Race-conscious conversations: A decolonial interviewing style

Abstract

Racism is not merely bad behaviours and overt discrimination. Yet interviews, a primary qualitative method, have not much evolved to help researchers generate a better understanding of the more subtle and structural forms of racism. To address this shortcoming, this article introduces race-conscious conversations, a decolonial interviewing style. Building upon epistemic interviewing and informed by decolonial thinking, race-conscious conversations are an interviewing style that I developed based on five principles: (1) understanding of multi-positionalities between interviewer and interviewee; (2) use of serial and active interviews; (3) use of creative methods to activate critical consciousness; (4) use of theories of race and anti-racism to interpret the data; and (5) ethics of care. With race-conscious conversations, qualitative researchers, especially those in applied sciences, can reconfigure interviews, a method arguably rooted in Western thinking, towards decolonial direction to generate better empirical foundations to eliminate racism, including in contexts where discussions on racism are often silenced.