This Is Not a Research Article: An Invitation to Mobilize Knowledge from the Epistemological Borderlands of Social Science

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Y

17

Social Science Research; Epistemology; Knowledge Management; Memory; International Cooperation; Foreign Countries; Social Justice

United States; Brazil

10.1007/s11422-023-10178-z

1871-1502
1871-1510

In this article, the authors engage with Anzaldua's (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Aunt Lute Books, 1987) notion of borderlands while approaching social science research as a process of (re)membering as explained by Cynthia Dillard (Learning to r(e)member the things we've learned to forget: Endarkened feminisms, spirituality, and the sacred nature of research and teaching, Peter Lang Publishing, 2012). The authors recount their experiences in an international teaching-research collaboration across three regions of the USA and Brazil. They problematize Western social science research as a knowledge system that enforces artificial borders and relegates borderland epistemologies to marginal spaces, thereby limiting what is knowable and doable when engaging in research activities for liberation. The authors propose the further development of pluralized ways of knowing and being from the epistemological borderlands, or "Nepantla," of social science. By sharing stories from their collaboration, the authors illuminate how borders are surveilled and policed, when and why social science researchers might allow themselves to epistemologically free-fall and allow space for not-knowing, and finally, how living social science research can be a potential escape route or path forward toward more expansive, fluid and porous ways of knowing and being as social science researchers.

As Provided

2023

EJ1379045