As I write this introduction, I pause to take stock of current events worldwide and reflect on the role of critical scholars in qualitative research. On a national level, there are discourses about whether the former president should be indicted for withholding sensitive documents at his home. Florida, my home state, has passed the Stop Woke Act, or House Bill 7 (HB7), which comes with a full squashing of intellectual freedom and the first amendment for faculty who engage in equity-driven work emerging from a reactionary stance on Critical Race Theory. Across the world, Pakistan is suffering from a destructive flood. The Ukraine and Russia conflict is ongoing with multiple devastating effects. In India, everyday people are boycotting various Hindi movies due to their religious sentiments being hurt and successfully causing films to flop. Such moves make me wonder why not use this massive organizational power for more equitable causes...
Editor’s Introduction: Answering the Call
Kakali Bhattacharya is an award-winning professor at University of Florida housed in Research, Evaluation, and Measurement Program. Her work has made spaces in interdisciplinary de/colonizing work and qualitative research where creativity and contemplative approaches are legitimized and seen as gateways for cultivating depth, integrity, expansive inquiry, and discovering critical insights. Substantively, she explores transnational issues of race, class, and gender in higher education.
She is the 2022 winner of American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) inaugural Guba award for Outstanding Contributions to Qualitative Research from the Qualitative Research Special Interest Group (SIG). She is the 2018 winner of AERA’s Mid-Career Scholar of Color Award. Her co-authored text with Kent Gillen, Power, Race, and Higher Education: A Cross-Cultural Parallel Narrative, has won a 2017 Outstanding Publication Award from AERA (SIG 168) and a 2018 Outstanding Book Award from International Congress of Qualitative Research.
Kakali Bhattacharya; Editor’s Introduction: Answering the Call. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 1 December 2022; 11 (4): 1–3. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2022.11.4.1
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