Creative Methods and Learning with Justice-Centered Mixed Methods Research

Decolonizing Systemic Inequities with Land Acknowledgments

Abstract

The purpose of this article is two-fold, offering both a methodological and socially meaningful direction in justice-centered research integrating the arts and texting. First, we invite readers into a narrative, creative approach centering social justice, environmental justice, and economic justice as justice-centered mixed methods in an effort towards decolonizing systemic inequities and issues of power. We highlight an arts-based response integrating poetry, photos, and texting as a response to the call to action from Onwuegbuzie and Abrams (2024) for “integrative, transformative approaches to research” that are “socially meaningful and transformative” (p. 218). Second, in this article, we guide readers through the methodological and practical process of developing, expanding, and adapting a land acknowledgment for the Sámi - Indigenous people with territory spanning Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia. Our methods weave together feminist collaborative processes with collaborative authoethnography in data generation, bringing together visual arts through asynchronous research processes, quantizing narrative, Wordcloud, and identification of learning contexts. Findings highlight the relevance of the arts and informal learning within justice-centered mixed methods (including an Appendix with toolkit), noting the need for further research continuing decolonial processes furthering social, environmental, and economic justice and research praxis for Indigenous peoples of the Sámi territory of Sápmi.