Abstract
This chapter seeks to chart a path toward a transformative decolonial paradigm of study abroad research involving students from a small-island postcolonial nation-state. It reflects on the author’s experience as an insider–outsider researcher of Caribbean study abroad primarily using narrative analysis, assessing the critical self-reflexivity required to assume the role of cipher and interpreter of emergent testimonies in the field. A literature review reveals valuable recent contributions to the traditionally scant bibliography on non-traditional sojourners; equally, some programs have striven to address constraints on sojourning for these students. Nonetheless, these positive developments have not generated a fully articulated research paradigm that might ultimately both mitigate inequities of access to study abroad and radically enhance its benefits—personal, collective, developmental, and epistemological. It thus concludes by tracing the broad contours of a new decolonial paradigm for study abroad research that is potentially transformative of both the reality of study abroad opportunities for such students and of the paradigm that informs research on their experiences.
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Notes
- 1.
This imbalance is clearly not limited to SA. For recent work in this area in gender studies, for example, see Medie and Kang (2018), which also discusses areas such as development studies, medical research, and research on Africa in politics and the humanities (p. 41).
- 2.
To be clear, a single, temporary research assistant is the only collaborator, other than myself as its creator, on the research side of this Project, begun in 2008, which has thus far focused exclusively on sojourners from the Cave Hill Campus in Barbados of the University of the West Indies (which now has four landed campuses and a virtual, Open Campus), producing a modest four journal articles and chapters. To be truly worthy of the regional epithet in its name, the Project would minimally need to incorporate collaborators—researchers, SA participants—at the other UWI campuses; the experiences of sojourners from outside the region entering it as SA students would also seem naturally encompassed by that name. As discussed later in the current chapter, both internal and external factors have contributed to the inertia that has impeded this expansion and which I now seek to overcome definitively.
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Craig, I. (2022). Toward a Transformative Decolonial Paradigm of Study Abroad Research. In: McGregor, J., Plews, J.L. (eds) Designing Second Language Study Abroad Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05053-4_4
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