This article offers our reflections upon how we invoked an Indigenous paradigm in undertaking/facilitating qualitative research in a setting in Northern Uganda (2020/2021). The research was aimed at co-exploring with participants how they mobilized as a community against social and environmental injustices attendant with the entry of certain foreign enterprises into their community. We set up four focus group sessions in three villages to generate discussion in regard to how they had built up a community protest (with some success) against the operations of two enterprises who had been operational in the community. In our article we do not concentrate so much on the content of the focus group sessions (or the ensuing dissemination/discussion workshop), but rather, on how we enacted our understanding of an Indigenous paradigm in this research initiative. In this way we share possibilities for activating an Indigenous paradigm in the doing of research. We do this in order to help strengthen and further credentialize this paradigm in academic paradigmatic discourses and help secure its respected place on the paradigmatic “dance floor” (to use a metaphor offered by Chilisa, 2020).
Keywords
Indigenous-informed research, decolonization, relational sampling, community learning, responsiveness to participants, dissemination as discussion
Author Bio(s)
Dr. Francis Akena Adyanga (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Kabale University (KAB). He is also the Dean of the Faculty of Education. He obtained his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2014. He was a Postdoctoral fellow at the College of Education, University of South Africa (UNISA) Pretoria (2016 - 2017) and now is a Research Associate at UNISA. He is a passionate educator with keen teaching and research interest in Indigenous Knowledge, Social and Environmental Justice Education, Education in Emergencies and Post Emergencies Contexts and Global Citizenship Education. He authored the following selected articles: “The ‘Miss Curvy Uganda’ Pageant: Representation, Commodification and Exploitation of Women's Bodies” (2020); “Researching Indigenous Science Knowledge Integration in Formal Education: Interpreting Some Perspectives from the Field” (2016); “Pornography and the Entrenchment of Western Hegemony: Deconstructing the Kony 2012 Video” (2014); “Critical Analysis of the Production of Western Knowledge and its Implications for Indigenous Knowledge and Decolonization” (2012); and “Gender and Performance Disparity in Mathematics: A Study of South Western Uganda” (2020). ORCID NUMBER: 0000-0002-5277-7175.
Prof. Norma R. A. Romm (DLitt et Phil) is a professor in the Department of Adult, Community and Continuing Education at the University of South Africa. She is author of: The Methodologies of Positivism and Marxism (1991), Accountability in Social Research (2001), New Racism (2010), People’s Education in Theoretical Perspective (with V McKay 1992), Diversity Management (with R Flood 1996), and Assessment of the Impact of HIV and AIDS in the Informal Economy of Zambia (with V McKay 2006). She has co-edited six books—Social Theory (with M Sarakinsky 1994), Critical Systems Thinking (with R Flood 1996), Balancing Individualism and Collectivism (with JJ McIntyre-Mills and Y Corcoran-Nantes 2017), Mixed Methods and Cross-Disciplinary Research (with JJ McIntyre-Mills 2019), Democracy and Governance for Resourcing the Commons (with JJ McIntyre-Mills and Y Corcoran-Nantes 2019), and Covid-19 Pandemic: Perspectives Across Africa (with A Fymat and J Kapalanga 2022). She has published over 100 research articles on social theorizing, transformative research towards social and ecological regeneration, Indigenous paradigms of knowing, and the facilitation of adult learning. ORCID number: 0000-0002-1722-9720. Please direct correspondence to *Address for correspondence: norma.romm@gmail.com
Acknowledgements
The production of this manuscript was made possible through the financial support provided by the University of South Africa (UNISA) and Kabale University (KAB).
We are moreover exceedingly grateful for the apt and incisive comments and queries (and careful edits) made by reviewer Daniel Wulff on our original submission.
Adyanga, F. A.,
&
Romm, N. R.
(2022).
Reflections Upon our Way of Invoking an Indigenous Paradigm to Co-Explore Community Mobilization against Irresponsible Practices of Foreign-Owned Companies in Nwoya District, Uganda.
The Qualitative Report,
27(7), 1359-1389.
https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2022.5147
