Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, I would like to share with audiences my own experience of incorporating decolonial lenses into my work with migrant farmworkers and how to incorporate decolonial scholars into the analysis of and representation of our data.

Paper long abstract:

The U.S.’s agricultural workforce is historically rooted in colonization, and its systems of oppression remain. Migrant farmworkers consist of a vast majority of the U.S. agricultural labor workforce who migrate from other countries to work or migrate around the country to find work. Due to the coloniality of labor in U.S. agriculture, decoloniality was selected as the lens to approach this study, so the participants were not forced into epistemological oppression. I used Grosfoguel’s (2016) concept of racialization and Fanon’s (1967) writings on the zone of being and zone of non-being to analyze the participants’ stories. I drew on post-qualitative inquiry to remove a set of prescribed methods for working with participants and telling their stories of how they resisted oppression in their daily lives. This presentation will focus on incorporating decolonial writers and scholars into analysis and alternative data representation to make research inclusive of participants' experiences.