Qualitative Research Journal

Darder, Antonia; Griffiths, Tom G.

2018 Qualitative Research Journal

doi: 10.1108/qrj-d-17-00059

The purpose of this paper is to provide a sense of the perspectives that guide the collection of articles.Design/methodology/approachThis paper provides an introductory essay regarding the contributions and critics associated with Spivak’s work.FindingsIn addition, the contents lay out brief descriptions of the articles included in the collection.Originality/valueThe notion of revisiting “Can the subaltern speak?” provides authors with innovative and provocative ideas to guide their submissions.

Paulson, Steve

2018 Qualitative Research Journal

doi: 10.1108/QRJ-D-17-00058

PurposeThis paper is an interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose work is inspiration for this special issue.Design/methodology/approachPublic radio interview methodology was used.FindingsThis paper provides autobiographical reflections by Spivak.Practical implicationsThe paper provides a glimpse into Spivak’s reflections on her life and work and its impact on her practice.Originality/valueThis is an excerpt of a previously published interview, included here by permission, and adds value to the special issue with insights from the author of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.

Darder, Antonia

2018 Qualitative Research Journal

doi: 10.1108/qrj-d-17-00056

The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of decolonizing interpretive research in ways that respect and integrate the qualitative sensibilities of subaltern voices in the knowledge production of anti-colonial possibilities.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws from the decolonizing and post-colonial theoretical tradition, with a specific reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s contribution to this analysis.FindingsThrough a critical discussion of decolonizing concerns tied to qualitative interpretive interrogations, the paper points to the key assumptions that support and reinforce the sensibilities of subaltern voices in efforts to move western research approaches toward anti-colonial possibilities. In the process, this discussion supports the emergence of an itinerant epistemological lens that opens the field to decolonizing inquiry.Practical implicationsIts practical implications are tied to discursive transformations, which can impact social and material transformations within the context of research and society.Originality/valueMoreover, the paper provides an innovative rethinking of interpretive research, in an effort to extend the analysis of decolonizing methodology to the construction of subaltern inspired intellectual labor.

Griffin, Gabriele

2018 Qualitative Research Journal

doi: 10.1108/qrj-d-17-00050

In “Can the subaltern speak?,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes the important distinction between representation as “Vertretung” and “Darstellung.” She also produces a strong version of whom she regards as a subaltern woman. Thirty years on both the distinction between “Vertretung” and “Darstellung” and the question of who the subaltern woman is, remain extremely important, not least in methodological considerations in cross-cultural contexts. A number of questions may be asked in relation to representation, such as: how distinct are its two meanings in the interviewing context? And how do they relate to the notion of the co-production of knowledge which has gained such traction in the past three decades? The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, I draw on cross-cultural interviewing experiences. Starting from the silence of illiterate rural women in a study conducted in Madhya Pradesh, India, in 2011 (Mohanraj), this paper draws on the research experiences of the author and a number of projects reported on in Cross-Cultural Interviewing (Griffin, 2016) to elucidate how one might re-think both representation and subalternality in the contemporary globalized context.FindingsThe experiences of cross-cultural interviewing I draw on in this paper show that in the contemporary context subalternality may be more productively understood in terms of a continuum rather than as the radical state of unreachable, unspeaking alterity that Spivak proposes.Originality/valueThe paper contributes new perspectives on Spivak’s notion of the unspeaking alterity of the subaltern in light of globalized developments over the past 30 years and specific experiences of cross-cultural interviewing, as these comment on Spivak’s insights.

Zembylas, Michalinos

2018 Qualitative Research Journal

doi: 10.1108/qrj-d-17-00048

The purpose of this paper is to revisit Spivak’s seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak” and the perennial challenges of researchers to collect information about the Other, focusing on the recent developments in affect theory.Design/methodology/approachThe paper brings into the conversation the recent work on affect and sentimentality by Lauren Berlant with Spivak’s claims in the essay concerning the representation of the subaltern by scholars and researchers. The paper draws on Berlant’s work to trouble the liberal culture of “true feeling” as well as the liberal subject implied in Spivak’s essay as a subject who is “actively speaking.”FindingsRecent theoretical developments on the affect theory make an important intervention to the perennial methodological tensions about representation, ontology and epistemology – as raised by Spivak and others over the years – and inspire new ways of thinking with the tools of doing qualitative research.Originality/valueBringing into the conversation, the affect theory and Spivak’s iconic essay have important methodological implications for qualitative research.

Paraskeva, João M.

2018 Qualitative Research Journal

doi: 10.1108/qrj-d-18-00004

Keeping Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in mind, the purpose of this paper is to examine the itinerant curriculum theory (ICT) as a subaltern momentum unveiling how ICT informs subaltern ways of being and thus, potentially, the research lens for qualitative approaches. In this context, the paper examines how curriculum as an ideological devise produces an epistemicide – the killing of knowledge – an epistemological havoc cooked up daily in the process of qualitative studies promoting and legitimizing a specific modern western Eurocentric episteme.Design/methodology/approachThe paper dissects modernity as a colonial zone, creating “abyssal thinking,” a eugenic system of visible and invisible distinctions that legitimizes the visible, i.e. “this side of the line” and produces “the other side of the line” as “non-existent.”FindingsThe paper urges the need to decolonize leading modern western Eurocentric counter-hegemonic traditions such as Marxism.Originality/valueThe paper analyzes ICT’s contribution to subaltern struggles, asserts ICT’s commitment against any form of canon, grabs the educational matrix of qualitative research as an eugenic beast from its very own ideological horns, alerting the need to examine any study of education and society within the ideological eugenic political economy and modes of production of systems pillared by poverty, exploitation, segregation, and intellectual rape.

Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, Valerie; McLaren, Peter; Monzó, Lilia

2018 Qualitative Research Journal

doi: 10.1108/qrj-d-17-00052

The purpose of this paper is to engage some of the central themes of Gayatri Spivak’s seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak? (CSS)” In particular, her criticisms of post-structuralism’s treatment of the “subject” as well as its privileging of “discourse” and micrological analyses of power vis-à-vis her discussion of Foucault and Deleuze.Design/methodology/approachThe paper also draws on a historical materialist approach to examine how Spivak’s own work often reinscribes the discursive and politically pusillanimous tendencies of both post-structuralist and post-colonialist thought.FindingsThis lends itself to the “complexification” of capitalism – a bourgeois form of mystification of capital’s essential workings and the underlying class structure of the globalized economy, inclusive of “postcolonial” societies.Originality/valueThe authors conclude that CSS – while an important question – is ultimately a misdirected one that, in effect, mistakes discursive empowerment for social and economic enablement.

Jain, Anita N.

2018 Qualitative Research Journal

doi: 10.1108/qrj-d-17-00053

The classic essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak takes leftist western intellectuals to task for essentializing subaltern subjectivity. I say this as someone who is guilty of this very thing and is struggling with this very question in my work as qualitative researcher. While Spivak concludes the essay with a resounding, “No,” she does provide us with a blueprint for conduction effective qualitative analysis using Derridean deconstruction. But after the deconstruction is done, how might I think about intellectual uncertainty and regret? Reflecting on a study of domestic workers I disbanded, in this paper I examine these questions and further query the limits of intellectual representation. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachThis essay uses ethnography as an approach.FindingsThrough an engagement of the seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” I argue that in the ethnographic relationship, researchers will be sure to come up against their own limitations, but that does not mean they should refrain from the work. Rather, being open to seeing our errors, and working through uncertainty and regret, reveals something vitally important about the participants of our study and about ourselves.Originality/valueThis essay adds to the academic discussion on the ethics of researching subaltern subjects, and expands on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of contradictory consciousness.

Orelus, Pierre W.

2018 Qualitative Research Journal

doi: 10.1108/qrj-d-17-00057

The purpose of this paper is to highlight various ways in which micro-aggressions and other forms of institutional oppression have affected subaltern professors and students in the academy.Design/methodology/approachThis qualitative case study draws from testimonios collected from fall 2010 to spring 2016. Six testimonios are incorporated in the study, and they stem from a various set of data. These testimonios show patterns across data set regarding systemic oppression subaltern that professors have experienced in the academy.FindingsAs the findings of this study show, subaltern professors face intersecting forms of discrimination – often race, language, accent, gender, and class based – in predominantly white institutions. Their testimonios unravel the complexity of the professional, academic, and personal lives of these professors highlighting their professional achievements and successes. Their testimonios demonstrate at the same time the ways in which various forms of oppression might have limited their life chances and opportunities.Research limitations/implicationsSuggestions are made as to how social justice educators and policy makers can collectively challenge and eradicate these social wrongs.Originality/valueThis paper is an original take on both micro-aggressions and institutional oppression affecting subaltern professors and students.

Tukdeo, Shivali

2018 Qualitative Research Journal

doi: 10.1108/qrj-d-17-00054

Submergence, dislocation, rehabilitation and reform are the terms that crowd out most discussions on Adivasi/indigenous communities. They also fit in aptly with the Adivasi experiences of education and their relationship with knowledge construction, for them but not necessarily with them. Over the course of the last century, the Adivasi story has been composed and reoriented by a confluence of hegemonic regimes, institutions and epistemic traditions. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachTracing the shifts over last few decades and paying attention to the larger politics of indigeneity, schooling and knowledge production, this paper advances a critical reading of the relationship between the marginalised and formal systems of schooling.FindingsEmploying Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1989) “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, the paper identifies the discourses that have contributed to the construction of Adivasi communities and their relationship with the Indian state.Originality/valueAs schooling continues to occupy a significant place among the communities in India and it gets associated with a number of contradictory logics, the present paper highlights the historicity of the project by which marginalised communities have been defined and their schooling needs have been framed and justified.

Hernandez, Kortney

2018 Qualitative Research Journal

doi: 10.1108/qrj-d-17-00051

The purpose of this paper is to examine the unaddressed phenomenon of photographic colonialism using service learning to illustrate the way in which photos and visual imagery are allowed to go unchallenged within educational media and qualitative research.Design/methodology/approachThis essay draws on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal essay to ask: “Can the subaltern be seen?” By so doing, it explores the manner in which photography produced from a Eurocentric gaze re-presents and speaks for the subaltern, particularly within the context of qualitative research and educational photos displayed in the colonizer’s image.FindingsThe colonizing impact of photographic methods also permits for the washing away of cultural, historical, and political responsibility for the plight faced by the subaltern.Originality/valueThis paper, moreover, seeks to challenge and disrupt the ways in which we accept, ignore, deny, and standby when photos of the subaltern are used to perpetuate the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), despite post-colonial claims.

Vicars, Mark

2018 Qualitative Research Journal

doi: 10.1108/qrj-d-17-00049

The purpose of this paper is to interrogate practice of research and discursively problematise the role of the researcher in relation to the ways in which knowledge is constructed and represented in and as a centre/periphery relation. It considers the ways in which research practices can refocus attention on claims made about knowing and speaking about the lives of Others and within the academe.Design/methodology/approachUnderlying this interrogation is Spivak’s (1998) work “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Methodologically, I reflect on, and address my experiences of research in the context of re-reading ontology as a signifying presence from which to address, contest and rearticulate the methodological norm in qualitative enquiry.FindingsThe paper suggests that it is relevant to attend to the ways, in which qualitative researchers, in the process of making the Other culturally intelligible and subsequent representation, acknowledge the process and product as a contested epistemic space.Originality/valueThe paper problematizes the notion of “giving voice” to ontological understandings of being and speaking as a unified subject.

2018 Qualitative Research Journal

doi: 10.1108/QRJ-05-2018-099