From Center to Margins: The Importance of Self-Definition in Research

In From Center to Margins, women educational researchers of color, trained in mainstream Euro-American traditions, interpret the experiences of those, including themselves, who are marginalized by these very traditions. Deliberately looking at research from within the margins rather than from the center, the contributors detail how their perspectives influence the way they frame questions for study, develop procedures to investigate them, and devise strategies for answering them. The contributors offer an alternative to the dominant perspective in educational research that uses its power to determine who shall be centered and who, marginalized. This book presents the margins, where women and other people of color reside intellectually, not as deficient areas from which we need to escape, but as legitimate sites where knowledge, useful to wider audiences, has been and will continue to be generated.