When searching library or archival databases, folks usually complain that “they can’t find anything on their topic.” The process can feel confusing, it can sometimes “take too long” and/or not yield results that you’re not looking for. In the last post in the #DoingResearch series, I aim to demystify the database search and give tips on how to work with primary sources.
There are so many different ways to approach a research problem. Some approach it theoretically, while others take a practical approach. Others use a disciplinary lens or an interdisciplinary lens. I cannot cover all the different approaches here, but what I can do is explain how to approach problem solving with an intersectional lens. This involves understanding two concepts — critical inquiry and critical praxis. While interrelated, each concept is unique.
Questions are fundamental to research. Writing is fundamental to research. If you want to get through the writing process and become proficient at editing your work, the first thing you must learn to do is devise questions and write them in such a way that anyone can understand them, including yourself. Questions help you communicate almost anything through words. The challenge is — how do you create questions that are robust enough for a research project?
This topic can elicit two reactions out of people. Either it strikes fear or it confuses. After taking a graduate class on this topic, some even feel like they don’t like research at all. I completely understand where all these perspectives are coming from. But here’s the reality, understanding your research philosophy and the two concepts that underpin it — epistemology and ontology — are like learning the fundamentals of driving.
Defining a research problem has to be one of the most difficult parts of the research process. How do you determine if your topic is “researchable?” What makes a project a research project? What does it mean to define a research problem? It doesn’t matter your level of training — from students to faculty, organizations to governments — defining a problem is difficult, but like scaling a mountain, it is not impossible.
I’m not going to lie, I love theory. But I’ve always understood theory, and the reasons why it matters to any research project. Without a theoretical point of view, “research” is not really research in terms of problem solving, critical inquiry, or scholarly study. Without theory, your “research” should be called an investigation. So, for example, if you wake up one morning and your pinky toe is swollen, you might declare “I need to research this symptom.” What you are really saying is, you are going to Google “swollen toe” and then read a bunch of stuff to confirm or rule out possible issues.
I believe in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI). I am not calling for its end, or making an argument against its relevance. I respect the field, I have friends who are EDI leaders, and I have dedicated my career to advancing these principles in the study of archives, theatre and performance, media and advertising. It’s because I do this work that I know critiques like this one are desperately needed.
Senior administrative leadership has the most significant role to play in academic governance, but the data demonstrates that the very idea of academic governance is fundamentally set up to reproduce itself. Collegial governance, as the dominant university reward system, reinforces the diversity gap in senior administrative leadership.
In academia, the coded language of “collegiality” is part of the larger project of the new racism because it does not seek to create space for Black people, queer people, disabled people, and social-justice-minded White people to speak freely and openly but instead intentionally rewards “loyal” Black people, White women, and all those who fall under the umbrella of “going along to get along.”
By the 1680s, the institution of slavery in the Atlantic colonies was premised on race. Blackness became intertwined with servitude, whiteness became an attribute of the free and by extension white identity functioned as a “shield from slavery.” In the American and Caribbean colonies, a tiered system based on skin colour distinguished whites and light-skinned Creoles from Africans.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries enslaved men, women, and children were culled from West African ethnocultural communities of the Wolof, Mandingo, Mende and Yoruba. Africans were frequently resisting their enslavement. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jamaica for instance, outbreaks occurred on an average of every five years.
If the nineteenth century was the age of mechanical reproduction, wherein the image became the most valued visual form, and print and photography were its agents, in the twentieth century, visual forms were also subject to the latent demands in society. These new images helped to co-create the modern visual landscape, and in so doing, Black women and men became part of the "new."
To have hope you have to dare to question the things you have taken as essential truths. Where many folks read the image of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in 1965, Colin Kaepernick in 2017, and Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, as depicting the act of kneeling in protest to systemic racism and against systems of capital that have benefited from Black servitude and disenfranchisement, others see anti-heroes, unpatriotic rebel rousers, and non-citizens who are not “grateful” for all that they have been given.
The fields of digital humanities, media studies, journalism, image and visual culture studies, and communication studies often ignore Black Canadian perspectives. In many instances, engagement with race, digital technologies, media production, culture, and history is also absent. Over the past decade, Black Canadians have been making significant moves in digital content creation, film production, digital archives, and heritage preservation.
During Black History Month in 2023, Montreal-based artist Franck Sylvestre performed a puppet show geared toward Black children. The show included a puppet named “Max” who appeared with coal black skin, jagged teeth, bright red lips, wide eyes, and an ape-like nose. Many Black community organizations publicly denounced Sylvestre and his puppet.
As a Black Canadian scholar, writer, and public speaker, I participate in Black History Month every year. I am also old enough to remember when there was no Black History Month, and we would sit around complaining about the lack thereof. But every year when February rolls around, I find myself torn about it, especially the way it is presented within universities where Black people often do not have a seat at the table (and even if we do, too often what we say is met with deafening silence or ignored altogether).
I completely understand the logic behind Black Excellence — Black people, especially students are underrepresented, under acknowledged, and often are made to feel like outsiders at universities, especially in Canada where universities are still predominantly White. However, when you only celebrate a people’s accomplishments and ignore the challenges they have had to endure, and systemic realities they lived (and continue to live) through, Black Excellence becomes the veil that shields us from seeing how our systems and institutions are still rooted in White supremacist notions of “success”.
It is a uniquely challenging time to be employed or a student at a university, especially if you are Black woman or a student(s) with divergent opinions. From the high profile firing of Claudine Gay at Harvard and its aftermath, to the tragic suicide of Dr. Antoinette Candia-Bailey, Vice President of Student Affairs at Lincoln University, to the Toronto Star’s investigation into my own university’s Law School and the student letter in support of Palestine, where there's a bad news story, institutions of higher learning are in it.
On September 21 and 22, 2023 the Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives (MOBA) Team co-produced Artists and Archivists in Dialogue (AAD), a SSHRC-Connection Grant-funded two-day speaker series and creative showcase that was held at Toronto Metropolitan University’s ILC and Toronto’s Tranzac Club.
I have been thinking a lot about Taraji P. Henson’s viral interview where she spoke about pay disparity in Hollywood: “[I’m] tired of working so hard, being gracious at what I do and being paid a fraction of the cost and people are like ‘you work a lot’ well, I have to, the math ain’t mathing.”
