A Chicana Feminist Epistemology Revisited: Cultivating Ideas a Generation Later

Abstract

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.