| Title | Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities |
| Publication Type | Journal Article |
| Authors | Tuck, Eve |
| Journal | Harvard Educational Review |
| Volume | 79 |
| Abstract | In this open letter, Eve Tuck calls on communities, researchers, and educators to reconsider the long-term impact of "damage-centered" research—research that intends to document peoples' pain and brokenness to hold those in power accountable for their oppression. This kind of research operates with a flawed theory of change: it is often used to leverage reparations or resources for marginalized communities yet simultane-ously reinforces and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless. Tuck urges communities to institute a moratorium on damage-centered research to reformulate the ways research is framed and conducted and to reimagine how findings might be used by, for, and with communities. Dear Readers, Greetings! I write to you from a little desk in my light-filled house in New York State, my new home after living in Brooklyn for the past eleven years. Today, New York does not seem so far from St. Paul Island, one of the Pribilof Islands of the Aleutian chain in Alaska, where my family is from and where my relations continue to live. Something about writing this letter closes the gap between these disparate places I call home. I write to you about home, about our communities. I write to identify a per-sistent trend in research on Native communities, city communities, and other disenfranchised communities—what I call damage-centered research. I invite you to join me in re-visioning research in our communities not only to recog-nize the need to document the effects of oppression on our communities but also to consider the long-term repercussions of thinking of ourselves as broken. This is an open letter addressed to educational researchers and practi-tioners concerned with fostering and maintaining ethical relationships with disenfranchised and dispossessed communities and all of those troubled by the possible hidden costs of a research strategy that frames entire communi-ties as depleted. |
| Notes | 'Re: Jim and Emily’s work on “freedom colonies” (like Greenwood/Tulsa), reservations, and our project:\nI’m starting to see some interesting potential connections between freedom colonies and reservations, though there are some pretty big and obvious differences too. I don’t know a whole lot about freedom colonies, except a little about the Greenwood District in Tulsa, OK, aka “Black Wall Street,” which is sadly famous largely for being a target of a massacre by a white mob in 1921. But the story of the community’s thriving isn’t told nearly enough. \nOnly telling the story of the massacre, and not the thriving of the community before that, relates to what the indigenous scholar Eve Tuck calls “damage-centered” research\n\n - Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn'
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| DOI | 10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15 |
| Short Title | Suspending Damage |
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