Black Epistemologies and Blues Methodology: Engaging Liminal Ontological Space in Qualitative Research

Abstract

This article demonstrates how liminality provides methodological possibilities that consider affective, social, and cultural knowledge domains in interdisciplinary qualitative research. Arguing that researching perspectives of liminal citizens whose intellectual traditions exist outside the bonds of the most liberal citizenship conceptions requires liminal ontological space for researchers to un think the research process. In this blues poetic narrative, I recount how Black Studies liminal concepts of alterity, blues epistemology, and forms of life twisted in my research praxis informing a critical culturally appropriate methodology which is the blues methodology. The methodology is a social inquiry designed to use community knowledge to identity and address issues of democratic governance, spatial displacement, and educational equity. Situated within the Black Studies theoretical perspective, blues methodology employs cultural tools to create liminal ontological space for historically marginalized Black epistemologies to challenge and recreate citizenship knowledge and practices from the alterity vantage point.