Autoethnography as a means of challenging Nordic exceptionalism and color-evasiveness in educational research
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7577/rerm.6361Keywords:
color-evasiveness, Nordic exceptionalism, Nordic academia, autoethnography, editorial work, knowledge productionAbstract
This paper aims to reflect on an editorial process as an instance of knowledge production within the context of Nordic exceptionalism (Ulrichsen et al., 2021) through autoethnography, which is used to probe, question, and contemplate on how the theoretical intersects with the everyday and vice-versa. Specifically, it looks at the operation of race in the Nordic academic context to better understand, reflexively, how our own and others’ racialized positionalities have manifested in inclusion or exclusion from institutionalized knowledge production. The foundational starting point in Western knowledge production aligns with the contemporary Nordic academy: knowledge from the racialized Other is often excluded, depreciated within the hierarchy of worth, or appropriated. A diversity of epistemologies, or what Grosfoguel calls pluriversal knowledges (2007), is hence lost. Dialectical reflections can center on, and hence highlight and un-silence, experiences of racialization in the Nordic context.
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