Reflections on Logic of Inquiry Sarah Bostic

On Martin Luther King day, 2021, I released this song. In this song I combine beats, melodies, chants, and calls to action from revolutionaries around the world, past and present. Let us never give up fighting for a better and more just tomorrow!

Today, let us celebrate the bold and continued United Struggle against intersecting systems of oppression rooted in racism, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism! From the Civil Rights Era of the 60s, to the Black Lives Matter Movement of today, from the struggles against police brutality and systemic racism faced by people of color here the US to the struggles against Western Imperialism in Yemen and the Philippines. From the calls to action given by the likes of Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Martin Luther King, to the chants of the Philippine National Democratic Movement, “makibaka! wag matakot!” (“Dare to struggle! Do not be afraid!”)

Let us continue to fight! In his passionate 1968 speech, “We Shall Overcome,” just 4 days before his assassination, MLK says “We shall overcome. Deep in my heart I do believe we shall overcome.

And with this faith we will go out and adjourn the counsels of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism and we will be able to rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. And this will be a great America! We will be the participants in making it so.” He says “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Let us be the “participants in making it so!”

In today’s episode, I’ll be briefly discussing the impacts, theoretical inspiration, and legacies of two texts, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga, and Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa.

Album artwork is a version of Johnetta Tinker's illustrations in This Bridge Called My Back, El Mundo Zurdo. The background has been edited by myself.

Beginning music is a 30 second clip of Kusanagi instrumental by ODESZA.
Closing music is a 30 second clip of Schools Out by MEMBA.

In this episode, I discuss 2 chapters from the 2018 book Other, Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology, edited by D’Lane Compton, Tey Meadow, and Kristen Schilt. Chapter 10, “Challenges, Triumphs, and Praxis: Collecting Qualitative Data on Less Visible and Marginalized Populations,” by Mignon Moore, and Chapter 11, “How Many (Queer) Cases Do I need? Thinking Through Research Design,” by D’Lane Compton

In 2018, I took a seminar with Dr. Kelli Zaytoun on the works of Gloria Anzaldúa. For a project, I took the creative route and created a musical interpretation of Anzaldúa's 7 Stages of Conocimiento  outlined in her final book Light in the Dark. The freedom, chaos, and constraints of auditory representation are all represented in this piece. For a quick reference on the 7 Stages, please refer to this link: https://borderlandslafrontera.tumblr.com/

Album artwork used for this episode was a visual representation of the 7 Stages drawn by Gloria Anzaldúa herself.

In this episode, I discuss “Deracializing Social Statistics: Problems in the Quantification of Race” by Tukufu Zuberi, from the 2008 book White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology by Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.

In this episode I discuss qualitative and quantitative methods by referring to Martyn Hammersley's chapter "Deconstructing the Qualitative-Quantitative Divide" from his 1992 book, What’s Wrong With Ethnography? Methodological Explorations.