Conducting Case Study Research to Address the Continued Crises: A Process of Learning to Employ Decolonial Perspectives to Produce a Flourishing Academic Lifeworld

Abstract

In this article, I rethink the process of training emerging scholars to engage in the act(s) of conducting case study methodology using decolonial orientations within the critical paradigm. Doing so creates the opportunity for me to make obvious the challenges of conducting research in this era of never-ending educational, environmental, and health crises. It also provides me with the opportunity to consider actions that researchers and instructors can take to generate and support critical qualitative practices throughout the research process to produce work that addresses these issues as well as fosters an academic lifeworld that allows such work to flourish.

Introduction

Crises resulting from structural racism (Ladson-Billings, 2006), neoliberal reforms (Slater, 2015), environmental devastation (Pérez & Cannella, 2011), forced migration (Clark-Kazak, 2021), and the global pandemic (Tremblay et al., 2021) continue to impact all of us, but especially actions by professionals in fields like education, social work, and medicine along with individuals and families they serve. These human and non-human calamities also create a range of challenges for researchers (Webber-Ritchey et al., 2021), impacting what research is and could be, how to engage with it, and the ethics in responding to and critiquing these disasters within a range of contexts. As the challenges continue to arise, some within various fields of study return to graduate school to pursue doctoral work so that they can illuminate, critique, and/or speak back to their own personal experiences with crisis. To do so requires that they learn how to be critical researchers in a manner that will allow their voices to be heard by the audiences to whom they hope to speak—be it the worlds of policy, the academy, or through advocacy. No matter the issue or the audience, they seek the knowledge and skills that will help them produce research that may alter current realities.

In this article, teaching about critical qualitative research in this era of never-ending crisis is explored. Specifically, I discuss the challenges I and future critical scholars face in learning to conduct critical case studies. Grounded in decolonial perspectives, the onto-epistemological, axiological, practical, and political issues that arise in teaching and learning how to conduct the form of critical qualitative inquiry are illuminated, especially in times of pandemic and disaster. Such an analysis provides the opportunity to consider the actions researchers and instructors, like myself, can take to support the next generation of critical qualitative scholars who seek to produce work that addresses these issues as well as fosters lifeworlds that allow them to take actions no matter the path of their choosing.

The Challenge

Many doctoral programs located in research institutions across the United States provide students coursework that introduces them to quantitative and qualitative research. Some offer specialized/advanced courses in research methodologies that fall under each of these approaches to research. Such courses are often designed to prepare students for completing their dissertations. At my institution, I have taught, and continue to teach, an advanced qualitative research course on case study methodology centered on investigating issues in education. While students from across the university have taken the course, most are interested in issues in higher education, education policy, educational leadership, teacher education, or curriculum and instruction. Each typically has a personal experience with the issue they want to investigate through case study methodology so that they can produce a study that will offer actionable items that might lead to change in their area of inquiry.

The challenge for me, as their instructor, is to provide them with the skills and knowledge required to produce work that will either lead to the completion of their dissertation or to a publishable research article within 14 three-hour class sessions. This compacted schedule not only intensifies the pressure they feel to produce good work but also limits the amount of depth I can go into each aspect of the research process. Adding to the complexity of our endeavor is the ever-unfolding series of societal, environmental, health, and/or education crises that have resulted from policy (e.g., C. P. Brown et al., 2019), environmental damage and disasters (Nxumalo, 2020), the horrors of war (Clark-Kazak, 2021), and global pandemics, such as COVID-19 (Tremblay et al., 2021).

In our case study methodology class, a major challenge I face in teaching future scholars is to help them rid themselves of their dependency on, and continued return to, the discourse of postpositivism, reducing qualitative research “to an instrumentalism that meets the demands of audit culture” while leaving current inequitable and unjust power structures untouched (Lather, 2018, p. 115). Thus, we, as a class, seek to name and push out the residue of this positivist logic, which centers around unquestioned universalized notions of truth, knowledge, reality, and so on (Guba & Lincoln, 2005), as it continues to reappear in our class discussions. In addition, crises, whether global or specific, result in circumstances that both mask critique and facilitate postpositivist perspectives even further. Klein (2008), as well as others (e.g., Cannella & Pérez, 2009), illustrates this positivist reinscription in her discussion of disaster capitalism following the impact of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2007 as disaster moving at the speed of light facilitates increased power for particular privileged groups and narrowed perspectives.

Moving Past the Imperialism of Postpositivism

To move past their postpositivist conceptions of approximate truth and knowing reality (Crotty, 1999), which will reappear again as the students are collecting data or are writing up their cases, we, as a class, briefly examine the onto-epistemological history of Western research. As we do this, I reiterate that the point of this examination is not to see this exercise as the history of humanity marching toward some “clearer” understanding of the world. Rather, what this examination into these philosophical constructs demonstrates is that these alterations of how scholars make sense of the world has much more to do with whose voices were accepted and became part of the dominant onto-epistemological conversations that exist within the academy.

Within these conversations, I emphasize the interpretivist nature of qualitative research; where reality is known through a constructivist (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) epistemology “contingent upon human practices, being constructed in and out of interaction between human beings and their world, and developed and transmitted within an essentially social context” (Crotty, 1999, p. 42). I then move into the critical paradigm, which shares a similar epistemology to interpretivism. However, I point out that this paradigm centers on issues of power, where the conceptions of knowledge of the dominant culture are promoted and other forms are obscured. Critical researchers seek to change this dynamic (Crotty, 1999), which most of the students themselves seek to do by either questioning or challenging the dynamics in their fields of study that negatively impact them and/or the communities in which they affiliate themselves.

While none of these instructional moves are surprising, the struggle emerges when I reveal to the students my own questioning of the limits of Western thought (e.g., Santos, 2014) and “its” imposition on the other—those intellectual communities that have been othered and damaged the insatiable thirst for more by settler colonialist (Cannella & Viruru, 2004; Pérez & Saavedra, 2017). To respond to the damage resulting from such things as policymakers’ neoliberal reforms that continue to create crisis with education systems across the United States, I discuss my reconceptualized thoughts about how to conduct as well as discuss case study research differently in the era of never-ending education reform (C. P. Brown, 2008; C. P. Brown et al., 2021).

Employing Postmodern and Deconstructionist Epistemologies

To begin this conversation, I discuss how postmodern and deconstructionist epistemologies illuminate the shortcoming of these Western realist onto-epistemologies citing both recent (Gerrard et al., 2017; St. Pierre, 2016) as well as the original critiques of these theories of knowledge (Gandhi, 2011; Loomba, 1998; Shiva, 1988). As Lather (2018) points out, “the ‘post’ move entails a shift from an epistemology of human consciousness to a focus on the limits of our knowing, with an emphasis on an affective turn” (p. 111). For example, Stewart et al. (2021), building off the work of Spivak (1984), contends that postmodernism disrupts the modernist postpositivist belief that scientific research can rid the problems of the world and

deliver infinite economic growth, which lies at the heart of the Western or Euro-American capitalist democratic project that has dominated Anglophone countries during the last few centuries of world history, supported by masculinist White supremacist frameworks operating at all levels. (p. 1056)

These conceptual challenges can be difficult for some to withstand since both Lather (2018) and Stewart et al. (2021) are forcing these students to rethink their intentions in returning to school to pursue their degrees, which may have been to produce research that makes the current systems of governing and thought to work more efficiently and effectively.

To help them move forward, I highlight St. Pierre (2016) and others’ argument (e.g., Gerrard et al., 2017) that “we must rethink and disperse that central figure” of the modern and often postmodern project, the “human being,” which, historically, often reflects a White, monied, male perspective (p. 45). Instead, as researchers, we need to consider engaging in an ontological understanding of the world where we engage in practices “that would be capable of engaging the materiality of language itself—its material force and its entanglements in bodies and matter—and wonder what such practices could consist of” as we study the dialogic interaction of humans actors in a range of educational contexts (MacLure, 2013, p. 658). Yet, as MacLure notes, the difficulty, at least conceptually, is the tendency to sink back “into the old habits of humanism and hubris that promise some kind of depleted mastery over the world through the dogmatic exercise of methodological good sense and common sense” (p. 666), which I often myself falling prey to in my own work (e.g., C. P. Brown et al., 2016).

Still, I tell these students that I choose to engage in this work because it challenges the Western project of “epistemological accumulation” (De Lissovoy, 2019, p. 2), which reflects the “Western impulse toward growth and expansion which has resulted in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples globally” and points to the need for decolonial research (p. 6). I am troubled by this desire Western impulse for more, be it intellectually, physically, or politically, and how it has created many of the crises that exist in education and beyond. As Santos (2014) explains, “Social injustice is based on cognitive injustice” (p. 189). Thus, I tell them that this work makes clear to me that we must rethink “the central dichotomies and contradictions of settler-capitalist society” (Grande, 2018, p. 173).

Rethinking Their Thinking

Once I clarify why I question the Western epistemological project, I work to help these novice researchers move forward in their work with case study methodology by emphasizing the point that “cognitive justice will never succeed if it is based only on the idea of a more equitable distribution of scientific knowledge”; instead, I hope they recognize that all fields of knowledge are incomplete and require “epistemological dialogues and debates” in making sense of the world (Santos, 2014, p. 189). To foster such conversations and for such conceptual, political, and practical change to occur in the world through their critical research necessitates what De Lissovoy (2019) terms “a project of inversion” in which they seek to invert “the system of values that lives within colonial modernity” and restore the agency and rights of “the marginalized while exposing the corruption of power’s supposed virtue” with the arguments they make and the products of research they produce (p. 3).

The challenge of engaging in such inversion in the research process is that it requires us, as researchers, to reject of the notion of “market citizenship” in any solutions that we may propose for change; market citizenship is the belief that those who suffer under this colonial project, which includes “indigenous peoples,” as well as many “others” within the educational system, “to throw away the yoke of internal colonialism by becoming successful entrepreneurs in the global economy” (Altamirano-Jiménez, 2004, p. 354). This means that as we engage in critical qualitative research, which may include the rich intellectual tradition of decolonial thought (e.g., Batiste, 2008), we cannot use our work to propose that our participants simply need to learn how to be more entrepreneurial in their field of education. Such work requires us, no matter our theoretical orientation, to recognize “the trauma of colonisation itself” (De Lissovoy, 2019, p. 4), meaning, we, as researchers, must use our empirical work to propose ways “to move forward” in which we recognize that the implications of our work “cannot magically transcend . . . coloniality” (De Lissovoy, 2019, p. 6).

These conceptual tensions are significant for any researcher who is striving to succeed in the academy, and in working with graduate students, my goal in sharing these ideas is to make them aware of the onto-epistemological challenges they will face when moving forward with their own critical research in and outside the academy. As I tell them, my conceptual positionality within this process of learning case study is a rejection of the positivistic lens that defines and centers the Western, White, human experience over all others. Because social injustices are rooted in cognitive injustice (Santos, 2014), I also seek to help them understand that “different types of knowledge are incomplete in different ways” (Santos, 2014, p. 212), meaning, whatever research they will produce is incomplete as well. As such, what I offer them is insight into the many possible interpretations and framings of case study methodology, not “the way” to do case study research.

As I do this, I personally recognize as well as verbally reinforce with these graduate students Todd’s (2016) argument that there is a long history of those who operate in and benefit from the Euro-Western academy, like myself, using Indigenous ways of thinking without crediting them. In sharing these onto-epistemological orientations toward research, I am not seeking to appropriate these knowledges as my own (Ritchie, 2013). Rather, I am simply illuminating decolonized pathways for those graduate students who are rooted in colonized and non-dominant communities so that they may choose to follow, ignore, or even critique the decolonial research process conceptually, practically, and/or politically (Santos, 2018).

Moreover, in putting forward these traditionally marginalized and silenced ways of knowing (Banks, 1993), I remind the students that decolonial scholars do not seek to replace one form of epistemological colonization with another. Rather, as Fregoso Bailón and De Lissovoy (2019) noted, there is no “epistemological finish line” (p. 358). Instead, these scholars are seeking to create epistemological “equity between different ways of knowing and different kinds of knowledge” (Santos, 2014, p. 237). In all, I reiterate to these students that these conceptual challenges must be addressed before moving into the practical process of case study research. Otherwise, it is likely their research will either be poorly executed or simply incorporated into the dominant Western narratives of knowing where crisis remains the norm so that those in power can reinforce their standing within the world and “expand sectors of potential profit accumulation” for their own greed (Slater, 2015, p. 3).

Research Conceptualizations in a Continued Crisis Context

Understanding the shortcomings of the dominant Western onto-epistemological conception of research creates the opportunity to begin to discuss how we, as researchers, go about conducting case study research that addresses the range of issues created by the continued influx of crises. For example, researchers might speak back to the historical erasure of indigenous peoples by settler colonialism by illuminating the significance of the lives and actions of those communities (e.g., Dumas, 2015). Or, as Webber-Ritchey et al. (2021) noted, we can seek to produce work that provides “vulnerable populations a voice so that they are no longer silenced” within the current and historical understandings of such crises as the COVID-19 pandemic (p. 17). No matter the direction they choose to follow in their work, I seek to help them recognize that addressing crises is challenging work; it is physically and psychosocially challenging (e.g., K. D. Brown, 2021), conceptually challenging (Ritchie, 2016), and methodologically challenging (e.g., Cannella & Viruru, 2004).

Physical and Psychosocial Pain and Vulnerability

When addressing issues of crises, there is a practical as well as conceptual danger in seeking to illuminate different ways of being through case study research. Practically speaking, as Tuck and Yang (2014) noted, those qualitative studies that are often “considered most compelling [and] authentic in social science research are stories of pain and humiliation,” and while this work is done to provide “people’s “real voices” . . . to yield needed material or political resources,” they contend that this is a “prominent but unreliable theory of change in the academy” (p. 812); this theory of change puts “too much faith in the power of exposure and awareness, and doesn’t account for the complacency of voyeurism” (p. 817). Yet, as an instructor of case study methodology, I find that these are often the types of studies doctoral students are drawn to as readers and as future researchers.

To respond to this challenge, we discuss Tuck and Yang’s (2014) argument for refusal, which contends that the “analytic practices of refusal can help researchers and the people who prepare researchers to avoid building our/their careers upon the pain of others” (p. 812). Instead, we discuss Webber-Ritchey et al.’s (2021) point that the goal of qualitative research is to illuminate the complexities of individual and group experiences as well as bring attention to the seen and unseen conditions that led to the crisis or oppression being imposed on those being studied. To achieve this goal, we examine Webber-Ritchey et al.’s (2021) 18 strategies to support researchers in conducting qualitative studies with vulnerable populations (see Table 3, p. 15).

Still, as Dr. Keffrelyn Brown reminds us, we, as researchers, must not engage in acts “that objectifies, dehumanizes, or essentializes” particularly sociocultural regroups “as depraved, deficient, or victims [because] it exerts a racialized harm” and/or racialized trauma on both those being studied as well as members of those communities reading such work (p. 1170). Ignoring these vulnerabilities, be it in the researching of crises or the sharing of work, only adds to rather than addresses the physical and psychosocial pain created by these crises. To move forward, K. D. Brown (2021) suggests that as researchers and/or instructors, we must recognize and, using the work of Crawley (2017), “sit with,” or “tarry” the suffering of those we research/study. Furthermore, we must demand for and act for change, which I tell the students must be a part of their critical case studies. Finally, K. D. Brown (2021) notes that “Black liberation,” or the liberation of any colonized group, “will necessarily mean a death to whiteness and its weighty significance in integrated social life” (p. 1176). This last point is significant, and leads us, as a class, to discussing the conceptual challenges in achieving the goals outlined by K. Brown.

Crisis and Decolonial Frameworks

Alongside discussing these issues of physical and psychosocial pain and vulnerability, I also engage these students in a conceptual conversation about how case study methodology, at its core, is an empirical endeavor set out to understand the case, which as Merriam (2009) pointed out, is “an in-depth description and analysis of a bounded system” (p. 40). In doing so, I want us, as a learning community, to be cognizant of the inherent danger in creating a bounded system. As da Silva (2007) pointed out, such a system appears to empower the Western subject, typically those responsible for the crisis, over others who often bear the brunt of the crisis while not having power to exercise within that bounded system and/or crisis.

Still, I work with these students to select a case study methodologist to help them bound their work so that it is conceptually and practically manageable. For instance, Yin (2018), who appears to be speaking to a postpositivistic audience due to his determination to address issues of validity and reliability, frames this methodology through a humanist lens. Yin notes that case studies rely “on multiple sources of evidence, with data needing to converge in a triangulating fashion” (p. 15). Thomas (2021), who appears more interpretivist in his framing of this methodology, centers this case study around the singularity of the “subject” of research, which he contends cannot be generalized. Stake (1995) and Merriam (2009), also interpretivists, appear more open to how the system is bounded, but both center their work on the case. Finally, Bartlett and Vavrus (2017) provide a heuristic known as the comparative case study (CCS) approach to investigate policy. The CCS approach constantly compares the actors, phenomena, and processes under investigation in one locale, which Bartlett and Vavrus term the horizontal axis, with what has happened in other places, which they term the vertical axis, across historical moments, which they term the transverse axis. Bartlett and Vavrus’s (2017) sociocultural approach to case study research frames policy as a deeply political process of cultural production engaged in and shaped by social actors in disparate locations who exert incongruent amounts of influence over the design, implementation, and evaluation of policy.

Thinking Anti-Colonial Research Within/During Crisis

No matter the methodological approach these researchers chose to employ, the primary focus of their case studies is to use the case to make sense of a moment, a program, a policy, a larger issue, and so on. Flyvbjerg (2011) points out, “The goal is not to make case study be all things to all people. The goal is to allow the study to be different things to different people” (p. 1012). In crisis, the goal is even more complex as the research must bound the case within flexible, even constantly changing, and unpredictable borders. Differences may be even more extreme.

Nevertheless, in trying to formulate a study that examines a “case” to help “us” better understand how a crisis is impacting their case or a larger issue, graduate students often struggle regarding how to ask case study questions. To construct questions that both illuminate and bound the case is “the most difficult thinking of research” (Stake, 1995, p. 33). Yin contends that case study questions often ask how and why about contemporary phenomena over which a researcher has little or no control. Furthermore, critical scholars attempt to generate questions that address hidden or previously unthought injustices and/or inequitable structures while requiring an openness to both reflexive and diffractive forms of thought and avoiding the imposition of new forms of domination (Crotty, 1999). No matter the methodologist, what researchers will ask centers on the case, and in doing so, I work with them to avoid framing, or constructing, boundaries through unconscious reinscriptions of Western dominance, colonialism, or capitalism.

Thus, the challenge becomes helping novice researchers recognize a way to identify and address these practical and conceptual challenges in conducting a case study—whether the case/issue they are investigating centers around a crisis or not. I find Jackson and Mazzei’s (2011) conception of a threshold to be a useful tool in rethinking this methodology. In their work, they employ the “space of the threshold” to “create new analytical questions” by recognizing “how theory and data constitute or make one another—and how, in the threshold, the divisions among and definitions of theory and data collapse” (p. 6). While for Jackson and Mazzei this recognition is occurring in the analysis phase of the research process, I see it also occurring within the process of formulating a case study—the questions, which are grounded in a theory, including the researcher’s onto-epistemological positioning, and the case are dialogically entwined. Whereby, collapsing these divisions and positioning this work with the image of a threshold, each construct, be it the case, the participants, data, and so on, become “brief stopping points” that are “continually transformed, and exceeded” as the researcher employs their theoretical orientation to turn the case “into something different” by pushing “theory to its limit” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2011, p. 7).

Whether or not the students find the threshold to be a useful conceptual tool in thinking through their case study, I also return to Bartlett and Vavrus’s (2017) CCS approach with these students because it provides additional guidance in moving beyond the objectivist framing of case study as a thing that is fixed in one locale. Instead, Bartlett and Vavrus frame case study as an assemblage, which draws from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. In their work, Jackson and Mazzei (2011) state that an “assemblage isn’t a thing—it is the process of making and unmaking the thing . . . we have to ask not only how things are connected, but also what territory is claimed in that connection” (p. 1). Doing so reinforces the connections and histories that exist at the micro, meso, and macro levels of the research process. Thus, crises are not seen as a momentary issue, but rather, they are connected to histories, policies, and politics in the past that are seeking to move forward in a way that allows those with power to continually reinforce their standing while expanding their reach—be it political, financial, or territorial (e.g., Slater, 2015). Thus, to move forward requires that we, as researchers, recognize the ethical implications of our work.

Research as Ethical Performance: Always and Especially in Times of Crisis

While all aspects of qualitative research are embedded within ethical values and performances, crises continue to make clear the imbalance of power within society and the research process. As Clark-Kazak (2021) notes in their research on forced migration (a specific form of crisis), “power asymmetries underpin many of the ethical dilemmas that researchers face when conducting work in migration contexts. From an epistemological perspective, unequal power relations are (re)produced in knowledge creation about migration,” and these power asymmetries exist in almost any form of case study research (p. 129). While research about and/or within crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can provide insight into “the social responses of this pandemic, including unfolding events and the influences of events for individuals,” it is also important to bring these crises into our discussions so that these novice researchers understand the ethical dilemmas they will face in their work (Webber-Ritchey et al., 2021, p. 13).

Conceptually, Guba and Lincoln (2005) note that the issues of values and ethics center around the construct of axiology, and as Creswell and Poth (2018) contend, researchers must recognize and “admit the value-laden nature” of their work (p. 21). Still, as crises continue to affect everyone, Lather (2018) argues,

The question before us is what it means to think of a science that is accountable to complexity and multiplicity, becoming and difference, the yes that comes from working the stuck places, the beyond that is what haunts us. To do so entails rethinking the theory of the subject in uncertain times. (p. 110)

Lather is illuminating MacLure’s (2013) point about the difficulty of sinking “into the old habits of humanism and hubris that promise some kind of depleted mastery over the world through the dogmatic exercise of methodological good sense and common sense” within the qualitative endeavor (p. 666). Yet, novice researchers are drawn to case study research and other empirical methodologies because they recognize that “the practice of research cannot be separated from increasing global inequalities, an upsurge in militant rightist and racist politics in Europe, Australia, and the United States, continued gender-based violence, and significant challenges for imagining and enacting justice and equity” within educational institutions (Gerrard et al., 2017, p. 391). Similarly, their goal, as is mine, is to work toward changing the power asymmetries that are creating and sustaining the range of crises in society generally, and for me in education specifically.

To produce research that pushes past the hubris of humanism, as St. Pierre (2016) points out, requires researchers to “learn a new responsibility both for how we produce ourselves as subjects and how, in relations, we produce others, how we subject them,” and for St. Pierre, the “rub” in this push is that “once the ‘I’ fails, qualitative inquiry, dependent as it is on humanism’s description of human being, fails as well” (p. 51). For me, this is the challenge in pushing graduate students to question these dominant conceptions of research, knowledge, reality, and morality. Luckily, I can share with the work of those who engage in postcolonial (e.g., Viruru, 2001) and decolonial work (e.g., Tuck & Yang, 2014) to illuminate the fallacies of the settler-colonialist project in framing the ethical role of the researcher and the theory of change embedded in the Western research project. This project assumes “people are unaware of an injustice or issue or illness or social calamity—and that in making them more aware” through the research process “we ready them to take appropriate action. It is a theory of pre-change. It assumes that people will generally do the right thing with the right information” (Tuck, 2018, p. 160). Instead, to move forward ethically requires researchers to remember other theories of change that “are anticipatory and proactive (not reactive),” which requires the researcher to “make space to speak what is otherwise silenced, make transparent that which is otherwise concealed, and make meaningful that which is otherwise forgotten or devalued” within the research process (Tuck, 2018, p. 165).

A clear example of this occurs within my class when we discuss the ethics of anonymity within the research process. I point them to the work of Moses (2021), a scholar who highlights institutional racism, who states that while anonymity for participants or the research site is commonly done by researchers to ethically protect them, it “minimizes racism’s impact and perpetuates cultures of silence” when those are engaged in such acts are not named (p. 886). While Moses (2021) is not trying to create a new methodological rule, Moses does bring to the forefront how such ethical acts within the research process, such as anonymity, can allow racist institutions or participants to keep their brand and public image intact within the neoliberal marketplace.

To move forward in this process, Mita (2012) reminds us, as researchers, that there are different ways of thinking and knowing; specifically, group consciousness exists among many indigenous communities, which “is not a straightforward translation of the individual to the group, although this is often the only way that Westerners can come to understand what may constitute a group” (p. 142). The point being that many of the taken-for-granted assumptions within the process of qualitative research are just that—assumptions framed in a particular belief structure. Postcolonial (e.g., Gandhi, 2011) and decolonial work “offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one,” and as such, Tuck and Yang contend that, “Decolonization is not an ‘end.’ It is an elsewhere” (p. 37).

Thus, regarding axiology, my goal in working with budding researchers is to recognize that ethics is a moment-to-moment dialogic decision-making process in which we, the researchers, must rethink our interactions with and use of our participants’ stories and any other form of data within our work. This requires us to not only question our own assumptions about relations, research, knowledge, and so on, but we also need to pay attention to the “localized meanings of ethics” within the communities we research (Clark-Kazak, 2021, p. 132). Nevertheless, mistakes will be made, and as I demonstrate, they need to be corrected as soon as possible (e.g., C. P. Brown et al., 2019).

Doing Anti-Colonial Case Study in the Era of Never-Ending Crisis

By working with the students to recognize and begin to resolve the onto-epistemological and axiological crises that White, Western thought has created, I want them to understand the power they possess in the research process and the potential impact of their work. I hope that such awareness will allow “us” to consider how “we” might conduct case study research that is able to illuminate the crises they are drawn to in a way that does not simply reinforce the constructs and conditions that created the crises in the first place.

As we begin this discussion, I reiterate the point that our process of coming to understand our topic of investigation as well as the data we are collecting as researchers to make sense of it is always “partial, incomplete, and always in a process of a re-telling and re-membering” within a given context, time, and space (Jackson & Mazzei, 2011, p. ix). I remind them that such data collection actions whether observing or “interviewing can unearth deep, true meaning is highly doubtful” (St. Pierre, 2016, p. 51). As researchers, we are only gathering the participants’ stories for that day, “and tomorrow’s will no doubt be different [which] always been the case” (p. 52). Moreover, I reiterate St. Pierre (2016) point that “the empiricism we practice assumes a founding, sensing, meaning-making individual separate from what it senses, and that assumption enables troubling binary oppositions” that allow the dynamics of crises to remain unchanged (p. 43). To move forward, be it in framing our work, collecting data to investigate our research questions, and/or analyzing what we found (e.g., C. P. Brown, 2021), I make clear to the students that we, as researchers, must “maintain a stance of constant critical questioning, never allowing ourselves to be too comfortable with the landscape we create, or for our practices and understandings to become taken for granted as part of the status quo” within the research process (Evans, 2016, p. 75). To remain critical while being uncomfortable with our research requires us to question constantly how our work, be it in the process of conducting case study or in sharing our findings, might privilege one group and disenfranchise another at any step in this process (Derrida, 2001; Foucault, 1977, 2006; Guba & Lincoln, 1981).

As we discuss conducting a case study to illuminate issues of crisis, I also reiterate the point that the process of data analysis is problematic. MacLure (2013) reminds us that “data have their ways of making themselves intelligible to us” (p. 660). Yet, the meanings we pull from data “are always in motion, incomplete, partial contradictory” (Denzin, 2019, p. 723). Often in qualitative research, analysis involves the coding of data, which is a process in which we, as researchers, not only give the data meaning but also organize it in the manner in which we want to answer our research question (Saldaña, 2021). Tuck and Yang (2014) warn us about this process of objectifying data; it creates “possessors and possessions” that reinforce the dominant settler-colonial paradigm (p. 814). Instead, Tuck and Yang (2014) want us, as researchers, to refuse this objectification and interrogate the “legacies and enactments” of power and privilege embedded in this process; doing so can assist us in recognizing how we are making sense of the issues we are investigating, including those of crisis, within our work. Jackson and Mazzei’s (2011) conception of the threshold is also useful here. Rather than see the process of analysis as a closed system that objectifies data, the process is one in which our data are transformed, but only in relation to theory that can be reimagined in new ways. The products of our research are not only limiting and incomplete, but they are also clearly dependent on our theoretical orientation toward our work (e.g., Nxumalo et al., 2020). Whereby, this endeavor in case study research is clearly bounded, but only in the temporality of our work. Nevertheless, it provides us, as researchers, with a range of opportunities to move forward with our work (C. P. Brown, 2005)—be it to rethink the issue under investigation or propose a new way forward in resolving a crisis.

Moving Forward in Times of Crisis: Decolonial Futures

Up to this point, I have outlined the challenges of educating novice researchers to conduct case study research in an era of never-ending crisis generally. The question now becomes what kind of work might be done to address the issues that arise in times of specific crisis. Furthermore, all these potential issues apply to all of us as we attempt to construct research that is decolonial and even anti-colonial in dangerous times of crisis.

While I try to help new scholars recognize, as De Lissovoy (2016) contends, that we, as researchers, must “lay bare the unfairness and oppression” that result from the crises circumstances, no matter the origin, it is also just as important to use work to consider “more liberatory possibilities” for all involved in the research process (p. 348). Yet, crises create unpredictable and precarious situations for all involved. Thus, resilience must be built “into the research process itself and provide lessons and considerations on adaptability and flexibility” while data are collected and analyzed (Rahman et al., 2021, p. 2). Furthermore, borrowing from the work of Souto-Manning (2017), it is essential to trouble “social issues and normative perceptions in a critically conscious manner” to provide insight as to how stakeholders become and/or continue to be “agents of change” (p. 96). If we, as researchers, refuse “to question our methodological norms” as well as the proposed outcomes of our research, we are not likely to have the “uncomfortable conversations necessary for change to ever materialize” (p. 89).

To move forward in this process, as Nxumalo (2021) notes, requires us, as researchers, to recognize that this “current moment of reckoning is a turning point that demands movements, at multiple scales, toward more livable futures” (p. 1192). Meaning, as an instructor, I try to assist students in recognizing the complexity of the assemblage our work represents, but also, I suggest that in our work we put forward proposals for change that address the micro, meso, and macro issues embedded within our study.

To help think about how we might propose such change, I turn to post- and decolonial thought so that we can begin to recognize the “differential impact and asymmetries of violence and harm on these populations persist not as an effect of crisis but rather as the normative order of the settler state” (Grande, 2018, p. 169). Turning to the work of Nxumalo (2016b), I recognize how “colonialisms do much of their work through erasures, displacements and exclusions that become normalized in everyday encounters” (p. 643). Thus, it is essential that as we share the results of our work that we do so through work that interrupts the distractions crisis creates “to make visible the colonial resonances and flows of power that circulate through everyday life” (Nxumalo, 2016b, p. 650). As we do this, Cannella and Manuelito (2008) remind us, as researchers, that we must also “support knowledges that have been discredited by dominant power orientations in ways that are transformative (rather than simply revealing)” (p. 56). Cannella and Manuelito (2008) also note that actions that challenge the status quo while promoting shunned indigenous understandings of the world also requires us to view this work through “activist conceptualizations of research that are critical and multiple in ways that are transparent, reflexive, and collaborative” (p. 56). Such movements create the space for new ideas and new solutions to emerge so that we, as researchers, avoid the trap of making the case for “yesterday’s solutions” to address “today’s problems” created by never-ending crises (Arndt et al., 2021).

For those researchers who are truly attracted to and hope to implement decolonial work, I reiterate that this works is designed to pursue “the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 1), which is an issue, while extremely important, may go beyond the scope of their project. Whether or not they choose to do so, as De Lissovoy (2019) explains, I want them to at least consider creating “the conditions for a genuine and difficult solidarity, as opposed to the impetuous announcement of it,” which means their work, when possible, needs “to confront the violations of coloniality, and open space for those who have been dispossessed to reclaim that which has been taken, denied, and erased” (p. 11). To be clear, not all the students I have the pleasure of working with want to pursue, or, as in my case, feel they have the sociocultural history and/or identity to speak with these important voices. Nevertheless, I propose to them that our goal, as researchers, with any endeavor should be to seek to acknowledge those who created the harm endured by those with whom we are working alongside and to work with our participants to alter the conditions that created such destruction (K. D. Brown, 2021). What I hope these students recognize is that the identification and naming of settler colonial, racist, and neoliberal actions that created these crises must become normal to them within the research process, so they are “better suited” to propose implications that “bring forth . . . dreams of change, racial inclusion and equity, and [an] end to social oppression” (Moses, 2021, p. 891).

Thus, to move forward in conducting case study research or any form of critical qualitative research to investigate the range of crises that exist throughout the world, I impart on these future scholars that there will be “unresolved questions and tensions that have emerged” in our work, but there will also be “hopeful interruptions, imaginaries, possibilities and relations” that we find as well as produce through our work (Nxumalo, 2016a, p. 50)—this is one of the main reasons I think we should engage in the research process. Moreover, I remind them that they must resist being “content” with the current state of “qualitative research methodology and dissemination” so that they can

affect positive change in the framing of contemporary policies, as well as in the constituencies that such policies serve. Such a task is pressing, complicated and challenging, yet it is one that research seeking to respond to the claims and demands of people [in crisis] is compelled to embark upon. (Squire, 2018, p. 455)

Finally, I state that if we, as researchers, do not take on this task, the global neoliberal systems of capital and governance that generate and depend on these crises to further their ability to accumulate wealth and power will remain unchanged.