Sheeva Sabati, Ph.D. is an educator, scholar, and activist. Her work brings together critical race, decolonial, and abolitionist feminisms to reimagine educational spaces and practices.
California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its gro... more California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its groundwater crisis is a warning of its impending collapse. In this paper, we argue that policies like California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act reinscribe the settler state, even as they aim toward environmental sustainability. Drawing from Indigenous feminist scholarship on water and frontier processes, our methodology traces settler colonialism materially and discursively through the movement of water. First, we analyze hydraulic engineering discourses at the turn of the 20th century to illustrate how racial logics were key to producing irrigation—and the broader project of white settlement—as ostensibly benevolent processes of improvement. We then highlight how turn-of-the-century legislation was central to producing agriculture as a site of accumulation by dispossession through the production of settler forms of property and relations with land and water. Finally, we consider ...
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2022
California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its gro... more California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its groundwater crisis is a warning of its impending collapse. In this paper, we argue that policies like California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act reinscribe the settler state, even as they aim toward environmental sustainability. Drawing from Indigenous feminist scholarship on water and frontier processes, our methodology traces settler colonialism materially and discursively through the movement of water. First, we analyze hydraulic engineering discourses at the turn of the 20th century to illustrate how racial logics were key to producing irrigation—and the broader project of white settlement—as ostensibly benevolent processes of improvement. We then highlight how turn-of-the-century legislation was central to producing agriculture as a site of accumulation by dispossession through the production of settler forms of property and relations with land and water. Finally, we consider ...
A broad body of literature outlines the interventions to support underrepresented and minoritized... more A broad body of literature outlines the interventions to support underrepresented and minoritized students’ inclusion and sense of belonging into university contexts. In this paper, we explore how two first-generation students of color articulate a critical sense of belonging through their reflections as student researchers in the Apprenticeship in Community-Engaged Research or (H)ACER program at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). (H)ACER integrates community engagement, ethnographic sensibilities, critical race and decolonial theory, as well as women of color feminisms into a curriculum designed to train critical scholar-researchers. Through themes of feeling isolated on campus and returning ‘home’ in the garden, building comfort with academic theory, and navigating insider/outsider identities in campus/community contexts, we trace how the students developed an awareness of their positionality and made sense of their experiences of ‘belonging’, both within the campus ...
This multivocal essay engages complex ethical issues raised in collaborative community-based rese... more This multivocal essay engages complex ethical issues raised in collaborative community-based research (CCBR). It critiques the fraught history and limiting conditions of current ethics codes and review processes, and engages persistent troubling questions about the ethicality of research practices and universities themselves. It cautions against positioning CCBR as a corrective that fully escapes these issues. The authors draw from a range of philosophic, African-centric, feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, and other critical theories to unsettle research ethics. Contributors point toward research ethics as a praxis of engagement with aggrieved communities in healing from and redressing historical trauma.
This article considers the institutionalization of research ethics as a site of “colonial unknowi... more This article considers the institutionalization of research ethics as a site of “colonial unknowing” in which the racial colonial entanglements of academic research and institutions are obscured. I examine the origin stories situating Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) as a response to cases of exceptional violence, most notably the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, within an otherwise neutral history of research. I then consider how the 2018 revisions to the Common Rule extend “colonial unknowing” by decontextualizing the forms of risk involved in social and behavioral research. I situate these complicities as necessary starting points toward anticolonial research ethics of “answerability.”
Writing as both instructors and students who worked together in the undergraduate course Water Ju... more Writing as both instructors and students who worked together in the undergraduate course Water Justice, we reflect on the limits and possibilities of engaging in anticolonial teaching-learning practices within the ongoing contexts of settler colonialism and racial violence that shapes universities. We describe how we designed Water Justice as a place-based, anticolonial research collaboration, and focus on how students grappled with the substantive and affective dimensions of their (un)learning process. Together, we illustrate the tensions and possibilities of anticolonial approaches to undergraduate education.
Background/Context: Although the uprisings in the summer of 2020 amplified existing abolitionist ... more Background/Context: Although the uprisings in the summer of 2020 amplified existing abolitionist organizing, including abolitionist struggles for justice within K–12 schools, it is unclear if the field of teacher education has been informed by these movements.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Given this gap, as well as the ongoing urgency to dismantle the interconnected structures of white supremacy, settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy within the field of teacher education, this paper calls on teacher education programs and teacher educators to grow abolition within the field.
Research Design: We situate abolition broadly and demonstrate the connections between abolition and struggles for justice in K–12 education. We draw on stories and lessons from our own work as educators and organizers to situate what must be dismantled, changed, and built in order to grow abolition within the field of teacher education.
Conclusions/Recommendations: We call on teacher education programs and teacher educators to begin the reflexive, relational, embodied, imaginative, coalitional, urgent, and necessary work of growing abolition within the field of teacher education.
This article considers the institutionalization of research ethics as a site of “colonial unknowi... more This article considers the institutionalization of research ethics as a site of “colonial unknowing” in which the racial colonial entanglements of academic research and institutions are obscured. I examine the origin stories situating Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) as a response to cases of exceptional violence, most notably the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, within an otherwise neutral history of research. I then consider how the 2018 revisions to the Common Rule extend “colonial unknowing” by decontextualizing the forms of risk involved in social and behavioral research. I situate these complicities as necessary starting points toward anticolonial research ethics of “answerability.”
Report -- including talk summaries and much more -- of an invitational conference rethinking the ... more Report -- including talk summaries and much more -- of an invitational conference rethinking the ethics of community-based participatory research
CCREC hosted the Unsettling Research Ethics invitational conference in February 2016. Designed to... more CCREC hosted the Unsettling Research Ethics invitational conference in February 2016. Designed to disrupt formalized approaches to research ethics, the conference facilitated critical dialogue among social scientists, ethics specialists, community based and collaborative researchers, and community leaders. This dialogue was graphically visualized and documented in real time by a graphic facilitator, Julie Gieseke of Map the Mind, thereby providing materials used in the knowledge production of the conference itself and reworked for this report.
The Unsettling Research Ethics conference and report presents a distinctive framework for grappling with the ethics of research, surfacing ethical tensions and dilemmas through the domains of knowledge, relationality, and space and time. This framework aims to deepen ethical praxis and professional formation for researchers and collaborators. Included in this report are learning tools like innovative cases, games, heat maps, and other materials designed for deep engagement with fraught ethical matters.
The Unsettling Research Ethics conference was an intergenerational gathering, with both early career and foundational scholars in anthropology, archaeology, critical race and ethnic studies, black studies, computer science, education, feminist studies, geography, public health, sociology, and philosophy. Participating scholars identify as scholar-activists and/or engage in work related to research ethics, community-based and collaborative approaches to research, and ethics policy work at institutional, professional association, and national levels. Community leaders in attendance have collaboratively partnered with academics, and work in multiple domains of social justice activism and community organizing, including labor, race, women’s issues, immigration, and youth development.
This report provides background on the CCREC ethics research project and its conceptual and pedagogical approaches, including its notion of ‘dwelling with/in the ethics of research.’ Additional frameworks and provocative invitations for engaging the ethics of research are offered by Troy Richardson (Cornell University), Joyce E. King (Georgia State University), Rena Lederman (Princeton University), Diane Fujino (University of California, Santa Barbara), Kisha Supernant (University of Alberta), Richa Nagar (University of Minnesota), Caitlin Cahill (Pratt Institute), and George Lipsitz (University of California, Santa Barbara). The materials included in this report, generated by the CCREC ethics project and Unsettling Research Ethics conference participants, are meant to serve as resources for fostering sustained ethical reflection and strengthened professional development for scholars and research partners concerning the ethics of knowledge, relationality, and space and time.
California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its gro... more California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its groundwater crisis is a warning of its impending collapse. In this paper, we argue that policies like California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act reinscribe the settler state, even as they aim toward environmental sustainability. Drawing from Indigenous feminist scholarship on water and frontier processes, our methodology traces settler colonialism materially and discursively through the movement of water. First, we analyze hydraulic engineering discourses at the turn of the 20th century to illustrate how racial logics were key to producing irrigation—and the broader project of white settlement—as ostensibly benevolent processes of improvement. We then highlight how turn-of-the-century legislation was central to producing agriculture as a site of accumulation by dispossession through the production of settler forms of property and relations with land and water. Finally, we consider ...
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2022
California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its gro... more California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its groundwater crisis is a warning of its impending collapse. In this paper, we argue that policies like California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act reinscribe the settler state, even as they aim toward environmental sustainability. Drawing from Indigenous feminist scholarship on water and frontier processes, our methodology traces settler colonialism materially and discursively through the movement of water. First, we analyze hydraulic engineering discourses at the turn of the 20th century to illustrate how racial logics were key to producing irrigation—and the broader project of white settlement—as ostensibly benevolent processes of improvement. We then highlight how turn-of-the-century legislation was central to producing agriculture as a site of accumulation by dispossession through the production of settler forms of property and relations with land and water. Finally, we consider ...
A broad body of literature outlines the interventions to support underrepresented and minoritized... more A broad body of literature outlines the interventions to support underrepresented and minoritized students’ inclusion and sense of belonging into university contexts. In this paper, we explore how two first-generation students of color articulate a critical sense of belonging through their reflections as student researchers in the Apprenticeship in Community-Engaged Research or (H)ACER program at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). (H)ACER integrates community engagement, ethnographic sensibilities, critical race and decolonial theory, as well as women of color feminisms into a curriculum designed to train critical scholar-researchers. Through themes of feeling isolated on campus and returning ‘home’ in the garden, building comfort with academic theory, and navigating insider/outsider identities in campus/community contexts, we trace how the students developed an awareness of their positionality and made sense of their experiences of ‘belonging’, both within the campus ...
This multivocal essay engages complex ethical issues raised in collaborative community-based rese... more This multivocal essay engages complex ethical issues raised in collaborative community-based research (CCBR). It critiques the fraught history and limiting conditions of current ethics codes and review processes, and engages persistent troubling questions about the ethicality of research practices and universities themselves. It cautions against positioning CCBR as a corrective that fully escapes these issues. The authors draw from a range of philosophic, African-centric, feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, and other critical theories to unsettle research ethics. Contributors point toward research ethics as a praxis of engagement with aggrieved communities in healing from and redressing historical trauma.
This article considers the institutionalization of research ethics as a site of “colonial unknowi... more This article considers the institutionalization of research ethics as a site of “colonial unknowing” in which the racial colonial entanglements of academic research and institutions are obscured. I examine the origin stories situating Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) as a response to cases of exceptional violence, most notably the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, within an otherwise neutral history of research. I then consider how the 2018 revisions to the Common Rule extend “colonial unknowing” by decontextualizing the forms of risk involved in social and behavioral research. I situate these complicities as necessary starting points toward anticolonial research ethics of “answerability.”
Writing as both instructors and students who worked together in the undergraduate course Water Ju... more Writing as both instructors and students who worked together in the undergraduate course Water Justice, we reflect on the limits and possibilities of engaging in anticolonial teaching-learning practices within the ongoing contexts of settler colonialism and racial violence that shapes universities. We describe how we designed Water Justice as a place-based, anticolonial research collaboration, and focus on how students grappled with the substantive and affective dimensions of their (un)learning process. Together, we illustrate the tensions and possibilities of anticolonial approaches to undergraduate education.
Background/Context: Although the uprisings in the summer of 2020 amplified existing abolitionist ... more Background/Context: Although the uprisings in the summer of 2020 amplified existing abolitionist organizing, including abolitionist struggles for justice within K–12 schools, it is unclear if the field of teacher education has been informed by these movements.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Given this gap, as well as the ongoing urgency to dismantle the interconnected structures of white supremacy, settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy within the field of teacher education, this paper calls on teacher education programs and teacher educators to grow abolition within the field.
Research Design: We situate abolition broadly and demonstrate the connections between abolition and struggles for justice in K–12 education. We draw on stories and lessons from our own work as educators and organizers to situate what must be dismantled, changed, and built in order to grow abolition within the field of teacher education.
Conclusions/Recommendations: We call on teacher education programs and teacher educators to begin the reflexive, relational, embodied, imaginative, coalitional, urgent, and necessary work of growing abolition within the field of teacher education.
This article considers the institutionalization of research ethics as a site of “colonial unknowi... more This article considers the institutionalization of research ethics as a site of “colonial unknowing” in which the racial colonial entanglements of academic research and institutions are obscured. I examine the origin stories situating Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) as a response to cases of exceptional violence, most notably the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, within an otherwise neutral history of research. I then consider how the 2018 revisions to the Common Rule extend “colonial unknowing” by decontextualizing the forms of risk involved in social and behavioral research. I situate these complicities as necessary starting points toward anticolonial research ethics of “answerability.”
Report -- including talk summaries and much more -- of an invitational conference rethinking the ... more Report -- including talk summaries and much more -- of an invitational conference rethinking the ethics of community-based participatory research
CCREC hosted the Unsettling Research Ethics invitational conference in February 2016. Designed to... more CCREC hosted the Unsettling Research Ethics invitational conference in February 2016. Designed to disrupt formalized approaches to research ethics, the conference facilitated critical dialogue among social scientists, ethics specialists, community based and collaborative researchers, and community leaders. This dialogue was graphically visualized and documented in real time by a graphic facilitator, Julie Gieseke of Map the Mind, thereby providing materials used in the knowledge production of the conference itself and reworked for this report.
The Unsettling Research Ethics conference and report presents a distinctive framework for grappling with the ethics of research, surfacing ethical tensions and dilemmas through the domains of knowledge, relationality, and space and time. This framework aims to deepen ethical praxis and professional formation for researchers and collaborators. Included in this report are learning tools like innovative cases, games, heat maps, and other materials designed for deep engagement with fraught ethical matters.
The Unsettling Research Ethics conference was an intergenerational gathering, with both early career and foundational scholars in anthropology, archaeology, critical race and ethnic studies, black studies, computer science, education, feminist studies, geography, public health, sociology, and philosophy. Participating scholars identify as scholar-activists and/or engage in work related to research ethics, community-based and collaborative approaches to research, and ethics policy work at institutional, professional association, and national levels. Community leaders in attendance have collaboratively partnered with academics, and work in multiple domains of social justice activism and community organizing, including labor, race, women’s issues, immigration, and youth development.
This report provides background on the CCREC ethics research project and its conceptual and pedagogical approaches, including its notion of ‘dwelling with/in the ethics of research.’ Additional frameworks and provocative invitations for engaging the ethics of research are offered by Troy Richardson (Cornell University), Joyce E. King (Georgia State University), Rena Lederman (Princeton University), Diane Fujino (University of California, Santa Barbara), Kisha Supernant (University of Alberta), Richa Nagar (University of Minnesota), Caitlin Cahill (Pratt Institute), and George Lipsitz (University of California, Santa Barbara). The materials included in this report, generated by the CCREC ethics project and Unsettling Research Ethics conference participants, are meant to serve as resources for fostering sustained ethical reflection and strengthened professional development for scholars and research partners concerning the ethics of knowledge, relationality, and space and time.
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struggles for justice within K–12 schools, it is unclear if the field of teacher education has been informed by these movements.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Given this gap, as well as the ongoing urgency to dismantle the interconnected structures of white supremacy, settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy within the field of teacher education, this paper calls on teacher education programs and teacher educators to grow abolition within the field.
Research Design: We situate abolition broadly and demonstrate the connections between abolition and struggles for justice in K–12 education. We draw on stories and lessons from our own work as educators and organizers to situate what must be dismantled, changed, and built in order to grow abolition within the field of teacher education.
Conclusions/Recommendations: We call on teacher education programs and teacher educators to begin the reflexive, relational, embodied, imaginative, coalitional, urgent, and necessary work of growing abolition within the field of teacher education.
The Unsettling Research Ethics conference and report presents a distinctive framework for grappling with the ethics of research, surfacing ethical tensions and dilemmas through the domains of knowledge, relationality, and space and time. This framework aims to deepen ethical praxis and professional formation for researchers and collaborators. Included in this report are learning tools like innovative cases, games, heat maps, and other materials designed for deep engagement with fraught ethical matters.
The Unsettling Research Ethics conference was an intergenerational gathering, with both early career and foundational scholars in anthropology, archaeology, critical race and ethnic studies, black studies, computer science, education, feminist studies, geography, public health, sociology, and philosophy. Participating scholars identify as scholar-activists and/or engage in work related to research ethics, community-based and collaborative approaches to research, and ethics policy work at institutional, professional association, and national levels. Community leaders in attendance have collaboratively partnered with academics, and work in multiple domains of social justice activism and community organizing, including labor, race, women’s issues, immigration, and youth development.
This report provides background on the CCREC ethics research project and its conceptual and pedagogical approaches, including its notion of ‘dwelling with/in the ethics of research.’ Additional frameworks and provocative invitations for engaging the ethics of research are offered by Troy Richardson (Cornell University), Joyce E. King (Georgia State University), Rena Lederman (Princeton University), Diane Fujino (University of California, Santa Barbara), Kisha Supernant (University of Alberta), Richa Nagar (University of Minnesota), Caitlin Cahill (Pratt Institute), and George Lipsitz (University of California, Santa Barbara). The materials included in this report, generated by the CCREC ethics project and Unsettling Research Ethics conference participants, are meant to serve as resources for fostering sustained ethical reflection and strengthened professional development for scholars and research partners concerning the ethics of knowledge, relationality, and space and time.
struggles for justice within K–12 schools, it is unclear if the field of teacher education has been informed by these movements.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Given this gap, as well as the ongoing urgency to dismantle the interconnected structures of white supremacy, settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy within the field of teacher education, this paper calls on teacher education programs and teacher educators to grow abolition within the field.
Research Design: We situate abolition broadly and demonstrate the connections between abolition and struggles for justice in K–12 education. We draw on stories and lessons from our own work as educators and organizers to situate what must be dismantled, changed, and built in order to grow abolition within the field of teacher education.
Conclusions/Recommendations: We call on teacher education programs and teacher educators to begin the reflexive, relational, embodied, imaginative, coalitional, urgent, and necessary work of growing abolition within the field of teacher education.
The Unsettling Research Ethics conference and report presents a distinctive framework for grappling with the ethics of research, surfacing ethical tensions and dilemmas through the domains of knowledge, relationality, and space and time. This framework aims to deepen ethical praxis and professional formation for researchers and collaborators. Included in this report are learning tools like innovative cases, games, heat maps, and other materials designed for deep engagement with fraught ethical matters.
The Unsettling Research Ethics conference was an intergenerational gathering, with both early career and foundational scholars in anthropology, archaeology, critical race and ethnic studies, black studies, computer science, education, feminist studies, geography, public health, sociology, and philosophy. Participating scholars identify as scholar-activists and/or engage in work related to research ethics, community-based and collaborative approaches to research, and ethics policy work at institutional, professional association, and national levels. Community leaders in attendance have collaboratively partnered with academics, and work in multiple domains of social justice activism and community organizing, including labor, race, women’s issues, immigration, and youth development.
This report provides background on the CCREC ethics research project and its conceptual and pedagogical approaches, including its notion of ‘dwelling with/in the ethics of research.’ Additional frameworks and provocative invitations for engaging the ethics of research are offered by Troy Richardson (Cornell University), Joyce E. King (Georgia State University), Rena Lederman (Princeton University), Diane Fujino (University of California, Santa Barbara), Kisha Supernant (University of Alberta), Richa Nagar (University of Minnesota), Caitlin Cahill (Pratt Institute), and George Lipsitz (University of California, Santa Barbara). The materials included in this report, generated by the CCREC ethics project and Unsettling Research Ethics conference participants, are meant to serve as resources for fostering sustained ethical reflection and strengthened professional development for scholars and research partners concerning the ethics of knowledge, relationality, and space and time.