In this paper, I address the role of those of us who read and write within cultural studies in this time of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism here includes state politics as well as the administration of universities. I write personally and culturally from within the United States, though this message is for all in systems leaning and tipped into authoritarianism. I first name various authoritarianisms in United States politics and higher education. I then explore a critical orientation to claiming truth and its various realities, while rejecting lies and their various unrealities, or absurdities. We must name the absurdities of this moment as such, refuse to accept them as part of our otherwise anarchic realities, and act to profane them within all of our social spheres. In doing this, we put our specific expertise to work in our societies and on our campuses to dismantle authoritarian systems and actively practice democracy.
Research practices increasingly require claims to become recognisable as evidence through forms that are detached, portable, and comparable. I argue that extraction is not the production of data but a mode of stabilisation through which claims emerging from situated inquiry are authorised as evidence. Data emerges through situated inquiry. Claims articulate what that data permits us to say. Through different practices of stabilisation, some claims become evidence, while others contract or are withdrawn. Alongside extractive stabilisation, I develop relational stabilisation as an alternative route to becoming evidence through return, contestation, contraction, and declared conditions, before considering the infrastructural implications for audit and accountability.
In this paper, I engage in evocative autoethnography that enacts musical performance as a form of artful inquiry, situated within a decolonizing methodological orientation. Drawing on three staged performances, I position music as a practice that thinks with and through boundaries shaped by socio-cultural, historical, and political forces. Grounded in self-reflexivity, this autoethnographic work (re)imagines boundaries not as fixed divisions but as relational spaces for meaning-making. Through embodied musical encounters, I examine how ethnic emotion of Han can be relationally shared, and at times productively left untranslated, across differences. I ultimately posit that music, as embodied practice, holds the potential to affect our ways of living, being, becoming, and coexisting as researchers, music educators, and members of a shared world.
The migration North of relatively privileged Global South citizens is part of a power-laden global dynamic that situates thriving in Global North countries as the end goal of a trajectory of progress. In this article, I draw from Anzald & uacute;a and Rivera Cusicanqui to use what I call autohistoria-teor & iacute;a in ch'ixi key to historicise my experience as a Chilean academic who migrated to the UK. When I came to the UK, I was keenly aware of Chile's colonial past with Spain, but ignorantly - an ignorance carefully sustained by (neo)colonial cultural and educational systems - I thought our relationship to the UK was more neutral; after all, they were not our colonisers. In this paper, I ask: What histories have been obscured, ignored, or distorted to dazzle a Global South citizen like me into following neo-colonial lights? And, what might happen to my sense of self when these histories are made visible?
This article outlines the qualitative methodology adopted in a study of Black British-born males of African heritage navigating counselling and psychotherapy training within a white-dominated, neo-colonial university context. Grounded in an Africana Critical Race Framework and guided by a decolonial stance, the article critiques the epistemological limits of Eurocentric qualitative methods and challenges assumptions of methodological neutrality. Through critical engagement with Structural Existential Analysis, Heuristic Inquiry, and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), it demonstrates how phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions universalise the human and risk reproducing epistemic and ontological violence when applied to Black Africana lives. IPA was ultimately employed—but only through a deliberate refusal of its philosophical foundations and a selective repurposing of its procedural steps. The article argues that ethical qualitative research with Black Africana participants requires not fidelity to inherited European traditions but methodological rupture, cultural alignment, and epistemic accountability.
