Moving from Damage-Centered Research through Unsettling Reflexivity

The author revisits autoethnographic work in order to examine how she unwittingly incorporated damage-centered (Tuck 2009) research approaches that reproduce settler colonial understandings of marginalized communities. The paper examines the reproduction of settler colonial knowledge in ethnographic research by unearthing the inherent surveillance that partly constitutes settler colonial subjectivities in the United States. Finally, the author discusses unsettling methodological approaches as a way to disrupt damage-centered practices in ethnographic research. In the author's data collection at the U.S./Mexico border, the deeply introspective method of unsettling reflexivity—the ways we might (both indigenous and non-indigenous scholars) reproduce settler colonialism—helps challenge colonial-blind knowledge production, which has affected our understanding of colonial histories and often shaped the research process.