Antiracist Interventive Interviewing: Subverting Colonial Interventions with Public Sector Workers

Abstract

What does it mean to intervene in antiracist interviews with public sector workers? What do interventions look like in research seeking to name complicity in settler colonial violence and imagine otherwise relationships between non-Indigenous and Indigenous people? How might we methodologically define interventions and their pedagogical purpose(s)? In this paper, we share our experience of adopting a dual-pedagogical antiracist interventive research methodology in our qualitative research with public sector workers on settler colonial socialization. Building on antiracist interventive interviewing method, we map out our conceptualization of interventions as multidirectional and multiscalar. We narrate how we see interventions as dual pedagogical moments of disruption and possibility occurring at three scales, where we intervene to support our participants’ learning and they intervene to support ours. Our approach is illuminated through illustrations from our transcribed data of virtual interviews with 32 public sector workers in BC (n = 23) and Alberta (n = 9), and through our reflections on our research process. Our analysis demonstrates that interventions have three key effects. First, they are generatively disruptive in that they offer better access to understanding processes of settler colonial socialization. Second, interventions create junctures for antiracist and anticolonial learning. Third, interventions with participants open up opportunities to imagine otherwise beyond the strictures of settler colonialism, and orient towards anticolonial praxis rooted in recognition of Indigenous sovereignties. We conclude with a vocabulary of interventions meant to offer other qualitative researchers possibilities for how to intervene to better access and disrupt sites of deep colonizing.

Introduction

What does it mean to methodologically intervene in antiracist interviews with public sector workers? What do interventions look like in research seeking to locate discretion and to name complicity in settler colonial violence? How might interventions support imagining otherwise relationships between non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples? How might we methodologically redefine interventions and their pedagogical purpose(s)?

In this paper, we describe a dual antiracist interventive research methodology emerging from our qualitative research with public sector workers on settler colonial socialization. Building on Okolie's (2005) antiracist interventive interviewing method, we map our conceptualization of interventions as multidirectional and multiscalar and narrate how we see interventions as dual pedagogical moments taking place at three scales. The first two scales we locate within interviews, where we intervene to support our participants’ learning and they intervene to support ours. The third scale we locate within shifts in our broader research process, ranging from the reframing of our interview scripts and our orientation towards coding. While the nature and temporality of interventions vary with each scale, in this research context, they are guided by our overarching assertion that settler colonial socialization is comprised of processes that implicate settler colonial common sense (Rifkin, 2014) and pedagogies (Hiller, 2017). Settler colonial socialization animates how non-Indigenous people learn to take up the work of sustaining settler colonial relationalities and structures, often through the exercise of discretionary power that can be both nuanced and variable. Settler colonial socialization helps reveal how discretion becomes a particular form of institutional literacy at the ‘meso-level’, which we can examine through multidimensional and multiscalar interventions. To that end, we illuminate this expansion of Okolie’s method through illustrations from our interviews with 32 provincial public sector workers on Treaty 6, 7 and 8 (Alberta, n = 9) and Coast Salish lands (British Columbia, n = 23).

Holding broader implications for antiracist and anticolonial methodologies, our analysis demonstrates that interventions have three key effects. First, interventions are generatively disruptive for they offer better access to understanding settler colonial socialization processes. Second, interventions open junctures for antiracist and anticolonial learning. Third, interventions can create opportunities to imagine otherwise beyond the strictures of settler colonialism, and to orient towards anticolonial praxis rooted in pre-existing Indigenous sovereignties. ¹

In what follows, we contextualize our interventive methodology within our study, and follow with an overview of Okolie (2005) method. We next explicate our research methodology and process, situating interventions within antiracist and anticolonial critiques that implore researchers to query what theories of change underpin research (Patel, 2015; 2021; Tuck, 2018). We then illustrate our interventions through excerpted interview data and research reflections. We conclude by articulating a vocabulary of interventions, inviting other qualitative scholars to consider the careful work of engaging interventively to support antiracist and decolonial research more broadly.

Research Context and Our Theoretical Frame

Our adoption of an antiracist interventive methodology is shaped by the ongoing structural violence of settler colonialism and the enduring sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous people. While we detail our research context elsewhere (Nath & Allen, 2022), in brief, our research probes how and why settler colonial myths remain pervasive, coherent and consistent across the public sector, and directly inform policies and practices that sustain and regularize harm towards Indigenous people. Despite measures introduced to support safety and access for Indigenous people in systems, we ask how do these structural harms continue? Lingering with this question and recognizing settlers including ourselves witness and are structurally complicit in settler colonial violence, we undertook this research with public sector workers.

Given direct links between public sector work and catastrophic manifestations of settler colonialism, we consider how people learn to enact the work of settler colonialism through their authority and discretion to act in institutions. The capacity to cause harm is insidious given that public sector work is frequently authorized through notions that the public sector serves ‘the public good’. Meanwhile the machinery of bureaucracies where harms endure, remain largely obscured from public view, functioning to legitimate settler colonial jurisdiction as seemingly absolute (Matsunaga, 2021). For these reasons, we methodologically focus on the ‘meso-level’ and contend that in this space of “deep colonizing” (Rose, 1996), colonial myths are put into practice despite, and sometimes through, vocabularies of reconciliation and antiracism. The ‘meso-level’ of action becomes a significant point of intervention given that this is a space often driven by discretionary choices to act or not act in ways that cohere with the logics of power in broader structures.

Briefly, our interdisciplinary theoretical framework of ‘settler colonial socialization’ attends to the pedagogical and social processes through which non-Indigenous people learn to systemically normalize dispossession of and violence towards Indigenous people, while making it appear impossible to comprehend living within/alongside Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Comprised of settler colonial common sense (Rifkin, 2013; 2014) and settler colonial pedagogies (Hiller, 2017), our framework illuminates “...how structures of domination, jurisdiction and authority enact and codify extractive, siloed, and inequitable relationalities: to other people, to structures, and to land, waterways and other-than human life” (Nath & Allen, 2022, p. 204).

Critically, as Tuck (2018) asserts, theories of change are implicit in all social science research, making methodological choices in antiracist and anticolonial research deeply significant. Engaging with our participants in their meso-level lives is not intended solely to document harm, but to support interrupting systemic patterns of learning and acting that work to foreclose anticolonial futures. For this reason, our interventive methodology is intended to open up a space for participants to narrate their relationship to public sector work, and most critically for participants to locate sites where they may witness and utilize discretionary power to intervene in settler colonial logics and relations. This work is supported by multiscalar interventions built into our framework. Extending Okolie’s method, we locate ourselves within bodies of scholarship working to enunciate a decolonial and anticolonial ethos and analysis in antiracist and anticolonial methodologies (Patel, 2015; Tuck, 2018).

Okolie’s Method

We were drawn to Okolie's (2005) method as a key component of our antiracist and anticolonial methodological framework (Carlson, 2017; Dei & Johal, 2005; Denzin, Lincoln & Smith, 2008). As part of antiracist research, Okolie's (2005) defined “interventive in-depth interviewing” as “deep, probing interviews in which the researcher goes beyond mere collection of facts or stories and narratives. Rather the researcher intervenes in order to get at the [participants’] interpretation of their experience” (p. 242). The researcher then analyzes participant articulations within broader structural conditions and returns their analysis to the participants. This exchange is intended to be one of conscientization, with attention paid to how interview questions are formulated and how researcher and participant social locations shape their respective understanding of oppressive systems. In Okolie's (2005) method, emphasis is on the significance of researcher-participant shared points of location, wherein the interventive process is most supported “when researchers interview their own people, people with whom the researchers share one or more of such identities as race, ethnicity, country of origin, class, or gender” (p. 242). In this method, naming the root causes and impacts of oppression supports researchers to “get beyond the official layer to locate what they are not being told or what the [participants] may be overlooking” (Okolie, 2005, p. 260).

Defining Interventions

We come to this language of intervention with heaviness as we confront how intervention in colonial contexts has, and continues to be, violent in both research and practice. As one example, tracing the implications of educational research in the reproduction of colonial logics and relationships demonstrates that how we conceptualize an intervention and to whom it is directed emanate from the normative assumptions that precede it (Patel, 2015). Educational research has essentialized and pathologized systemically excluded peoples as ‘vulnerable’, ‘at-risk’, and in need of intervention. This logic trades on its negation, where ‘privileged’ populations need not come under scrutiny, and if studied, “it has often been from the episteme of what they’ve purportedly done well, to then apply such practice as an intervention to others” (p. 41). As such, colonial interventions target individuals and populations as ‘the problem’, while systems and structural conditions are obscured from interrogation, and people enacting those power relations are functionally absolved.

The logic and the impacts of colonial interventions in public sector work of health (Stout et al., 2021), child welfare (Blackstock, 2020; Dhillon, 2017; Spencer & Sinclair, 2017) and education (Cote-Meek, 2014; Reddington et al., 2021; Sabzalian, 2019) are viscerally harmful and long challenged by Indigenous people. These are all sectors in which our participants work. In our focus on the meso-level where public sector actors act, we write in actors who are often concealed from view. In other words, through a shift towards a critical definition of interventions, we can probe by whom and how discretionary in/actions are taken, and decisions are made that allow these interferences and intrusions to continue. This certainly has methodological implications. Patel (2015) for example asks, “How might research progress differently if it searched for interventions to transform the interconnected structures that marginalize some populations while privileging others?” (p. 23 - emphasis added). The interventions we narrate herein gesture towards research that recognizes knowing and change is already in communities and interventions from government are not what is needed (Tuck, 2018). For non-Indigenous researchers, this requires an ethical, ‘care-full’, and intentional orientation to interventive research that is relationally accountable in a context where Indigenous knowledges and sovereignties are enduring, but also in a context where non-Indigenous peoples are variably implicated in perpetuating structures of colonial violence. In this sense, the interventive approach we map out is one that requires a level of methodological and ethical rigor that can be challenging in research contexts driven by the temporal imperatives and extractive relational norms of the neoliberal academe. This requires a distinctive kind of commitment from qualitative researchers.

We thus reframe interventions as moments that are pedagogically disruptive, generative and promising in that they offer opportunities to push back and break hegemonic frames. In this case, these are frames that delimit our access to settler colonial socialization and to antiracist and anticolonial learning, and foreclose enacting otherwise relationalities. Building from Okolie (2005), we methodologically characterize interventions by their scale, direction and their particularity to time and subject matter. We make two key expansions of Okolie’s interventions that we posit will be useful to other qualitative researchers. First, we treat interventions as multidirectional or dual-pedagogical in their conscientizing impacts for researchers and participants. Second, we position interventions as multiscalar in that they can be enacted throughout the research process, and not solely within interviews.

Our Antiracist Interventive Methodology

We adopted a three-step interventive process consisting of a brief survey and two 90-minute interviews. With each step building the pedagogical and relational foundation for the next, we sketched out lines of inquiry and probing questions. This meant threading interventions into our research design, and incorporating interventions as we analyzed in real-time where participants would ‘go’, and how we might revise to better access processes of settler colonial socialization. ² Supporting our approach to interventions was also our decision to come together as a research team, comprised of Allen, a white Ashkenazi Jewish settler woman living on lək̓ʷəŋən peoples’ lands, Nath, a South Asian settler woman of colour living on the lands covered by Treaty 6, and Georges, a First Nations woman living on the unceded, unsurrendered Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. Our varied public sector experiences and our distinct social locations have supported multiple entry points to enacting interventions throughout our research process, including the framing of the project, recruitment, interviewing, coding and analysis, as well as our considerations regarding how we carry our research learnings forward.

After obtaining written informed consent from participants, we began with a seven-question survey, four of which inquired about participants’ early lives, their memories of racism and whiteness, and their learning about colonialism. Building from survey responses, the first interview was structured around three themes: (1) identity and social location, (2) relationships and distance, (3) and impacts of settler colonialism. To close the first interview, participants were asked to reflect on four questions during an intentional pause of 2–3 weeks between interviews. The questions foregrounded the four themes of our second interviews: (1) settler colonial common sense, (2) naming and disrupting complicity, (3) the authority and discretion to act, and (4) imagining otherwise in response to Indigenous refusals (Arvin, 2019). Guided by conversations with Indigenous colleagues outside the study, and noting the evasion by some settler participants to address impacts for Indigenous public sector colleagues in the first interview, we intervened in our own process and added an article and video clip for participant review meant to ensure Indigenous people’s leadership and resistance were framing our consideration of impacts. ³ In the second interview we also queried participants to share a workplace experience in which they were complicit in something that did not feel ethical, just or right. ⁴ Drawing connections to our framings of discretion and of complicity, we then asked participants to re-write that encounter to envision how it could be more ethical and relational.

Our interviews with racialized, Indigenous, and white settler participants looked and felt differently, which generated distinct interventions. Shared aspects of our social locations with participants shaped how we interacted with them and which of us would intervene with a participant. Such interventions included nuancing the tensions with the categories of non-Indigenous, racialized, Black, white, and settler, and the complexities of emplacement and complicity vis-a-vis structured anti-Blackness, and state settlement and displacement for racialized immigrants, migrants and refugees (Chatterjee, 2019; Jafri, 2012; Vowel, 2016). Moreover, recognizing that Indigenous people’s experiences within settler colonial bureaucracies are distinct and that our interviews and interventions needed to engage Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants distinctly, we created an interview script for Indigenous participants. While maintaining the same themes, the scripts were structured differently, in that we asked non-Indigenous participants to reflect on their own complicity, while we invited Indigenous participants to instead bring forward the forms of complicity they witness, and what changes and forms of solidarity they want to see in government and from non-Indigenous people.

The interventions we describe are enacted across our research process. While we provisionally articulate three distinct scales of interventions, these scales necessarily intersect. ⁵

Interventions in Application

First Scale – From us to Participants

In keeping with Okolie (2005), our first scale of interventions flows from us to our participants, with the intention being to support participants to ‘break the frame’ and inch closer to where the logics of settler colonialism no longer ‘make sense’ (Martineau & Ritskes, 2014). This level of intervention aligns most with the logics informing Western methodological approaches, wherein the researcher is positioned as ‘knower’ and can support a participant’s trajectory. While our multiscalar/directional approach to interventions resists this methodological hubris, we share three examples of interventions we made to support participant thinking to illustrate some possibilities for intervening in this way.

Systemic Patterns and Pathologizing Myths

Drawing connections between the individual or anecdotal and the systemic can be powerful as we saw in our conversation with a white settler participant (education, Sm, he/him). In a series of exchanges, Sm was supported by Nath to elaborate on systemic connections from his observations regarding his school’s socio-geographical landscape, which he described as one where the white and racialized children were separate. In response to the question, “What happens with the Indigenous children in your school? Where are they? Where do they fit?” Sm explained that:

As a special ed teacher…they’re often on my caseload…which means they’re often sort of on the social outskirts, I guess. I would say, they’re slightly more likely to hang out with the white kids, but they’re often not hanging out with anyone. Or if they are, it’s teacher-mediated social activities…I’m looking at that now, it’s not something that occurred to me.

He went on to reflect that “...it feels like I was for the last 5 years, witnessing an active process of colonization without realizing it.” Sm moved from making a matter-of-fact observation about the school’s racialized geographies, to denaturalizing this geography by identifying it as an active political process. After a short interview pause, Sm broke the individualizing, deficit frame in special ed and moved towards an account of his own complicity.

…my entire job is to individualize what is happening with these kids, which means that my entire lens is to see it as supports for an individual, rather than a systemic intervention…my job is going to be to support the individual kids on the margins, and not to look at the fact that a very large percentage of our Indigenous kids are on the margins…So, if the special ed teacher is not looking at it through a systemic lens…what chance does the regular classroom teacher have?

Our interventions also involved reframing inequitable patterns that participants were identifying and often normalizing, in order to contextualize these patterns within settler colonial relationalities. For example, a teacher participant (Ma, she/her, white settler) stated how colleagues described an Indigenous student as “just in the cycle” and that he “fell through the cracks” - expressions manifest in many interviews when participants recounted what institutions can do to people’s lives. The participant then articulated that “for whatever reason, we’ve come to accept that we can make comments like that. More so I think in a professional context…it’s come to be acceptable (emphasis added).” Later Allen returned to situate those comments within a settler colonial frame, and to name their impacts as violence.

Allen: Indigenous people have been voicing the racism and harm directed at Indigenous people who work in the public service, and then we also know this is happening to Indigenous students in the school…even in the example you shared with the student, we can imagine that kind of comment being reproduced and then actually being what perpetuates that harm - that's actually the cycle…even this expression ‘falling through the cracks’, that's not just an accident or sort of fatalistic, there's so many steps involved in that happening over and over again. And so I wonder, as you think about that, what can that tell us about how this harm continues?

Following Allen’s intervention that framed how discretionary in/action is neither isolated nor individual but can rather be seen as coordinated and collaborative, Ma broke the frame by turning the gaze towards colonial impulses and affects. She traced the continuation of harm back to settler resentment to treaty responsibilities and attendant myths about Indigenous people “taking advantage of the system”. Through this break we could address how myths become reproduced in institutions through the meso-level work or actions of public sector actors.

Settler Centricity

Settler centricity loomed large in interviews with many white settler participants, notably in their affective responses to learning about colonialism, witnessing racism (e.g., guilt, shame, reasserted innocence) and affecting change (e.g., motivation, “buy-in”). Oftentimes there would be a decentering or distancing of impacts for Indigenous colleagues, clients and communities. In turn, we more intentionally probed about collective processes of learning and socialization, in part through reference to (anonymized) responses of other participants. For instance, when participants emphasized their individual experiences and learning trajectories, we intervened to ask about implications for broader socialization processes as in this first example (child welfare, Am, he/his, white settler).

Allen: We're thinking about your personal experience one hundred percent. And yet what you're sharing has come up, where there are these distinct experiences of racism, and there can sometimes be, especially for white settlers, not necessarily learning explicitly about racism and [instead] really internalizing multiculturalism. So anything that comes up around these patterns? What might they tell us about how white settlers learn to see themselves and other people?

In a different interview, we set up a similar reframe for imagining otherwise and outside of settler colonialism (education, Hr, she/her, white settler). Nath prefaced: “[We’re] also naming things that are not based on centering settlers, right?” After several further reframes, the participant responded by breaking the white settler centric frame that had been operating:

I just want to say I think the reason why this is such a difficult question for people is because we are so used to the world revolving around that white, settler, patriarchal system. It's so hard to place yourself on the other side of the fence, right? And I think that's a little bit what you're asking us to do is, what would it look like if we are not number one?

Settler centricity also repeatedly surfaced as participants grappled with Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and self-determination, and how to imagine otherwise governance structures not premised on assumptions of settler authority, jurisdiction or discretion to act. For example, He (health, she/her, racialized settler) stated:

I'd really like to engage people with more power and influence within my department to sort of lead us through the reimagining of a renewed relationship with Indigenous communities…with more folks in power, they are able to advocate for an agenda to even their peers within the department as well as their leaders. So, from there, I would like to think that there would be that influence and the upper levels of the hierarchy.

Nath: …I think that's a really interesting response. And it's one that I'm going to try to push you on a little bit, because I think it's really interesting when we were thinking about settler colonialism, and then who we're going to center when we think about how we are going to disrupt settler colonialism. One of the things we know in terms of imagining otherwise, in terms of challenging settler colonialism, it's not something that non-Indigenous folks can really do on their own, right? And so, what we know is that Indigenous people have always been refusing the settler colonial state, they've been specifically refusing this presumption that the state's authority and legitimacy to act is absolute.

Such interventions subsequently led us to preemptively decenter settlers in our process, including how we set the stage for the second interview; for example, Nath: “in the second interview, we asked you to think about this…in an otherwise that de-centers white settlers in particular, and white settlers’ feelings and responses.”

Refusals

Our final questions for participants were how they witness Indigenous refusals in their work and how they could be responsive to them going forward. The intervention comes from Kanaka Maoli scholar Maile Arvin’s explication of Indigenous refusals as “regenerative refusals” - where there is recognition of settler colonial violence and pain, but this is not the center of Indigenous identity; rather these refusals include “envisioning and enacting different futures that are suffused with more love, humor, connection, and freedom”...and this allows for a “...a blooming of desires beyond the strictures of settler colonialism that pretends to be eternal and unchangeable” (2019, p. 228). We named that Indigenous refusals enacted against the settler colonial state do not always get recognized as intentional and political, but can be painted through a damage-centered lens as incapacity, non-compliance or pathology, as many participants narrated through their workplace experiences. Arvin’s quotation and our discussions led to grappling around accountability and often returned us to experiences of complicity and racism participants had already articulated. The interventive opportunity became one of re-witnessing and re-narrating an experience through the lens of refusals.

For example, after explaining the opaque complexities of limited funding streams that had constraining implications for Indigenous educational institutions, a participant He (health, she/her, racialized settler) reflected:

I've encountered refusals in terms of funding projects [that involved] approaching one of the First Nations colleges to work on a project with us…in corresponding [with] the President, she sort of refused a proposal that we had put forward. And from that experience, I had actually learned a lot on how to build relationships with that community specifically...it's top of mind whenever I reach out to this institution, as well as other Indigenous institutions. I guess it makes a lot of sense now that we're talking about it in terms of refusal. She was basically, educating me essentially on why this can't happen.

While most participants were settlers (reflecting the public sector’s composition), the power of including Arvin’s articulation of refusals as an intervention stood out in an Indigenous participant’s response (education, Li, she/her) and how she envisioned refusals as a possible reframe for her work with students.

I already feel like this could be part of my explanation for when I'm envisioning us [teacher and students] together, this is what we want to teach in the school, this is what we want to empower our Indigenous students to do when they eventually get in the workplace. Just the framework in this quote you gave me, it just does wonders for how I'm thinking about it too. And it puts everything in a positive light… even that term self-determination, we're determining who gets to write our content, basically. And we're determining what authors we're going to be using. But even to get to that first step that had to be like a disruption. And, when we look back on it, maybe we could use it as a learning experience for the college too…

Second scale – From Participants to us

Our approach broadens our understanding of the scale at which interventions can occur (for example, temporally - before, in between, during, and after the interviews), and the direction of interventions. Our relational understanding of settler colonial pedagogies and common sense carries into our understanding of the interviews as dual pedagogic encounters in which we are intervening to support participants to imagine otherwise, and participants, through their knowledge - embodied and otherwise - are intervening to support us. Our expansion of Okolie’s method requires self-reflexivity, and ethical and relational accountabilities that recognize our own implication and complicity in settler colonial structures, even through a research process meant to disrupt the same. In this sense, our multidirectional approach to interventions is also meant to expose the structures of deep colonization (Rose, 1996) that we are implicated in.

These interventions manifest in subtle and less subtle ways. For example, in his first interview, Am (child welfare, he/him, white settler) shared his learning from Indigenous community members that using the term ‘discovery’ to designate the unmarked graves of Indigenous children buried at former residential schools reproduces the harm of Canada’s genocidal policies and practices. Stressing that these graves were well documented in the Truth and Reconciliation Report (2015) through the testimonies of Indigenous people, Am intervened when we used the language of ‘discovery’ in our contextualizing of the gravity of entering into these conversations about settler colonialism and work, and in our intention to recognize this was occurring in real time and with real impacts. Following Am’s interventive reframe, we immediately shifted our language in all interviews, enunciating his intervention in the interview, as well as in subsequent participant interviews.

Or, in wrapping up the first interview with a racialized participant (business, Le, they/them, racialized settler), Nath expressed appreciation for Le’s participation, particularly in light of the interview’s close proximity to the deadly anti-Asian Atlanta shootings in March 2021 in which 8 people were killed, six of whom were Asian women. Le responded by naming the importance of pausing between interviews, and their need for self-care after discussing highly proximate subjects pertaining to complicity, but also their experiences of racism within the public sector. Thereafter, we named the weight of the content, its differential impacts, the distinct labour being asked of Indigenous people, Black people and people of colour in participating in this study, and the broader context of extreme racial harm and violence shaping how participants choose to participate. This intervention provided an intersectional framing for other participants who did not ‘see’ these relational webs of power in their contexts, or as shaping their study participation.

Beyond these framings in our interviews, we describe the distinctive ways participant interventions introduced significant pause and shifting with respect to two guiding conceptual frameworks in our research: (1) settler colonial common sense; and (2) Batliwala’s (2013) notion of deep structures.

Common Sense

In the first interview we probed at settler colonial common sense, or how “non-Native access to Indigenous territories comes to be lived as a given, as simply the unmarked, generic conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, history, and personhood” (Rifkin, 2013, p. 323; emphasis added). Describing the challenges in confronting settler colonialism when much is treated as ‘just the way things are’, we asked participants to reflect on what is held as common sense inside and outside their workplaces. In several interviews, participants intervened to pluralize our understanding of common sense:

I think of common sense in terms of common senses….there's the common sense … that's going to be related to your socio-economic, cultural background, [and] then there's the larger culture in your province or region, your nation. And then there's professional common senses… (health, Ji, she/her, white settler)

Ji intervened later, offering not only a nuanced understanding of how and why power is held through common sense, but also that one might intentionally access forms of common sense to disrupt and complicate the frame internally:

I'm thinking about my relatives…when things that are going on in the world that are complicated come up, and we have those conversations, I tend to access their common sense that's really white centered, that's really male centered, that's really kind of the normative…And I do find that in my personal life, I can do that much easier than I can in my professional life, because I realize there's people who I work with who can really hurt people…and it is harder for me to extend that kind of grace and understanding and empathy to help walk beside somebody, when their common sense is getting in the way of people getting their needs met.

Ch (health, she/her, racialized settler), in describing common senses across patients and physicians, also named that common sense “...depends on what circles you’re running in…in my organization we try to operate from an anti-carceral, anti-police, anti-state, hopefully anti-nonprofit industrial complex lens. We don’t want to turn our organization into a nonprofit industrial complex….But of course, we are operating within that framework still.” Ch’s destabilization of a singular understanding of settler colonial common sense is articulated back to them by Nath, who narrows in to name hegemonic common sense (language adopted in later interviews), recognizes Ch’s disruption, and goes on to amplify Ch’s assertion that these dominant forms of knowing are ones that “many of us don’t experience…as common sense.”

Deep Structures

The second interview drew connections between settler colonial common sense, deep structures, and how the two converge in participants’ workplaces. To prompt those connections, we started sharing feminist scholar Srilatha Batliwala’s description of deep structures as,

the hidden sites and processes of power and influence, the implicit culture, the informal values and systems of reward and recognition...deep structures [invisible and obscured power hierarchies] are, in a sense, like the elephant in the room - we all know they’re there, but we do not know how to name them and tackle them analytically or practically (2013, p. 199–200).

Before recounting examples from other participants who were thematically identifying sites where common sense gets reproduced (e.g. timelines, hierarchical relationships and reporting structures, the categorization and valuation of different populations, funding and regulatory models, paternalism), we queried participants as to how Batliwala’s quote resonated with them, admittedly expecting that it would resonate. Instead, some participants ‘broke’ our framing by nuancing the structural in deep structures.

M disrupted our framing of deep structure, therein challenging a theory of change implicit within our research (Tuck, 2018):

…the first thought that immediately comes into my mind is that settler colonialism is not embedded within the system. It is the system. And I take issue with the concept of embedded…Because that implies there might be pressure points where we could if we just poked this spot, and we shifted this thing…it would change other things...I don't think there are pressure points that we can push that would level everything else out…the information that's been coming forward from the different nations in the residential schools…really illustrate that because the fact that…there's functionally an entire nation of people that just had no idea, tells you that the system was designed to do its job and to do it quietly. I think the fact that this information is coming out is the beginning of an undermining of an entire system rather than an “unembedding”…I think a lot of people have a hard time stomaching the fact that…it's not possible to not cause harm, in the current system, even with the absolute best of intentions, even with the absolute best trauma informed individuals, you can't.

Er (municipal affairs, she/her, Indigenous - international) also troubled our engagement with deep structure, offering a multiscalar challenge to a presumption of willful unknowing (Vimalassery et al., 2016; 2017) or settler innocence. Her intervention enabled us to consider whether the ‘elephant in the room’ framing forecloses an intersectional account of settler complicity, as well as an intersectional account of the conditions under which differently racialized public sector workers are surviving public sector work, navigating being adjacent to power, and how complicity of non-Indigenous racialized public sector workers reflects dynamics of the state:

…one of the things that does not quite resonate with me is the idea that we don't know how to dismantle…Because I do think there is a high level of complicity across public servants in the work that is being done. For white settlers, it can be very much about power…about maintaining and sustaining privilege and reproducing a system that has benefited them enormously. But for racialized people, including settlers, or racialized people who are Indigenous to other parts of the world, there are a ton of different dynamics in there, right? I don't think that, for a lot of us, this is a matter of ‘we don't know what to do with it’, but at the end of the day, we have these dynamics as racialized bureaucrats where we want access to this power, we want access to these privileges, we want access to belonging, right? So, this craving of the belonging becomes this reproduction of the myth of the state, and of national identity and of national pride, and of things that very much function in tandem with settler violence…I think that for me, the elephant in the room, especially for racialized public servants, is that we don't want to admit why we are there. Right? We don't want to have that conversation.

Following interventions by Er and other participants, we nuanced our introduction of deep structures, reflecting our commitment to multidirectional interventions where we are theorizing with, and in response to the participants as per our antiracist interventive framework. While participants were intervening methodologically, they were just as significantly intervening theoretically, pushing us to further our analytic depth into the underlying theories of change and pedagogical orientations we are drawing on in the study.

Third Scale – Intervening in our own Process

The third scale describes interventions in our process that required ongoing pausing, rewitnessing and revisioning of our research. This orientation to the co-implication of interventions and process requires a radical reimagining of how and why pause and change are imperative parts of an antiracist and anticolonial research process. We briefly describe two examples of this third scale, first in our pedagogical pause (Tuck 2015; Patel 2015) on the thematics of privilege and complicity, and second in our choices around coding.

Pedagogical Pause on Privilege

While our original interview script was formulated around interventive questions and prompts, we also made interventive shifts as we responded to thematic participant articulations and noted language that was not landing. For example, while still interviewing, a major shift occurred after noting the prevalent turn many white settlers were making to identify their privilege, a structured enunciation or ‘confession’ we often witnessed as an evasive settler move to innocence (Nath & Allen, 2022; Tuck & Yang, 2012). As part of our post-interview debriefs, we identified this pattern and intervened in our process. We expressly foreclosed the retreat to privilege, articulating to participants that while many prior participants had spoken about their privilege, we wanted to consider complicity, because complicity requires a relational engagement that implores us to address how to be “in better ethical relationships with Indigenous peoples of this territory” (Patel, 2021, p. 7). By entrenching this intervention into our script, we intended to disrupt how primarily white settlers would distance themselves from settler colonial violence through privilege declarations that would ultimately insulate them from considering their implication. Accompanying this, we incorporated key quotations – informed by the participant’s social location ⁶ - about complicity to ground reflection. By introducing this intervention in the middle of the interview cycle, we witnessed a substantive shift in participants’ willingness to consider their implication, alongside a distinct foreclosure of participants’ capacity to distance themselves from the discretionary forms of power and patterns of settler colonial harm they were mapping. We do not suggest this intervention brought forth a settler reckoning, but that it was meant to break the frame of settler colonial common sense and to configure an interview space that enabled us and the participants to access otherwise terrain instead of solely reproducing settler colonial logics of deep colonization.

Coding

In data coding, interventions continued playing a key role. As Tuck & Yang (2014) assert, coding is not a neutral, routine act. In fact, “coding, in the guise of objective science, expands the project of settler colonial knowledge production-inquiry as invasion is built into the normalized operations of the researcher” (p. 811). How might interventions support denormalizing this colonial operation, particularly in a context where Indigenous communities have been “overcoded” (p. 811) through harm-centered research and settler-centric demands to know? Decision-making about coding continues to feel like a political act in which our choices risk complicity in settler colonial knowledge production, and/or offer possibilities to resist it. In intervening in coding, we chose not to follow the linear trajectory of our interview schedule, or to begin with the largest participant group, but to code transcripts of Indigenous participants first, followed by racialized non-Indigenous participants, and lastly white settler participants. Following this trajectory meant Indigenous participants’ experiences would be foregrounded in generating codes, and our subsequent analysis.

We found Indigenous participants and racialized non-Indigenous participants’ experiences and relationships to settler colonial bureaucracies vastly differed from those of white settlers, as did their depth of consciousness and lived knowing around the logics and harms of public sector work. Recognizing the limitations of our witnessing as non-Indigenous researchers, we wanted to be responsive to a coding and analytic process that turns the gaze back on power to refuse a centering of whiteness and an invocation of white settler experience as the normative. Not foreclosed temporally and open to code generation, we are working from codes including Indigenous resistance, Indigenous leadership, Indigenous communities, sovereignty and rights, solidarities, refusals, and Indigenous knowledge and relational systems.

Discussion and Conclusions

Our intention in this paper has been to reflect on the importance of Okolie’s antiracist methodology, and to map our expansion of antiracist and anticolonial interventions as multidirectional and multiscalar. In our project, this adoption of interventions enables us to deepen access to settler colonial socialization processes that can be overlooked and obscured, and to develop a methodological framework that explicitly attends to racism and settler colonialism with a focus on learning. Reflecting on our antiracist interventive approach in qualitative research more broadly, we put forward what we call a vocabulary of interventions below. This list is not exhaustive but is meant to offer other researchers opportunities to reflect on how to carefully adopt such an approach and intervene to better access and disrupt sites of deep colonizing. As illustrated throughout this paper, each interventive form can take different iterations shaped by the scale, time, context and dialogical dynamics Figure 1.

Figure 1.

A vocabulary of interventions.

As illustrated through the examples we shared, interventions can be multidirectional and multiscalar, as well as co-constitutive as they build on one another in a dialogical exchange or process; for example we may pause, then probe, then a participant might break the frame of their own understanding. Moreover, as these interventions are multidirectional, beyond giving researchers a repertoire of interventions to enact, this vocabulary provides cues to recognize when participants or co-creators are intervening to support the learning of researchers. In this sense, the vocabulary offers a grammar through which to think about how an orientation to reflexivity, and antiracist and anticolonial change can be baked into a research ethos and research relationalities. Critically, this is a transparent ethos that relies on naming those interventions, and a proximity between researcher and participants that is relationally close by design. This gestures towards a methodology that not only anticipates change throughout a research process, but also invites it, challenging conceptions of research processes as static, prescriptive, and linear. Specifically, building reflexivity and change into the process makes the analysis stronger and has implications for what it means to do this work in a context like the public sector that regularly relies on colonial interventions, a numbness to colonial violence as routinized bureaucracy, and an erasure/obfuscation of public sector actors’ variable access and use of discretionary power.

The questions that opened our paper are meant to begin responding to some of Tuck’s (2018) questions regarding theories of change in academic research: “Is research really the intervention that is needed? Is research going to make it better or worse? Is the research going to do what we think it will do?” (p. 156 - emphasis added). The pedagogical promise of interventions is meant to extend beyond critique and deconstruction towards otherwise/imagination and support a coming to material accountability (King et al., 2020). There remains a tension in this work that is not resolved through interventions when we ultimately do not know their long-term impacts. We recognize antiracist and anticolonial analyses alone do not affect systemic change, nor expect that public sector workers will re-enter their bureaucratic routines transformed by this process. Yet by methodologically supporting participants and ourselves to inch closer to where settler colonialism does not make sense, we can resist settler hubris and centricity to recognize, as several of our participants did, that transformative change does not reside in settler institutions.