Dolores Calderón, Lindsay Pérez Huber, María C. Malagón, and Verónica Nelly Vélez
In this article, the authors simultaneously examine how education scholars have taken up the call for (re)articulating Chicana feminist epistemological perspectives in their research and speak back to Dolores Delgado Bernal’s 1998
Harvard Educational Review article, “Using a Chicana Feminist Epistemology in Educational Research.” They address the ways in which Chicana scholars draw on their ways of knowing to unsettle dominant modes of analysis, create decolonizing methodologies, and build upon what it means to utilize Chicana feminist epistemology in educational research. Moreover, they demonstrate how such work provides new narratives that embody alternative paradigms in education research. These alternative paradigms are aligned with the scholarship of Gloria Anzaldúa, especially her theoretical concepts of nepantla, El Mundo Zurdo, and Coyolxauhqui. Finally, the authors offer researcher reflections that further explore the tensions and possibilities inherent in employing Chicana feminist epistemologies in educational research.
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Dolores Calderón is an assistant professor of education and ethnic studies at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on Indigenous education, culturally relevant/multicultural education, Chicana(o)/Indigenous student success, and anticolonial/critical race theories. She has a chapter in Erik Malewski and Nathalia Jaramillo, eds., Epistemologies of Ignorance and Studies of Limits in Education (Information Age, 2011). Calderón is the primary investigator of The Role of Home in Chicano/Indigenous Student Success, a research project documenting the educational trajectories of Chicana/o and Indigenous student graduates from highly selective Ivy League universities and sister Ivies in order to map out what culturally relevant success looks like and make policy recommendations for interested stakeholders. Prior to working as a professor, Calderón worked in educational outreach for the University of California, Santa Cruz, and as a high school social studies teacher.
Lindsay Pérez Huber is an assistant professor of social and cultural analysis of education in the College of Education at California State University, Long Beach. Her work examines how racism and other forms of oppression mediate the educational trajectories of Latina/o students, with a particular focus on undocumented Chicana/Latina college students. She also engages critical race-gendered approaches for developing conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical tools in educational research that disrupt systemic inequalities. Her work has appeared previously in the Harvard Educational Review as well as in other academic journals, such as Equity and Excellence in Education and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and can also be found in academic law review journals such as the Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law. Pérez Huber is also a visiting scholar at the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.
María C. Malagón is a postdoctoral fellow in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an adjunct faculty member in the Chicana and Chicano Studies department at California State University, Fullerton. Her research interests focus on the educational trajectories of Chicano male continuation high school students, providing a sociohistorical understanding of how the social construction of racialized masculinities mediates the experiences of marginalized students in remedial schooling institutions. Malagón’s teaching and research areas include critical race theory, Chicana feminisms, and racialized masculinities in education. She has experience working in gender education, high school outreach, and gang “prevention” programs. Her work can be found in several education, social justice, and legal studies journals.
Verónica Nelly Vélez is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Latino Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on critical race theory, the political agency of Latina/o families in educational reform, popular education, community-based models of research, and the use of GIS technologies to further a critical race research agenda on the study of educational opportunity. She recently coauthored with Denise Pacheco, “Maps, Mapmaking, and Critical Pedagogy: Exploring GIS and Maps as a Teaching Tool for Social Change,” in the Seattle Journal for Social Justice and has coauthored with Alejandro Covarrubias, “Critical Race Quantitative Intersectionality: An Anti-Racis Research Paradigm” in the forthcoming Handbook on Critical Race Theory in Education (Routledge), edited by Marvin Lynn and Adrienne D. Dixson. In addition to her scholarly work, Vélez serves as a consultant, board member, and community organizer for several grassroots and nonprofit organizations in California.