CBR Canada Webinar: Decolonizing and racing research: Critical perspectives on research with racialized communities

Event Date: 
Friday, November 20, 2020 - 12:00pm EST
Event Location: 
online
Event Fee: 
free
Event Contact Name: 
Anne Klymenko
Event Contact E-mail: 

Research is a powerful act of knowledge creation that has significant real world impacts for communities in, for example, developing, implementing and transforming policies and in the distribution of resources. Complicit in colonial projects around the world, research also has problematic histories of harm, exploitation and theft within Indigenous and racialized communities. These histories and the colonial landscape of academia continue to situate researchers and academic institutions in a position to decide who is the "knower" in research and who is constructed as those to be known or knowable. Community-based research is an alternative approach to traditional forms of research that attempts to counteract the imbalance of power experienced by communities subject to marginalization and structural violence, including Indigenous and racialized peoples. Is community-based research enough of a counterbalance if the institutions in which research is conducted and the researchers conducting the research are consciously or unconsciously grounded in a colonial worldview? This webinar will offer ideas and considerations towards decolonizing approaches to research from a systems perspective. Dr. Hackett will draw from a decolonizing framework applied to social work established from her research with an African-Caribbean community situated in Tkaronto on the Indigenous lands of Turtle-Island, also known as the Greater Toronto area of Canada.

Rhonda Hackett
 
Dr. Hackett is an assistant professor at the University of Victoria. Her scholarship is focused on advancing an understanding of the lived experiences and knowledge of African Caribbean peoples living in the lands currently known as Canada, including matters of family and community wellbeing. An African and Caribbean social work scholar, Dr. Hackett’s work is informed by extensive social work practice experience and a decolonizing theoretical lens woven from the offerings of critical race theory, Black feminist thought, and Indigenous thought. Her publications can be found in the Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work and Intersectionalities: An International Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity and Practice.