ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the current regime of knowledge production and investigates what it means to engage in education research outside the politics of knowing naturalized within prominent guides of the field. Wong enters into conversation with researchers and theorists of collective freedom from Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, and intersecting and overlapping Communities of Color who have developed ways of gathering, interpreting, sharing, and valuing knowledge outside of the “White gaze.” These researchers and theorists confront the assumption that ideal education research should contribute to knowledge focused on improving nation-state schools as conduits for producing workers for racial capitalism and ongoing processes of colonialism. Signifying how rapper Kendrick Lamar accomplishes this epistemic labor in his Hip Hop classic good kid, m.A.A.d city, this chapter explores how our epistemologies are bound to systemic processes of injustice and offer culturally sustaining strategies for engaging Hip Hop to conduct research “otherwise.”
