We do not live in a post-racial society, and multiracial people are not the solution to the problem of the future of the racialized body. Research on multiracial identity focuses on "healthy" development and psychology (Renn, 2008), demonstrates a Black-white binary (Rockquemore & Brunsma, 2008), and pathologizes us with the intent to maintain monoracial (reliance on 5 racial categories) standards (Johnston & Nadal, 2010). We still err on the side of deficit-focus in educational research.
This Dissertation Project explores critical multiracial wholeness with the assumptions of wholeness, inherent inter-connectedness, in-betweenness, agency, healing, and shapeshifting through time and space and figured worlds (Holland, Lachicotte, Cain, & Skinner, 1998). This project offers insight, and pushes us to question faulty (racial) category constructions, racial formation (Omi & Winant, 2015), and acknowledges the multiple and evolving truths of y/ourselves, that other possibilities exist, and have always existed, and always will exist. I utilized theoretical framing concepts interstitial integrity (Nakashima Brock, 2007), ancestor veneration (Iwamura, 2007), nepantla/nepantlera (Anzaldúa, 2012; 2015), and liminal purgatory, to create a Critical Multiracial Wholeness Conceptual Framework / Methodology. I utilize critical autoethnography methods, which situates the lived experiences of my multiracial body as a site of inquiry in cultural contexts (Boylorn & Orbe, 2014), informed by co-interviews with other mixed race Asian people.
The Research Questions include:1) How do I/we make sense of my past, present, and future-oriented/imagined embodied mixed race whole self? 2) In what ways do I/we shape-shift (nepantla) as a whole mixed race person, through past, present, and future time and space and constructed identities? 3) In what ways do I/we
integrate/connect/create our whole mixed identities, in the past, present, and future? In what ways do we construct wholeness, own/assume, re-member, claim whole identities? 4) How do I/we enact agentive whole identities and healing-oriented work in the past, present, and future?