ARDR Capstone Students
Alejandra Salazar Salame
Madres Unidas en Acción: An In-progress CBPR Project
My ARDR capstone afforded me the opportunity to work alongside experienced scholars dedicated to working alongside marginalized communities in the inclusion of their voices in research. The work completed during my capstone has greatly informed my proposed doctoral dissertation and my approach to all future research.
Eden Langston
A QuantCrit Approach: Centering Teachers Beyond the Numbers
My ARDR capstone was a pivotal moment in my growth as both a scholar and practitioner. Engaging deeply with QuantCrit challenged me to reconsider the assumptions behind quantitative methods and to recognize how data is always shaped by context, power, and history. The process pushed me to confront my own positionality and to remain reflexive about the ways bias and interpretation influence every stage of research. Conversations with critical friends encouraged me to test ideas, question categories, and analyses while reflecting on how equity and justice could guide methodological choices. Rather than viewing numbers as neutral, I came to understand them as narratives that must be handled with care, transparency, and accountability. This experience not only sharpened my methodological lens but also strengthened my commitment to producing research that disrupts inequity and re-centers the humanity of those whose lives and stories often get reduced to data.
Holly Tate
Nurturing Critical Consciousness in the Pursuit of Critical Consciousness
"My ARDR capstone experience was transformative, a profound exploration into the depths of self-discovery as a critical researcher. The invaluable collaboration with critical friends helped me to navigate personal positions, biases, and power within my research. Dr. Letiecq served as a facilitator of inquiry, allowing me the reflective space not only to interrogate my researcher positionality but also to nurture my criticality through a highly intellectual cycle of reading, discussing, and questioning. My capstone project summarized a semester of personal growth, and the process is one I will hold with me as I continue my work as a critical researcher."
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What is ARDR?
The Anti-Racist and Decolonizing research (ARDR) Collaborative supports the advancement of research methodologies and the administration of the ARDR concentration of the CEHD Research Methods graduate certificate.
What is ARDR's Mission?
Our Mission is...
"To create space for and nurture a collaborative of resistant knowledge creator to disrupt institutions, structures, and mechanisms of inequity and injustice, and reclaim social inquiry to advance justice and peace."
What good work do we hope to foment in the world?
Our Vision is...
- To stop cultural genocide
- To sustain democracy, humanity and promote peace
- To save the species and protect the land
- To end oppression and marginalization of Black, Indigenous, immigrant and other People of Color
- To advance critical research and praxis...to take action
- To promote solidarity and community cohesiveness
Faculty Advisors
ARDR Advisory Board
ARDR Planning Committee
ARDR Affiliates
If you are struggling to find someone in your field, department, or discipline who can act as a sounding board, research partner, or mentor, consider contacting some of our affiliates – people at Mason who have taken our workshops and have self-identified as affiliates.
If you would like to be added to this list and are dedicated to helping lift others in this effort, please contact Marvin Powell or Bethany Letiecq.