Habitus Detritus Editorial 2013
Abstract
The foundation of feminist scholarship is criticality. Criticality toward social, economic, and environmental injustice becomes advocacy and activism for social justice by responsibly listening to voices of people who are marginalized and oppressed. Their stories reveal power structures that control people, cultural narratives, and hegemonic worldviews and by responding to these stories, we imagine ways of stopping harmful, inequitable, and discriminatory practices and envisioning eco-utopian well-being alternatives.1 “An emancipatory, critical social science develops out of the social relations of the research process itself, out of the enactment of research praxis that uses intellectual effort to work toward a more just society†(Lather, 2004, p. 208).
Lather (1991) writes, “Feminist researchers see gender as a basic organizing principle which profoundly shapes/mediates the concrete conditions of our lives†(p. 71). For example, as we (Karen and Debbie) approached a main entrance to the University of Illinois-Chicago in May 2011, we passed a bar and grill advertisement of a woman offering herself for consumption along with the meat she serves on a platter stopping us in our tracks. (See Figure 1.) This is just one of a myriad of representations influential in how women are perceived and how they have come to understand themselves. Social justice action researchers, such as the authors in volume 8, have taken signs such as this from visual culture and engaged in research that opens emancipatory windows as a form of intervention, providing alternatives to dominant views of desire of power. Theirs is the type of research praxis Lather (2004) describes. Since the 1970s, action research has entered educational research as a critical problem posing and solving methodology. Attention to how race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect to legitimize the inherent cultural privilege of those at the intersections of White, male, heterosexual, and middle to upper class, directs activism to disrupt oppressive social constructs, which limit difference lived at multifarious intersections.
