The Demon of Hope: An Arts-based Infused Meditation on Race, Disability, and the Researcher’s Complicity with Injustice

My ethical stance demands that my research mutually benefit all research participants and that it should serve to reverse systemic policies of anti-blackness that permeate the educational system in the United States. Through publications and similar academic activities, however, my research advances my own career, but it is doubtful that it significantly advances the trajectories of the students with whom I work. Indeed, it could be argued that this imbalance in benefits advances the very system of white dominance that I claim to contest. In this arts-based, auto-ethnographic study, I document how, through the creation of pastel drawings and digital collage making, I seek to make sense of my compromised role as a white researcher in communities of color. I focus on my recent research with an 18-year-old African-American woman who was diagnosed with ADHD in the 5th grade.