Conference session

This proposed paper presentation offers a novel methodological paradigm for transnational qualitative research for social justice using media and digital cultural archives. The interdisciplinary approach is borne from the author’s dissertation work seeking to internationalize curricula for social justice using a multi-sited global ethnographic framework (Burawoy, 2000; Marcus, 1998) through transnational feminist theory, globalization studies, and social justice education. Exploring social conditions on a global scale, attuned to the goals of social justice and equality, requires a methodological approach that does not reduce subjects’ unique and highly contextual experiences to universal, monolithic snapshots or events. Considering this, this multi-sited global ethnographic approach provides a methodological framework through which to observe and analyze global phenomena, such as the racialized, classed, gendered, and heteronormative foundations and reproductive discourses of globalization and capitalist patriarchies (Swarr & Nagar, 2010), and their differential impacts on subjects around the world. To do so, the approach relies on media and digital cultural archives from around the world to weave together local acts of resistance, observing and analyzing globally circulating systems (capitalism, colonialisms, patriarchies, etc.), and “using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and find out their point of application and the methods used” (Foucault, 1982, 780). This paper presentation aims to promote the approach across social scientific and humanistic disciplines as a potent manner of quilting (Das, 2025) differently positioned global subjects’ experiences in pursuit of relational understandings across borders.