Crafting a Postcritical Compass

Recounting community based work with Burundian families navigating resettlement in the United States, the author details how postcritical ethnography opened ways to understand and engage with the complexity of the families’ experiences and her own while a part of an interdisciplinary research team. Emphasizing reflexivity, the interrogation of positionality, and the importance of multiple representations to generate new understandings, the author recounts turning critique back on herself as the researcher and subsequently changing directions in the research process. She argues that an orientation to postcritical ethnography made such decisions possible and ultimately led to the creation of data for Burundian families rather than data about them.