Promoting social justice in qualitative research and empowering early career researchers
by Anna Cohen Miller, PhD
When I started working in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, back in 2015, I began looking to build s qualitative research networks. As a social justice qualitative researcher, I focused on collaboration and empowering early career researchers and communities I worked with. I was lucky to come across a likeminded researcher, Safary Wa-Mbaleka, who was the founding president of Asian Qualitative Research Association (AQRA). Soon after our initial introduction, Safary connected me with Arceli Rosario, who was a key leader of the organization in the Philippines, and our collaborations expanded exponentially. AQRA became a partner with The Consortium of Gender Scholars – an organization I had helped start – and sharing experience between faculty and student members became common place across Central Asia to and from Asia.
Over the years, we’ve followed each other’s work, finding ways to connect, collaborate, and mentor early career researchers (e.g., The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in the Asian Context and The SAGE Handbook of Online Higher Education). Our latest collaboration was for Safary’s Qualitative Research Connect, a Facebook group of over 10,000 members internationally. I was attracted to this group, as it continues to fill a gap in the qualitative research community, speaking to issues of social justice, recognizing the needs, questions, and directions of researchers and practitioners from the Majority World.
For the Facebook Live event, I drew from one of my recent textbooks, Questions in Qualitative Social Justice Research, written with Nettie Boivin. In the book, we emphasize the idea of becoming “better” researchers and recognizing the need to critically self-reflect to find our own personal meaning and direction. Becoming better can be seen as becoming more socially just in our work and practice. In my new book, Transformative Moments in Qualitative Research: Method, Theory, and Reflection, I mention being inspired by others, such as Donna Mertens and Norma Romm, to expand the notion of social justice to explicitly address justice-centered research integrating social, economic, and environmental justice.
More Methodspace Posts about Safary Wa-Mbaleka and Arceli Rosario
Safary Wa-Mbaleka, Arceli Rosario, and Anna Cohen Miller discussed opportunities and challenges for global researchers and academic writers in this roundtable discussion.