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The experience of going natural or deciding to rock an afro, wash-n-go, twist-out, or braided updo on a campus where similar faces are rarely seen in the classroom, in the residence hall, or even in the nearby local community can be one fraught with numerous personal and political identity tensions. Nonetheless, this is the experience for many Black women collegians, both undergraduate and graduate, who choose to wear their natural hair in its kinky, curly, coily, or afro-textured state while in college. Through an intersectional perspective we examine the stories of six Black women and their experiences with their hair, identities, and community as they transitioned to wearing their natural hair. Through this study we center the bodies, voices, and needs of Black women as they navigate the complexities of thriving in a Eurocentric environment (i.e., a predominantly white university). This chapter ends with a call for greater attention to the meaningfulness of Black women's hair and a discussion of strategies for campus agents to more intentionally support Black women throughout their development in college.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the contributions of Smiths legacy in Indigenous methodologies and to show how her interventions encourage and facilitate meaningful research relationships with Indigenous communities. It is also a practical guide for future Indigenous researchers who aim to work with their communities.

This article outlines the legacy and interventions from Linda Smith that have influenced my research and pedagogy work with my community—the Navajo Nation. I weave together a Kejnrj story and theory to show how Smith’s predominant legacy has taught me how to create, maintain and safeguard relationships with horses, humans and knowledge while working within a Western institution.

I discuss the navigation of research relationships before, during and after official research and the implications this has for increasing indigenous sovereignty in partnership with research. It also describes the process of researcher reflexivity required for Indigenous methodological work.

This paper outlines one Navajo researcher’s individual story with research on community. This adds value to researchers who intend to do research/pedagogy work with Native communities.

This study aims to identify how Brazilian followers of an X/Twitter profile engage in theory-building processes leading up to the January 8, 2023 riots in Brasília, the Brazilian capital. This paper seeks to understand how cognitive and sociocultural processes weave together to weaponize collective knowledge construction that, in isolation, could be seen as virtuous but, in specific contexts, might lead to radicalization.

This study uses qualitative content analysis of comments on ambiguous X/Twitter posts published by a conspiratorial profile associated with former President Jair Bolsonaro. Content was published in the three weeks that preceded the coup d’état attempt by Bolsonaro supporters on January 8, 2023.

Findings point to users’ resorting to intuitive knowledge to support sensemaking processes in their search for subliminal meanings in tweets. That includes, for example, attempts to crack binary code-encrypted messages. This study also identified practices of cross-media sourcing, where users collect evidence from alternative social media channels to interpret messages containing verbal and visual information. Finally, this study found that religious symbols are often instrumentalized and become a lens through which followers organize information to integrate with their existing knowledge and assumptions.

With this work, the authors build on existing scholarship on epistemologies used by conspiratorial and radicalized groups as they engage in systematic sensemaking and often refer to religion to interpret messages that motivate extreme political position-taking. This study addresses a similar phenomenon as it unfolds in an understudied geographical context (Brazil) and seeks to demonstrate how individuals engage in collective sensemaking practices. The authors hope that their findings inform educators as they explore the affordances of social media to foster positive collective learning experiences in reasoning supported by social media.

The originality of this study is twofold. First, this study uses an analytical lens that draws on the learning sciences and cognitive science for inquiry of radicalization happening around social media. The authors understand that social media lend themselves particularly interesting to the analysis, as they are settings where notions of mastery blur, and individuals engage in conversations on complex, controversial topics. With that engagement, they demonstrate willingness to reason collectively. Second, this study investigates how those phenomena unfold in an understudied context, responding to calls for more diversity in research in the learning sciences as well as in media studies.

This investigation sought to identify learning outcomes for undergraduate students at a US college enrolled in community‐based learning courses. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to examine the similarities and differences between American students' and international students' development of leadership skills through senior level service‐learning (SL) courses and analyzed the role of teaching methods on those outcomes.

Over 150 SL courses from students representing 30 countries were examined at a major university in the USA. US and non‐US student leadership and learning outcomes were cross‐tabulated with instructional techniques to analyze for statistically significant differences.

Facilitating leadership skill development is a function of utilizing transformational rather than traditional classroom teaching techniques.

Transformational teaching and learning methods such as collaborative projects, student‐selected readings, and group decision‐making in SL courses help transform students' views of themselves, their communities, and the world as they consider their roles as leaders in an unscripted future.

Few studies have examined the instructional elements in SL that transform student knowledge and leadership skills especially across such a breadth and variety of SL courses and student cultural backgrounds.

This chapter will discuss how the traditional role of principal, as the lead learner of schools, is both challenged and complemented by the cultural and epistemic values of Aboriginal communities in publicly funded school across Ontario in light of the Ministry of Education's Ontario First Nation, Métis, and Inuit Framework (2007). Leadership, in this context, is redefined to create a positive working environment. The authors also address the social impact of large-scale assessment programs on the standards for Aboriginal students, including the respective challenges for principals and teachers in Ontario schools.

In this chapter, we contribute to ongoing discussions surrounding decolonising research and teaching in higher education by considering the place of language and linguistic diversity within this decolonising turn. The question we explore is how academic researchers and lecturers can recognise and respect that a move to decolonise will involve engaging with epistemologies expressed in different languages and expressed from diverse worldviews. We take inspiration from the work of linguistic citizenship researchers who make explicit the links between knowledge systems, languages and issues of equality/inequality. In linguistic citizenship, research connections are made between the everyday practice of translanguaging, moving between different linguistic repertoires by multilingual speakers, and transknowledging or the fluid movement between differing systems of knowing. To explore the potential of using the concepts of translanguaging and transknowledging as tools in the task of decolonising higher education research and practice, we discuss in depth two published research studies for critical reflection.

The purpose of this paper is to describe culturally responsive methodology as a way to develop researchers. The aims is to illuminate the dimensions of culturally responsive methodology such as cultural and epistemological pluralism, deconstruction of Western colonial traditions of research, and primacy of relationships within culturally responsive dialogic encounters. An overarching question is: “How can we maintain the original integrity of both participants and researchers and their respective cultures and co-construct at the same time something new?”.

Five case study narratives are described in order for readers to understand the range and types of studies that have been undertaken within a culturally responsive framework. The contributors represent emerging as well as veteran researchers, Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous cultures, practitioners (i.e. teachers in the school systems) as well as teacher educators (i.e. that is teachers within colleges and universities).

The major issues raised in this paper (knowing one's self and being willing to develop new methodologies) can help to inform those who aspire to research “with” rather than “on” Others.

This paper offers an ontology that is not framed from western traditions. Using reflexivity, criticality, and other epistemological links, the authors show methodological negotiators who invent, craft, personalize, and navigate their methodology and methods specific to the context and participants with whom they are working. They challenge unexamined assumptions in research methods. It is hoped that this paper can contribute a more respectful and humble way of working with all peoples.

This paper aims to undertake a critical evaluation of the purpose and objective of Islamic Law, namely, maqasid as-shari’ah, as it has evolved in Islamic scholastic experience. But, the greater philosophy and potential of maqasid as-shari’ah within the great design of the monotheistic law, sunnat-Allah, is explained. Such explanation is carried out in the light of the core of Islamic epistemology that directly induces Islamic Law.

This critical evaluation is pursued in the light of the epistemological worldview and its methodical formalism of unity of knowledge contra a differentiated and conflicting view of human experience in rationalism. The episteme of unity of knowledge is Tawhid as the law of everything in the precept of unity as understood by the monotheistic law, sunnat-Allah. In the light of the extendibility of maqasid as-shari’ah across the relationally unifying domain of sunnat-Allah, the potentiality of shari’ah in terms of res extensa (epistemic extension) and res cogitans (cognitive capacity) is discussed.

Various occidental thoughts in this quest for extendibility of the epistemic totality are critically examined by the Tawhidi monotheistic law. The universality of the Tawhidi law of monotheism in respect of its characteristics of res extensa and res cogitans is studied to bring out the potentiality of maqasid as-shari’ah. Thereby, the new vision of inter-systemic extensions across diverse domains of intellection interactively unified together is formalized. This formalism goes beyond the existing limits of maqasid as-shari’ah confined as it is to worldly socioeconomic affairs (muamalat).

A much broader investigation is opened up by this paper that can be extended by academic work.

The practical support of the criticism against both the idea of shari’ah-compliance and the incomplete implication of maqasid as-shari’ah as presently understood among Islamic scholars is carried out by a detailed empirical work. The extension to the choice of a new financial instrument of Foreign Trade Financing Certificate is introduced.

The critical discussion launched in reference to the wider meaning, objective and purpose of maqasid as-shari’ah under the epistemology of the Tawhidi methodological worldview results in the substantive understanding of maslaha, well-being. Maslaha as well-being forms the ultimate index of socio-scientific valuation under maqasid as-shari’ah in the light of the Tawhidi epistemological worldview. Thereby, the perspective of socioeconomic development, and more extensively socio-scientific intellection, is brought out as extensively participatory evolutionary process under the principle of unity of knowledge (Tawhidi episteme). Brief examples are invoked to establish this fact. An example of measured multidimensional well-being (maslaha) as the final index of participatory organic relations that maqasid as-shari’ah ought to project in reference to Tawhidi methodological worldview is represented.

This is a distinctively original paper in an area that has not been investigated thus far. Besides, much scope for further intellectual investigation is opened up.