The Insider’s Journey: Two Investments for Epistemic Justice in Educational Research

Abstract

The extent to which any social scientist is authentically an insider continues to be a spirited debate within qualitative circles. Amid this weighty dispute, “insider” researchers, or me-searchers, maintain that we have certain advantages in conducting qualitative inquiry in marginalized communities that mimic our personal histories and life experiences. This article reports my first professional study as a publicly engaged scholar who directed an ethnographic childhood lead poisoning study among my cultural group, and the ways in which that initial investigation formed the trajectory of my identity as an educational researcher. Two investments needed by African American me-searchers, regarding personal and professional contributions for qualitative inquiry among marginalized people, are explored. Upon reflection, disclosure of the insider’s personal history and the inclusion of the researched as affirmed collaborators in studies that impact their lives are determined to be prerequisites to epistemic justice.

Precis

One of my earliest memories was the sound of my mother’s voice. The fury in her voice when my brothers stayed out all night; the resolution in it when the local grocer in our rural town did not want to accept her food stamps; the disappointment in it when the light bill was too high; the camaraderie in it when she shared a spot of fish and cornbread with her friends and neighbors; the strength and power in it when she prayed over my anemic, lead-poisoned blood and phlebitic legs; the pain in it when she described the horror of watching her five year old sister burn alive; and the resignation with hegemony when she recalled being turned away from a “Whites only” hospital in 1956 with her dying baby in her arms . . . as the twelfth child of thirteen, I thought her voice was magical. . . (Researcher’s journal, August 5, 2002)

There is a mounting call among qualitative circles for “insider” researchers that study communities that mirror their own identities, to choose for ourselves the power to name, to describe, to evoke the emotion and humanity (Caraballo et al., 2017; Davies, 2012) denied by colonizing approaches of social science (Conrad, 2022; Dillard & Neal, 2021; Morton et al., 2020; Villenas, 1996). This appeal deviates from those who surmise that, because culture is fluid and the researcher’s academic identity creates distance between the researcher and the researched, the degree to which any researcher is an authentic insider is doubtful (Aguilar, 1981; Messerschmidt, 1981).

A glimpse at my first researcher’s journal above reveals that my personal story has inevitably shaped my professional proclivities and research agenda. As an African American scholar who grew up in abject poverty, in a lead-poisoned home, my illiterate mother is two-parts local icon and one-part miracle worker as she loved her children and the community. As I reflect on my words, I am confronted with the realization that I cannot discharge a childhood of oppression in my new professional life of “advantage” in academia; nor would I want to do so. For African American scholars, we are obliged to contemplate “the ways that [our] personhood as a (re)searcher matters . . .” (Dillard & Neal, 2021, p. 1182). For me, confessing my lived reality is more than a planned activity as a researcher, but a natural reflex as a woman of color seeking validation for the knowledge of my community. Epistemology, or the act of knowing, is at the heart of all social science research—including educational research. Fricker (2015) clarifies the contested terrain of whose knowledge counts in the definition for epistemic justice when she writes:

No matter the cultural context, the question of who gets to contribute epistemically to shared knowledge and/or shared social understandings that may be sought, canvassed, pooled, or otherwise genuinely engaged with in any given practical context is a locus of what we might usefully conceive of as epistemic relational equality and inequality. (p. 76)

In what follows for this essay, I argue that insider researchers have certain epistemological and methodological advantages in conducting ethnographic work in marginalized communities that mimic their own life experiences. To affirm my life’s work in me-search, “research with, about or connected to one’s identity or positionality” or community (Gardner et al., 2017, p. 90), I use an ethnographic case study on childhood lead poisoning (CLP), recounted from my early career, to illustrate how research performed by a researcher from a similar background and experiences can de-center colonizing assumptions and interpretations about the “other.” Next, I share two investments, sacrifices of personal and professional assets, employed as an educational researcher from the inside attempting to transcend the hyphen—enacting qualitative techniques that draw upon one’s own history of oppression and marginalization to diminish epistemic distance between the African American mothers in Camden and myself. And third, in a reflection that is deeply personal, I surmise that the conversations that emerge from an insider-researched dialogic can propel extraordinary productivity when performed alongside oppressed communities as collaborators for epistemic justice.

Theoretical Framework: Toward Epistemic Justice

The search for knowledge and truth becomes complicated by status quo methodologies and practices that dictate whose voice is included or excluded. Epistemic justice, parity of knowledge for the researcher and the researched in real-world education settings, are achieved when authentic approaches in the qualitative inquiry are the goal. Epistemic justice promotes a common understanding for the meaning of dialogue and actions (Freire & Macedo, 1995), respect of the personhood (Banks, 1998; Dillard & Neal, 2021), and uncompromising belief that the researched and the researcher in the inquiry both have valuable contributions or assets to bring to bear in the exchange (Freire & Macedo, 1995).

The very idea of Epistemic Contribution and the way in which it connotes the importance of relationships of epistemic giving and receiving that function unimpeded by asymmetries of mere status (i.e. status not won by epistemically relevant factors such as expertise) is consistent with, and perhaps lends support to, the general view that equality is best understood as fundamentally relational rather than distributive. On such a view the continued importance of distributive equality, not to mention its allure as apparently fundamental, can be elegantly explained by reference to the fact that social arrangements of relational equality will be strongly conducive to distributive equality. . . (Fricker, 2015, p. 79)

In this way, the personal history, experiences, and knowledge of the researcher and the researched are stripped of hierarchy, and both enter a reciprocal relationship to advance the inquiry. I further assert that being able to make equal knowledge contributions is an essential human function to a self-actualized life and wider freedoms (Fricker, 2007, 2016) and that such contributions can be fostered in support of those from marginalized communities as well as marginalized researchers.

Those who are traditional social science researchers often study the culture of others as they struggle to understand them; but still claim authenticity of epistemology through a colonizer’s worldview. By contrast, “insider” qualitative researchers are accused of bringing forward our compromised subjectivities that entangle the voices of the community with that of the researcher. Banks (1998) offers a nuanced typology of minoritized knowers or researchers—one that links their identity or personhood and relationship with the community: the indigenous-insider, the indigenous-outsider, the external-insider, and the external-outsider, and clarifies that:

The indigenous-insider endorses the unique values, perspectives, behaviors, beliefs, and knowledge of his or her primordial community and culture. He or she is also perceived by significant others and opinion leaders within the community as a legitimate member of the community who has a perspective and the knowledge that will promote the well-being of the community, enhance its power, and enable it to maintain cultural integrity and survive. (pp. 7-8)

The indigenous-insider in this sense is considered as a vetted person of the local space, and it is this designation that gives him or her authority, because of a shared history and like experiences, to speak about issues of that bordered territory or studied community. Yet others speculate that common experience between the researcher and researched can sometimes be too intimate with a lack of professional boundaries; rendering it as an inadequate form of knowledge or method to sanction useful investigations (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2009).

Existing research methodologies have, until recently, excluded the experiences of studied communities or historically disadvantaged people as a basis of study and analysis (Caraballo et al., 2017; Muhammad et al., 2015; Nganga et al., 2022). This kind of epistemological elitism is the core reason why insider experiences as knowledge have become excluded in qualitative studies (Settles et al., 2021); particularly because its deconstruction becomes the primary focus of the research (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2009). Many have argued that experience cannot speak for itself, again shifting the meaning and silencing the epistemological validity contained in certain insider studies. Qualitative researchers and community educators continue to search for meaningful ways to counter the effects of traditional and discriminatory research approaches on underrepresented communities (Muhammad et al., 2015). Participatory community-based researchers (Caraballo et al., 2017; Conrad, 2022) and critical methodologists (Miller et al., 2020; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) reason for frameworks and practices that can be used by insider researchers (understood as me-searchers) to theorize, examine and counter the ways marginalization and bias implicitly and explicitly affect social systems, cultural orientations, routines, and discourses.

Researchers on the inside, or me-searchers, offer a perspective influenced by both the objectivity of the academy, with the sensibility of our experiences which can move a qualitative inquiry closer to epistemic parity. Scholars cannot merely pontificate about marginalization but suggests a real understanding of such ideas requires actual learning from those who have experienced these realities. When seeking to understand how African American mothers negotiate CLP, for example, social science should seek scholars of like experiences to act as translators—as “we often share the social-political histories that have shaped our collective lives as marginalized peoples . . .” (Kanuha, 2000, p. 445). As a precursor to Gardner et al. (2017), Banks (1998) hypothesizes that the indigenous insider is a member of the community in which his or her lived experience adds value to the investigation.

Two Investments of Insiders for Epistemic Justice

In the early 2000s, long before I was acquainted with the definition of epistemic justice and before the headlines were consumed by the lead-poisoning water crisis in Flint, Michigan (Green, 2019), I conducted an ethnographic case study among African American mothers as an examination of their lived experiences in Camden, New Jersey. Lead poisoning has long been known as a “toxicity of habitation” (Turner, 1897, cited in Warren, 2000) as the mothers struggled to protect their babies from CLP in their lead-filled, dilapidated homes. High-risk lead poisoned communities are those that have old housing, a high minority population, and whose residents are low-income (Allwood et al., 2022; Ettinger, Leonard, & Mason, 2019; Ettinger, Ruckart, & Dignam, 2019).

The housing stock in Camden City is a graveyard of aging homes that carry the silent threat of lead contamination. Over two decades ago 96% of the 24,177 housing units in Camden City were built before 1973 and the median year for a home built in Camden City was 1945; of these figures, 42%, which is 10,202 of these homes sheltered children under the age of 18 (U.S. Census, 2000). By all accounts, Camden City was, and still is, a high-risk lead-poisoned community (Rivera, 2022). Regrettably, Camden maintains one of the highest rates of poverty for children in the United States (U.S. Census, 2022; Kozol, 1997). While universal screening was recommended for children in high-risk communities decades ago, only 40% of children in Camden are currently tested for lead (Benfer, 2017). Camden became the place for my first scholarly foray into educational research, and it would later prove to be the place where I found my voice for epistemological advocacy and an unconventional career in educational research.

In elevating, or at the very least acknowledging, the experiences and knowledge of participants from underserved communities, one must find a way to tether community ways of knowing to Western ways of conducting research. Because this is a socio-cultural study, this investigation peers at African American mothers in other places outside her home. African American mothers’ experiences, and the myriad of interactions that occur, are the human ingredients of her cultural environment, the living reality of an urban mother of color. Quantitative studies provide little data into the living reality of urban mothers of color, her role as an advocate for her children, and how she perceives and navigates risks in her environment. I used individual and group interviews, observation, life history, and participant observation to investigate and capture holistic contextualized pictures of the social, political, economic, and cultural factors that affect the everyday existence of African American urban mothers in Camden.

Building on theories of community participatory research (Caraballo et al., 2017; Conrad, 2022) and critical methodologists (Miller et al., 2020; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), I impart the two investments I poured into my research with urban African American mothers. The term investment is used in this article to refer to the dedication of the insider as researcher to the researched community for the relationship to attain an increase in a study over time. Investment requires a sacrifice of some present asset such as time, power, or knowledge. In ethnography, the purpose of investing by the researcher is to generate a return from the exchange between the researcher and the researched. The return may consist of a gain (deeper connection or better understandings of the phenomenon) to avoid losses experienced by thin or failed relationships in the community. My investments to the African American mothers in my CLP study sought to achieve epistemic justice by: (a) challenging the issue of power between the researched and the researcher and (b) centering the voices of the researched by serving as a facilitator of knowledge production.

Investment 1: Challenging Research Authority

Those who possess power, whether in academic circles or the larger society, also exert epistemic power and such knowledge maintains marginality. By convention, those who have access to certain channels of power—research, educational policy development, curricula, and education more broadly—have assumed the privilege to generate master narratives in the CLP agenda. This power often comes in the ability to name and create lead-poisoning policies and curricula for families whose children are at risk of lead poisoning. Epistemic injustice prevents some people from “speaking for themselves or formulating their own legitimate knowledge claims. Moreover, such exclusions are not abstractions but active and relational in our lives; our epistemic lives involve being, doing, and acting with others” (Barker et al. 2018, as cited in Walker & Boni, 2020, p. 2).

For example, aging studies have demonstrated lead’s devastation and prevalence, recent studies idle serious study by examining caregivers’ knowledge, beliefs, and barriers associated with lead poisoning prevention behaviors (Kegler et al., 1999; Mahon, 1997). Traditional lead poisoning outreach has responded to this research and replicate culturally inappropriate interventions supporting the hegemonic health care systems that seek to impose generic lead poisoning strategies and propose a priori lead prevention literature—regardless of the family’s knowledge, experiences, or cultural orientation. Previous lead poisoning studies have taken a deficiency approach (Serwint et al., 2000) and look at families of color as having perception and attitude barriers that prevent them from utilizing lead poisoning knowledge. Israel et al. (2001) and Hill-Jackson (2004) advises that traditional approaches to community concerns can be ineffective in marginalized spaces.

One such CLP study addresses health belief models that investigate: washing hands, cleaning areas where the child plays, diet, and blood-lead level testing (Kegler et al., 1999, p. 54). The caregiver interview took about 1 hour to administer and covered knowledge, health beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors related to CLP. This report is full of informative data as to what the lead-prevention barriers are but is void of any discussion as to why parents and caretakers are not engaging in compliant behaviors more often. Noticeably missing in this form of health assessments are the types of qualitative reporting that gives us some insight as to the lives of these children and their parents and/or caretakers. The one-part interview also included a detailed frequency questionnaire, possible sources of exposure, social networks, and demographic information.

This type of investigative rape, that comes into a home for a one-shot deal, then exits very quickly, does little to advance the understanding of parents’ and caregivers’ lives. These studies do little more than provide a baseline against which to measure the ineffectiveness of intervention. The lead poisoning prevention barriers presented in these studies do little to advance the understanding for why these behaviors occur and offer no help in prevention strategies. This is to say, these studies are unproductive in that they give a traditional approach to examining barriers and behaviors by looking at the perceived “deficit” of the parents and caretakers in marginalized communities. Culturally sensitive methodologies draw attention to deficit perspectives in research, through counter storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), and serve as a transformative approach to capturing the voices of the marginalized because “counter-narrative holds promise to expose, analyze, and critique the racialized reality in which those experiences are contextualized, silenced, and perpetuated” (Miller et al., 2020, p. 273).

Constructed in a critical and culturally sensitive methodology, the CLP research described below is done in the interest of marginalized women and communities, about their lived reality. Dunbar (2008) agrees that scholars of color have certain ways of knowing that privileges research performed in marginalized communities when he writes,

. . . that particular insights provide entrance into a situation that might be otherwise misunderstood, viewed as insignificant or completely missed about “lived experiences’ of oppressed/colonized people . . . there exist other intangibles/nuances that are best transmitted and understood when shared experiences, epistemologies, and the relationship to both are evident between the observer and the observed—that is when the subject and the object have shared struggles . . . there is a common experience/understanding between those who ask and those being asked. (p. 90)

Dunbar proposes that the researched and insider researchers share a worldview that needs little articulation and “where the expression on one’s face tells the whole story or a simple nod says, ‘I know where you’re coming from’” (p. 90). Likewise, lead poisoning studies require authentic insight between the researched and the researcher that would counteract the deficit theories which exist about marginalized communities. Insider research is a form of counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) and a viable tool to thwart the silenced knowledge of persons of color. The insider’s perspective can be a powerful medium to respectfully unveil, examine, and translate the voices from marginalized communities.

To be sure, an ethnography of African American mothers should produce knowledge relevant to the understanding of such lives and cultural arrangements in general. Qualitative inquiry in this space would also necessitate an assessment by someone who had access and similar lived experiences, and one who would invest in the urban community in a culturally sensitive way; a manner most majoritorian researchers are not willing or unable to devote.

Epistemologies of Home that Shape Research Intuitions

As an insider researcher, I attempted to create a rapport with my participants; this would require good communication skills. I sometimes failed to use language that was free of “academese,” (academic language) but when challenged by my qualitative reviewer and personal reflection, quickly changed to adapt to the cultural language of the participants. A journal entry documented my incompatibility of the mothers’ lives and my methodology:

Insider: Have I been replicating the same type of theoretical interactions in my methodology that I criticize in my theoretical frame? I have been using a majoritorian methodology. Dissertation chair first noticed it in my focus groups’ structure, it is too rigid; then again in the language of the questions. I see the need for a phenomenological methodology in parts of the study. But this looseness creates too many opportunities for us to laugh, conjole, and get off track. But academic jargon is too scholarly and removed from the women’s lived reality.

My research advisor challenged my positivistic inclinations and forced me to look at my scholastic voice in the study. Segall (2001) examines how qualitative researchers must weave “academic” voices from those of their participants in the field. This process forced me to push for methodologies in the field that paralleled the lived experiences of the cultural group.

This ethnography sought a culturally sensitive research approach because I was committed to and accepted the responsibility for maintaining the cultural uniqueness of the participants and other members of the community. As a researcher, I carefully considered the extent of my own cultural knowledge, across class and same race perspectives, and insider /outsider issues related to the research process.

There was still a definite power imbalance, scholars advocate that researcher name the tensions, contradictions, and power imbalances that they encounter in their work rather than attempting to eliminate them (Dillard & Neal, 2021; Miller et al., 2020). I aimed for culturally sensitive practices that would diminish participants’ presumed authority about me (Fetterman, 1989). So, while my ethnicity got me through the door, I still had to work to build trust among the women—which was temporarily being overshadowed by the weight of my university position. I changed my boardroom dress to adapt to the culture, set aside my academic language, and worked to facilitate—not dominate—productive interviews. I tried to bring dignity to the experiences with the women by serving them meals, acknowledging the importance of their experiences, and by rewarding their participation with small gifts. I sent thank you and holiday cards to all the participants. These endeavors were subtle messages to the participants that I value their time, knowledge, and contributions, and simultaneously eroded the imbalance of power and captured a bit of humanity.

I had to disclose who I was as an African American mother, and at times baring my soul. I shared my racialized oppression and stories of my mother’s inner strength and personal pain, as cited in the introduction, with the participants. Certainly, similarity of experience was key to this study; I listened to their collected voices for consensus of similar experiences and shared cultural attitudes and perceptions. The voices of the focus group members and my voice were a part of a continued dance of temperance, respect, and vulnerability.

I asked the women in my focus groups if my presence made a difference in the honesty of their responses. I got a resounding yes. The participants told me that they “were not comfortable” talking to researchers who were not of the same race. Ochieng (2010) performed studies in which the race of interviewer had profound positive effects on the outcomes in the studies. I felt as though my own history of oppression and discrimination was a reality that I shared with the women, which added to the dynamics of our relationship in the field. Collins (2000) maintains that at the intersection of race, class, and gender, culturally sensitive methodologies can act to free the voice of racialized oppressed women and elicit empowerment. This investigation extended beyond a voyeuristic gaze for me. I saw this study as my responsibility to make space in the inquiry for the researched to participate and share their contributions because “who has access to these epistemic goods at various layers of society is then a matter of justice” (Walker & Boni, 2020, p. 2). I recognized my power in the relationship with the African American mothers, tried minimizing its effect on the study, but hoped that I could use this power and research out of the field as a tool for social justice for lead poisoned children in Camden. It seems counter-intuitive but was true; the more I sought reciprocity and exposed much of life history to the mothers, power between the mothers and me became more uniform.

I learned a little about building trust in qualitative studies, in part, from watching my mother share a spot of fish and cornbread with members of our community. Often the people who ended up with their legs bent under our kitchen table were not community folk but heard that my mother Cora was “good people” and could make a mean pot of collard greens and fried fish. These people sat down as strangers but got up from our table as lifelong friends. When the mothers in the community mothers came by, it often entailed several hours of them revealing the most intimate details of their lives. This came after my mother disclosed her personal journey, regaled them with song, wiped their tears, cried on their shoulders, and laughed and prayed with them.

As a child, I surreptitiously eavesdropped on the adults—just steps away from their private conversations. I would be very careful because my discovery would mean a certain admonishment. I would lay on the floor of the living room that adjoined the kitchen where they congregated, inconspicuous but alert, and listened to “grown folk” expose their lives; it was only in those visits did I learn about my mother’s life experiences as a migrant child in a Jim Crow South who was born at the cusp of World War II. These impromptu soirées were spiritual; an indescribable level of sisterhood that was more fellowship than friendship. What I recall most is the look on the faces of these women when they left our home—they all had the look of validation. Their stories had been exposed yet held by my mother in the strictest confidence. These early life experiences of woman to woman, baring souls, would later inform my journey as a researcher.

Epistemic justice is a commitment to push back against our positivistic leanings and presumed authority so that we engage the qualitative experience with transparency. The research protocol I adapted from my childhood is a world away from the hallelujah moments my mother had with the women from the community. But these experiences among the community became my modus operandi for ensuring validity “there” in the community, while I straddled in the scientific world “here” in academia.

Investment Two: Educational Me-searchers as Community Translators

Throughout the study as a me-searcher, I proactively worked to shift the hierarchy of knowledge and place the participants’ cultural standpoints at the center (Collins, 2000). In doing so, I labored to position the participants’ lived reality as legitimate, appropriate, and necessary for understanding, analyzing, and reporting the data. To do this work well as a me-searcher, I would need to serve as a bridge or facilitator by: (a) engendering reciprocity, trust, and community and (b) co-constructing the meaning making alongside the community in the CLP study.

Reciprocity, Trust, and Community Building

I went into the field as learner with humility and not an imparter of knowledge. The use of focus groups is a great method to validate lived experiences by consensus or disclaimers and appeals to the social nature of women (Finch, 1984).

For example, money was the chief concern of all the African American mothers that I interviewed. One of the African American mothers managed her minute finances in the following way:

Participant A:

. . .one of my checks the most might be some $300 every two weeks. Daycare is $50 now after that I give my mom $60. . .then I might get a pack of diapers, maybe a pack of wipes I need. The rest is for me to put in my pocket which is not a lot to another person but to me it’s alright. . .A $100 or something left maybe $50 left that I stretch that for the next two weeks. I set aside $5 a day for lunch you know and when I go home my mom cooks dinner. I take some of that dinner and take it to work next day for lunch and then I would have an extra $5 in my pocket. That’s stretchin.’

Another African American mother from our focus groups concurred with the daily struggle of trying to make ends meet and confided:

Participant B:

For example, in one month, it was at the end of the month when I was receiving assistance from welfare and it always seems to be at the end of the month that I’d run out of food. . . I am always last on the total [totem] poll when it comes to my kids so I said well I am gonna go in here regardless of what it is and scrape something else and I am gonna feed my kids. That is something what I call a struggle.

Jarrett (1994) points out that this type of experience with economic fragility with ingenuity is typical and demonstrates the ways that poor women become acclimated to economic marginality.

Co-construction and Meaning Making

Although I had “unique values, perspectives, behaviors, beliefs, and knowledge of his or her primordial community and culture” (Banks, 1998, p. 7) that could be used as tools for performing research about other African American mothers, my epistemic snobbery almost got in the way. Like that of other so-called experts, I held firm to the fact that these women were not interested in matters of lead poisoning and would not be able to articulate their concerns.

I soon discovered that if these women are given lead poisoning education, that respects their history and culture, then they are better able to understand, synthesize, and utilize this new knowledge. We engaged in a productive interchange of knowledge for which we all benefited: I shared theory and resources while the women provided thoughtful strategies about protecting their children from CLP. The participants’ research perspectives were more than a casual check of member checking, but instead became a means for earnest reflection and to build theory alongside the mothers. Two of the women gave preventive strategies for preventing CLP. The primary informant suggested that doctors should just do a mandatory blood lead test of all Camden children when they are immunized. Another mom in a follow-up interview proposed that placards be placed in the windows of inspected homes in Camden so that parents can know if they are moving into potentially lead poisoned homes. Fricker (2015) explains “the importance to human well-being of the ability to function not only as a receiver but also as a giver—one who, in this case, stands in presumptive relations of epistemic reciprocity with others” (p. 83). Walker and Boni (2020) assert that what is at stake is:

. . . whose voices are enabled, who gets to tell their stories, and who is heard and listened to. The basic challenge posed by a specifically epistemic form of justice is how some persons—and not others—are advantaged in influencing and contributing to public discourse whether at the micro, meso or macro level, and hence in contributing epistemically. (p. 2)

By the end of the study, a spirit of mutualism was the established norm: the participants and I were all receivers and givers of knowledge and shared in the epistemic contributions of this CLP inquiry. The methodology that was used in this study was very traditional in its initial design but became more culturally sensitive as the study unfolded. I was forced to become more reflexive, spontaneous, adaptive, and culturally aware. I was pushed to rely on participants’ perspectives and cultural understandings of lead poisoning to establish connections between espoused theory and reality, with the hope of generating new understandings from ethnographic work in the field. This form of engagement was counter to “persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s contribution to knowledge production, an unwarranted infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers” (Dotson, 2014, p. 115). My investments as an insider researcher, or me-searcher, are charitable acts, which carry with them many implications for qualitative inquiries.

Upon Further Reflection

Upon further reflection, I found that there is an implicit familiarity in communication between the insider and the researched that surpasses all understanding “here” in the academy and occurs in a sacred dialogic “there” in the community. The said and unsaid, found only in intimate and authentic conversations within the community, form the insider-researched dialogic exchange which elevate all voices in the research journey. It is through empowering discussions and relationships, between the insider and researched, that epistemic justice is possible. Consequently, there are two epistemic contributors (Fricker, 2015) who emerge from an insider-researched dialogic for epistemic justice.

The first epistemic contributor is the insider who is often taken for granted. As an insider, it feels affirming to be seen by one’s community when the academia may diminish our research questions and expertise. My epistemology of home allows me to flex my research intuition and serves as reminder for why academics like me must pursue study questions within similar communities. As Dillard and Neal (2021) explained, our personhood and history shapes who we are and how we see the world. Baldwin (1964) adds that history,

. . . does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe or frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. (pp. 47-48)

Our personal histories become, then, a responsibility to claim for ourselves the authority to name, to question, and command a personal story worth sharing with others and not do so in defense of the majoritarian stories that are told about us and our people. Ultimately, we decide how our stories will be written. For Dilliard (2000), who has expanded ideas developed of Collins (2000), argues that culturally sensitive research must “possess instrumentality: it must do something towards changing particular ways of knowing and producing knowledge” (p. 662). It is important for novice scholars of color to be intentional about sharing one’s personal history and positionality so that identity and experience might be used as instruments, and not weaponized in the research context.

I found my voice by ensuring the voices left out of the CLP conversation were included, and my current research continues to be influenced by such sensibilities. Two decades later, I still labor in the academy to negotiate a professional existence with the life experiences of the African American community whose lives parallel my own. In terms of positionality, I have always given equal weight to the lived experience and knowledge that every human possesses—much like my mother. Reflexively, I have endeavored to amplify the voices of the voiceless, as well as my own, as part of my journey as an educational researcher. Whether engaged in critical research on educator preparation (Hill-Jackson et al., 2019; Hill-Jackson & Lewis, 2010; Hill-Jackson & Stafford, 2017; Stafford & Hill-Jackson, 2016) or fashioning a research experience as a Fulbright scholar to unearth the hidden histories of the Black wives of Black World War II soldiers (Hill-Jackson, 2016), forging a path that included parity of knowledge would be my personal mission statement—my North Star (Dillard & Neal, 2021). I would learn not to hide who I am as a scholar but use all of me as a resource to do this work.

The second epistemic contributor are participants from marginalized communities when the insider-researched dialogic becomes an instrument used for validating their local knowledge. These are conversations which are focused on unpacking hidden or disregarded epistemologies, moving beyond idle dialogue, and seek engagement alongside the oppressed,

. . . so they can understand the veiled ideology that continually dehumanizes them . . . to educate the oppressed and the ever-present violence perpetuated against their humanity . . . to retake what has been denied them, including the ability to think critically and the option to own their world as subjects of history and not objects. (Freire & Macedo, 1995, p. 385)

For the researcher to do otherwise establishes a “persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s contribution to knowledge production, an unwarranted infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers” (Dotson, 2014, p. 115).

Being mindful of epistemic inclusion does not guarantee egalitarian outcomes, so insider researchers must operationalize the types of investments or culturally sensitive practices that de-center colonizing assumptions and validate the knowledge of the “other.” This is a major indictment on the democratic process in which policy creation, implementation, and evaluation fail to include the contributions of local knowledge in its effort.

Conclusion

I have co-signed on a provocative but maturing idea that forms the theoretical framework of this article: insider researchers are me-searchers who have certain innate advantages in conducting qualitative inquiries within marginalized communities that mimic their own life experiences. To enact culturally sensitive research approaches that emit epistemic justice, insider researchers must invest two things. First, the insider will need to quiet the authoritative voice we have all been taught from our professional training and reconcile it with an epistemology of home. The magic of my mother’s voice was in its ability to affirm while evoking emotion and humanity for her children and beloved community. Her voice would prove to serve as the foundation for my ways of knowing in the academy. My experiences as a marginalized African American woman have catapulted me on a lifelong professional charge to endorse and dignify voices from marginalized spaces for which I share experiences. Second, one must center the experiences and knowledge of the oppressed participants. In this way, the insider acts as a broker or facilitator by engendering reciprocity, trust, and community building so that meaning making is co-constructed in the understanding, analyzing, and reporting of data. These two types of investments by the insider are benevolent acts that do not diminish our research credibility. This work is not for the faint of heart. After serious reflection, I have hypothesized that the insider-researched dialogic is a conduit for authentic expressions of the study to come to life in the search for epistemic contributions from the researched as well as the insider.

The insider’s journey from “here” (the academy) to “there” (the community), between the academic and personal domains, must be artful, academic, authentic, and action oriented in pursuit epistemic justice. I will not turn my back on my personal history, and like Villenas (1996),

I will not stop at being the public translator and facilitator of my communities, but that I am my own voice, an activist seeking liberation for my communities, but that I am my own voice, an activist seeking liberation from my own historical oppression in relation to my communities. . . (p. 730)

I view it as an imperative for insider researchers, or me-searchers, who enter qualitative inquiry among communities like themselves to unearth their own identities and personal histories alongside marginalized participants so endeavors tackled by like-minded cultural workers may be performed in solidarity. Contemplation of the insider’s personhood, and the inclusion of the researched as affirmed collaborators in studies that impact their lives, are preconditions of epistemic justice.