Blue-collar folks are good craftspeople–they know their tools.”
Johnny Saldaña, 2018
I think of myself as both a critical methodologist and a curriculum theorist. That is, I am continually interested in what qualitative methods can do and what they cannot. Reading methodology critically means understanding its lineage and its results with an eye for what knowledge a particular theory of method can produce and what futures dreams up. In other words, I think of methodology as theories of change. Typically, I am drawn to methodologies that purport to lead toward equity, (social) justice, liberation, and decolonization. But the more I read Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, the more I learn to think through science and mathematics for their material and theoretical implications.
Curriculum theory attracts me for both its invitations to purposeful storytelling (thinking of Saidiya Hartman here) and its use of writing as a method (Christina Sharpe and Jennifer Nash both write on this specifically). As with methodology, here I am concerned with knowledge production and its epistemic and ontological realities. While I now bring more Black feminisms to the work, I was originally drawn to curriculum theory by Indigenous scholars and their accomplices (e.g., Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang, Sandy Grande, and Leigh Patel). These thinkers who work in or alongside Black and Indigenous feminisms reshaped my entire orientation to education scholarship.