Emancipatory Inquiry: Listening, Learning, and Acting for Social Change

EDU S515 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Throughout history, individuals, scholars, social justice movements, and social justice organizations have leveraged disciplined inquiry or research to highlight untold stories, illuminate goodness, expose systems of power and colonialism, and offer pathways to greater justice and freedom. Yet, we often do not provide educators or doctoral students with research methodology training oriented to these aims, even though research frameworks that prioritize justice-based action are particularly critical in our current global context. Nor do we offer educators in the field or doctoral students with research methodology training beyond those traditionally accepted in the Western Canon.

Grounded in Critical Theory, with an emphasis on feminist theory, queer theory, disability theory, Black Crit, and decolonial theory, this survey course aims to introduce all educators (teaching artists, teachers, school leaders, counselors, and educators working in non-profit organizations) and doctoral students to a strand of qualitative research approaches that fall under the broad umbrella of emancipatory research. These collective ways of exploring questions and gathering knowledge seek to explicitly address power, inequalities, and injustice and prioritize the human interactions in research-based inquiry. Overall, emancipatory research approaches ask: How do we engage in research in ways that center relationships, elevate agency, and considers power dynamics? How are we attentive to who and what is included/excluded in research? How do we expand what is considered knowledge and who generates it? Finally, emancipatory research approaches seek to ensure that any information gathered is used to advance a more just society. Through practice-based and exploratory model, this course will cover the following methodologies: arts-based inquiry, narrative inquiry/storytelling, walking methodologies, and critical community-based/participatory action research. Ultimately, this course seeks to overview the theoretical foundations and practical steps of emancipatory research approaches to knowledge creation and knowledge sharing. As a final project, students will either complete an original inquiry project investigating a justice-oriented question rooted using the philosophies or methods of the course or write a proposal for an inquiry project they hope to complete in the future. 
Permission of instructor and application required. Enrollment is limited to 19. The enrollment procedure will be posted on the course website. This course fulfills the Equity & Opportunity (E&O) Foundations for those students who have chosen E&O as one of their Foundations experiences in 2025-26.