Bearing Witness: Methods for Researching Oppression and Resistance—A Textbook for Critical Research

This paper forecasts a “fictional” methods textbook for researchers interested in studying social oppression and resistance. The volume moves between historic and contemporary writings on methods, with particular interest in questions of objectivity and subjectivity, history and psychology, relations among units of analysis, expert and construct validity, and the ever-thorny ambition of generalizability. Crafted with inspiration from Kurt Lewin, Carolyn Payton, Ignacio Martín-Baró, and many contemporary critical writers, the book is designed to provoke conversations about social research, asking—For what? With whom? and If not now, when? The essay is written to incite a re-membering, and re-thinking, of critical methods for the social psychological study of oppression and resistance.