Our Spatial Orientation: Positionality,Relationality,and Learning Through the Body

Abstract

Components of place and sites of where we know from are pertinent to positionality, particularly in its importance for education research with and for communities. However, conversations discussing the relations of place a researcher brings to their work are limited. In this conceptual paper, I center and build with the contributions of Black geographies as both a theoretical and methodological shift to consider spatial orientations and the spatial knowledge we bring to qualitative inquiry, connecting our prior time in spaces to our current approaches. Relations to space through Black spatial knowledge, imagination, futures, and carceralities are core features that frame how we come to understand “where we know from.” Boveda and Annamma provide an approach to positioning attending to “(1) the onto-epistemic that recognizes how embodied experiences shape understandings of intersectional oppressions, (2) the sociohistorical that engages historicity, and (3) the sociocultural that concedes whiteness and ability as property” (p. 310). My experience is framed through these theories by adding an explicit spatial dimension to detail curricular inquiry guided by Blackness, decoloniality, and disability justice. This piece aims to provide insight and approach to learning from our bodies and their interactions with places we have been to as a process to engage our positionality. Black geographies coupled with disability justice approaches to curriculum design and inquiry allows us to reshape and reorganize geographies through pedagogies that position us to learn the world anew. This approach also provides a perspective that centers Blackness as a means of disrupting coloniality through identifying the role of place (and spatial beliefs) in pedagogy and learning. This promotes the remembering of carrying places across time as we come to teach, build, cultivate, and research. I argue cultivating spatial relations and knowledge—core to community research and qualitative inquiry—provides new possibilities for disrupting geographical power dynamics and emplacing knowledge of place in our research process.

Keywords

Black geographies disability studies embodied ethnography spatial knowledge positionality and inquiry

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