Methodologies and Epistemologies of the South: Folktales, Flesh Memory, and Transcultural Decolonial Duoethnography
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article advances folktales as methodological tools for critical transcultural qualitative inquiry. We argue that mobilizing folktales as methodological pathways and content in transcultural qualitative research disrupts extractive, decontextualized Western research practices by foregrounding Indigenous, embodied, and storied onto-epistemologies. Using decolonial duoethnography, we place our autobiographical narratives in dialogue with the Luo folktale “Simbi Nyaima” (The Village That Sank) and the Chinese folktale “三打白骨精” (The Monkey King Beats the White Bone Demon Three Times) to show how engaging storywork sharpens the methodological imagination by recasting data analysis as a relational and ethical encounter rather than a purely procedural activity and as an embodied, affective, and dialogic practice of knowledge-making. We demonstrate that folktales can function as far more than cultural expressions that transmit knowledge; they can also operate as narrative and performative practices through which meaning is made, lived, and remembered, allowing for preserving memory and enacting research ethics grounded in communal responsibility, human–land reciprocity, and relational accountability. As such, folktales can be instrumental in actively challenging colonial hierarchies of knowing that privilege text over orality, and observation over participation, thereby fostering epistemic and cognitive justice. We propose three interlocking methodological insights as core contributions of folktale-based inquiry: thinking with rather than about the other, embracing relationality over productivity or outcome, and deepening transcultural connections and feelings. We contend that when coupled with decolonial duoethnography, folktales reposition qualitative research within the methodological traditions of the South, thereby expanding what counts as knowledge and who is validated as a knowledge producer. Ultimately, utilizing folktales as methodological utensils within a decolonial duoethnographic framework enables qualitative researchers to envision futures not only as representational but as storied, embodied, and relationally enacted, narrated through flesh memories across multiple languages, embodied ethics, and participatory, nonextractive research design.
Authors: Esther O. Ohito, Lin Wu
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,650
OpenAlex ID: W7211891718