Critical Research Methodologies

We live in a society that promotes the universal process of producing knowledge and truth as a fundamental social process. Such promotion of universality seems to subjugate others forms of knowing, rendering them invisible, unintelligible, and ineligible and subsequently outside the community of knowing. This has material and symbolic consequences in terms of how research informs policy and subsequent victimization of those who live, and experience subjugation meted out by Western truth making universalism. In the words of Foucault, this book is an insurrection of subterranean and clandestine knowledges in the ways it provides not just an alternative process of knowledge production but also affirms local knowledge as necessary in production of a just society.

Critical Research Methodologies looks at research as a social justice and transformational process that should speak of people's ways of living without necessarily streamlining them into numbers. The book is a critically reflexive project in terms of returning processes of knowledge production to the local space rather than imagining them as entirely centred in the structure. To imagine this book as a reflexive exercise is to break boundaries of knowledge in ways that come to imagine how the local performs the global in very complicated and complex ways. This book is a resurrection of local knowledges, steeped in creative and imaginative reflexive methodologies that come to reorient how we know what we know, the values and realities that mark what we know, and the how of knowledge production. It centres subjugated voices and knowledges as fundamental in production of knowledge.

Contributors include: Katie Bannon, Elizabeth Charles, Khulood Agha Khan, Dionisio Nyaga, Fritz Pino, and Rose Ann Torres.

Rose Ann Torres is the Director and Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Algoma University. Dr. Torres pioneered the creation of a Master of Social Work at Algoma University. She is the principal investigator of the SSHRC Insight Development Grants research project entitled “Examining Access to Mental Health Care Service: The Impact of COVID-19 on Filipino Health Care Workers in Northern Ontario” and co-principal investigator of the SSHRC Institutional Grants project titled “Effects of COVID-19 on Teaching and Learning: Stories of Indigenous and Black and Asian Faculty Members and Students at Algoma University”. She has published numerous co-edited books, peer reviewed articles and book chapters.