retrenchment and crises, those who understand, seek, and participate in racial justice and decolonial work can draw inspiration from a question posed by bell hooks: “What are the actions I will concretely do today in order to bring myself into greater community? With that which is not here?” (2003, p. 163) Being in community (or building community) in both intimate and collective settings offers the opportunity to create space for a local to global range of resistant knowledges. We define resistant knowledges as processes of thinking and acting against the grain of coloniality in order to build collective consciousness and calls to action for racial justice and social change.
Resistant knowledges often occur within community formations and can emerge as “knowing as collective rhythm” (Gago, 2020, p. 164) and modes of epistemic disobedience for the global majority research (narrative) ecosystem (Fuh 2022). These collective rhythms reverberate knowledge along a continuum of communities from those who intimately syncopate their rhythms at the (micro) local level to those communities that aspire to or are already vigorously beating their (praxes) drums to amplify their resistant knowledges with global intentions. Authors are encouraged to explore and ultimately explain their framing of community in their submissions.
Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community. bell hooks –
from: Teaching community: a pedagogy of hope (197)
Valentin-Yevies Mudimbe (1990, p. 14) reminds us that the term ‘colonial’ derives from the latin root colére, meaning to cultivate, design or arrange, and that imperial colonists did this through the violent re-organisation of non-European territories into Europe an constructs of land and knowledge. Coloniality is both an epistemic frame and a lived reality that subsumes language and bodies of knowledge, land, and action; arranging and structuring our societies and institutions into hierarchical research or divisions of knowledge and power. In the words of Frantz Fanon, “the business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much bigger business of plunder”(1963, p.189).
Decoloniality, Avtar Brah argues, “enables us to prioritise and foreground regimes of knowledge that have been sidelined, ignored, forgotten, repressed, even discredited by the forces of modernity, colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism.” (2022, p. 15) As such, this call is interested in re-search (Smith, 2021) which counters colonial narratives in all their forms: theoretical, empirical,or as praxes and manifest on micro (intimate/personal), mezzo, macro (structural/systemic) levels.
Hyphenating “research” into “re-search” is very useful because it reveals what is involved, what it really means, and 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 somepeople 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.
We frame (counter) storytelling within the bigger picture of storywork; an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from decolonial, indigenous and black feminist re-search methods, as well as the core CRT tenet/method. (Adebisi, 2023; Degado, 1989; Lee & Evans, 2021; Miller, et.al.,2020; Natarajan, 2021; Smith, 1999; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002)
Foluke Adebisi invokes the story of the British slave ship Zong, which in 1781 threw approximately 130 African captives overboard, to highlight that the telling of such colonial stories from the past are too often temporally or spatially limited and hence reproduce harms rather than repairing them. We must, she argues, “craft better futures for us all and the earth on which we are precariously surviving. To survive at all, we need new ways of thinking, being and doing in the world.” (2023),and, in turn, limit (or optimistically reverse) the effects of colonial epistemicide has on resistant knowledges. (Youngman, 2022; Yeon, 2023)
As Nuu-Chah-nulth Hereditary Chief E. Richard Atelo puts it, “as more communities work toward protecting and revitalizing Indigenous knowledges, they have also chosen to reframe and reposition these incredible sources of knowledge as stories. They do so in order to move away from any misunderstandings about the power and truths that are embedded in the stories.” (2011, p.2) Stories, then, should not be considered merely metaphoric or representational. Whilst it is important to heed Tuck and Yang’s (2012) critique that decolonization is not a metaphor, that does not mean that the topics of coloniality and decoloniality cannot be engaged in ways that counter-narrate the dominant epistemological and institutional frameworks in ways that transcend empirical and abstract binaries (even those that metaphoric).
What local and global stories and counter stories of resistant knowledges and (de)coloniality can you tell from your community sites (the gathering of two or more represents the possibility of community) of knowledge, information and learning?
THE GLOBAL CALL
This is more than a ‘call for papers’; it is call and response, inspired by indigenous storywork practices and counter-storytelling methodologies. We are a community of practice, and we are calling for contributions that are rooted in communities, in order to respond to current contexts of crises and manufactured culture wars that are rooted in the dehumanization and domination of coloniality. Hence the question framing this call: can we unmask coloniality through the re-search of local to global communities? An unmasking that emphasizes authentic self representation of identities; an unmasking that has evolved from Fanon’s original articulation that reflected his time (Fanon,1952). An unmasking which empowers re-search of local to global communities by removing the mask of coloniality (that obscure language) masquerading to provide distraction from the much bigger business of plunder. (Fanon,1965)
We seek contributions within Education for Information’s full editorial scope: thus inviting a broad continuum of theoretical, empirical, and/or praxes based counter storytelling submissions related to but not limited to information and education fields and/or interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary work within the following areas:
- archival science
- critical information literacy;
- data science;
- digital humanities;
- documentation theory and practice;
- education studies;
- ethnic studies;
- gender studies;
- queer studies (queer-crit)
- re-search papers (various forms) including empirical quantitative or qualitative studies as well as reflexive, hermeneutical, historical, and other conceptual approaches;
- technology studies or the philosophy of technology commentaries
- topics of interest to education, pedagogy and learning; and indigenous or Pan-African epistemologies;
- information and health equity;
- information and media;
- information policy and ethics;
- information retrieval;
- information seeking and use;
- professional practices or theoretical approaches within
- galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) as
- well as conservations and debates from scholars and practitioners connected interdisciplinarily/ transdisciplinarily to GLAM;
- critical race theory contexts connected to any of the previous options
- counterstory as re-search method
- dis-crit
- interest convergence discussions
- intersectional analysis
- prácticas de liberación
- racial battle fatigue (RBF)
- racial realism
- whiteness as property discussions
- white supremacy perspectives
- works discussing microaggressions
REFERENCES CITED
THE PUBLISHING CHRONOLOGY
- from 10/15/2023 through 12/15/2023 (prospective) authors can submit an abstract of no more that 750 words (on one occasion) for baseline feedback about their re-search counter narrative applicable to this call. Abstracts can be sent to editorialteam@crtcollective.org
- author’s first drafts due Monday March 4, 2024 by 11:59 EST
- CRTc review of submissions March 5 through May 20
- author’s resubmission (response to CRTc reviews): May 21 through June 30
- CRTc Review of resubmissions July 1- 21
- CRTc delivery of submissions to EFI managing editor: July 22
- managing editor review: July 23 – August 30
- target publishing issue 4, 2024
SUBMISSION (AUTHOR) GUIDELINES
This Special Issue will follow Education for Information’s Author Guidelines.
Most Notably:
- Full-length articles and literature reviews should be between 5000-8000 words of text excluding the references. Commentaries, funded innovative re-search protocols, short communications and book reviews should be between 1000-1500 words of text excluding references.
- Manuscripts must be written in English. Authors whose native language is not English are advised to consult a professional English language editing service or a native English speaker prior to submission.
- Manuscripts should be prepared with wide margins and double spacing throughout, including the abstract, footnotes and references. Every page of the manuscript, including the title page,references, tables, etc., should be numbered. However, in the text no reference should be made to page numbers; if necessary, one may refer to sections. Try to avoid the excessive use of italics and bold face.
- Authors are requested to use the APA (American Psychological Association) citation style and references must be listed alphabetically in APA style.
Authors should submit their contributions for review through the CRTc Call for Papers Submission Form
THE HOST COMMUNITY / EDITORIAL TEAM
CONTACTING THE collective
Author’s are invited to reachout to the CRTc with general or specific inquiries for the special issuethrough email: editorialteam@crtcollective.org.
For those seeking to contact a specific CRTc community member, please visit the collective’s Contact Us page.
