Kakali Bhattacharya
Biographic Data
| ID | 3587478 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kakali Bhattacharya |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kakali |
| FAMILY NAME | Bhattacharya |
| SIGNATURE | BHATTACHARYA K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Florida, Gainesville, USA |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4236-3005 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 156 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Advancing Qualitative Inquiry Toward Methodological Inclusion
As a collective of critical, minoritized, feminist, queer, and decolonial scholars who hold multiple identities simultaneously, this manuscript advances an argument for methodological inclusion grounded in axio-onto-epistemological responsibility. Writing in a dangerous sociopolitical moment marked by intensified attacks on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, the authors refuse epistemic neutrality and instead approach qualitative inquiry …
Parikrama of Presence
This autoethnographic essay explores presence and beingness through Parikrama, a contemplative circling practice serving as both a method and metaphor. Drawing on Anzaldúa’s concept of reimagining realities, I present interconnected narratives that collapse boundaries between past, present, and future into a crystallized “now” where memories and dreams merge. Through absurdity as refusal and reimagination—from a horse’s wisdom to defiant linguist…
Homecoming With Culturally Situated Philosophies of Being in Qualitative Inquiry
In this article, I enact moves of homecoming in which I reclaim knowledge that I had forgotten or never known. Drawing on wisdom traditions from my heritage, I discuss how I inform my philosophies of inquiry that are de/colonial, Par/Des(i), and transnational. I move between dreamspaces built by utopian desires and the materiality of our existence, connecting absurdity and nonsense as modes of inquiry and as critiques of and relief from multiply …
Introduction
“Walk in Grace”
Grounded in the power of our interconnectedness and humanity, this kitchen-table talk explores what it means to cultivate care, dignity, love, and respect in education. We begin by sharing personal offerings and stories that center us in this conversation, and these lead us to exploring the possibilities in showing care and feeling cared for in education spaces. We name the vitality and urgency of this work and discuss the impact of collaborating…
Superheroes and Superpowers
Teaching qualitative research brings with it some unique challenges, because students are often underexposed or unexposed to the ideas about inquiry that inform qualitative research. Additionally, teaching qualitative research classes online may lead to the perception of sacrificing quality and complexity. Educators and researchers charged with creating such classes face the task of learning a new medium of instruction in addition to the challeng…
Connecting with Water Spirits
This chapter can be read as a critical and spirit- and ancestor-driven autoethnography of the author’s experiences as a woman born in India and educated in India and the U.S. She offers parallel narratives and rhyming scenes, moving between two timelines, to demonstrate the ways in which power works socially, culturally, materially, and spiritually. She argues that we exist in many nurturing, spirit-strengthening relationships that exceed the mat…
Embodying Moral Discourses Through Arts-Based Methodologies
Understanding Entangled Relationships Between Un/Interrogated Privileges
I explore how using a bag portrait activity, duoethnography, and a mixed-medium layering method of arts-informed analysis in a doctoral-level qualitative research class enhanced students' understanding of their un/interrogated privileges, relationship between Self and Other, and the role of creativity in inquiry. Using pecha kucha as a medium and a message allowed me to integrate visual information and de/colonial and anti-oppressionist narrative…
Nonsense, Play, and Liminality
In this article, I put postintentionality in dialogue with de/colonizing ontoepistemologies to identify where these perspectives converge and diverge. Informed by Vagle's notion that a particular idea may have virtue in one discipline while considered a given in another, I explore the possibilities of hybridized, interdisciplinary work that crosses various borders. By placing these fluid disciplinary discourses in dialogue, I identify a shift in …
Reworking Prejudice in Qualitative Inquiry With Gadamer and De/Colonizing Onto-Epistemologies
In this article, the authors explore prejudice from Gadamerian and de/colonial perspectives, grounded in methodological discourses of qualitative inquiry. Using a vignette of a typical conversation in a dissertation defense, the authors perform a Gadamerian and de/colonial reading informed by Anzaldúa, Mohanty, Smith, and Chakravorty Spivak. Through these readings the authors enact a fusion of horizons, a possibility forwarded by Gadamer as a cri…
Theorizing from the Streets
In this chapter, the author demonstrates that the process of unlearning using the key idea of theorizing from the streets. Theorizing from the streets highlights the ways in which the unlearning of colonial and privileged discourses has unfolded in the author's scholarly work in qualitative inquiry engaging in knowledge-making expansively within and beyond academia. Consequently, theorizing from the streets became a conscious effort to integrate …
Migratory Patterns of a Fish Doodle
Border crossing, migrations, and desire are deeply interconnected. Using a Desi historiography, I trace the entanglement of migration and desire, examining both what is made possible through geopolitical, emotional, and ideological border crossings and what lies in the wreckage of certain crossings. Using the trope of fish doodles, I trace the intractability of desire and highlight how the distortions inherent in migratory experience shatter illu…
Love as De/Colonial Onto-Epistemology
Chocolate Kisses and Eyes Watching
In this critical autoethnography, I highlight memories of sexual repression, liberation, and orientation within the cultural context of a Desi-Brown woman from India. I do so not to further exoticize myself, although that happens inevitably, regardless of what I write, but to demonstrate that such issues cross cultural borders and people in various sexual orientations are often silenced, shamed, and disciplined, leading to various forms of accomm…
Teaching Qualitative Inquiry in the Era of the Big Tent
Teachers of qualitative research tasked with conveying the complexity and diversity of paradigmatic difference to novice researchers face challenges, including how to convey complexity without misrepresenting topics, facilitating respectful and ethical dialogue among students, and finding sufficient time within the curriculum to examine multiple paradigms. This special issue presents articles that consider how teachers of qualitative inquiry envi…
Contemplation, Imagination, and Post-Oppositional Approaches Carving the Path of Qualitative Inquiry
In this article I explore how paradigmatic polyphony can be enacted in a graduate-level qualitative research class through post-oppositional and contemplative approaches. Specifically, I use the notion of nepantlera, an Anzaldúan concept for a nomadic threshold traveler across multiple worlds, to explore ways of understanding and teaching paradigmatic polyphony. These approaches are enacted in a pedagogical narrative through arts-based activities…
Coloring Memories and Imaginations of 'Home
In this postcolonial gendered autoethnography, I critically examine how my understanding of home was first imprinted and how, once dislocated, I have negotiated my desire for and imagination of home. I argue that colonialism and patriarchy are interconnected structures of oppression that contribute to individuals' understandings of home. For transnationals, a dislocated understanding of home need not result from migration but can arise long befor…
Expanding Beyond Public and Private Realities
In two voices, we evoke an Anzaldúan framing of autoethnography, or what Anzaldúa named autohistoria-teoría, to investigate our engagement in difficult conversations about current political events at home and at school. More than writing self into existence, autohistoria-teoría represents hybridized creativity and bridge building that uses life stories to generate innovative insights and theories. We see this work as deeply excavatory shadow work…
Fundamentals of Qualitative Research
This book is the road map to proficiency and development in the field of qualitative research. Borrowing from a wealth of experience teaching introductory qualitative research courses, author Kakali Bhattacharya lays out a dynamic program for learning different paradigms of inquiry, empowering students to recognize the convergence of popular research methodologies as well as the nuances and complexities that set each of them apart. Her book: supp…
Twenty Years of Technology Integration and Foreign Language Teaching
The evolution of the use of technology in the foreign language classroom has proven to be a challenge. In this paper, we highlight a study whose purpose is to understand how one retired foreign language educator reflected on the ways in which she integrated different modes of technology in her classroom. In this interview study, the participant discussed how technology has evolved in the span of her twenty-year career as a foreign language educat…
Power, Race, and Higher Education
"Power, Race, and Higher Education is a parallel narrative written by two scholars. Kakali Bhattacharya, who is a South Asian woman who immigrated to the United States to pursue her graduate degrees and eventually became an academic. Kent Gillen is a White man who focuses on completing his doctoral studies under Kakali’s supervision. Kent comes to a crossroad where he has to interrogate his sociocultural position, how he benefits from a White sup…
Mixing mediums, mixing selves
In this paper, in collaboration with a friend, who is an artist and a licensed counselor, I use a mixed-medium art project to enact Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorizations of nepantlera. I do so by making visible how I operate from the liminal space that Anzaldúa terms nepantla, as a transnational woman of color in US higher education. Using Anzaldúa’s framework of autohistoria-teoría, I integrate fragmented storytelling, art-making, and theorization, ex…
The Vulnerable Academic
In this article, I use vulnerable personal narratives to demonstrate how de/colonizing and microaggressive discourses intersect in higher education in the United States. Arguing that vulnerability offers a means of reconceptualizing and rethinking possibilities for addressing social inequities in higher education, I demonstrate how colonizing and decolonizing discourses exist always already in relation to one another. I recount my decade-long jou…
Never a Yellow Bird, Always a Blue Bird
This article is a response to calls for more first - person accounts from researchers using narrative formats to interpret data. The authors examine the practice of ethnodrama as a means of exploring and analyzing the experiences of a Latina public - school student in a small South Texas coastal town during the 1950s and 1960s as she attempted to negotiate multiple ethnic spaces while resisting traditional behavioral expectations representative o…
The Vulnerable Academic
In this article, I use vulnerable personal narratives to demonstrate how de/colonizing and microaggressive discourses intersect in higher education in the United States. Arguing that vulnerability offers a means of reconceptualizing and rethinking possibilities for addressing social inequities in higher education, I demonstrate how colonizing and decolonizing discourses exist always already in relation to one another. I recount my decade-long jou…
Consenting to the Consent Form
Grounded in the author's dissertation study, this article presents the negotiations of the formal and informal expectations arising out of interpretations of the consent form. These negotiations disrupt the structure of qualitative inquiry and its associated guidelines for academic rigor, trustworthiness, and transferability. If the understanding of the consent form and its meaning is contingent and permanently deferred, then how does the relatio…
Coloring Memories and Imaginations of 'Home
In this postcolonial gendered autoethnography, I critically examine how my understanding of home was first imprinted and how, once dislocated, I have negotiated my desire for and imagination of home. I argue that colonialism and patriarchy are interconnected structures of oppression that contribute to individuals' understandings of home. For transnationals, a dislocated understanding of home need not result from migration but can arise long befor…
Negotiating Shuttling Between Transnational Experiences
Using several approaches of data collection over a period of 10 months, the author combines participant observations, conversational interviews, photoelicitations, and various other serendipitous types of information gathering in performative spaces of actions and re-actions, demonstrating the contestatory negotiations of two transnational female Indian graduate students who had been in the United States for no longer than a year. Methodologicall…
Diving Deep Into Oppositional Beliefs
In this article using notions of liminality, I evoke Anzaldúa's theorizing of nepantlera to demonstrate the pain caused by various oppositional discourses and to posit that self-healing is the key to transformative works in social justice. Beyond discussing border crossings, multiplicity, and disrupting polarizing binaries, I enact the path of becoming a nepantlera by demonstrating trans-temporal healing through writing a letter to my younger sel…
Nonsense, Play, and Liminality
In this article, I put postintentionality in dialogue with de/colonizing ontoepistemologies to identify where these perspectives converge and diverge. Informed by Vagle's notion that a particular idea may have virtue in one discipline while considered a given in another, I explore the possibilities of hybridized, interdisciplinary work that crosses various borders. By placing these fluid disciplinary discourses in dialogue, I identify a shift in …
Reworking Prejudice in Qualitative Inquiry With Gadamer and De/Colonizing Onto-Epistemologies
In this article, the authors explore prejudice from Gadamerian and de/colonial perspectives, grounded in methodological discourses of qualitative inquiry. Using a vignette of a typical conversation in a dissertation defense, the authors perform a Gadamerian and de/colonial reading informed by Anzaldúa, Mohanty, Smith, and Chakravorty Spivak. Through these readings the authors enact a fusion of horizons, a possibility forwarded by Gadamer as a cri…
Mixing mediums, mixing selves
In this paper, in collaboration with a friend, who is an artist and a licensed counselor, I use a mixed-medium art project to enact Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorizations of nepantlera. I do so by making visible how I operate from the liminal space that Anzaldúa terms nepantla, as a transnational woman of color in US higher education. Using Anzaldúa’s framework of autohistoria-teoría, I integrate fragmented storytelling, art-making, and theorization, ex…
Love as De/Colonial Onto-Epistemology
Cirque du Silence
In this performative play without speech, the author demonstrates the various acrobatic negotiations she makes in her everyday life as a transnational feminist educational researcher who was born in India, raised in Canada, and educated and employed in higher education in the U.S. The author uses silence as a space of reflection, resistance, adaptation, retreat, and freedom in order to challenge the duality of silence and voice where silence is s…
Expanding Beyond Public and Private Realities
In two voices, we evoke an Anzaldúan framing of autoethnography, or what Anzaldúa named autohistoria-teoría, to investigate our engagement in difficult conversations about current political events at home and at school. More than writing self into existence, autohistoria-teoría represents hybridized creativity and bridge building that uses life stories to generate innovative insights and theories. We see this work as deeply excavatory shadow work…
Understanding Entangled Relationships Between Un/Interrogated Privileges
I explore how using a bag portrait activity, duoethnography, and a mixed-medium layering method of arts-informed analysis in a doctoral-level qualitative research class enhanced students' understanding of their un/interrogated privileges, relationship between Self and Other, and the role of creativity in inquiry. Using pecha kucha as a medium and a message allowed me to integrate visual information and de/colonial and anti-oppressionist narrative…
Embodying Moral Discourses Through Arts-Based Methodologies
Cultural Brokers and Aliens
Reflecting on the omnirelevant categories that inform our lives, we narrate our embodied experiences at the intersection of the social axes of differences informed by being transnationals in the United States. With a strong difference in our backgrounds as transnationals in the United States, we reflect on markers that highlight differences to incite resistance, acceptance, interrogation, and accommodation. Following Richardson's format of writin…
Twenty Years of Technology Integration and Foreign Language Teaching
The evolution of the use of technology in the foreign language classroom has proven to be a challenge. In this paper, we highlight a study whose purpose is to understand how one retired foreign language educator reflected on the ways in which she integrated different modes of technology in her classroom. In this interview study, the participant discussed how technology has evolved in the span of her twenty-year career as a foreign language educat…
Never a Yellow Bird, Always a Blue Bird
This article is a response to calls for more first - person accounts from researchers using narrative formats to interpret data. The authors examine the practice of ethnodrama as a means of exploring and analyzing the experiences of a Latina public - school student in a small South Texas coastal town during the 1950s and 1960s as she attempted to negotiate multiple ethnic spaces while resisting traditional behavioral expectations representative o…
Consenting to the Consent Form
Grounded in the author's dissertation study, this article presents the negotiations of the formal and informal expectations arising out of interpretations of the consent form. These negotiations disrupt the structure of qualitative inquiry and its associated guidelines for academic rigor, trustworthiness, and transferability. If the understanding of the consent form and its meaning is contingent and permanently deferred, then how does the relatio…
Performing to/Against Anti-Intellectual Discourses in Higher Education in the U.S
In this paper the author critiques the ways in which anti-intellectual discourses discipline qualitative inquiry in higher education in the U.S. Written through multiple embodied performative narratives, the author presents de/colonizing possibilities informed by transnational feminism and critical pedagogy. By focusing on the historicity of particular moments, the author demonstrates how she works and plays with methodological and substantive im…
Negotiating Shuttling Between Transnational Experiences
Using several approaches of data collection over a period of 10 months, the author combines participant observations, conversational interviews, photoelicitations, and various other serendipitous types of information gathering in performative spaces of actions and re-actions, demonstrating the contestatory negotiations of two transnational female Indian graduate students who had been in the United States for no longer than a year. Methodologicall…
Voices, Silences, and Telling Secrets
In this paper, I discuss how the intersection of qualitative inquiry and poetic-inquiry grounded in arts-based research allows me to construct knowledge about self and the transnational shuttling of two female graduate students from India during their first year of education in the United States. Resonating with the participants’ experiences, I describe the messiness of being an insider-outsider researcher and use arts-based research to portray t…
Cirque du Silence
In this performative play without speech, the author demonstrates the various acrobatic negotiations she makes in her everyday life as a transnational feminist educational researcher who was born in India, raised in Canada, and educated and employed in higher education in the U.S. The author uses silence as a space of reflection, resistance, adaptation, retreat, and freedom in order to challenge the duality of silence and voice where silence is s…
Cultural Brokers and Aliens
Reflecting on the omnirelevant categories that inform our lives, we narrate our embodied experiences at the intersection of the social axes of differences informed by being transnationals in the United States. With a strong difference in our backgrounds as transnationals in the United States, we reflect on markers that highlight differences to incite resistance, acceptance, interrogation, and accommodation. Following Richardson's format of writin…
Never a Yellow Bird, Always a Blue Bird
This article is a response to calls for more first - person accounts from researchers using narrative formats to interpret data. The authors examine the practice of ethnodrama as a means of exploring and analyzing the experiences of a Latina public - school student in a small South Texas coastal town during the 1950s and 1960s as she attempted to negotiate multiple ethnic spaces while resisting traditional behavioral expectations representative o…
Diving Deep Into Oppositional Beliefs
In this article using notions of liminality, I evoke Anzaldúa's theorizing of nepantlera to demonstrate the pain caused by various oppositional discourses and to posit that self-healing is the key to transformative works in social justice. Beyond discussing border crossings, multiplicity, and disrupting polarizing binaries, I enact the path of becoming a nepantlera by demonstrating trans-temporal healing through writing a letter to my younger sel…
Power, Race, and Higher Education
"Power, Race, and Higher Education is a parallel narrative written by two scholars. Kakali Bhattacharya, who is a South Asian woman who immigrated to the United States to pursue her graduate degrees and eventually became an academic. Kent Gillen is a White man who focuses on completing his doctoral studies under Kakali’s supervision. Kent comes to a crossroad where he has to interrogate his sociocultural position, how he benefits from a White sup…
Mixing mediums, mixing selves
In this paper, in collaboration with a friend, who is an artist and a licensed counselor, I use a mixed-medium art project to enact Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorizations of nepantlera. I do so by making visible how I operate from the liminal space that Anzaldúa terms nepantla, as a transnational woman of color in US higher education. Using Anzaldúa’s framework of autohistoria-teoría, I integrate fragmented storytelling, art-making, and theorization, ex…
The Vulnerable Academic
In this article, I use vulnerable personal narratives to demonstrate how de/colonizing and microaggressive discourses intersect in higher education in the United States. Arguing that vulnerability offers a means of reconceptualizing and rethinking possibilities for addressing social inequities in higher education, I demonstrate how colonizing and decolonizing discourses exist always already in relation to one another. I recount my decade-long jou…
Fundamentals of Qualitative Research
This book is the road map to proficiency and development in the field of qualitative research. Borrowing from a wealth of experience teaching introductory qualitative research courses, author Kakali Bhattacharya lays out a dynamic program for learning different paradigms of inquiry, empowering students to recognize the convergence of popular research methodologies as well as the nuances and complexities that set each of them apart. Her book: supp…
Twenty Years of Technology Integration and Foreign Language Teaching
The evolution of the use of technology in the foreign language classroom has proven to be a challenge. In this paper, we highlight a study whose purpose is to understand how one retired foreign language educator reflected on the ways in which she integrated different modes of technology in her classroom. In this interview study, the participant discussed how technology has evolved in the span of her twenty-year career as a foreign language educat…
Teaching Qualitative Inquiry in the Era of the Big Tent
Teachers of qualitative research tasked with conveying the complexity and diversity of paradigmatic difference to novice researchers face challenges, including how to convey complexity without misrepresenting topics, facilitating respectful and ethical dialogue among students, and finding sufficient time within the curriculum to examine multiple paradigms. This special issue presents articles that consider how teachers of qualitative inquiry envi…
Contemplation, Imagination, and Post-Oppositional Approaches Carving the Path of Qualitative Inquiry
In this article I explore how paradigmatic polyphony can be enacted in a graduate-level qualitative research class through post-oppositional and contemplative approaches. Specifically, I use the notion of nepantlera, an Anzaldúan concept for a nomadic threshold traveler across multiple worlds, to explore ways of understanding and teaching paradigmatic polyphony. These approaches are enacted in a pedagogical narrative through arts-based activities…
Coloring Memories and Imaginations of 'Home
In this postcolonial gendered autoethnography, I critically examine how my understanding of home was first imprinted and how, once dislocated, I have negotiated my desire for and imagination of home. I argue that colonialism and patriarchy are interconnected structures of oppression that contribute to individuals' understandings of home. For transnationals, a dislocated understanding of home need not result from migration but can arise long befor…
Expanding Beyond Public and Private Realities
In two voices, we evoke an Anzaldúan framing of autoethnography, or what Anzaldúa named autohistoria-teoría, to investigate our engagement in difficult conversations about current political events at home and at school. More than writing self into existence, autohistoria-teoría represents hybridized creativity and bridge building that uses life stories to generate innovative insights and theories. We see this work as deeply excavatory shadow work…
Theorizing from the Streets
In this chapter, the author demonstrates that the process of unlearning using the key idea of theorizing from the streets. Theorizing from the streets highlights the ways in which the unlearning of colonial and privileged discourses has unfolded in the author's scholarly work in qualitative inquiry engaging in knowledge-making expansively within and beyond academia. Consequently, theorizing from the streets became a conscious effort to integrate …
Migratory Patterns of a Fish Doodle
Border crossing, migrations, and desire are deeply interconnected. Using a Desi historiography, I trace the entanglement of migration and desire, examining both what is made possible through geopolitical, emotional, and ideological border crossings and what lies in the wreckage of certain crossings. Using the trope of fish doodles, I trace the intractability of desire and highlight how the distortions inherent in migratory experience shatter illu…
Love as De/Colonial Onto-Epistemology
Chocolate Kisses and Eyes Watching
In this critical autoethnography, I highlight memories of sexual repression, liberation, and orientation within the cultural context of a Desi-Brown woman from India. I do so not to further exoticize myself, although that happens inevitably, regardless of what I write, but to demonstrate that such issues cross cultural borders and people in various sexual orientations are often silenced, shamed, and disciplined, leading to various forms of accomm…
Superheroes and Superpowers
Teaching qualitative research brings with it some unique challenges, because students are often underexposed or unexposed to the ideas about inquiry that inform qualitative research. Additionally, teaching qualitative research classes online may lead to the perception of sacrificing quality and complexity. Educators and researchers charged with creating such classes face the task of learning a new medium of instruction in addition to the challeng…
Connecting with Water Spirits
This chapter can be read as a critical and spirit- and ancestor-driven autoethnography of the author’s experiences as a woman born in India and educated in India and the U.S. She offers parallel narratives and rhyming scenes, moving between two timelines, to demonstrate the ways in which power works socially, culturally, materially, and spiritually. She argues that we exist in many nurturing, spirit-strengthening relationships that exceed the mat…
Embodying Moral Discourses Through Arts-Based Methodologies
Understanding Entangled Relationships Between Un/Interrogated Privileges
I explore how using a bag portrait activity, duoethnography, and a mixed-medium layering method of arts-informed analysis in a doctoral-level qualitative research class enhanced students' understanding of their un/interrogated privileges, relationship between Self and Other, and the role of creativity in inquiry. Using pecha kucha as a medium and a message allowed me to integrate visual information and de/colonial and anti-oppressionist narrative…
Sociology (28 works) · Aesthetics (18 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Social science (14 works) · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics (13 works) · Art (12 works) · Participatory Visual Research Methods (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Narrative (10 works)