Debate marks the archival accumulation of settler colonial patterns of research-making. Debaters are archivists, and the curation of the archive is and was never insulated---research is not owned, it becomes echoed across social contexts and complicates ethical stances with or against settler colonialism. We control the only tangible impact – learning is an iterative process that can be disrupted

Settler colonization trains people to see each other, the land, and knowledge as property, to be in constant insatiable competition for limited resources. For the vantage of the settler, the focus becomes maintaining those property rights, and all others are positioned in relative locations around that center, being erased from visibility or antithetically supporting the settler center while never being able to achieve its status. But even a cursory understanding of cognition, culture, and consciousness tells us that, as Bakhtin (1986) theorized, our ideas, our words, have all been said before. He put it like this: Every utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere [we understand the word ‘response’ here in the broadest sense]. Each utterance refutes affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account ... . Therefore, each kind of utterance is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speech communication. (91) Bakhtin meant response not only in the literal sense of what was just uttered before, but in a much farther-reaching sense, including people near and far in myriad contexts. Responses involve speakers and listeners. There is an answerability in the roles we have with each other. How we interact is not just about that specific moment and context, but echoes across contexts. It’s related to poststructural feminist theorizations of subjectivity (e.g., Ahmed 2006; Grosz 1994), in that the ways that we come into being in space and time, how we carry ourselves and act, are dynamic mixtures of affordances that have been shaped by and echo longstanding yet not sealed histories (Gordon 1994). Our social locations and histories have an impact on not just what we say but how we say it, and what meanings are made of our utterances. Considering educational research’s role in the perpetuation of settler-slave-Indigenous relationships, those of us employed as educational researchers are answerable to these deep trajectories. Given these deep trajectories, research and researchers who have succeeded, have been validated through settler colonial structures of schooling and, consequentially, also have contributed to creating a science that reflects misunderstandings about race, class, and gender (Jordan-Young 2011). Educational researchers must, as one example, answer to ways in which the field has allowed for learning to be lost in the pursuit of test score-driven achievement. Answerability means that we have responsibilities as speakers, listeners, and those responsibilities include stewardship of ideas and learning, not ownership. As educational researchers, how can we become and stay fundamentally answerable to the core endeavor of learning, not test score production or unachievable achievement in a stratified society? Learning, like all practices, is conducted in context so cannot be seen as a cordoned off space that is not subject to settler colonial relations. Rather, learning is fundamentally about coming into being and altering that being; in other words, it is a subjective act. Coming into being is, in essence, about being-in-relation. Therefore, the study, theorizing, and praxis of learning is the space our integrity should hold and where it has, instead, shown the most discipline-specific manifestations of settler colonialism. How educational research serves learning provides a place to more fully embody decolonial stances, as it has the potential to materially alter how educational research is conducted and for what purposes. I propose a repositioning toward learning, an alteration of researching bodies in places. For this, I must draw on work largely outside educational research. In her study of the places of learning found in media, architecture, and pedagogy, Ellsworth (2005) draws attention to the fundamentally transitional space that is learning. Rather than how the tradition of schooling has materially designed conditions for the transmittal and disciplined mimicry of expert knowledge, and educational research has, in turn and in cahoots, truncated learning to be measureable achievement, meant to be predicted, Ellsworth encourages the reader to think about the conditions that make learning possible but still unpredictable. She follows the traditions of thinkers like Grosz (1995), Massumi (1995), and Winnicott (1989), who attend to the social self as one in constant motion, constantly reconfiguring itself, learning, in relation to time, space, and materiality. She wrote: Learning never takes place in the absence of bodies, emotions, place, time, sound, image, self-experience, history. It always detours through memory, forgetting, desire, fear, pleasure, surprise, rewriting. And because learning takes place in relation, its detours take us up to and sometimes across the boundaries of habit, recognition, and the socially constructed identities within our selves. (Ellsworth 2005, 55) Through several examples, Ellsworth draws our attention to, in part, the interior changes involved in spaces designed for pedagogy. For example, in discussing how the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham sets up exterior conditions for interior alterity, Ellsworth (2005) writes, “Such places of learning implicate bodies in pedagogy in ways that the field of education has seldom explored. As they do this, they encourage and challenge us to move away from understanding the learning self merely through notions of cognition, psychology, or phenomenology or as being subjected to ideology” (6). Core to this framing is learning as a constant becoming and unbecoming, a constant inquiry and coordinate-taking, which sounds a lot like what research is supposed to be. Such a stance opens up spaces to depart from paradigms that theorize freedom, here to learn, as defined relative to restrictions, as in freedom from, but rather freedom as expansive, as in freedom to (Grosz 2010). Learning and knowledge, then, are better approached, particularly in the name of decolonization, as fundamentally quixotic, even wild (Sandoval 2008). Consider another example of learning, also imbued with research, this one from choreography. In 2009, an actor named Gregg Mozgala started to work with choreographer Tamar Rogoff (Genzlinger 2009). Mozgala has cerebral palsy, and Rogoff has no formal understanding of the biology, neuroscience, or physical therapy knowledges of cerebral palsy. But their way of working together and taking cues from his body, rather than working around it, altered deeply his way of being with his body. And what they did was use the principles of research—looking, inquiring, keeping track, and doing it all over again constantly. Like the pauses noted at the start of this article, meaning making and performance was interrupted, slowed down, with observation and bio feedback to return again. This created the space for learning and knowledge production. More specifically, Rogoff introduced Mozgala to a tension-releasing shaking technique. They began doing intensive oneon-one sessions of body work, Ms. Rogoff using her knowledge of the body and dance-training techniques to help Mr. Mozgala find individual bones, muscles, and tendons that he had thought were just collateral damage of the cerebral palsy. Much of this, in the medical field, would be understood to be evidence of neuroplasticity, and although it certainly is, it also speaks fundamentally to what research is. It is contextual, it is about constant coordination of self with other, self within self, and it is in constant motion. I offer these extra-educational examples not to barter in tacit antiintellectualism or to imply that deep, rigorous, discipline-specific study is unimportant, but to promote a radical reconfiguration of being and being-inrelation to knowledge and learning, to foreground “a politics of liberation rather than a politics of recognition” (A. Smith 2010, para 31). If we are to be other than owners invested in settler colonialism, educational research needs a radical restructuring of its relationship to knowledge. Rather than property, we should see knowledge, and more specifically knowledge about learning, as what we are answerable to. We should see ourselves as stewards not of specific pieces of knowledge, but rather of the productive and generative spaces that allow for finding knowledge. To be sure, this is not a new thought or appeal. Much of postmodern and poststructural thought embraces the idea that human practices are much more complex than can be predicted through fine-tuned measurements. Rather, my appeal is that we cease to see the problem in educational research as the lack of application of these ideologies. The problem is not simply one of failure to execute postmodernist or poststructural thought in practice, as these epistemologies do not, in and of themselves, include a critique of the genealogies of coloniality. Interrogating the logics of settler colonialism frees us to counter those logics. It also demands a productively more precise articulation of researcher reflexivity in relation to settler colonial structures. This kind of being-in-relation addresses and destabilizes potentially deterministic readings of settler colonial structures as some being settlers and others not, which in turn runs the danger of locating responsibility to counter coloniality partial rather than pervasive. Spivak (1990) addressed the less useful pauses that some of her White male students expressed when they had come to grips with their social locations, pauses that were more self-serving than answerable to structures of coloniality. She explained: I say to them: ‘Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?’ Then you begin to investigate what it is that silences you, rather than take this very deterministic position. ... From this position, then, I say you will of course not speak in the same way about the Third World material, but if you make it your task not only to learn what is going on there through language, through specific programmes of study, but also at the same time through a historical critique of your position as the investigating person, then you will see that you have earned the right to criticize, and you will be heard. (62–63).