(Re)Orienting Ourselves Toward What Ought to Be: Democratizing Qualitative Inquiry as Hopeful World-Building

This article learns from the liberatory praxes of Martín-Baró, a Salvadoran psychologist and cofounder of liberation psychology, and Ella Baker, an American activist known for her transformative role in the Civil Rights movement. After discussing democratizing as verb , we explore three areas of engagement— the art of being together, the art of thinking together , and the art of empowering —as these: trouble consequential givens sedimented within qualitative research, and offer radical epistemic, ontological, and axiological propositions for cultivating inquiry as hopeful world-building. To end, we call forth response-ability as an ongoing ethico-political commitment foundational to democratizing inquiry during worsening and converging crises.