The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education 2020052763, 2020052764, 9780367174675, 9780367174682, 9780429056963

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The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education

The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education approaches theory as a method for doing research, rather than as a background framework. Educational research often reduces theory to a framework used only to analyze empirically collected data. In this view theories are not considered methods, and studies that apply them as such are not given credence. This misunderstanding is primarily due to an empiricist stance of educational research, one that lacks understanding of how theories operate methodologically and presumes positivism is the only valid form of research. This limited perspective has serious consequences on essential academic activities: publication, tenure and promotion, grants, and academic awards. Expanding what constitutes methods in critical theoretical educational research, this edited book details 21 educationally just theories and demonstrates how theories are applied as method to various subfields in education. From critical race hermeneutics to Bakhtin’s dialogism, each chapter explicates the ideological roots of said theory while teaching us how to apply the theory as method. This edited book is the first of its kind in educational research. To date, no other book details educationally just theories and clearly explicates how those theories can be applied as methods. With contributions from scholars in the fields of education and qualitative research worldwide, the book will appeal to researchers and graduate students. Cheryl E. Matias is a full professor and Director of Secondary Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on race, whiteness, and education, and she was awarded the 2020 American Educational Research Association Division K Mid-Career award. She’s a motherscholar of three.

The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education

Edited by Cheryl E. Matias

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Cheryl E. Matias; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Cheryl E. Matias to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Matias, Cheryl E., editor. Title: The handbook of critical theoretical research methods in education / edited by Cheryl E. Matias. Identifiers: LCCN 2020052763 (print) | LCCN 2020052764 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367174675 (Hardback) | ISBN 9780367174682 (Paperback) | ISBN 9780429056963 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Education—Research—Methodolgy. Classification: LCC LB1028 .H314 2021 (print) | LCC LB1028 (ebook) | DDC 370.72—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052763 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052764 ISBN: 978-0-367-17467-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-17468-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-05696-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For educational researchers, may your research never be limited by a method

Contents

Author biographies Acknowledgments Preface: “Researching under the mortal realities of pandemic life”

x xviii xx

C H E RY L E . M ATI AS

Introduction

1

C H E RY L E . M ATI AS

1 Critical race hermeneutics: a theoretical method for researching the unconscious of white supremacy in education

15

RI C K Y LE E A LLE N

2 The postdigital challenge of critical educational research

31

P E TAR JA N D RI Ć

3 Aspiring to a sociogenic phenomenology: a theoretical method in emancipatory research

49

DAV I D F. LAV I SCO UNT AND E LI ZAB E TH K . JE FFER S

4 A fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability as a theoretical method to investigate ‘difficult knowledge’

64

M I C H ALI N O S Z E MB Y LAS

5 Uncovering internalized whiteness through Critical Race counterstories: navigating our experiences in the state of Texas SO C O RRO M ORALE S, SO NYA M. ALE MÁN, AN D E N RI QU E ALE MÁN, JR .

79

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Contents

6 Phenomenology of racial embodiment: method and the study of white humanity in education

95

G A RD N E R S E AWRI GHT

7 Visually mapping totality: Fredric Jameson’s Greimassian square

112

T Y SO N E . L E WI S

8 Cultivating culturally situated theorizing in educational research: challenging imperialistic curriculum and training

126

K AK A LI B H ATTACHARYA

9 Synthesizing theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative research: metasynthesis as a methodology for education

142

K I P AU S T I N HI NTO N, ALCI O NE N. O STO RGA, A N D C H R I STI AN E . ZÚÑI GA

10 Agential realism: applying Barad’s ontology to reconceptualize teaching and learning mathematics for social justice

161

L E E M E LV I N PE RALTA

11 Toward a transgressive decolonial hermeneutics in activist education research

182

JA I RO I . F Ú N E Z- FLO RE S

12 Thinking with habitus in the study of learner identities

199

G A RT H S TAHL AND SARAH MCD O NALD

13 Theorizing with assemblage: context and text in youth studies

212

T H O M A S A LB RI GHT AND KO RI NA M. JO CSON

14 Using critical race spatial method to understand disparities in controlled choice plans

226

A M O S J. LE E AND ALI CE Y. LE E

15 Critical chronotopic analysis for disrupting whitewashedness in TESOL teacher education Y I N L AM L E E - JO HNSO N

243

Contents 16 Postformal method for critical education research

ix 259

T RI C I A K RE SS AND RO B E RT LAK E

17 Black lives mattering in and out of schools: anti-Black racism, racial violence, and a hope for Black imagination in educational research

272

C O U RT N E Y M AULD I N AND LAMAR L. JO HNSO N

18 Beyond the individual: deploying the sociological imagination as a research method in the neoliberal university

284

JAC O B K E LLE Y, AND RE A ARCE - TRI GATTI , AND A DA HAYN ES

19 Unapologetic Black Inquiry: centering Blackness in education research

303

J E LI SA S. C L ARK AND D E RRI CK R. B RO O MS

20 Paying emotional tolls: politics, poststructural narrative theory, and research on race and racism subjects for emotional well-being

319

TAN E T H A G ROSLAND AND LASO NJA RO B E RTS

21 Meditations on experience: the politics and ethics of “not-knowing” in educational research

336

B E LÉ N H E RN A ND O - LLO RÉ NS

Index

355

Author biographies

Thomas Albright is a PhD candidate in education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research and teaching interests include youth participatory action research, school-community partnerships, ethnic studies, social justice education, and postqualitative methodologies. His forthcoming dissertation is titled “Agential Schooling: Posthumanism, YPAR, and Spooky Entanglements.” Enrique Alemán, Jr., PhD, is the Lillian Radford Endowed Professor of Education and Director of the Tomorrow’s Leaders Program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. His research agenda includes studying the impact of educational policies on Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x students and communities, the utilization of Critical Race Theories (CRTs) in educational research, and the application of community-based research methods as a way of creating pathways to higher education. He is published in Harvard Educational Review, Race Ethnicity and Education, Educational Administration Quarterly, and Equity, Excellence and Education, as well as in numerous chapters in edited books. Sonya M. Alemán, PhD, is an associate professor in the Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department and Mexican American Studies Program at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She studies media representations of communities of color, alternative media content produced by communities of color. She draws on critical race theory and Chicana feminism to inform her scholarship and pedagogy. She is published in Critical Studies in Media Communication; Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Equity and Excellence in Education; Review of Research in Education; and International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Ricky Lee Allen, PhD, is a free, independent scholar after serving two decades as an institutional academic. He earned his doctorate in Urban Schooling from UCLA. He studies race and whiteness through the lenses of critical race theory, critical theory, and critical whiteness studies. He has twice won AERA’s Outstanding Reviewer Award. He has published in journals such as Educational Theory, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Social Identities, and Urban Education.

Author biographies

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Andrea Arce-Trigatti, PhD, is an interdisciplinary educational researcher interested in diversity, equity, cultural studies, and social justice issues in engineering education, pedagogy, and educational policy. She is a founding member of the award-winning Renaissance Foundry Research Group and co-advisor for the Eta Nu Chapter of Kappa Delta Pi and the IMPACT Tennessee Tech community organization. Working with underrepresented, rural, and first-generation student populations, she is involved with several community-based research to practice projects centering on student representation, community outreach, student success and resilience, as well as pedagogical practices for holistic learning. Kakali Bhattacharya, PhD, is a multiple award-winning professor at University of Florida, housed in the Research, Evaluation, and Measurement Program. She is the 2018 winner of AERA’s Mid-Career Scholar of Color Award and the 2018 winner of AERA’s Mentoring Award from Division G: Social Context of Education. Her co-authored text with Kent Gillen, Power, Race, and Higher Education: A Cross-Cultural Parallel Narrative has won a 2017 Outstanding Publication Award from AERA (SIG 168) and a 2018 Outstanding Book Award from International Congress of Qualitative Research. She is recognized by Diverse magazine as one of the top 25 women in higher education. Derrick R. Brooms, PhD, is faculty in Sociology and Africana Studies at the University of Cincinnati and serves as a youth worker as well. His research and activism focuses on educational equity, race and racism, diversity and inclusion, and identity. His education research primarily centers on Black men and boys’ pathways to and through college as well as on their engagement on campus and identity development. He is author of Being Black, Being Male on Campus, is founding book series editor of “Critical Race Studies in Education” for SUNY Press, and has been acknowledged for his community service, diversity work, and mentoring. Jelisa S. Clark, PhD, earned her doctorate in Applied Sociology from the University of Louisville and is currently an adjunct assistant professor at Fayetteville State University. During her graduate studies Dr. Clark was the recipient of the Southern Regional Educational Board Doctoral Fellowship. Her research and teaching are focused on the intersection of race and gender in education. She is a co-author of Empowering Men of Color on Campus: Building Student Community in Higher Education, which examines how Men of Color negotiate college through their participation in a male success program. Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, PhD, is an independent activist researcher. He is the recipient of the 2019 AERA’s Minority Dissertation Fellowship. His research is informed by decolonial, hermeneutic, curriculum, and collective action theory. He has a particular interest in Latin American student movements and the ways in which student activists construct political identities,

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Author biographies

knowledges, pedagogies, and practices of resistance within and beyond the university. His dissertation is titled “A Critical Ethnography of University Student Activism in Postcoup Honduras: Knowledges, Social Practices of Resistance, and the Democratization/Decolonization of the University.” Tanetha Grosland, PhD, is an assistant professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of South Florida. She uses critical/ poststructural theory to research policy and political narratives in education. Her principal focus chronicles these concerning emotion, emotion rhetoric, and critical educators’ everyday political and policy experiences. She has published articles in the Journal of Education Policy; Race Ethnicity and Education; and a co-edited book on Feminism and Intersectionality in Academia: Women’s Narratives and Experiences in Higher Education. Ada Haynes, PhD, is an award-winning professor of Sociology and the CoDirector for the Center for Assessment and Improvement of Learning at Tennessee Tech University. Her research agenda includes diversity, cultural studies, gender, immigration, social justice, equity in science, technology, engineering, mathematics education, and critical thinking. Several of her research projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation. She is the author of Poverty in Central Appalachia: Underdevelopment and Exploitation. Belén Hernando-Lloréns, PhD, is an assistant professor in Teacher Education at San Diego State University. Her scholarship explores the historical production of racial and linguistic diversity as a pedagogical problem, in the US and in Spain. Her research is located at the intersection of curriculum studies, cultural studies, and race and critical language studies in education. Her research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School, among other institutions. Her dissertation received the AERA-Division D Exemplary Work from Promising Scholars. Her work has been published in Curriculum Inquiry and Journal of Curriculum Studies. Kip Austin Hinton, PhD, is an associate professor in the Bilingual and Literacy Studies Department at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He conducts empirical and theoretical research on educational equity, borderlands, race, and multiliteracies. He is especially interested in academic and non-academic work to improve universities’ support for undocumented immigrant students. Petar Jandrić, PhD, is professor at the Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Croatia, and Visiting Professor at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, previously at Croatian Academic and Research Network, National e-Science Centre at the University of Edinburgh, Glasgow School of Art, and Cass School of Education at the University of East London. Petar’s research interests are situated at the post-disciplinary intersections between

Author biographies

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technologies, pedagogies and the society, and research methodologies of his choice are inter-, trans-, and anti-disciplinarity. He is Editor-in-Chief of Postdigital Science and Education journal and book series. Elizabeth K. Jeffers, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of New Orleans. For close to a decade, she taught in New Orleans public schools, and in this role, she worked with community organizations for the return of locally governed, community-based public schools. As such, her scholarship focuses on collaborative and ethical research methodologies, racial equity and school choice, and culturally relevant and sustaining school leadership development. Korina M. Jocson, PhD, is an associate professor of education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research focuses on youth literacies (inclusive of media culture and technology), critical social inquiry, and equity issues in education. She is the author of Youth Media Matters: Participatory Cultures and Literacies in Education and Youth Poets: Empowering Literacies in and out of Schools. Lamar L. Johnson, PhD, is an associate professor of language and literacy for linguistic and racial justice in the Department of English at Michigan State University. His work explores the intricate intersections of language, literacy, anti-Black racism, Blackness, and education. He was the recipient of the 2017 Promising Researcher Award, the recipient of the 2018 Edwin M. Hopkins Award, and 2019 honorable mention for the Alan C. Purves Award, all through the National Council of Teachers of English. His co-edited book with Drs. Gloria Boutte, Gwenda Greene, and Dywanna Smith, African Diaspora Literacy: The Heart of Transformation in K-12 Schools and Teacher Education, is published with Lexington Books and received the 2019 Critics’ Choice Book Award for the American Educational Studies Association. Jacob Kelley is a PhD student in the Department of Educational Foundations, Leadership, and Technology at Auburn University. His research focuses on teaching and learning in higher education. He has facilitated a number of initiatives aimed at reimagining higher education as more just for all. He is committed to the use of research methods that promote trust and dignity. Tricia Kress, PhD, is an associate professor in the Educational Leadership for Diverse Learning Communities EdD program at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, NY. Her research uses critical pedagogy, cultural sociology, and autoethnography to rethink teaching, learning, and research in urban schools. She has authored or edited several books including Critical Praxis Research (Springer 2011) and Paulo Freire’s Intellectual Roots (Bloomsbury, 2013, winner of Society of Professors of Education 2014 Book Award.) She co-edits two book series on critical pedagogy and imagination for Brill/ Sense Publishers and DIO Press.

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Author biographies

Robert Lake, PhD, is a professor at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, GA. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in curriculum studies and multicultural education. Robert is the author of (2012) Vygotsky on Education: Peter Lang and (2013) A Curriculum of Imagination in an Era of Standardization: An Imaginative Dialogue with Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire: Information Age. He is a co-editor with Tricia Kress of Imagination and Praxis: Criticality and Creativity in Education and Educational Research with Brill/Sense Publishers and Transformative Imaginings: Critical Visions for the Past-PresentFuture of Education with DIO Press. David F. LaViscount, PhD, is a principal of a public charter school in New Orleans, Louisiana. He received a PhD in Educational Administration from the University of New Orleans in 2019. His dissertation, Inside the Black Box of Mentoring: African-American Adolescents, Youth Mentoring, and Stereotype Threat Conditions, explored the mentoring experiences of African American youth. His work focuses on the experiences of African American students, Blackness, school environments, educational leadership, and research methodologies. Alice Y. Lee, PhD, is an assistant professor of critical literacy in the Graduate School of Education at University of California – Riverside. Her research focuses on the raciolinguistic life experiences of teachers, and how such experiences are embodied into pedagogy. She employs this lens to interrogate the continued maltreatment of Black Language speakers, particularly early childhood and elementary-aged children. She also applies her work toward teacher selection, recruitment, and education in efforts to diversify the teacher workforce. Her work has been supported by the Spencer Foundation, and published in The Reading Teacher, Language Arts Journal of Michigan, and Talking Points. Amos J. Lee, PhD, is an assistant professor of teaching in the Graduate School of Education at University of California – Riverside. As a former school teacher in urban schools, his research investigates the intersection of race and space in the ongoing struggle over school desegregation. He employs critical race frameworks to expose and examine race-based inequities embedded within school of choice policies and practices. His work has been published in Humanities, Journal of Curriculum Studies Research, and in the edited volume Literacy Research Methodologies. Yin Lam Lee-Johnson, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Education at Webster University, St. Louis, MO. She is the Doctor of Education (EdD) Program Director and Co-Director of a $2.7 million National Professional Development Grant from the US Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition. She received the Women of Webster Award in 2016–17 and is a guest editor of Journal of Asian Pacific Communication’s 2021 special issue on Preparing Teachers for Addressing the Sociocultural Issues with Asian

Author biographies

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Pacific Immigrants and Refugees. Her research interests include discourse analysis, rights of immigrants and refugees, intersectionality, and critical pedagogy. Tyson E. Lewis, PhD, is a professor of art education in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas where he teaches courses in critical theory, phenomenological research methods, educational philosophy, and aesthetics. He is author of numerous articles and books, including Walter Benjamin’s Anti-Fascist Education: From Riddles to Radio (SUNY Press, 2020), and is co-editor of the book series Radical Politics and Education for Bloomsbury Press (www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/ radical-politics-and-education/). Cheryl E. Matias, PhD, is a full professor in the College of Education at University of Kentucky and recently was awarded the 2020 American Education Research Association Division K Mid-Career Award. In 2018, she was recognized in Diverse as the top 40 women making a difference in higher education. Employing critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and feminism of color, her research focuses on the emotionality of whiteness in teacher education and supporting women and motherscholars in academia. She’s the author of Feeling White and editor of Surviving Becky(s). While a book series editor on social justice and education for W.W. Horton Books and an associate editor for the journal Educational Studies, she’s also a motherscholar of three, Lakers fan, and bachatera. Courtney Mauldin, PhD, is an assistant professor in Teaching and Leadership at Syracuse University where she teaches courses focused on Curriculum and Instructional Leadership as well as Equity and Excellence in Educational Leadership. Her research prioritizes investigating the absence of youth voices in educational leadership with attention to centering elementary youth voices of color with the use of transdisciplinary frameworks and arts-based methodologies. Sarah McDonald is a PhD candidate in the School of Education at the University of South Australia. Her doctoral research focuses on how the intersection between gender and class interacts with higher education, and how this interaction impacts upon the construction of feminine identities for young women transitioning into university. She is interested in gendered subjectivities, social mobility, social barriers, and inequalities in education. Socorro Morales (she/her), PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her scholarship intersects critical race theory, Chicana/Latina feminisms, and critical youth studies in examining the ways that young Latinas resist oppressive spaces, including schools. She is also a Visiting Scholar with the Center for Critical Race Studies in Education (CCRSE) at UCLA. Alcione N. Ostorga, PhD, is a professor in the Bilingual and Literacy Studies Department at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She teaches

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undergraduate and graduate courses in the Bilingual Education program. Her scholarly work focuses on researching border pedagogies to address contextual mitigating factors in the identity development of Latinx teacher candidates, such as ways to help them mediate the intersections between their cultural and professional identities. These may include specific pedagogies for developing teacher agency, and the use of translanguaging pedagogies to foster bilingual and professional development. Lee Melvin Peralta is a PhD student in curriculum, instruction, and teacher education at Michigan State University and is also pursuing a master’s in probability and statistics. His research agenda includes studying the implications of aesthetics, Indigenous thinking, new materialism, and ecocritical perspectives for teaching and learning quantity and number across the curriculum. Formerly, he taught middle school mathematics in New York City. LaSonja Roberts, PhD, is an assistant professor of educational leadership at Western Michigan University. She has had the privilege to serve as a teacher, administrator, and district and university consultant in California, Mississippi, and Florida. Her research agenda focuses on leader preparation and retention, specifically a leader’s ability to create environments that foster learning and well-being for educators and students. Gardner Seawright, PhD, is a middle school social studies teacher at the Prairie School in Wisconsin, and an associate lecturer in the Institute of Professional Educator Development at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside. Gardner’s scholarship examines how white supremacy comes to bear on classrooms. In particular, Gardner’s work explores student-teacher relationships through the relationality and phenomenology of racial embodiment. Gardner’s research also analyzes the possibilities and limitations of antiracist, anti-colonial, and place-based social studies curricula in majority white contexts. Gardner’s work can be found in Educational Studies, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and numerous edited collections. Garth Stahl, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland and a research fellow, Australian Research Council (DECRA). His research interests lie on the nexus of neoliberalism and socio-cultural studies of education, identity, equity/inequality, and social change. Currently, his research projects encompass theoretical and empirical studies of learner identities, gender and youth, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, gendered subjectivities, and educational reform. Michalinos Zembylas, PhD, is a professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus and honorary professor, Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. He has written extensively on emotion and affect in relation to social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human rights education, and citizenship education. His recent

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books include: Critical Human Rights Education, and Socially Just Pedagogies in Higher Education. In 2016, he received the Distinguished Researcher Award in “Social Sciences and Humanities” from the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation. Christian E. Zúñiga, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Bilingual and Literacy Studies Department at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her research focuses on teacher education and language policy, and how these influence bilingual/biliteracy development for minoritized communities. She is experienced with using organizational structures for data analysis as well as using culturally relevant teaching and caring pedagogies.

Acknowledgments

Though my heart and soul are tired by racial injustice and COVID-19, I survive, moreover, thrive because unbeknownst during these pandemic, isolating times, I finally had time to rethink and relearn what truly matters most. Beyond pure elations of finally mustering the courage needed to leave the familiarity of a toxic workplace only to be welcomed to the caring and respecting open arms of another institution, I relearned how intensely I care about cooperating with colleagues who are not insecure to the possibilities of critical cooperation. In this book, for example, authors are from all around the world and instead of coldly delivering detached critiques in the isolation of the academy and the pandemic, I reached out with love to my authors, offering sustenance (even if nominal), friendly human-based videos, friendship and mentorship, and community. I honor your trust in my leadership abilities and thank you profusely for your scholarship, relationship, and appreciation. Amidst quarantining I was forced to ground myself. Though, literally speaking, my once weekly flights from California to Colorado were grounded, the grounding I speak of requires no flights. This grounding is thanks to my spiritual and religious faith, my academic mentors and homies, my girlfriends in LA and abroad, and even those who have gravely trespassed me. To the former you ground me to who I truly am and what I stand for: education, justice, and humanity. In my forever quest to bring the beat of a heart to research I emulate you and try to pay all the kindness you’ve passed onto me, forward to others. From your ceaseless recommendation letters, encouragement, late-night texts, and deep conversations to our Marco Polos, you ground me with a smile every day. To the latter, you remind me to never fall for deceptions or consume my life with hate, lies, and insecurities. I forgive you because I am stronger, happier, and more loving than ever. Finally, this pandemic made me relearn that despite the hate, partisan division, and racist hateration during a US presidential election, at the crux of it all is our humanity: closeness to those we love and care for. 2020 can go down in infamy for multiple reasons but ’twas out of this darkness that many of us saw the light. And for that I am thankful. For me, my mother’s heart attack reminded me of how I need to relearn what it means to be a daughter to an aging mother. My new position as a full professor and director reminded me of

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how I need to relearn my role and responsibilities to other scholars and, more importantly, how I must lead as I wish I was led: with respect, love, and dignity. Though we hear stories of other families strained from the 24-hour confinement, I relearned how much I love to be with my children while also relearning healthier ways to be at peace alone. Thank you, pamilya, for helping me live and breathe hope and humanity every day, especially while bearing witness to the inhumanity of it all.

Preface “Researching under the mortal realities of pandemic life” Cheryl E. Matias

Though naysayers argue objectivity is necessary for valid educational research they forget, much like blind religious followers, that the research (and the bible) are still written down by human beings wrought with fallacies, complexities, and socialized identities. And, within this revelation, research and the bible, for that matter, can never be divorced from those subjectivities. Clearly, the research and researcher are one. Presuming out-of-body/consciousness/ subjective experience when conducting research is absurd. Yet, the pomposity, narcissism, and entitlement for one to claim objectivity amidst social identities that are always entangled within complex social structures is nothing but a blatant attempt, as historians would argue, to ordain oneself as the master narrator. Eerily, when metaphorically comparing to religion, this Hidalguismo (see Rimonte, 1997), or self-presumption of God-like status, then forces upon the field impossible guidelines of what constitutes valid research as oppose to what is not. So, metaphorically speaking, the gates of research Heaven, in this sense, become nothing more than a gatekeeper monitored by blasphemous narcissists. As dramatic as these opening words are I write with grave urgency because as scholars defend educational research that honors social justice, racial justice, criticality, and humanity, we do so amidst surviving a global pandemic (COVID-19) and worldwide racial injustice. We, as a society, watched a Black man’s life be taken away in eight minutes and forty-six seconds.1 We watched the murder of a Black women as she slept silently in her bed.2 As of January 2021, we bore witness to 359,849 COVID-19 related deaths in the US.3 Thus, my dramatics are not for dramatics’ sake. Indeed, my words of passion and urgency are nonetheless emblematic of this apocalyptic era, a time where my authors and I struggled to journey together in this endeavor. Therefore, I honor my contributing authors by recognizing the sacrifices they made with their family inclusive of a lack of childcare, existential crises of our morality, and uncertainty of our futurity during COVID-19 to write, edit, revise, and present these chapters. I honor the field of educational research, hoping it will forever include critical theoretical research methods as a viable, respected approach to research. And, I honor researchers who will continue to honor

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dignity and humanity embedded in research long after these pandemics. With these precursors I, along with my contributing authors, present The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education.

Notes 1 www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html 2 www.nytimes.com/article/breonna-taylor-police.html 3 www.covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100klast7days

Reference Rimonte, N. (1997). Colonialism’s legacy: The inferiorizing of the Filipino. In M. Roots (Ed.), Filipino Americans (pp. 39–61). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Introduction Cheryl E. Matias

Researching educational research The frequent trope in educational research is to narrowly conceive theory as strictly an epistemological stance that undergirds a researcher’s framing of empirically conducted studies. Though well received and commonly employed in this manner, theory, in this strict application, becomes an abstract framing at best; one that is used only to analyze and make sense of empirically collected data. However, there is much more to theory than meets the eye, yet, unfortunately, there are many educational researchers who may not have had the exposure or access to coursework that better explains theory’s expansive employment. Instead of conceptualizing theory in reductive ways, merely used to interpretate and analyze data, thinking of theory anew creates expanded possibilities for educational research. Specifically, to spark our intellectual curiosities, let us reconsider, more precisely, reimagine, how theory is not just epistemological or ideological framings, but perhaps, a method for research in and of itself. What?! Theory as method?! This sociological imagination of theory and methods qua Mills (1959/2000) has been entertained by other disciplines like sociology for some time. Morrow (1994), for instance, offers critical theory and methodology as a process by which disciplines like communications, sociology, and political science can reimagine their use of theory as methods. Sandoval (2000) provides the discipline of ethnic studies a methodology of the oppressed, a research method that accounts for how People of Color experience racist colonial contexts. In education, Fine (2018) also pays homage to the imagination in educational research arguing that in order to conduct socially just educational research, researchers must widen their methodological imagination. Clearly, this imagination is not just an imagined reality. Indeed, it has become a possibility. As promising as this reimagination of theory as method in educational research is, there are naysayers that usurp power and police what constitutes validity in research via methods. These Grim Reapers, so to speak, kill the imagination, offering to educational research prescriptive methodologies that, oftentimes, do not meet the needs of diverse researchers or justice-oriented critical research (see for example Smith, 2013). Sadly, some prescriptive methods

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even recycle racism and white supremacy in research (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008). Though seemingly logical to decry racist practices in research, the issue perhaps is an ignorance, overlooking, or a misunderstanding of how methods alone can be used as tools for racial domination, or for that matter, as tools for domination period. In fact, in Kelley’s (2001) book titled, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional, he reveals how white sociologists who employed white methods of research inadvertently engaged in racially biased findings in the study of the corner street dozens. To Kelley, these white sociologists overlayed their racial stereotypes and anti-Black bias when analyzing their findings from a study on the street behavior of Black people. Even the great W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) himself, godfather of sociological ethnography in education, could not escape accusations of racial bias in his methods simply because he was Black and the field was predominantly white; wrongly a scholar denied (see Morris, 2015). That researchers of color refuse prescriptive methods that oftentimes produced the very findings that promote eugenic racist science, or deficit social science, is nothing new. What is new is that researchers of color and other diverse researchers conducting justice-oriented educational research are tired of having their research validity determined by methods that clearly do not speak for them nor made by them. And, as they attempt to reclaim space within educational research to offer new methods, new theories, or new asset-based approaches to criticalize educational research, they, based on their identity politics alone, are presumed incompetent (see Gutiérrez y Muh, Niemann, González, & Harris, 2012) or, simply, mistreated for being researchers of color (see Fasching-Varner, Albert, Mitchell, Allen, & Smith, 2015; Stanley, 2006), much like how Du Bois was treated years prior.

This hidden curriculum of empiricism in educational research The question then is who or, more poignant to the spirit of initial revealing, what ideological movement undergirds the reasonings as to why gatekeepers feel compelled to police the field of educational research in ways that then redefine valid research through methods? The answer, oftentimes masked like a hidden curriculum of educational research, is the ideological birth of empiricism, not to be confused with empirical. Like empirical research, empiricism presses upon the field the usage and importance of positivistic and behaviorist methodologies in educational research. The idea of empirical data collection as a means for answering research inquiries is empiricism’s guiding principle. However, that is not the issue I take up. What distinguishes the epistemological under link of empiricism from traditional empirical approaches is that empiricism presumes that those approaches alone are considered the only valid approaches to educational research, rendering everything else nonscientific. Though heralding “scientific” approaches is nothing new in educational research, its resurgence, much like the resurgence of white nationalism in the US, is taking swift prominence and because of that swiftness, researchers and the nation alike are

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frightfully unaware as to the consequences of its growing presence. Be it as it may, the presence of empiricism, not to be confused with empirical, severely limits what is and what is not formidable research. This ideological movement is of grave importance because as it gains prominence in educational research, it also redefines underlying principles that inadvertently dictate publish-ability, tenure and promotion, and academic recognition. Essentially, empiricism sets the basis for which manuscripts, tenure, and promotion can be denied simply because they’re “not empirical enough.” Refusal to recognize this ideological transition is to refuse to see the canary in the coalmine. For if education shuts out theoretical methods it also shuts out the ideological, philosophical, and theoretical prowess brought forth by scholars like John Dewey (1923/2020), Paulo Freire (1970/1992), and Henry Giroux (1988). Frankly speaking, who did they interview? To get at the elephant in the room of educational research, empiricism is made possible by empiricists, claiming that theory cannot expand beyond its abstract epistemological limitations. By empiricist, I again do not mean empirical researchers. Alas, I too, at times, am a qualitative empirical researcher thanks to my UCLA doctoral training via Fred Erickson and Kris Gutiérrez. Unlike empirical researchers, empiricists believe the validity of educational research is measured predominately by the study’s alignment to positivism and have an agenda to push this definition as the definition of what constitutes good or valid research, whether conscious of that agenda. They self-appoint themselves as research gatekeepers who work within dominant power structures to delegitimize theoretical educational research in ways that silence theoretical research often conducted by scholars, many of whom are women, motherscholars (see Matias & Nishi, 2018), Black, Indigenous, People of Color, or of other marginalized identities. To echo the metaphor in the Preface, empiricists wrongfully presume themselves Gods of research by bending, twisting, and perverting research, findings, and methods all to produce an outcome that severely limits the theoretical possibilities of diverse scholars and scholarship. To put it clearly, although white men, and some white women, have had the opportunity to theorize education in ways that make educational researchers think, practice, and test anew, this latitude is not afforded to scholars of color, particularly for women scholars of color. Herein lies my caution to educational research; if we, as researchers, believe in diverse perspectives, approaches, and ideas then we must take to task the overwhelming presence of empiricism brought forth by empiricists. To illuminate the portraiture of an empiricist I share a counterstory of the tenure process of a woman professor of color who is known for her radical scholarship on race. This portraiture paints how empiricist and empiricism operate alongside dominating ideologies of white supremacy and patriarchy. During her tenure process one white woman administrator took it upon herself to write a tenure letter that looked starkly different from any other letter so written by her before. In this tenure letter, the white administrator refuted external reviewers’ accolades for the scholar’s work (many of whom were internationally

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reputable scholars), claiming she knew more about the topic of race and whiteness than they, a common practice in whiteness (see Matias & Newlove, 2017). As aforementioned, she narcissistically self-presumed herself to be the “white” expert (see Miller & Josephs, 2009) despite never having published on the topic before nor having earned a PhD. To prove her “expertise” this white woman’s tenure letter ended with two to three pages of references, an odd occurrence in tenure letter writing. However, what is more interesting is that this empiricist made multiple attempts to discredit theoretical research. First, she claimed there were no methods or validity in theoretical research or critical race theory despite the facts that the largest, most premier professional educational research organization, American Educational Research Association (AERA), issued a 2009 memorandum1 to honor what they coin humanities-oriented research and the entire field of critical race theory promotes the method of counterstories (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). After arguing the scholar had no methods in her scholarship, the white administrator then doubled back and argued that the scholar’s method of counterstories were invalid methodological approaches, an exemplification of how colorblind racism works via rhetorical incoherence (Bonilla-silva, 2006). Was it that the scholar had no methods or that the methods that the scholar used were not to her liking? Or, more critically, that this white administrator was exerting her power of whiteness to be the Determiner (with a capital D) or gatekeeper of educational research based on her white fragility (DiAngelo, 2018)? The white administrator claiming that the scholar in question, a woman of color who studied race, was not conducting research simply because the scholar also embedded her own experiences with racism, is a blatant form of racism and sexism. Indeed, scholars have always drew from their own experiences to help frame their analyses, but when it came to this particular woman of color, this administrator refused to acknowledge the scholar’s stories. In fact, in a twisted sense of reality, this white woman administrator then used Black female novelist, Chimamanda Adichie’s 2009 TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story”2 to refute the scholar’s scholarship of whiteness and racism inside the overwhelming presence of whiteness in teacher education (see Sleeter, 2001, 2016, 2017). Essentially, this white administrator asserted her white entitlement by taking liberties that are not her own to reappropriate Adichie’s talk. Clearly, Adichie argues that the real danger of a single story is the British white narrative that silences stories from Black, Nigerian, and other women of color. Instead of honoring Adichie’s message, this white administrator perverted the message, claiming the real danger of a single story is honoring the story of this woman scholar of color whose scholarship details her experiences of racism inside white academia. Essentially, this white administrator co-opted civil rights, decolonial and critical race terminologies and concepts designed to affirm the voices of marginalized people in order to reaffirm whiteness (see Matias & Newlove, 2017). And she did this by usurping the power to determine what are appropriate and inappropriate methods to educational research. However, empiricist ideology does not end there.

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To exemplify the interconnectivity of narcissism and empiricist ideology, I continue with this counterstory. As if refuting the scholar’s approach to methods alone was not enough, this white administrator again draws from empiricist ideology, presuming she knows the proper methods to conduct said research. In fact, she again takes liberties not of her own and disregards the external experts advising the scholar that her scholarship must adhere to more traditional methods in the study of whiteness. Pretending that she knows what those traditional methods are, she wrongfully presumes that traditional whiteness scholars, like Peggy McIntosh (1990) herself, interviewed individuals in her now famous invisible knapsack publication. Though the entire scenario is problematic, the focus here is how the white administrator draws from an empiricist ideological frame to undergird her decisions about what constitutes valid methods in educational research that then informs a scholar’s tenure. Clearly, methods become more than tools simply used to conduct research; for an empiricist with power, it becomes an ideological justification to deny tenure. Returning to the counterstory, this empiricist gatekeeper can continue to assert her power and domination through controlling what constitutes valid methods in educational research. In this story, to stamp out theoretical research altogether, this white administrator uses her administrative powers to force faculty to revise the tenure and promotion rubric. However, this time she pays particular attention to ensuring that the research to be counted towards tenure and promotion must be defined as empirical research only. Or, as she notes through an asterisk on the rubric, research that is “based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory.” By such standard Dewey himself would have never earned tenure there. I share this counterstory to illuminate how an empiricist, indoctrinated by empiricism, can wield power in ways that, in the end, whether conscious, still maintains racism and sexism, and much more. Suffice it to say that as empiricists take a methodological side-step (see Matias, 2019) by limiting what constitutes valid research, particularly to scholarship that directly addresses racism and whiteness, they uphold white supremacist patriarchy in educational research. Limiting who can conduct theoretical research, what constitutes valid research, and what is considered worthwhile methodological scholarship, as means to falsely promote rigorous methodological educational research, only destroys the possibilities and intellectual imagination for research itself. “For even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14) inasmuch as the presumed angelic ideal of methodological rigor and objectivity in educational research, let alone education writ large, is a devilish disguise that murders the hope of justice in education research. In order to steer clear from sins of empiricism this handbook presents methods anew.

Introduction of theoretical methods Moving beyond empiricism’s limited imagination of theory, this handbook approaches theory as a method for doing critical theoretical research in

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education. The book addresses three main questions: (1) How does theory operate as a methodological approach for doing theoretical research? (2) What theories can be utilized as research methods? (3) What insights do theoretical research, rooted in theoretical research methods, provide to education that non-theoretical research often fails to grasp? While there may be a wide number of ways to do theoretical research, we, myself and my contributing authors, focus on critical theoretical research because we connect such research to emancipatory counter-ideologies. Meaning, research and how we research is a political project not presuming itself to be neutral. Drawing from various scholars in education, this handbook identifies the theoretical methodologies and applications of theories like critical race hermeneutics, phenomenology, dialogism, and sociogenic methods (to name a few). We do this to provide the discipline of education new and old ways of engaging theorizing such that we can better understand the educational context of today. For example, in providing new ways to think about how whiteness continues to manifest in teacher education despite Sleeter’s (2001) warning of the problem 20 years ago, my own scholarship went head to head with empiricism. Traditionally, research in teacher education focuses on K-12 teaching practices and utilizes traditional qualitative or quantitative methods to investigate effective teaching practices. Though I am sensitive to these approaches and have applied them before, my research as a racially just teacher educator focuses on how to engage in racially just education, specifically in teaching and teacher education. Applying critical race theory (CRT) and critical whiteness studies, which I now strategically opt for a critical study of whiteness (see Matias, forthcoming), I knew that interviewing, canvasing, surveying, or observing alone would not be enough to capture how whiteness works in almost invisible ways, especially when whiteness plays a major role in why racial justice in education rarely happens (see Sleeter, 2016, 2017). With respect to CRT I was not invested in determining to what extent racism happens in education more so than knowing it already does; for CRT already acknowledges the permeance of race (see Bell, 1992). Therefore, proving racism in education is a moot point for CRT researchers. Also, demanding I empirically prove racism exists in teaching is as stupid as drawing from the theory of relativity to re-prove that gravity works. By employing CRT in my research, I already acknowledge proven theorems of race and thus find it a waste of time to conduct studies that lead to findings that prove that which has already been proven. Furthermore, when applying a critical study of whiteness to my research I was not preoccupied with finding ways to make whites aware of their racism because as this approach attends, they are very aware and resort to ignorance as a way to relinquish culpability of racist behaviors (see Mills, 1997). I am not a researcher who is transfixed on helping white people with race more so than revealing race as a white problem. As such, why would I conduct studies that identify the ways in which whites can be racist in teaching if by virtue of a critical study of whiteness, their white privilege, whether conscious, always makes them antiracist white racists at best (see Allen, 2004). I’m more preoccupied as to why whites

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might continue to invest in whiteness in education and how it embeds itself in one’s psyche. Adding to my skepticism of which research method to employ, is BonillaSilva (2006) claims that whites, many of who populated the field of education, are masterful when talking about race, regardless to ever mentioning the word race. For me this meant something quite specific to the field of teaching. In my pilot studies, and my experiences as a former classroom K-12 teacher in both Los Angeles Unified School District and New York Department of Education, I knew all too well that people, particularly teachers, many of whom are white, have already memorized the pageant answer for antiracist teaching. They sing the tune of committing to culturally responsive teaching, mouth the words of antiracism and justice in education, and get jiggy with hums of antiracist movements, book clubs, and, in honor of COVID-19 times, webinars. Therefore, a method whereby I simply ask participants about racism or whiteness would never get at the crux of how they operate within the subconscious, or maybe even conscious, mindsets of people. Plainly, let’s be real. No one ever cops up to being racist because folks already have learned all the necessary words they need to know to pretend that they are not. In fact, all a person had to say was “it was not my intention” to release accountability for their racist behaviors. I was at a methodological standstill. To get at the crux of my research inquiries, using the theories that I employ, I had to rethink what constitutes methods in research in teaching and teacher education. I didn’t need to observe K-12 students. I needed to observe the mindsets of teachers and teacher educators. I needed to understand why they think the way they do, what reasonings they apply to justify their behaviors or discourse, and to theorize why they came to be this way. All of which informs how they teach and how they resist or apply racial justice in teaching. Therefore, I leaned towards theoretical methods of research. From Cheng’s (2000) or Fanon’s (1967) racial psychoanalysis, critical hermeneutics of whiteness (Leonardo, 2003, 2016), or racial phenomenology (Yancy, 2008), I needed new methods to successfully theorize why teachers and teacher educators are resolute on holding onto whiteness in teacher education, despite knowing it is a problem for the field. Much like a person’s compulsion to eat while stressed, engaging in whiteness while knowing it is probably not the healthiest response to a condition becomes a psychosocial condition that embeds itself into one’s psyche in ways that manifest in that person’s behaviors. Therefore, studying whiteness is not about a person’s intent, as one oftentimes refers to when exposing racism. With theoretical methods, what constitutes data, findings, or even the research inquiries themselves are redefined. To exemplify this, I apply this research inquiry to my own scholarship; how does one collect a psyche? Obviously, one cannot. However, the data in theoretical approaches expands educational research because data in this sense is not necessarily something that can be collected, more so than experienced or observed. That is, if we as social scientists are trained to identify social patterns in society, then collecting those

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patterns is near to impossible. Or, applied to my scholarship, the consistency of crying, defensiveness, denial, anger, and even frozenness are all emotional patterns that routinely surface when engaging in race in education, a data quite observable in any field. I need not collect. Theoretical methods provided me an expanded definition of what constitutes data worthy for examination for the purpose of critical educational research. For Dewey (1923) and Freire (1993), “data” was bearing witness to society itself. Similarly, instead of, as a critical study of whiteness so dictates, bearing false witness to the manifestations of race in society, my research hones in on emotional patterns of race and whiteness in society, particularly in teacher education (see Matias, 2016). Essentially, this approach cannot turn a blind eye or choose to ignore reality for the sake of one’s emotional comfort. In this sense data becomes a living, breathing testament of socially live reality, often denied credence based on the viewer’s marginalized identity, demonstrated by belittling comments like “that’s just your experience” or “you’re being too sensitive.” Additionally, findings, under a theoretical methodological approach, are also expanded. Instead of renderings that are tied to a particular study, at a particular time and location, findings under theoretical methods becomes lasting theories or interpretations of patterned phenomena. They apply continuously until proven false. In this way, theoretical findings are much like other disciplines where a theorem is proven until it is not. And that, in and of itself, makes research sexy. Meaning, the findings under theoretical methods continuously attract us to the meanings of things that oftentimes render traditional findings so resolute and finite. Applied to my scholarship, I theorize the emotionalities of whiteness and how they may perhaps be a viable culprit as to why whiteness persists in teacher education (see Matias, 2016, 2020). Or, more poignantly stated, why teacher education and teaching in general, a field predominated by whites, may emotionally refuse to let go of whiteness in teaching and education. Perhaps, they, like my scholarship has theorized, are too emotionally invested in whiteness in ways that has defined their identities as teachers and as human beings. And, ergo, letting go of whiteness may mean a deeper, more traumatic process of letting go of that which they truly believe they are, but never actually were (see Matias & Allen, 2013). Even the development of research inquiries change shape under theoretical methods. As aforementioned, inquiries may not be preoccupied with the extent to which something influences another if such factors are already proven as influential. Thus, theoretical methods provide new ways of thinking how we might question the world around us. I refuse to do traditional methods that do not ask the necessary questions that dig deep into why one chooses to be racist in teacher education. Instead, I ask what some may refuse to acknowledge is a viable question. That as teacher education identifies whiteness as a problem and knowing it is a field replete with white educators, why then is it that the field refuses to address whiteness? This tickles my research fancy because asking it this way does not rely on simplistic, surface-leveled questions that almost automatically are returned with kumbaya-esque, pageant-like answers that start

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with songs of “I believe the children are the future.” Although I adore Whitney Houston as a singer, as a critical researcher I am tired of hearing every rendition of how teachers, many of whom are white, love children, especially when pedophiles love children too. Proclaiming love is not enough. Simply put, theoretical methods tickle a researcher’s sociological imagination in education research in ways that it has never been tickled before. This was my research path, a path not so readily welcomed in teacher education, especially when empiricists serve as gatekeepers of what is and what ain’t teacher education research. One would think that since US teacher education is preoccupied with improving teacher training to address the needs of racially diverse student populations, it would readily welcome deeper research questions that excavate how deeply embedded racial biases came to be. Yet, in my pomposity to presume that teacher education and all its members are ready for racially just teaching, I realized many more teachers and teacher educators have already thrived, excelled, and almost became martyrs within the existing structure of whiteness in teacher education. How dare I critique a space that others have made their home? Clearly, there were deeper problems not only to my methods but what types of findings such methods would render. On the surface employing theoretical methods in educational research were evident, particularly during times when empiricism takes root. One, the push towards empiricism has led teacher education to assume that only the studies adhering to positivism present proper findings (Abdal-Haqq, 1998), a decision that impacts the careers of theoretical scholars and the field of theoretical research as seen in the previous counterstory. Two, this biased, empiricist assumption regarding what is proper research in teacher education “could lead the researcher to conclusions that present an incomplete or partial picture of an environment” (Willis, Thompson, & Sadera, 1999, p. 32). Focusing on the latter, rendering empiricist research as the litmus test of what constitutes “proper” research may ignore the implicit bias already at play in society; biases that theoretical research acknowledges. In fact, the American Educational Research Association claims that humanities-oriented, otherwise theoretical research “problematize[s] unrecognized assumptions, implications, and consequences of various kinds of educational practice, policy, and research, as well as . . . challenge[s] what these approaches take for granted as beyond questioning” (p. 482). Therefore, dismissing theoretical research may, in the end, recycle hegemonic power structures of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and language that is taken for granted in society. Notwithstanding this, I knew, though unpopular as it may be, that teacher education deserves new methods to ferret out deeply embedded ideologies so popularized in teaching that they become almost invisible. For example, ideologies and rhetoric behind white teachers teaching in urban schools rich with students of color are always imbued with notions of saviorism. To think the contrary is too disconcerting. In fact, to prove this I shared the MadTV clip of “Nice White Lady”3 to my predominantly white teacher candidates while at Colorado as a counterstory of how unhealthy, dangerous, and racially biased

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white teachers can be to students and communities of color. Upon viewing this, the scene was hysteria (see Rodriguez, 2009). The crying, anger, and disbelief were just the emotional beginning, all of which led to complete discrediting of any realization of whiteness in teaching. It was as if, for too long, the ideology of whiteness in teaching was left unchecked, so much so that no viable alternate schema of the way teaching works could ever take root. Whiteness, in this sense, became as natural as breathing air while racial justice in teaching became tantamount to the unnatural ways of things. Clearly, to think anew one must approach anew.

Critical theoretical research methods in education In the hopes of thinking anew, especially with regards to justice and criticality in educational research, this edited handbook explicitly details 21 new approaches. Specifically, the book highlights various theories (their ideological roots, its role in challenge systems of power, etc.), how they can be conceptualized as method, and offers metacognitive examples of how such theories as methods are applied to educational contexts. Additionally, each chapter pedagogically weaves in what educational research looks like if such theories as methods are not taken into consideration. In doing so, this book serves its purpose as a handbook to assist other researchers in the application of theoretical research methods to critical theoretical educational research. Chapter 1 explores the ideological frames of critical race hermeneutics and, in applying it post dissertation study, reveals its potentiality of rendering different inquiries and findings that help debunk white supremacy in educational research. Chapter 2 posits the postdigital challenge where its methodological application can explicate hidden biases in how researchers understand technology in educational research. Chapter 3 introduces sociogenic phenomenology as a theory and method that centers Blackness in studies of educational leadership. Chapter 4 draws from Judith Butler’s work to present a fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability as a way to get at difficult conversations of race and emotions in teacher education. Chapter 5 reconsiders critical race theory’s counterstorytelling as both a theory and a method and applies it to how internalized whiteness ideology inhabits the mindsets of People of Color, many of whom also believe themselves to be agents in racially just education. Chapter 6 offers a phenomenology of racial embodiment as a theory and method to demonstrate how race operates in the daily classroom practices of white teachers. Chapter 7 uses Fredric Jameson’s Greimassian square and applies it to visually map a researcher’s research agenda for educational research. Chapter 8 presents Par/Desi framework as a theory and method to engage in decolonial education research, especially documented in the intellectual growth of scholar identity. Chapter 9 revisits metasynthesis to explicate how to better methodologically engage in the literature reviews of critical bilingual educational research. Chapter 10 applies Karen Barad’s agential realism as a theory and method for researchers investigating social justice in mathematic educational research.

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Chapter 11 advances transgressive decolonial hermeneutics as theory and method to more clearly understand educational research on international student movements in higher education, especially with respects to student movements in Honduras. Chapter 12 employs Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and, how when applied as method, it provides greater insights in educational research on student learner identities. Chapter 13 borrows from Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and assemblage to better understand YPAR and youth literacy educational research. Chapter 14 merges critical race theory and spatial theory to present critical race spatial method as a theoretical method to read race in mapping, particularly in their application to understanding school choice policies in the Champaign school district. Chapter 15 draws from Bakhtin’s theory of chronotope to introduce critical chronotopic analysis and how its application to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) teacher education ferrets out embedded whitewashedness. Chapter 16 applies Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg’s notions of postformal theory as method to reveal how dominant ideology embeds itself in educational research on Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in public schools. Chapter 17 contends that the theory of Critical Race English Education (CREE) can be used as a method to demonstrate how Black lives matter in educational research on English education. Chapter 18 utilizes C. Wright Mill’s sociological imagination as a method to prepare socially just student-researchers. Chapter 19 applies the ideology of Unapologetic Black Inquiry (UBI) stemming from various Black scholars as a method for educational research that documents Black girls’ schooling experiences. Chapter 20 fuses poststructuralism and narrative theory to present poststructural narrative theory that then can be applied as a method for educational research in educational leadership, particularly for educational leadership studies that hones in on race, leadership, and fatigue. Finally, Chapter 21 draws on postfoundational feminist researchers’ conceptualizations of not-knowing as a method to explore a researcher’s journey in conducting educational research, specifically as applied to her study on convivencia as a technology of modern governmentality in education in Spain. Regardless to what theories they so choose, each chapter explicitly details the intellectual lineage of the theory and its application as method to a subfield of education, in order to pedagogically inform readers how to apply theory as method in critical theoretical educational research. Readers come away with an understanding of various theories and how they too can use such theories as method in their own educational research. The hope of this handbook is manifold. First, it seeks to provide examples that forever expand the methodological imagination of educational research; one which never silences nor limits the scopes and power of theory. Second, honoring the traditions of educational pedagogy – for the sake of learning something anew – this book is written to teach new and old researchers new pathways for educational research that does not rely on or give credence to empiricist traditions. Finally, this book was written in the time of COVID-19 and blatant racial distress. Amidst the hopelessness and despair of these pandemics, one of which has resonated in US society since its inception, we write because, after all, we are researchers

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continuing to improve the field of education with more humanizing, racially just, and equitable research methods. We refuse to lay idly by as ideological movements, like empiricism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, reaffirm the very power structures that detrimentally “spirit-murders” our hope and humanity (see Johnson & Bryan, 2017; Love, 2016; Williams, 1987). Our research is our identities, our passions, and our commitments to our communities, and to presume that the only valid research are those processes that strip away these markers, especially in some pseudoscientific attempt for objectivity and rigor, is nothing but fake news itself. So, in the spirit of educational professionalism, research, and responsibility, we offer a way to think and approach anew in The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education.

Notes 1 www.aera.net/Portals/38/docs/481-486_09EDR09.pdf 2 www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story? language=en 3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVF-nirSq5s&t=44s

References Abdal-Haqq, I. (1998). Constructivism in teacher education: Considerations for those who would link practice to theory. ERIC Digest, 47(4), 29–45. Adichie, C. (2009). The danger of a single story. TED Talk. Retrieved from www.youtube. com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg Allen, R. L. (2004). Whiteness and critical pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(2), 121–136. American Educational Research Association AERA. (2009). Standards for reporting on humanities-oriented research in AERA publications. Educational Researcher, 38(6), 481– 486. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X09341833 Bell, D. (1992). Face at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. New York, NY: Basic Books. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racist: Color-blind racism and racial inequality in contemporary America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Cheng, A. A. (2000). The melancholy of race: Psychoanalysis, assimilation, and hidden grief. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Dewey, J. (2020). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. Middletown, DE: Unabridged Class Reprint (Original work published 1923). Dewey, J. (1923). Democracy and education. Gorham, ME: Myers Education Press. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The souls of Black folk. A. C. McClurg & Co. (no location). Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. New York, NY: Grove Press. Fasching-Varner, K., Albert, K. A., Mitchell, R. W., Allen, C., & Smith, W. A. (2015). Racial battle fatigue in higher education: Exposing the myth of post-racial America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Fine, M. (2018). Just research in contentious times: Widening the methodological imagination. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

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Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum (Original work published 1970). Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the city. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group. Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H. A. (2001). Theory and resistance in education: Towards a pedagogy for the opposition. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Giroux, H. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Gutiérrez y Muhs, G., Niemann, Y. F., González, C. G., & Harris, A. P. (2012). Presumed incompetent: The intersections of race and class for women in academia. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. Johnson, L., & Bryan, N. (2017). Using our voices, losing our bodies: Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and the spirit murders of Black male professors in the academy. Race Ethnicity and Education, 20(2), 163–177. Kelley, R. D. (2001). Yo’mama’s disfunktional!: Fighting the culture wars in urban America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Leonardo, Z. (2003). Interpretation and the problem of domination: Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 22(5), 329–350. Leonardo, Z. (2016). Tropics of whiteness: Metaphor and the literary turn in white studies. Whiteness and Education, 1(1), 3–14. Love, B. (2019). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Matias, C. E. (2016). Feeling white: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. The Netherlands: Brill Sense. Matias, C. E. (2019) Beyond White: The emotional complexion of critical research on race. In K. Strunk & L. Locke (Eds.), Research methods for social justice and equity in education (pp. 263–274). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05900-2_22 Matias, C. E. (2020). Surviving Becky(s): Pedagogies for deconstructing whiteness and gender. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Matias, C. E., & Allen, R. L. (2013). Loving whiteness to death: Sadomasochism, emotionality, and the possibility of humanizing love. Berkeley Review of Education, 4(2). Matias, C. E., & Newlove, P. M. (2017). Better the devil you see, than the one you don’t: Bearing witness to emboldened en-whitening epistemology in the Trump era. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(10), 920–928. Matias, C. E., & Nishi, N. W. (2018). ParentCrit epilog. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(1), 82–85. McIntosh, P. (1990). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Independent School, Winter, 31–36. Miller, A. E., & Josephs, L. (2009). Whiteness as pathological narcissism. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 45(1), 93–119. Mills, C. W. (1997). The racial contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mills, C. W. (1959/2000). The sociological imagination. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Morris, A. (2015). The scholar denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Morrow, R. (1994). Critical theory and methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rodriguez, D. (2009). The usual suspect: Negotiating white student resistance and teacher authority in a predominantly white classroom. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 9(4), 483–508.

14 Cheryl E. Matias Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the oppressed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Sleeter, C. E. (2001). Preparing teachers for culturally diverse schools: Research and the overwhelming presence of whiteness. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 94–106. Sleeter, C. E. (2016). Wrestling with problematics of whiteness in teacher education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(8), 1065–1068. Sleeter, C. E. (2017). Critical race theory and the whiteness of teacher education. Urban Education, 52(2), 155–169. Smith, L. T. (2013). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. New York, NY: Zed Books Ltd. Solórzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2002). Critical race methodology: Counter-storytelling as an analytical framework for education research. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 23–44. Stanley, C. (2006). Faculty of color: Teaching in predominantly white colleges and universities. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing. Williams, P. (1987). Spirit-murdering the messenger: The discourse of fingerpointing as the law’s response to racism. University of Miami Law Review, 42, 127. Willis, J., Thompson, A., & Sadera, W. (1999). Research on technology and teacher education: Current status and future directions. Educational Technology Research and Development, 47, 29–45. Yancy, G. (2008). Black bodies, white gazes: The continuing significance of race. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Zuberi, T., & Bonilla-Silva, E. (2008). White logic, white methods: Racism and methodology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Critical race hermeneutics A theoretical method for researching the unconscious of white supremacy in education Ricky Lee Allen

Introduction All human communication requires interpretation (Habermas, 1985). A person initiating a linguistic exchange uses mechanical processes, mainly sounds or movements, in an attempt to convey a particular message, with a certain imagined meaning. Yet, they have no control over how the audience makes meaning of the message. Individuals on the other side of a communicative relationship receive sensory stimuli that their brain makes sense of through language, which, as a symbolic representation of the world, may hide as much as it reveals to the interpreter. Moreover, both parties have their own socially and psychologically constructed desires, investments, and motives, which may or not be apparent to one another, or even to themselves. The same applies to academic research and those who engage in its discursive construction. As a venue for human communication, all educational research is interpretive. Researchers endeavor to convey the meaning they make of surveys, interviews, and bodies of research literature. They also engage in conflicts over interpretation through their studies of social and education phenomena, conflicts that drive subsequent research paradigms along with the politics of research funding and publishing. Tensions over the racial meaning of things are ever-present in the production of educational research, which takes place in academic institutions that are organizationally divided not just along racial identity lines but moreover into ideological camps that wage interpretive battles over race. For those in the educational research community, none of this is breaking news. Rather, it is the stuff of normal, everyday talk in the hallways and offices of the academy. Thus, it is quite perplexing that educational researchers, who are clearly self-aware that they are immersed in daily struggles over racial interpretation, do not place central importance on hermeneutics, which is the study of the theories and methodologies of interpretation (Morrow & Brown, 1994), in debates about research methodology. Broadly, hermeneutical scholars seek to reveal the presuppositions that guide interpretive processes (Gallagher, 1992). Importantly, the field of hermeneutics, particularly in more critical approaches, instructs us that interpreters are typically not conscious of their hermeneutical presuppositions (Habermas, 1989), meaning that many

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tend to see interpretation as little more than “common sense” or “differences of opinion.” Why is the avoidance of hermeneutics so pervasive, even among those who might benefit from a critical study of it, such as those doing work in critical studies of race? What are the consequences of avoiding the study of hermeneutics in educational research, particularly as it relates to racial power? Who benefits from the avoidance of a critical approach to the interpretation of race in a white supremacist social system? Is this part of a white supremacist academic desire to constrain racial interpretations for fear that a focus on a critical version of a racial hermeneutics might let the proverbial “cat out of the bag” in the production of educational research? This chapter traces the intellectual lineage of hermeneutics, offers critical race hermeneutics (CRH) as theory and methodology, and applies CRH to education in ways that pedagogically models how researchers can engage in educational research anew.

Background: hermeneutics and education Generally speaking, the present-absence of the field of hermeneutics in educational research, a situation where hermeneutics is implicitly practiced by everyone but explicitly addressed by almost no one, is concerning since the field studies schooling, an institution predicated, consciously or not, on hermeneutical theories and activities. In other words, hermeneutics in educational research is out of sight, and out of mind, whether the research focuses on race or not. Shaun Gallagher’s (1992) Hermeneutics and Education is one of the few book-length theoretical studies of hermeneutics in educational theory and practice. As Gallagher argues, schooling is fundamentally hermeneutical (see also Leonardo, 2003). The everyday activities of schooling are largely based on learning to interpret texts discursively, which can include making meaning of written passages, mathematical equations, historical narratives, classroom dialogues, or everyday social interactions. Teachers act in ways to guide, or even control, how students learn not only to interpret texts but also what counts as “proper” meanings and “correct” interpretive approaches. Although race and structural white supremacy are not Gallagher’s focus, it is easy to see how educational control over interpretation is chained to white racial power. From a critical lens, domination necessarily employs a hermeneutical imposition that regulates the interpretive process, ensuring that meanings that support the interests of the dominant group are legitimated over others (Leonardo, 2003; Leonardo & Allen, 2008; Roseboro, 2008). Gallagher’s discussion of the politics of hermeneutics in the classroom is instructive, even if constrained by an inattention to structural white supremacy. For example, Gallagher argues that conservative and moderate hermeneutics are the two most common approaches used in schools. In conservative hermeneutics, the educator teaches that the meaning-making process should be focused on “accurately” arriving at the “original intent” of the author, thus ascertaining the correct or commonly accepted interpretation (e.g., the

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intent of the “Founding Fathers” when interpreting the U.S. Constitution through an ideology of whiteness). Conservative hermeneutics often works to persuade students to think of authors’ alleged intentions as the (racialized) “natural order of things,” thus it often supports long-standing rationalizations of social inequalities as just (e.g., rationalizing racial hierarchies). Or, educators very often employ a moderate hermeneutics rooted in a phenomenological approach that emphasizes the relative nature of interpretation. In this mode, students are taught that interpretation is perspectival, that people have different cultures and experiences that shape how they understand texts, and that the goal of interpretation is to come to a consensus understanding, or a “fusing of horizons,” for making sense of and, moreover, evaluating current social interactions and group relations. However, Gallagher fails to problematize how conservative and moderate hermeneutics operate dialectically as the interpretive norm in schools, both working together hegemonically to exclude and occlude critical approaches to hermeneutics in the curriculum. In addition to an inattention to white supremacy, Gallagher problematically supports a moderate hermeneutical approach, one that leaves students without a sophisticated interpretation of how oppressive social structures, such as white supremacy, work through the nexus of discourse, ideology, and the unconscious in classroom and social dialogues. In fact, seemingly “open” dialogues rooted in moderate hermeneutics often become sites of further repression and injury due to an intentional pursuit of “consensus” (i.e., social stability due to alleged “slow-but-steady progress”) over the more revolutionary desire to profoundly interrogate the racial ideologies that constitute racial hierarchies, whether the dominant consent or not (see Leonardo & Porter, 2010). K-12 schools are not the only ones engaged in hermeneutical politics; so are the colleges of education that research them. In the post-Civil Rights Era, students and faculty of color have challenged research interpretations mired in an ideology of whiteness, thus increasing hermeneutical conflicts over racial meaning in the ivory tower (Collins, 1998). Sometimes those caught up in interpretations driven by structural white supremacy attempt to negate those making critical racial interpretations. Other times, those who are uncomfortable with critical racial interpretations become passive aggressive by becoming an “enforcer” of the normative rules of research methodology. For example, rather than more directly discussing their disagreement with the researcher’s critical racial interpretations, they instead resort to pedantic attempts to discredit the work by questioning the implementation of methods, such as sample sizes, search schemes for literature reviews, interview protocol questions, etc. (see Matias, 2019). While a critical race researcher’s work could benefit at times from improved process details, the enforcer’s intense preoccupation with methods is not proportionally in step with the overall level of the detail’s importance relative to other crucial aspects of the work, such as the racial insights that are made. Also, a critical race scholar may be told by a qualitative researcher, for example, that their critical race analyses are an “imposition on the data,” and

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thus on their participants, and not consistent with the subjectivist orientation of qualitative methodology. In this scenario, the rhetorical move of invoking the norms of methodology is an act that conceals the deeper problem around theories of interpretation and the important role they play in maintaining white supremacy through methodological silencing. Armed with a critical race approach to hermeneutics in educational research, critical race scholars would be more empowered to engage directly and meaningfully in methodological conflicts that are fundamentally hermeneutical. Moreover, much work is needed to develop a critical hermeneutical approach to race studies. The established field of critical hermeneutics provides many insights upon which to draw (Leonardo, 2004). Critical hermeneutics developed out of the larger field of critical theory, an insightful paradigm that developed in the 1930s (mainly to understand the rise of Nazism) that synthesizes Marx’s approach to social structures, Freud’s notion of the unconscious, and Weber’s insights into the rationalization of status hierarchies (Jay, 1996). Critical hermeneutics seeks to intervene by exposing the problematic historical (and geographical) imaginaries often deployed to mystify interpretation (Thompson, 1981). However, it suffers from an inattention to structural white supremacy (see Allen, 2001; Leonardo, 2013; Mills, 1997). Conversely, while critical race theory clearly makes structural white supremacy its focus, it has not paid explicit attention to the field of hermeneutics, even though CRT often works implicitly to systematically reinterpret the word and the world through processes similar to critical hermeneutics. So, in this chapter I introduce critical race hermeneutics (CRH), which uses critical race theory (CRT) to revise the best aspects of critical hermeneutics, creating a methodology for the theoretical study of race and white supremacy in education. In short, CRH is a study of how communication is distorted by a white supremacist social structure, turning discursive exchanges into everyday forms of racialized material, psychic, and symbolic violence. It seeks to show how language and communication is a site of conflict and domination, a place where white supremacy not only operates ideologically but also where the structure of white supremacy is, itself, reproduced. CRH works to interpret, more so, reveal the unconscious of the objective reality of white supremacy in subjective forms.

Introducing critical race hermeneutics as a theoretical methodology In 2010, I created a graduate course called “Theoretical Research” to address two main issues. First, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) had begun to demand a methodology statement in conference proposals for theoretical scholarship. Second, the absence of a course on theoretical research methodology was implicitly teaching graduate students in my department that the only legitimate methodologies were the traditional empirical paradigms (i.e., quantitative and qualitative), a common practice in most colleges of education. Students wishing to do philosophical or theoretical dissertations had

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no research methodology courses that aligned with their interests, effectively diminishing the production of critical theoretical scholarship. I felt emboldened by AERA’s 2009 statement that outlines the legitimacy of theoretical scholarship, so I decided to teach a course that would show how critical theory can be practiced as a research methodology. I had been reluctant to teach critical theory as a methodology because I knew that it paid little, if any, attention to structural white supremacy and colonization (see Leonardo, 2013). Yet, I also knew that my approach to doing theoretical scholarship on race was greatly informed by critical theory, which I learned during my doctoral studies. As I taught the course, I quickly realized how central critical hermeneutics was to students’ understanding of critical theoretical methodology. Many said that it felt awakening and empowering, but I felt conflicted because I knew that critical hermeneutics, despite its benefits, is racially problematic. Since I am a scholar of CRT and critical whiteness studies, I could readily share with students my race critiques of the readings and revised possibilities for application to critical race studies. I wanted to have students read published literature on hermeneutics and CRT, but CRT, as a field, had (and has) not developed an explicit CRH body of literature. This chapter helps to fill this void. Due to space constraints, it is more of a snapshot than a full treatment. Also, to maintain academic honesty, I will move back and forth between critical hermeneutics and CRH to show the sources of my thinking. Jürgen Habermas is the scholar most associated with critical hermeneutics. His take on it links to the field of communication studies. He presupposes that a theory of interpretation must recognize the centrality of communication to the human experience. Rather than thinking of humanity as merely a collection of people, it can be meaningfully understood as a “dialogue,” one that is, and has been, constructed time and again through countless communicative actions (Habermas, 1985). Power and domination have tragically ruled the quality of communicative actions of “humanity” in ways that dehumanize and oppress, comprising what Freire (1970/1993) calls anti-dialogical action. Emphasizing the historical role of race in human dialogue, CRH sees how human experience is shaped by the power dynamics of communication in global white supremacy, a regime where racialized anti-dialogical actions work to reproduce the structure of racial hierarchies. CRH seeks to unveil racially normative meaning making in dialogues controlled primarily by whiteness, and secondarily by those with more relative power in racial status hierarchies. Borrowing from Geuss’s (1981) description of critical hermeneutics, CRH is about not only the alleged “proper” interpretation of racialized texts but also the critical interrogation of the underlying presuppositions, theories, and ontological claims that contextualize the politics of interpretive racial domination. In critical hermeneutics, the primary belief is that interpretation is derived, consciously or not, through how one theorizes history, that is, through the way one imagines how social and political history is made (Geuss, 1981; Habermas, 1989). Critical hermeneutics grounds interpretation of texts in what sociology refers to as conflict theory, rather than functionalist theory (see Feinberg &

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Soltis, 1998). Like critical hermeneutics, CRH believes that textual interpretation is best understood through conflict theory, though one that sees white supremacy as the historical (and geographical) context. Meaning making in a white supremacist context is driven by how interpreters theorize the history of racial hierarchy, how it came into being, how it changes or persists, and how it creates dehumanizing conditions. But before discussing CRH’s conflict theory composition, it is important to describe functionalism’s problematic approach to racial history. From a functionalist lens, one akin to Gadamer’s (1989) popular approach to hermeneutics, society has had, or even has, racial problems, but nevertheless it is essentially good and imagined to always be moving toward racial progress. For example, a liberal functionalist interpreter may concede that, yes, some bad things happened at the start of U.S. society, such as slavery and genocide, but then rationalize that those things are in the past, and history is about making slow but steady racial progress through tweaking institutions, policies, and laws (Bell, 1992). In fact, many may claim to still be on board with “racial justice.” This functionalist view of racial history, although seemingly antiracist to some, is actually consistent with colorblind and uncritical post-racial interpretations of social and educational texts in that it implies that past racial oppression happened because whites did not know any better, but now they do (see Bonilla-Silva, 2017; Mills, 1997). Or, they may even think that current racial problems are due to a small subgroup of “deplorable” whites, or maybe “just a few bad apples.” Allegedly, progress has happened, or is happening, even though racial groups still occupy the same status locations in the racial hierarchy (Bell, 1992). Conversely, CRH embraces a racial conflict theory, which imagines that society was, and continues to be, formed out of continual racial group conflict, in particular, the attempts of those racialized as white to actively dominate others and re/produce an unjust racial hierarchy (Bonilla-Silva, 1997). In this sense, the larger structure of white supremacy is the “context,” not actions, ideas, or spaces (e.g., schools, neighborhoods, or states), which are “texts.” Although liberal interpretations theorize social institutions as the structure of a society, a critical interpretation sees these institutions as only a part of a larger social arrangement (Bonilla-Silva, 1997). In a white supremacist social system, it is the racial hierarchy, that is, how races are organized relative to their status and social power, that is the main feature of the structure, the context, and institutions are interpreted for how they work to reproduce races and their hierarchical status relations (Bonilla-Silva, 1997). In this view, whites are invested in maintaining their status. As Derrick Bell (1980) argues in his formulation of the interest convergence principle (itself an example of conflict theory), we need to reinterpret white actions and motives during periods of alleged racial progress. What we see in those periods, such as during the abolition of slavery then Jim Crow, is less about whites having a baseline moral awakening and more about whites acting to preserve their dominant racial status . . . while faking justice. Historical work by Dudziak (2009) on the connection between the Cold War and white support for civil rights in the 1950s shows

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that whites feared losing their racial status largely due to the perceived threats of communism, and thus they modified some of their legal expressions of racial superiority only to the extent that it did not threaten their overall power. The maneuver of giving justice with one hand while taking it away with the other has served white domination well, and little or nothing has changed about the arrangement of the racial status hierarchy, with whites on top, over the long haul of U.S. colonization. What this means for educational research is that CRH does not see racism and structural white supremacy as aberrations of an otherwise fundamentally good institution, as a functionalist approach would have us believe. Instead, schools are institutions whose real function is to legitimate and reproduce white structural power and the racial hierarchy, even though commonsense discourse problematically promotes public schooling as the primary mechanism through which racial justice is actualized. Instead, the truer aberrations are those rare occasions when schools work to actively subvert the racial hierarchy. In other words, CRH and liberal racial hermeneutics are mainly oppositional in how they approach the “intelligibility” (which is how clearly and insightfully something can be understood) of everyday racial texts in schools. Habermas (1989) argues that normative (i.e., functionalist) hermeneutics see most of the mundane events of everyday life as intelligible, that is, as readily understandable and without need of specialized interpretive discourses. However, agents of normative hermeneutics act to develop specialized discourses for that which they see as abnormal. Think, for example, how much of liberal, or even progressive, educational discourse poses urban students of color as a problem to be solved, a group for whom specialized pedagogical, curricular, and policy discourses must be created. Meanwhile, those depicted as normal (e.g., whites) are not seen as in need of specialized interpretive discourses; they are already interpreted as being fully human, passing as the image of humanity itself (Allen, 2004). Flipping the script, critical hermeneutics approaches the norms of everyday life as “unintelligible,” its meaning distorted discursively and in need of critical interpretive discourses to be understood clearly and insightfully. The so-called outliers are those who see through the facade, who possess specialized interpretive discourses that understand how the mundane hides the workings of oppressive social structures. For example, CRT is an interpretive tradition that empowers educational researchers to make intelligible how normative discourses about schooling function to reproduce structural white supremacy. It also poses the racial norm, that is, whiteness, as a problem in need of critical interpretation, including not only whiteness in educational research but also how whites are taught to misinterpret themselves and the world. Understanding the presence of white supremacy in the mundane, or the allegedly unintelligible, school discourses and practices is ultimately an ontological struggle over what is real. It is an ontological fight over being able to name what some clearly see as existing, which may also be what others likely see, at least partially, but they fear knowing it more completely. And, while a language may be a worldview, as the saying goes, it is also true that a worldview,

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and thus the language that represents it, can be systematically distorted and disconnected from what is real (Habermas, 1989; Thompson, 1981). In critical hermeneutics, interpretation of the unintelligible subjective forms that reproduce oppression is based on a critical approach to objectivity (Gallagher, 1992). Many are often surprised by this since they have been taught that objectivity is a false, oppressive endeavor and only subjectivity has real meaning. It is true that objectivity, when defined as the uncovering of universal laws that were already naturally there, do not apply to understanding how people subjectively experience and represent social structures. Yet, this is not the full picture of objectivity. Critical hermeneutics believes in a critical objectivity where oppressed social collectives work to systematically understand social structures, which are ontologically real not because of universal, natural laws, as commonly believed in the natural sciences, but because they are socially constructed by human beings (Harding, 1991). In other words, social constructions are no less real for humans than natural forces. Like gravity, an oppressive social structure’s effect on you does not require that you have the language to describe it; it affects you nonetheless. In this way, structures are “extra-discursive,” meaning they lie both inside and outside of language (Gallagher, 1992). They work through language, and language works to reproduce them, but language is not all that they are because they are materially real. Likewise, CRH believes in a version of critical objectivity, although one that is more race oriented. Through lists of tenets, CRT scholars repeatedly assert that white supremacy is ontologically real, and that its various mechanisms, like the racial realism of the interest convergence principle (Bell, 1992), actually do exist. White supremacy is therefore a socially constructed object. As such, it affects people in a myriad of ways, whether they are conscious of it or not, or whether they have critical interpretive discourses to describe it. The struggle, then, is to be conscious of the presence of the object, structural white supremacy, in subjective forms. White supremacy, as an object, is created in large part through discursive means. CRH approaches the interpretation of subjective forms through a critical objectivity of the ontological presence of white supremacy. Consider how the hermeneutics of whiteness interprets texts in ways that instrumentally rationalize the unjust racial order. It engages in an ideological form of dialogue that masks, often even to whites themselves, the presence of the object in their subjective forms. To riff on Adorno’s (1969/1982) classic turn of phrase, it is not just that white subjects act on and recreate the objective structure, that is, white supremacy, but also that white supremacy, as the object, constructs white subjectivities at the level of the unconscious. In other words, whites act to make white supremacy, but what may be less obvious is that white supremacy is also what makes them a white person, and all that goes with that, since race is after all a social construction and not a natural, biological reality (Allen, 2009; Leonardo, 2009; Thandeka, 1999). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, CRH works to reveal how white supremacist ideology shapes the unconscious. Borrowing from critical psychoanalysis, the unconscious, residing in the psyche, is a site of potential meaning

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that is socially and politically constructed. On one hand, there is the racialized “conscious” self, the one we believe ourselves to be, which we interpret and represent through racial discourses. On the other hand, racial discourses are ideological, including those we use to interpret our racial selves. Distortions in problematic racial ideologies act to make what Lacan termed our othered, more hidden “self,” that is, the unconscious self, that is present and active, many times driving us in ways we may not be aware (Roseboro, 2008), including how we choose to interpret texts and participate in racialized regimes of truth and myth. The ideologies that we have available to interpret white supremacist realities and imaginaries are most often normative, functionalist ones that distort. They are theoretical mismatches for what is racially real, and thus they can cause us to be contradictory in our talk and thinking. The self often does not know what to do with racial experiences and memories that are at odds with the narrative of white supremacist ideologies, so the mind, for lack of a better meaning, represses them. This repression of racial knowledge, or what Stuart Hall (1982) calls racial ideology, is housed at the psychic level of the unconscious, just as language resides not out in the air but within us, and represents the symbolic internalization of the white supremacist social system, the object in racialized subjectivities. This is why not all stories that People of Color tell run counter to ideologies of colorblindness, colorism, or anti-Blackness, for example, and thus are not counterstories (Cabrera, 2018). CRT is therefore a therapeutic discourse, a counter ideology, that employs CRH to re-symbolize repressed concepts, emotions, and memories, forming a more insightful consciousness about racial realities. As one learns CRT and undergoes the re-symbolization process, old memories take on new racial meaning, or experiences that were once barely memorable suddenly come to the forefront.

Application of CRH: revisiting the methodology of “whiteness and critical pedagogy” CRT theoretical research using CRH is conducted mainly as a textual exegesis, meaning an ideological critique using interpretive structuralism to reveal the distorted lens of white supremacy that is at work, combined with a reimagining of how to see a topic through a CRT lens. The focus could be on a single key text, a genre of research literature, a public policy debate, or maybe institutional discourses and practices. For example, consider important theoretical works of CRT literature. Cheryl Harris (1995) critiqued the discursive practices of normative legal doctrine to reveal how courts protect whiteness as a form of property. Charles Mills (2003) critiqued Marxist literature to argue how it masked the reality of global white supremacy as an interpretive structural context. Derrick Bell (1980) showed how liberal public policy discourse hides the reality of the interest convergence principle though a strategic discursive attachment to the functionalist myth of racial progress. In education, David Gillborn (2005) excavated educational public policy to expose how whites openly conspire to elevate their status over People of Color, while Cheryl Matias (2016) revealed

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how the unconscious of white supremacy operates in the emotionalities of faculty and students in teacher education programs. As a form of hermeneutical study of society, CRH is more focused on interpretation than explanation, which is more associated with the “objectivity” of natural sciences (Leonardo, 2003). In addition to possessing a passion for interpretive activities, to be in a good interpretive position CRH scholars need to immerse themselves in the literature of the field they wish to interpret, noting any contradictions or problematic patterns in the discourse that may reveal the underlying ideology. It can also be very important to experience how the discourses are used in particular social spaces, such as teacher education classrooms, courtrooms, school board meetings, dissertation hearings, etc. A research question for a CRH study will emphasize making meaning of racial texts through the context of structural white supremacy rather than “proving” the causes of structural white supremacy. To be sure, one must have a critical understanding of the connection between racial texts and structural white supremacy, how they construct one another, but the CRH researcher uses interpretation as persuasion. One either believes that structural white supremacy exists or they do not. And, a focus on “proving” it exists to them may lead to research that oversimplifies or overmechanizes the problem. There is also the question of the form the research takes. CRH in theoretical research can take the form of either a counterstory (see Solorzano & Yosso, 2002) or, more commonly, an essay, which is an established scholarly form that “can provide integrative, imaginative, and speculative leaps of interpretation” (Schubert, 1991, p. 62). Derrick Bell, for example, used both forms to produce his foundational CRT scholarship (e.g., 1980, 1992). In hindsight, I can see how my own theoretical scholarship has used CRH, though I have not always had a language to describe it. In 2002, I completed my theoretical dissertation study called Whiteness as Territoriality, which was a series of essays exposing white identity politics in critical theorizing. The most difficult part to write was the methodology section. My dissertation committee asked me to include one, even though the work was not empirical and most of the members were mainly established theoretical scholars. While I wrote about some of the concepts I have included in this chapter, such as white supremacy as an interpretive context and the role of discourse and ideology in constructing the problem of whiteness in established interpretive traditions like critical theory, I did not take up a discussion of critical hermeneutics, let alone CRH. That said, my focus was on combining ideas from CRT and critical whiteness studies with the best aspects of various critical theoretical discourses to produce an enhanced critical race synthesis. My approach was to show readers how a particular critical theory discourse (e.g., social reproduction theory) failed to take up white supremacy as a historical and spatial context and was therefore an example of white supremacist discourse. Then, I interpreted the presence of structural white supremacy by using a critical race approach built on some of the ideas and language found in that critical theory discourse. Now, I better understand how CRH was my methodology, that I was conducting textual exegeses of various critical theory discourses, seeking to reveal the object,

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white supremacy, in these subjective forms to create improved race-oriented, self-reflective interpretive discourses that help others to re-symbolize their un/ conscious and, thus, transform how they interpret schools and society. To briefly demonstrate how I apply CRH, I will revisit an older piece called “Whiteness and Critical Pedagogy” (2004), which was a substantial revision of a chapter in my dissertation. My goal was to make two main arguments. First, I wanted to better use some ideas already found in critical pedagogy to interpret how whites function as oppressors in a white supremacist social system. While the then emerging field of CRT in education was offering more sustained and insightful analyses of race, critical pedagogy was mired in a white Marxist discourse that contextualized everything within capitalism, avoided prolonged discussions of white people as oppressors, and addressed race with little more than the phrase “race, class, and gender” tacked onto the end of a sentence. Rather than focus on critical pedagogy literature as a whole, I decided to focus on what was considered the most influential and loved text of the field, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970/1993). In my CRH textual exegesis of it, I keyed in on Freire’s critique of the oppressor and the possibilities for their transformation. Freire did not talk specifically about white people as the oppressor, opting instead for an allegedly more “universal” (i.e., vague) representation that did not specify a group, so I used his own language to show the characteristics of whites as the oppressor that sustained a system of racial domination. My experience with reading this text with other whites was that they would often not identify with “the oppressor” being theorized in the book. I attributed this to Freire’s lack of racial specificity about the oppressor, as well as whites’ tendency to deny their participation in whiteness. By focusing specifically on whites and structural white supremacy, I was directly asking white readers to see themselves as “the oppressor,” or at least see how others may see them as such. Absent this, whites will tend to distance themselves from a potentially transformative experience of critical self-reflection on their own whiteness. Worse, they may even be left to imagine themselves as the Freire’s “oppressed,” avoiding any attention by others to their problematic expressions of whiteness. As such, looking back now, implicitly using CRH as a method provided the structure I needed to excavate the embedded white supremacist ideology in discourses that are, in essence, colorblind. Not using CRH then would render research void of any critical racial analysis that exposes how structural white supremacy embeds itself in seemingly invisible ways. The second goal of my article was to consider the unconscious of white supremacy in Freire’s choices as an author, and thus of those who do not see his text as racially problematic (see also hooks, 1994). Pedagogy of the Oppressed draws heavily from Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and Colonized (1957/1991) and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961/2004), both deeply immersed in critical racial analyses. In fact, Freire stated that after reading Fanon he made major revisions to his draft of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1994). This means that Freire, through active omission, discursively stripped away the racial context, meaning the conflict theory of a colonial history that

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produced structural white supremacy, of these momentous works (Allen, 2004). Freire often responded to this type of criticism, that he did not emphasize race enough, by suggesting that he was from a Brazilian context and that his ideas could be “reinvented” by people in other places for their own contextual specificities (see Freire, 1994, Freire & Macedo, 1987). But, the problem is that Brazil is a country immersed in the racial conflict of structural white supremacy (Winant, 2002). Portuguese colonizers killed Indigenous people and enslaved Africans in numbers even greater than most other countries. Most Brazilians have African ancestry and are racialized as People of Color, and darker-skinned people are much more likely to be in poverty than white or lighter-skinned Brazilians (Winant, 2002). The study of hermeneutics teaches us that historical context matters. Writing theory in an a-contextual way is always fraught with problems. Freire would have benefited People of Color in Brazil and other places had he utilized CRH, from seeing white supremacy as a context in colonialism. That said, it is important to not throw away Freire’s ideas. Not only are many of the ideas insightful, but sometimes, like with Pedagogy of the Oppressed, some of the ideas originated with authors of color (Allen, 2004). CRH brings to theoretical research a more explicit, realistic understanding of how language is used as a form of white supremacist social practice, revealing the unconscious of white supremacy, the lies whiteness tells about Others, and itself, that are all around us. It seeks to systematize an implicit hermeneutics already at work in CRT while showing that a more explicit focus on the presence of white supremacy as an object, an ideological presence, in educational discourses and practices can add methodological power and weight to an established, yet still marginalized, interpretive tradition. CRH creates a theoretical discourse that emphasizes ideological clarity and structural insights for truthtelling, rather than just relying on concepts like experience and identity, as if these, too, are not also interpretive representational forms (see Soja, 1996). Absent CRH, theoretical research in education runs the risk of contributing to an academic research industry that mainly functions to legitimate whiteness as smartness (Leonardo & Broderick, 2011), thus bolstering a racial arrangement scholars claim they are against.

Conclusion: obstacles facing CRH in the current methodological landscape CRH discourse should be a powerful addition to the CRT researcher’s methodological repertoire, an explicit methodology for conducting theoretical research. Yet, CRT researchers are faced with an educational research landscape controlled by problematic normative notions of methodology. For example, how does one deal with being asked, “Yeah, you’re doing CRT, but what’s your methodology?” What obstacles does one need to consider in making spaces for CRH in theoretical research? In The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills (1959/2000) demonstrates how U.S. colleges and universities in the mid-20th century function to legitimate

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research methodologies that align with dominant political and economic interests. Academic agents work to marginalize methodologies that run counter to those interests. Although the players may have changed since then, the song remains the same. Today, academic institutions are neoliberal knowledgeindustry research parks that advertise for professors who, as “intellectual” entrepreneurs, “must be able to procure external funding.” By and large, the vast majority of external funding goes to empirical, not theoretical, research. And little, if any, money is going to theoretical research rooted in a CRH interpretation of structural white supremacy. Academic institutions provide much more support for empirical research, even for empirical research that may seem more critical than normative. The effect is that professors develop bureaucratic power based on how much research money they bring to the institution. There is no question that quantitative researchers, particularly those in STEM, bring in the most research dollars. They are also the least likely researchers to associate with CRH. However, most CRT scholars doing theoretical work in education find themselves without funding, and thus without bureaucratic backing, working in departments dominated by qualitative researchers, who often display their suspicion of theoretical scholarship. Like quantitative researchers, qualitative researchers in education have yet to take up a significant study of hermeneutics, let alone CRH, despite attention they may pay to other common philosophical concepts like epistemology and phenomenology. Rather than including a thorough hermeneutical statement, qualitative researchers more often simply state that they did a thematic coding of data, as if by interpretive magic, leaving unanalyzed the researcher’s hermeneutical theory that shaped the creation of their insight. It is as if, like those in natural sciences, they believe they are in the business of offering explanations rather than interpretations. Researchers from this limited view of the interpretive process may act to dismiss theoretical scholarship that openly and directly interprets the object of white supremacy in subjective forms, especially if they are already insecure about their racial selves. Scholars doing mainly theoretical work may also make themselves an obstacle for CRH-based theorizing. The institutional privileging of empirical educational research may have led many theoretical scholars to reject methodology as nothing more than a positivistic, constraining discourse, and they would therefore not impose on themselves a need to articulate their own methodology. That is, they see methodology as something odious that someone else has, but not themselves. This blanket, non-dialectical approach to methodology has led to many more not fully understanding the hermeneutical theories at work in their scholarship. And, it is also possible that their investments in ideologies like colorblindness, whiteness, colorism, and anti-Blackness might be psychological blocks to accepting CRH. So, theoretical scholars using CRH should expect to face resistance because academic institutions function to reproduce racial hierarchies, even in the research process. And, it should be expected that many whites (and even some People of Color) do not really want People of Color to theorize in this way. Instead,

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they voyeuristically prefer that People of Color produce qualitative narratives about racial strife so they can have an “aha!” moment about the racial Other. What they seem to fear are insightful structural interpretations of their favored subjective forms of representations, ones that falsify paradigms they find ideologically pleasurable, and constitute what they imagine to be their white selves.

References Adorno, T. (1982). Subject and object. In A. Arato & E. Gebhart (Eds.), The Frankfurt school reader (pp. 497–511). New York, NY: The Continuum Publishing Company (Original work published 1969). Allen, R. L. (2001). The globalization of white supremacy: Toward a critical discourse on the racialization of the world. Educational Theory, 51(4), 467–485. Allen, R. L. (2002). Whiteness as territoriality: An analysis of white identity politics in society, education, and theory (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of California, Los Angeles, CA. Allen, R. L. (2004). Whiteness and critical pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(2), 121–136. Allen, R. L. (2009). What about poor white people? In W. Ayers, T. Quinn, & D. Stovall (Eds.), The handbook of social justice in education (pp. 209–230). New York, NY: Routledge. American Educational Research Association. (2009). Standards for reporting on humanitiesoriented research in AERA publications. Educational Researcher, 38(6), 481–486. Bell, D. (1980). Brown v. Board of Education and the interest-convergence dilemma. Harvard Law Review, 93(3), 518–533. Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. New York, NY: BasicBooks. Bonilla-Silva, E. (1997). Rethinking racism: Toward a structural interpretation. American Sociological Review, 62(3), 465–480. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2017). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (5th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Cabrera, N. (2018). Where is the racial theory in critical race theory? A constructive criticism of the crits. The Review of Higher Education, 42(1), 209–233. Collins, P. H. (1998). Fighting words: Black women and the search for justice. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dudziak, M. (2009). Desegregation as a Cold War imperative. In E. Taylor, D. Gillborn, & G. Ladson-Billings (Eds.), Foundations of critical race theory in education (pp. 85–95). New York, NY: Routledge. Fanon, F. (2004). The wretched of the earth (R. Philcox, Trans.). New York, NY: Grove Press (Original work published 1961). Feinberg, W., & Soltis, J. (1998). School and society. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed (Rev. ed., M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York, NY: The Continuum Publishing Company (Original work published 1970). Freire, P. (1994). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word & the world. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc. Gadamer, H. (1989). The historicity of understanding: The discrediting of prejudice by the Enlightenment. In K. Mueller-Vollmer (Ed.), The hermeneutics reader: Texts of the German tradition from the Enlightenment to the present (pp. 256–274). New York, NY: Continuum.

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Gallagher, S. (1992). Hermeneutics and education. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Geuss, R. (1981). The idea of a critical theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt school. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gillborn, D. (2005). Education policy as an act of white supremacy: Whiteness, critical race theory, and education reform. Journal of Education Policy, 20(4), 485–505. Habermas, J. (1985). The theory of communicative action, volume 1: Reason and the rationalization of society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1989). On hermeneutics’ claim to universality. In K. Mueller-Vollmer (Ed.), The hermeneutics reader: Texts of the German tradition from the Enlightenment to the present (pp. 293–319). New York, NY: Continuum. Hall, S. (1982). The rediscovery of “ideology”: Return of the repressed in media studies. In M. Gurevitch, T. Bennet, J. Curran, & J. Woollacott (Eds.), Culture, society and the media (pp. 56–90). New York, NY: Methuen. Harding, S. (1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women’s lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harris, C. (1995). Whiteness as property. In K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, & K. Thomas (Eds.), Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement (pp. 276–291). New York, NY: The New Press. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY: Routledge. Jay, M. (1996). The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt school and the institute of social research, 1923–1950. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Leonardo, Z. (2003). Interpretation and the problem of domination: Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 22(5), 329–350. Leonardo, Z. (2004). Critical social theory and transformative knowledge: The functions of criticism in quality education. Educational Researcher, 33(6), 11–18. Leonardo, Z. (2009). Race, whiteness, and education. New York, NY: Routledge. Leonardo, Z. (2013). Race frameworks: A multidimensional theory of racism and education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Leonardo, Z., & Allen, R. L. (2008). Ideology. In L. Given (Ed.), The SAGE encyclopedia of qualitative research methods (Vol. 1, pp. 415–420). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Leonardo, Z., & Broderick, A. (2011). Smartness as property: A critical exploration of intersections between whiteness and disability studies. Teachers College Record, 113(10), 2206–2232. Leonardo, Z., & Porter, R. (2010). Pedagogy of fear: Toward a Fanonian theory of “safety” in race dialogue. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 13(2), 139–157. Matias, C. E. (2016). Feeling white: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishers. Matias, C. E. (2019). Beyond white: The emotional complexion of critical research on race. In K. Strunk & L. Locke (Eds.), Research methods for social justice and equity in education (pp. 263–274). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Memmi, A. (1991). The colonizer and the colonized (Exp. ed., H. Greenfield, Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press (Original work published 1957). Mills, C. W. (1997). The racial contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mills, C. W. (2000). The sociological imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Original work published 1959). Mills, C W. (2003). From class to race: Essays in white Marxism and Black radicalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

30 Ricky Lee Allen Morrow, R., & Brown, D. (1994). Critical theory and methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Roseboro, D. (2008). Jacques Lacan and education: A critical introduction. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishers. Schubert, W. (1991). Philosophical inquiry: The speculative essay. In E. Short (Ed.), Forms of curriculum inquiry (pp. 61–76). Albany: State University of New York Press. Soja, E. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. Solorzano, D., & Yosso, T. (2002). Critical race methodology: Counter-storytelling as an analytical framework for education research. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 23–44. Thandeka. (1999). Learning to be white: Money, race, and God in America. New York, NY: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. Thompson, J. (1981). Critical hermeneutics: A study in the thought of Paul Ricouer and Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winant, H. (2002). The world is a ghetto: Race and democracy since World War II. New York, NY: BasicBooks.

2

The postdigital challenge of critical educational research* Petar Jandrić

Introduction In the late 20th century we started using computers for various educational purposes: teaching, student assessment, administrative work, COVID-19 instruction, and educational research. Until recently, these practices have been restricted by three main factors: computer memory (which determines how much data we can store), processors (which determine how many calculations we can do in a unit of time), and speed of network (which determines how much data we can transfer from one computer to another). Slowly but surely, recent advances in computing have removed many of these restrictions: memory is practically limitless, while processors and the Internet have become fast enough for processing and transferring large datasets. The ability for (near) real-time processing large amounts of data has brought about the so-called big data turn in educational politics, policy, research, and practice, and ‘magical’ results produced by the rapidly growing field of learning analytics have managed to convince many educators to place increasing faith in data. While these new methods do produce some fascinating results (see, for instance, Anderson, 2008), the underlying philosophy in this data-driven approach is good oldfashioned positivism. However, increased size of datasets and processing power cannot overcome in-built epistemic problems associated with positivism identified by earlier generations of researchers (Carr & Kemmis, 1986) – on the contrary, they seem to exacerbate these problems even further (Fuchs, 2017, pp. 42–43). To make things more complicated, a lot of big data analytics now uses various forms of Artificial Intelligence tools; under the hood, these tools operate in conceptually very different ways than their predecessors such as Learning Management Systems. In a nutshell, older tools such as Learning Management Systems execute long lines of commands written by human programmers; more commands in program code translate into more options for the user. As opposed to these tools, Artificial Intelligence systems have very different architectures. Human programmers program an initial set of rules, and then ‘teach’ the system by inputting large amounts of data. During

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the ‘learning’ process, the system independently links data based on the initial set of rules. Finally, when we ‘ask’ a question, the system uses its own artificial ‘brain’ and provides an answer. The key difference between these two generations of computer systems is that older tools such as Learning Management Systems are predictable, while the new Artificial Intelligence systems are non-predictable – even their makers cannot predict what they will ‘conclude’. This conceptual change between the two generations of computer systems is the essence of the shift towards the so-called age of algorithmic cultures “in which automated computer operations process data in such a way as to significantly shape the contemporary categorizing and privileging of knowledge, places, and people” (Knox, 2015, p. 5). While this non-predictability obviously brings philosophy behind Artificial Intelligence systems beyond positivism, educational politics, policy, research, and practice still tend to interpret results provided by these computer systems in essentially Galilean ways. The computer is “a medium of the most general nature” (Carr, 2011), and this description of recent advances in education can easily be generalised to many traditional disciplines. Consequently, we are witnessing profound changes in all areas of human activity – from factory production and organisation of shops and warehouses, through digital medicine to digital humanities. According to George Ritzer and Steven Miles (2019), processes involving digital technologies such as “bureaucratization, McDonaldization, even ‘Amazonization’ should be seen as variants of, or stages in, a more general process of rationalization” (p. 15). Similarly, in his recent book, Andrew Feenberg (2017) speaks about socio-technological development as a continuous conflict between multiple rationalities. Rationalities are not cast in stone; they are co-constituted by ways in which we see ourselves and the world around us. In fact, of recent, the global pandemic of COVID-19 forced society to reengage with technology in new ways. Video conferencing platforms, like Zoom, have placed human communications directly in the hands of technology. Therefore, it has become mainstream knowledge that digital technologies do not merely optimise existing work processes. At least since Donna Haraway (1991/1985), we know that (digital) technologies profoundly interact with the contemporary human condition; this impact reaches all the way to the question what it means to be human. These days, philosophers such as Luciano Floridi (2015) suggest that ICTs [information and communication technologies] are not mere tools but rather environmental forces that are increasingly affecting: 1. our selfconception (who we are); 2. our mutual interactions (how we socialise); 3. our conception of reality (our metaphysics); and 4. our interactions with reality (our agency). (p. 2) In our recent article, Michael Peters and I (2019) show that these questions are a part of a larger bio-informational challenge. It is at the intersections

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between the post-positivist nature of Artificial Intelligence systems, the bioinformational challenge, and political economy of knowledge creation and dissemination, that this chapter outlines some pressing challenges of critical educational research and presents some postdigital responses to these challenges. These challenges are particularly important today, when the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disturbed yesterday’s teaching and learning ‘old normal’ and has sent most of the world’s universities into an ‘emergency remote teaching’ mode (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust, & Bond, 2020). Early testimonies of teachers and students are a display of people’s resilience and creativity in the face of the disaster (Jandrić, 2020a; Jandrić & Hayes, 2020), yet more importantly, they also point towards multiple issues such as tensions between short-term responses and long-term visions (Zhu & Liu, 2020), social justice (Sapon-Shevin & SooHoo, 2020), equality (Czerniewicz et al., 2020), race (Chang, 2020), gender (Hurley, 2020; Khan, Ratele, & Arendse, 2020), nationalism (Yan, 2020), religion (McLaren, 2020), techno-edu-policy (Kerres, 2020), software (Teräs, Suoranta, Teräs, & Curcher, 2020), democracy (Carr, 2020), and many others. Written before the COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter does not address educational issues in the age of COVID-19. However, as I wrote in my emergency COVID-19 editorial for Postdigital Science and Education in March 2020, we, educational researchers, have a practical and moral duty to “look into the strengths of our disciplinary knowledges and research methods to try and create opportunities to contribute to humanity’s collective struggle against the Covid-19 pandemic and point towards more sustainable futures” (Jandrić, 2020a, p. 237). Analysing 56 papers written by more than 200 authors from all five continents written in response to that emergency editorial, the other day I concluded: “Born within a postdigital world, the Covid-19 pandemic requires postdigital research approaches” (Jandrić, 2020b, p. 532). Following this thought, this chapter on the postdigital challenge of critical educational research is now perhaps even more relevant than in pre-pandemic times of its writing.

Epistemological and methodological foundations While common practice in critical theory to move directly into the critique, this chapter’s theme deserves a bit of auto-reflection about epistemology and methodology used in this research. All critical theories, including the one employed in this chapter, share the same general background in the Frankfurt School of Social Science. Focusing to philosophy of technology, I am especially indebted to Horkheimer and Adorno’s identification of links between disciplinarity and the Enlightenment presented in their masterpiece Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002). The next important milestone is Herbert Marcuse’s (1964) identification of technology with ideology. While some thinkers, such as Marcuse, did develop nuanced understandings of relationships between human beings and technologies, mid-20th-century

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critical theory has generally struggled with various forms of technological determinism. One of the most eloquent expressions of these struggles are eloquently summed up in Martin Heidegger’s ‘Only a God Can Save Us’ interview: The fields of sciences lie far apart. The manner of handling their objects is essentially different. . . . At the same time, the rooting of the sciences in their essential ground has become dead. (Heidegger, 1981) In the next generation of critical philosophers of technology, Bernard Stiegler and Andrew Feenberg are amongst the biggest influences. Stiegler’s development of technoscience, summarised in the following quotations, lies in the very basis of postdigital theory. Science is then no longer that in which industry invests, but what is financed by industry to open new possibilities of investments and profits. Because to invest is to anticipate; in such a situation, reality belongs already to the past. . . . This science become technoscience is less what describes reality than what it destabilizes radically. Technical science no longer says what is the case (the ‘law’ of life): it creates a new reality. (2007, p. 32) Feenberg, who studied philosophy under Herbert Marcuse, has developed critical theory of technologies which rejects all forms of determinism, provides a nuanced approach to human relationships with technologies, and builds into the basis of the critical posthumanist approach to education (Feenberg, 2002, 2017; see also Jandrić, 2017, p. 206). Building on Stiegler and Feenberg, amongst others, I finally arrive to a wide diversity of perspectives and approaches characterising contemporary critical philosophy of technology (see Jandrić, 2016; Jandrić et al., 2018).

The elephant in the room: the postdigital challenge Contemporary education cannot be thought of in separation from digital technologies – buzzwords such as e-learning, digital education, technology enhanced learning (TEL), networked learning (NL), Zoom, and others, dominate discourse of educational research, politics, policy, and practice (Hayes & Jandrić, 2014; Hayes, 2019). Some of these buzzwords, such as TEL and NL, can be associated to distinct research traditions with different philosophical underpinnings and varying attitudes towards digital technologies typically described as technological determinism, uses determinism, social determinism (Dahlberg, 2004). While these attitudes arrive in all shapes and combinations, technological determinism is by and large the most popular of the three ( Jandrić & Hayes, 2018). The research ideology of empiricism, ranging

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from objectivism to subjectivism, has more structural power than critical methodologies, and this results in various conflicts between the traditions. For an empiricist, it is not too difficult to dismiss critical theoretical methods because of incompatibility with the bases of their claims and interests. For those of us working with critical theoretical methods, however, it is more difficult to completely dismiss empiricism because that would imply denouncing the crucial aspect of critical theory – a productive relationship between theory and practice often described as educational praxis (Jandrić & Boras, 2015). Many have recently become increasingly aware of the essential unity of problems resulting from the previously mentioned (and other) approaches to educational research. Education cannot be thought of in isolation from the human condition, and a large part of contemporary human condition arrives into being through human relationships with technologies. Exploring this relationship, we soon found an inspiring article by Nicholas Negroponte (1998), who boldly claims: Face it – the digital revolution is over. . . . Its literal form, the technology, is already beginning to be taken for granted, and its connotation will become tomorrow’s commercial and cultural compost for new ideas. Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence. From here, we, critical postdigital scholars, started developing a theory which accepts the shift from 20th-century primacy of physics to 21st-century primacy of biology; we examined the conceptual shift from continuous analogue technologies (such as gramophone) to discrete digital technologies (such as CD). We looked into the contemporary human condition drawing from various posthumanist traditions from Donna Haraway until today, and we examined the contemporary educational reality where the social and the material worlds come together – where the human teacher’s agency comes up against the workings of data to conduct another, and different, kind of teaching which is neither human not machinic but some kind of gathering of the two. (Bayne in Jandrić, 2017, p. 206) Looking at existing terminology, we also decided that existing approaches project heavy (philosophical) biases. We decided to start anew, and sought inspiration in the field of the arts. In early 2000s literature about various artistic topics such as music (Cascone, 2000) and fine arts (Pepperel & Punt, 2000) we found complementary ideas under the name of postdigital. We decided to adopt the concept, published a ‘mission statement’ article about our ideas (Jandrić et al., 2018), founded the journal Postdigital Science and Education, invited a wider group of like-minded researchers, and initiated broader enquiry

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into these ideas. Developing a new concept in a heavily cluttered research space has already provoked some resistance (e.g. Levinson, 2019); on the bright side, it signals our refusal to engage in academic turf wars and provides an opportunity to build a common denominator that has the potential to build bridges and connections between theories and methodologies. So what, then, is the postdigital? In an early attempt to describe the postdigital, we wrote: The postdigital is hard to define; messy; unpredictable; digital and analog; technological and non-technological; biological and informational. The postdigital is both a rupture in our existing theories and their continuation. . . . [T]he contemporary use of the term ‘postdigital’ does describe human relationships to technologies that we experience, individually and collectively, in the moment here and now. It shows our raising awareness of blurred and messy relationships between physics and biology, old and new media, humanism and posthumanism, knowledge capitalism and bioinformational capitalism. ( Jandrić et al., 2018, p. 895) Since we wrote these words, the concept of the postdigital has been criticised on various bases. Paul Levinson writes: “I do not disagree that we are in a postdigital age. I disagree that we are first entering it now” (Levinson, 2019, p. 14). Andrew Feenberg similarly claims: “In reality, these terms ‘digital’ and ‘postdigital’ seem artificial. If the terms have something like the content I am ascribing them, then the postdigital preceded the digital and should be called the predigital instead” (Feenberg, 2019, p. 9). Yet other authors, such as Sinclair and Hayes, see things a bit more optimistically: “The postdigital throws up new challenges and possibilities across all aspects of social life. We believe this opens up new avenues too, for considering ways that discourse (language-in-use) shapes how we experience the postdigital” (Sinclair & Hayes, 2019, p. 119). At the moment, postdigital research methodologies are the elephant in the room. While most people will agree that “All teaching should take account of digital and non-digital, material and social”, it is much more difcult to critique one’s own philosophical positions and accept that “ideas like ‘digital education’ are useful insofar as they encourage people to look closer at what is happening, but become problematic when used to close down ideas or attribute instrumental or essential properties to technology” (Fawns, 2019, p. 132). While the postdigital human condition provides fertile ground for almost endless debates, we also need to move on and ask: What about postdigital research methods?

The hedgehog and the fox: the epistemic challenge in empiricism I think that we need to get out of the prioritizing of the hedgehog model of digging the same hole and owning it, without completely denying the model or its value.

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The hedgehog approach has enormous value, but I think that we need a little bit more of the interstitial connecting tissue approach, the fox approach, where you find a way to jump from one thing to another and connect them to things that happen in the world. (Wark in Jandrić, 2017, p. 123)

The postdigital is an uncanny mashup of technological and non-technological, biological and informational. While this is not at all a new enterprise – in 1948, Norbert Wiener defined the new field of cybernetics as “control and communication in the animal and the machine” (Wiener, 1948/1985, n.p.) – such rejection of clear borders between radically different traditional disciplines empties a lot of epistemic space which needs to be built from scratch. In their recent article, Michael Peters and Tina Besley (2019) offer some guidance in that direction: A critical philosophy of the postdigital must be able to understand the processes of quantum computing, complexity science, and deep learning as they constitute the emerging techno-science global system and its place within a capitalist system that itself is transformed by these developments. (p. 40) Following Peters and Besley, I will now explore the inner workings of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning systems as they relate to traditional research methods. According to Ng (2018), machine learning is “the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed” (n.p.). Functioning of AI systems thus depends on two main factors – (1) predetermined rules of behaviour or algorithms, and (2) large input datasets or big data. However, both factors are heavily contested. In big datasets, shows Tim Harford (2018), “Found data contain systematic biases and it takes careful thought to spot and correct for those biases. ‘N = All’ is often a seductive illusion” (p. 18). Similarly, dannah boyd and Kate Crawford (2012) of Microsoft Research see big data “as a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology, analysis, and mythology” (p. 663). Moving towards algorithms, it may seem easier to design non-biased and non-discriminative rules of behaviour than to collect non-biased and non-discriminative data. Yet, algorithms do not work in isolation, and it is almost impossible to predict biases that might (and often do) arise from various automatic interactions among them. In result, AI systems do not only embed, replicate or reinforce attitudes or prejudices found in data – more importantly, they also recombine them and produce new biases. Creators and researchers of AI cannot directly predict or interfere with these processes; they can only change input variables such as

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architecture of neural network or input dataset and hope that their results will improve. However, this is easier said than done, and non-predictability remains an important in-built feature of AI. (Jandrić, 2019, p. 32) Even if we somehow managed to get rid of various AI biases, an increasing number of researchers have started to realise that “Big Data reframes key questions about the constitution of knowledge, the processes of research, how we should engage with information, and the nature and the categorization of reality” (boyd & Crawford, 2012, p. 665). In short, development of new research methodologies has started to make significant impact to our epistemologies. According to Rob Kitchin (2014), “Big Data analytics enables an entirely new epistemological approach for making sense of the world; rather than testing a theory by analysing relevant data, new data analytics seek to gain insights ‘born from the data’” (p. 2). This turn, continues Kitchin, results in two types of response. The first, empiricist response, makes a simple yet powerful claim that “new data analytics and ensemble approaches signal a new era of knowledge production characterized by ‘the end of theory’” (Kitchin, 2014, p. 3; see also Anderson, 2008). The empiricist response is seductive, because it ofers “the possibility of insightful, objective and profitable knowledge without science or scientists, and their associated overheads of cost, contingencies, and search for explanation and truth” (Kitchin, 2014, p. 5). In this way, “the articulation of a new empiricism operates as a discursive rhetorical device designed to simplify a more complex epistemological approach and to convince vendors of the utility and value of Big Data analytics” (Kitchin, 2014, p. 5). The new empiricism fits as glove to buzzwords such as ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge society’ which mark a new era of digital capitalism where “higher education becomes a crucial sector of the information industry where various kinds of performative power intersect directly with new communication and information technologies” (Peters & Jandrić, 2018, p. 47). The other approach is data-driven science, which “seeks to hold to the tenets of the scientific method, but is more open to using a hybrid combination of abductive, inductive and deductive approaches to advance the understanding of a phenomenon” (Kitchin, 2014, p. 5). Theoretically, data-driven science can be done offline – for instance, by connecting a computer to an experimental device. In practice, especially speaking of humanities and social sciences, data-driven science soon collapses into a somewhat narrower (but often used) concept of Web Science. Shadbolt, Hall, Hendler, and Dutton (2013) provide some compelling arguments for Web Science: During the past 20 years, humans have built the largest information fabric in history. The World Wide Web has been transformational. . . . Although most people are not formally trained in its use, yet it has assumed a central role in their lives. Over the past few years, there has been a growing recognition that the ecosystem that is the Web needs to be treated as an

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important and coherent area of study – this is Web science. It is ‘science’ in the original and broad sense of the term – science as the quest to build an organized body of knowledge. As such, it will need to embrace engineering – the Web is an engineered construct, a set of protocols and formalisms. It will need to embrace the human and social sciences – the Web is a social phenomenon whose vast scale has produced emergent properties and transformative behaviours. (n.p.) Epistemically, data-driven science and its subsets such as Web Science and educational Web Science have reached beyond discussing relative advantages and disadvantages of various multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary methods (Jandrić et al., 2018; Peters & Jandrić, 2018) and have gone straightforward to new postdisciplinary approaches. However, as McKenzie Wark (in Jandrić, 2017, p. 123) beautifully formulates in the leading quotation for this section, the new postdisciplinary recognises that there is a lot of value in traditional disciplinarity (the hedgehog model) and points towards the need for creating new connections between traditional disciplines (the fox model). This is a typical postdigital situation, which represents “both a rupture in our existing theories and their continuation” (Jandrić et al., 2018, p. 895), and which does not offer one-size-fits-all solutions. Depending on nature of research problems, we need to draw from a wide range of epistemologies and develop appropriate critical theoretical research method (Jandrić, 2016). Postdigital research methods are still not developed enough to be confidentially called ‘methodologies’ – they still lack a distinct body of theory, and a distinct set of practices, that they could ‘own’. Yet these days, an increasing number of researchers develop their own postdigital methods to problems of their interest. For instance, looking at digital/social media, Christian Fuchs (2017) advocates “a paradigm shift from administrative, positivist big data analytics towards critical digital/social media research that combines critical social media theory, critical digital methods and critical-realist social media research ethics” (p. 47). In another example, Ben Williamson (2019) analyses relationships between neurotechnology developments and education (or brain data) and advocates “the need for novel forms of analysis drawing on postdigital, biosocial, sociotechnical and posthumanist theory” (p. 83). While these two examples have very little in common, they indicate a wide diversity of postdisciplinary research methods and a very important common thread that connects them: a recognition that data and research methodologies always arise from specific contexts. However, that recognition does not imply a laissez faire attitude towards knowledge. According to Eduardo Beira and Andrew Feenberg (2018), science is always a human activity, and therefore impure, but relativism is essentially irrelevant, not much different from the claim that Bach’s music is relative to his time. The point is obvious and gives

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rise to interesting research, but it is ultimately trivial: the music remains, irreducible to the circumstances of its creation. (p. 13) Therefore, continues Feenberg, “scientific truths have a similar status as products of supreme crafts that transcend the ordinary events from which they arise” (Beira & Feenberg, 2018, p. 26). Situated between a recognition that human research is never neutral, and a firm rejection of relativism, postdisciplinary research needs to take into account its own protagonists and ask: Who conducts postdigital research and how?

The fox and the stork: the collective challenge For dinner the Fox served soup. But it was set out in a very shallow dish, and all the Stork could do was to wet the very tip of his bill. Not a drop of soup could he get. But the Fox lapped it up easily, and, to increase the disappointment of the Stork, made a great show of enjoyment. The Stork served a fish dinner that had a very appetizing smell. But it was served in a tall jar with a very narrow neck. The Stork could easily get at the food with his long bill, but all the Fox could do was to lick the outside of the jar, and sniff at the delicious odor. And when the Fox lost his temper, the Stork said calmly: Do not play tricks on your neighbors unless you can stand the same treatment yourself. (Aesop, 1st century)

The current state of educational research strongly resembles this ancient Aesop’s fable. If we want to enquire issues such as inequality, we still need to base our research on some hard data. If we subscribe to one or another form of learning analytics, we need to understand that our data and algorithms are never neutral. While it is fairly easy to subscribe to the postdigital idea of unity between the biological and the informational challenge, and while it is almost intuitive to accept its corollary in the form of postdisciplinarity, this theory is very far from practice. Trying to engage in critical methodologies, empirical researchers often resemble the poor stork who tries to eat from a shallow plate; trying to engage in big data analyses, critical methodologies look like angry foxes who can only smell and lick the outside of the tall jar of data with a very narrow neck. And this story is not just about storks, foxes, and human researchers – critical posthumanist theories make convincing arguments that tall jars, shallow plates, and other technologies behind our research also have their own agency (Knox, 2016; Jones, 2018; Malone & Bernstein, 2015). Feenberg’s rejection of relativism (Beira & Feenberg, 2018, p. 26) implies that research produced by storks using tall jars with very narrow necks, and research results produced by foxes using wide shallow plates, should meet on a higher conceptual plane which is irreducible to circumstances of their production. These days, foxes and storks of the world need to learn how to work together;

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in the process, they need to develop new research tools, or postdigital research methods, which are neither shallow plates nor tall jars with narrow necks. In this way, postdigital epistemologies bring about the collective challenge of educational research. In his review of claims for creativity in the economy and in education Michael Peters (2009) distinguishes two main approaches. The first approach, ‘the personal anarcho-aesthetics principle’, emerges in the psychological literature from sources in the Romantic Movement emphasizing the creative genius and the way in which creativity emerges from deep subconscious processes, involves the imagination, is anchored in the passions, cannot be directed and is beyond the rational control of the individual. This account has a close fit to business as a form of ‘brainstorming’, ‘mind-mapping’ or ‘strategic planning’, and is closely associated with the figure of the risk-taking entrepreneur. By contrast, ‘the design principle’ is both relational and social and surfaces in related ideas of ‘social capital’, ‘situated learning’, and ‘P2P’ (peer-to-peer) accounts of commons-based peer production. It is seen to be a product of social and networked environments – rich semiotic and intelligent environments in which everything speaks. (p. 40) At first glance, ‘the design principle’ provides a much better fit to the collective challenge of postdigital research. Building on Peters’ work, however, Peters and Jandrić (2018) show that ‘the personal anarcho-aesthetics principle’ and ‘the design principle’ are mutually co-constituting typologies which always co-exist in our reality – creative collective research requires both creative individuals and creative collaborations. However, while “we are not dealing with an either-or notion of human capital vs. collective labour”, these metaphors are nevertheless very useful because they “provide insight into the human position within (digital) capitalism at large” (p. 346). ‘The personal anarcho-aesthetics principle’ provides a good fit with the new empiricism and with ideologies and principles of digital capitalism, while ‘the design principle’ sides with critical Web Science and ofers opportunity for political, social, and technological development of radically diferent futures (Peters & Jandrić, 2018, p. 346). In words of Richard Barbrook, ‘the design principle’ has the potential to turn “dotcom capitalism in the service of cybernetic communism” (in Jandrić, 2017, p. 89). We are again dealing with a postdigital rupture-and-continuation situation which can be explored alongside numerous axes: empiricism vs. critical theoretical methods, capitalism vs. communism, individual vs. collective, and many others. These concepts can achieve many hybrid states (such as Chinese communism) and can mean many different things, so each of the axes can branch in numerous directions. Looking at the individual vs. collective spectrum, postdigital researchers of all shapes and hues need to find a common language without oppressing each other and without being oppressed

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by technologies. In this way, we arrive to Pierre Lévy’s (2015) definition of collective intelligence as a scientific, technical and political project that aims to make people smarter with computers, instead of trying to make computers smarter than people. So, collective intelligence is neither the opposite of collective stupidity nor the opposite of individual intelligence. It is the opposite of artificial intelligence. It is a way to grow a renewed human/cultural cognitive system by exploiting our increasing computing power and our ubiquitous memory. (in Peters, 2015, p. 261) Postdigital collective research transforms our theories and methodologies; at the same time, the postdigital condition removes sharp distinctions between human beings and technologies. “We have all, willingly or unwillingly, become cyborgs – by the very fact that we live in the digitally saturated world” (Peters & Jandrić, 2018, p. 331). The postdigital cyborg has three main characteristics: • • •

The cyborg self is constructed in dialectical relationships with technologies which, in turn, co-construct our social and economic landscapes. The cyborg self inevitably ‘picks up’ ideologies and principles built into (digital) machinery. . . . Significant changes in social construction of cyborg identity, therefore, require significant changes at the level of epistemology. Our digital selves are sometimes more important than our physical bodies – with ubiquitous tracing technologies, they are also increasingly significant generators of revenue. (Peters & Jandrić, 2018, pp. 331–332)

The collective challenge of postdigital educational research reaches much deeper than developing new ways of humans working together with technologies – it fundamentally transforms our identities, epistemologies, social and economic relationships. However, these processes are not cast in stone. In words of Andrew Feenberg (2002), “technology is not a destiny but a scene of struggle” (p. 14), and we – postdigital researchers – have a responsibility to participate in this struggle and actively shape our individual and collective future.

Applications of a postdigital theoretical method The postdigital challenge of critical educational research is both theoretical and methodological. In this, final section for the chapter, I hypothetically apply a postdigital theoretical method to developed theoretical insights to the real-life example of the Woolf University. The Woolf University (2019) was developed in 2018 by academics from Oxford University as a fully online educational platform. Based on the merger between technology behind popular platforms such as Uber and Airbnb and the blockchain technology behind transactions of cryptocurrencies, the Woolf University aims “to remove higher education intermediaries, support decentralized governance structures and ensure the security of data” (Vander Ark,

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2018). The Woolf University is a non-profit company developed in response to rising costs of educational administration, increasing precarization of teachers, top-down style of university management, and other problems of neoliberal academia. The University’s white paper promises: For students, it will be the Uber of degree courses; for teachers, it will be the Airbnb of course hosting, but for both parties the use of blockchain technology will provide the contractual stability needed to complete a full course of study. (Broggi et al., 2018, p. 1) This makes the Woolf University very diferent from other online learning initiatives including Massive Open Online Courses. In the following paragraph, I will outline what a fictional postdigital critical research project looks like, particularly when applying the postdigital theoretical method. Ultimately, such application provides for an enquiring into ideologies behind the Woolf University using insights developed in this chapter. The postdigital challenge The Woolf University uses a lot of advanced technology which enables communication between students and instructors with a minimum of human administrative support. This techno-administrative system needs to be analysed in relation to issues such as privacy of student/instructor information, safety of transactions, and relationships to accreditation, using quantitative/positivist approaches. Special attention should be paid to ideologies built into design and workings of different digital tools such as Artificial Intelligences and the platform as a whole. The human aspect of using the University platform should be enquired either through personal experience (using an appropriate form of autoethnography), or through other students and instructors (using quantitative methods such as interviews/ focus groups, etc.). These insights should be blended into a whole-rounded critical research enquiring power relationship at the Woolf University. By using a postdigital theoretical method, the intricacies of power behind the ideologies the University upholds are in question, not just the operations of those ideologies. The epistemic challenge Workings of the Woolf University will imply a certain view to knowledge, or a combination thereof, and a certain set of understandings of what it means to acquire knowledge. These views can be read from documents such as syllabi, expectations from students including bits limited to attendance, design of student assessment, and others. Research methods in this area will include critical discourse analysis, social media theory, and various critical digital methods, with a special aspect to ethos and ethics of the University. An important part of the epistemic challenge is to recognise researcher’s own epistemic assumptions and own position within research (and this position will vary depending on choices made

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while researching the postdigital challenge). By using a postdigital theoretical method researchers must self-interrogate the epistemological stance which undergirds their analysis, assuming neutrality is squarely questioned. Instead, researchers using this critical theoretical method must consider the ways in which power, position, and society have influenced their experiences, identities, and thought. The collective challenge The collective challenge is researched in three main directions: (1) relationships between human beings, (2) relationships between human beings and technologies, and (3) relationships between technologies and technologies. Under a postdigital theoretical method, researchers must pay special attention to ideologies built into technologies, ideologies built into policies, and their mutual shaping in human-machine interaction within the University. The collective challenge also implies a detailed enquiry into political economy of the University’s functioning, its business model, sources of revenue, and ways of spending. Researchers employing a postdigital theoretical method that draws from the postdigital challenge must look into staff contracts and examine questions such as work conditions, health and safety, contract duration and stability. A similar line of enquiry should be made for students, administrators, and other stakeholders. Combining these insights, the postdigital theoretical researcher will be able to outline a fairly detailed picture of ideologies underpinning the Woolf University instead of presuming such ideologies cease to exist upon surface examinations of routines, dialogue, and policies.

Conclusion: how do we ‘produce’ critical postdigital researchers? There is a quote attributed to Hunter S. Thompson: “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” (Thompson, 1985). So the question becomes: How do you produce weird people for the weird times we are in? That strikes me as one of the really interesting challenges for education at the moment. (Wark in Jandrić, 2017, pp. 123–124)

Theoretical and practical tensions between various forms of empiricism and critical theories/methods are as old as education. However, the advent of big data, learning analytics, and other advanced digital tools has lifted many traditional distinctions between the two groups of approaches to educational research. The postdigital challenge brings about a new set of epistemic challenges. The need to simultaneously understand individual human experience (traditionally associated with interpretivist methodologies), huge amounts of data produced by the human experience (traditionally associated with positivist methods), and power relationships which co-produce the human experience (traditionally associated with various critical theoretical methods) brings about the need for a new critical philosophy of the postdigital (Peters & Besley, 2019).

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In our postdigital world, (researchers’) human condition cannot be separated from epistemologies and research methods, which, in turn, cannot be separated from questions pertaining to collaboration. For something like postdigital theoretical method these questions are theoretical (What are the new postdigital epistemologies?), practical (How do we bridge different worldviews and disciplinary approaches?), and social (What is the position of postdigital research within capitalist relationships of production and dissemination of knowledge?). Above all, these questions are dialectically intertwined with our own identity as human beings and researchers. Unlike the marriage between a researcher’s epistemology and method found in a postdigital theoretical method, traditional empirical methods do not account for these considerations. In our pandemic age, these conclusions are more needed than ever. COVID-19 is “is a medical, social, racial, and political problem. Add an adjective of your choice – educational, artistic, whatever – and you cannot go wrong” (Jandrić, 2020b, p. 535). It is only by accepting this multi-dimensional postdigital nature of critical educational research that we will be able to make sense of our current historical moment and build sustainable futures. Disclaimer This research outline is based on available online materials about the Woolf University. Toutline is purely fictional, and its sole purpose is illustration of theoretical principles developed in this chapter. This chapter was written before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and briefly updated in the last stages of review to briefly identify the chapter’s relevance for pandemic conditions.

Note * An earlier version of the chapter was published in Chinese language in Jandrić, P. (2020). Educational Research in The Postdigital Age. Journal of South China Normal University (Social Science Edition), 6, 5–17.

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Aspiring to a sociogenic phenomenology A theoretical method in emancipatory research David F. LaViscount and Elizabeth K. Jeffers

Introduction Scholarship has detailed the architecture, purpose, and outcomes of education for African Americans in the United States (Watkins, 2001; Woodson, 1933/2010). It should be no surprise that graduate faculty in Western institutions of learning often provide emerging African American researchers a rubric that details the guidelines for designing and conducting research purported to produce credible Truth/truth/truths. We conceptualize this rubric as a coordinating system of codified and uncodified dispositions, expectations, and approaches that align with white academia and barricade emancipatory research. The rubric, if applied according to its guidelines, is purported to have a universal capacity for application regardless of local context, history, or peoples. It is informed by what anti-colonial scholar, Sylvia Wynter (2003) referred to as “the ethnoclass (i.e. Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself ” (p. 260). This rubric, or what Wynter refers to as a “lawlike order of knowledge” (King, 2005, p. 361), is set into the schema of emerging researchers, creating a fixed approach for what constitutes quality research and knowledge regardless of socio-cultural (Fanon, 1952/1967) reality. Emerging African American researchers are often impelled to accept this rubric that implicitly denies our [their] own experiences, in part, because of what W. E. B. Du Bois (1903/2017), recognized by some scholars as the founder of modern sociology (Morris, 2015), described as double consciousness. Du Bois explained that this is an African American experience of “twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (p. 9). That is, double consciousness describes how African Americans experience the world with a pervasive experience of “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (p. 9). One of its features is an implicit hierarchical organization by race as it relates to being fully human – African Americans’ voices are suppressed because we [they] are relegated to the bottom of this hierarchy (Wynter, 2003). Indeed, Freire (1970/2017) highlighted this behavior (simple transfer of information from teacher to student) and referred to it as the banking model – information, masquerading as all-inclusive knowledge, is etched into the students’ schema.

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As such, we propose (re)creating and (re)imaging research training so that researchers might work with and respond to our [their] communities. In considering how doctoral students’ training might extend beyond this rubric, we draw upon: (1) Frantz Fanon’s (1952/1967) sociogeny and Sylvia Wynter’s (2001) sociogenic principle, or the governing code of our present culture’s mode of subjective understanding (Wynter, 1995); (2) the African American scholarly tradition (Du Bois, 1903/2017; Harding, 1974); and (3) hermeneutic phenomenology (Heidegger, 1962/2010). “The education of any people should begin with the people themselves, but Negroes thus trained have been dreaming about the ancients of Europe and about those who have tried to imitate them,” wrote Carter G. Woodson (1933, p. 31). The rubric continually prohibits researchers from proceeding “with the people themselves,” however. As such, we inquire: How might sociogenic phenomenological theory (SP) disrupt the limitations placed on African American doctoral students’ work and ability to advocate for [with] our [their] communities, while also informing the development of new curriculum that supports students’ engagement in emancipatory research?

Part I: theoretical lineage of sociogenic phenomenology Sociogeny and the sociogenic principle Fanon (1952/1967), a Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary philosopher, wrote, “Besides ontogeny and phylogeny stands sociogeny” (p. 11), to signify an ontological (pertaining to the nature of reality) shift from a reality conceptualized as exclusively biological to one in which the human species operates according to an existential conception of what it is like to be human coded into our consciousness. In contrast to the genomic principle, which defines life in strictly biological terms, Wynter (2001) developed the sociogenic principle. Building on Fanon’s sociogeny and Du Bois’s (1903/2017) double consciousness, the sociogenic principle offers insight into the governing codes over our subjective experiences, or the “interrelated phenomenon of identity, mind, and/or consciousness” (Wynter, 2003, p. 32). Wynter highlighted the significance of this shift: “humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis” (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015, p. 23). Hence, this ontological shift precedes and underpins the redefined way of knowing reality in this new tradition of phenomenology – sociogenic phenomenology. In her conversation with Katherine McKittrick (2015), Wynter illuminates how the rubric transcends criticism and examination in such a way that Black people of the colonized world operate within an “order of consciousness” that impels us [them] to “desire against [oneself] but also to work against the emancipatory interest of the world-systemic subordinated and inferiorized Negro population to which [they] belong” (p. 49). That is, Black people, living a double consciousness experience, do not necessarily work in our [their] own interest – particularly without the critical awakening, confrontation, and unravelling of double consciousness necessary for dismantling the systems,

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institutions, and ideas that have relegated Black people to an inferior status. Undergirded by a “sociosystemic organizing process” (Wynter, 1995, p. 45) where Black is placed at the bottom of the hierarchy (Wynter, 2003), educational institutions enforce the rubric through hegemonic discourses and curriculum. As such, we note that the embodiment of the “ethnoclass ‘Man’” is often valorized through who instructs research courses and supervises dissertation research. As Causey-Konaté (2018) wrote: [M]y scholarship was apparently being held to reflect universality and political neutrality. . . . My own ideas and understandings about what constitute scholarship and the purposes that scholarship is meant to achieve were inconsistent with those underpinning the policy-based decision that resulted in the invalidation of my graduate faculty status. (p. 39) Educational institutions have a propensity for silencing African American scholars’ voices, which efectively diminishes the emancipatory potential of research. Phenomenological research SP, in part, developed out of a gap in methodological literature. Discourse on phenomenological research often centers on two branches of the tradition: (1) transcendental phenomenology (Husserl, 1931/1970) and (2) hermeneutic phenomenology (Heidegger, 1962/2010). Before explaining SP and sociogenic phenomenological method (SPM), it is important to understand transcendental (descriptive) and hermeneutic phenomenology. Doctoral students, depending on the training and epistemological (how reality is known) orientation of their advising faculty, may, intentionally or not, integrate a fixed understanding of quality phenomenological research design into their schema. For instance, a doctoral program may introduce students to a rubric for conducting [transcendental] phenomenology and label this variant as phenomenology. Within the colonized world, rigid conceptions of being are characterized by an interconnected value system comprised of, among other elements, the purity of objectivity and singular Truth. These values, representing a particular epistemology (inconsistent with emancipatory research), are closely aligned with the transcendental phenomenological approach, which does not account for its own bias. As such, Husserl (1970) argued that one could suspend prior knowledge and assumptions in order to perceive the essence of a phenomenon. Through phenomenology, or “the sciences of the natural standpoint” (Husserl, p. 106), one could bracket their experiences through a detached consciousness. Yet, this detached consciousness, or pure reflection, is particularly problematic for African American doctoral students. The “ethno-class ‘Man’” (Wynter, 2001) often directs minoritized students to “bracket” their “biases.” Hycner’s (1985) “guidelines for the phenomenological analysis of interview data” is an example

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of this hegemonic epistemology. It provides a step-by-step guide for conducting phenomenological analysis, including concepts such as bracketing and peer debriefing, without an explanation of epistemological position or delineation between different traditions. While these guidelines might be helpful for doctoral student training, the omission of the term transcendental and this particular tradition’s situation pari passu hermeneutic is an indication of hegemonic epistemology. This lack of distinction normalizes whiteness and is eminent of white logic, a context in which White supremacy has defined the techniques and processes of reasoning about social facts . . . [and it] assumes a historical posture that grants eternal objectivity to the views of elite Whites and condemns the views of non-Whites to perpetual subjectivity. (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008, p. 17) Guidelines such as these, aligned with the rubric, severely limit humanizing qualities needed for conducting emancipatory research. While Husserl’s student Martin Heidegger (1962/2010 argued that phenomenology (Hegel, 1807/1977; Kant, 1781/2004) was built upon ancient ontology (as in the nature of reality and the human being in the world), thus, his work sought to destroy imposed categories as well as their restrictions. “[T]his hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be resolved. . . . We are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology,” wrote Heidegger (p. 44). Yet, what was absent from Heidegger’s destruction of ancient ontology is what is central for SP, and that is the lived experience of antiblackness and colonization, which Du Bois (2017/1903) addressed as “the Negro Problem” (Warren, 2018). In our application of phenomenology, we found a need to articulate how the colonial context and the historico-racial world impacts research, lest we recycle dominant orientation. We challenge what Wynter referred to as the “lawlike order of knowledge” (King, 2005, p. 361) that induces novice, marginalized researchers, and particularly African American researchers, to believe that our [their] positionalities, and hence our [their] emotions, perceptions, and cognition, are limitations. As doctoral student Ingrid Alvarado-Nichols stated to her committee during her dissertation defense, “being a Latina woman, and woman of color, is a strength of my research rather than a limitation.” Further, we add that Ingrid’s positionality enabled her to experience and learn about phenomena in ways that as Elizabeth noted to her colleagues, “we as white faculty members cannot” (Jeffers, personal communication, January 24, 2019), and also in ways that might work toward healing and redressing systemic injustice. African American scholarly tradition Simultaneously, SP builds upon the African American scholarly tradition. The late African American interdisciplinary scholar and historian, Vincent Harding

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(1974), acknowledged, “we do not exist in splendid isolation from the situation of the larger black community” (p. 5). As such, we believe that educational researchers have a moral imperative (King, 2017) to develop and implement “new ways of looking into the reality of others that open our own lives to view – and that makes us accountable to the people whom we study and their interests and needs” (Dillard, 2000, p. 662). This imperative aligns with research on African American school leadership (Dantley, 2002; Lomotey, 1993; Tillman, 2004). For instance, Tillman’s findings on African American principals highlights engagement in school leadership as less of a career, and more as a vocation characterized by great personal sacrifice rooted in the moral imperative of wholly educating African American students. Oftentimes, however, findings such as these and discussions on race and racism are absent from school leadership curriculum (Davis, Gooden, & Micheaux, 2015; Gooden, 2012). The universality of this rubric, indeed, precludes essential dialogue on race in education, a necessity for healing in African American communities. Sociogenic phenomenology (SP) SP aims to disrupt oppression, and “the lawlike order of knowledge” (King, 2005, p. 361). While hermeneutic phenomenology names historical orientation and contextualization as principles of its application (Lopez & Willis, 2004), it fails to address Wynter’s (2003) conception of the “ethnoclass ‘Man’” and the liminal Other, or sub-human. Methods that fail to name this overrepresentation risk omitting how power has historically silenced certain voices, particularly those of African American students and scholars (Rabaka, 2010). Or, as Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva (2008) so poignantly argue, renders research with white logic, white methods. It is important to note that SP does not require an absolute rejection of findings generated from positivist/positivist-adjacent research; rather, it rejects the idea that findings represent a singular, objective Truth. The sociogenic phenomenological method (SPM) allows for the consideration of such findings pari passu the findings of other approaches. Just as important, SP is a departure from critical hermeneutics (Brenkman, 1987; Lopez & Willis, 2004) and critical phenomenology (Desjarlais, 1997). Critical traditions share the aim of disrupting oppression, yet they lack an explicit feature necessary in the colonized world – the treatment of experience in a way that confronts how the colonized world distorts identities and imposes “traumatic psychic burden” (Newkirk II, 2017, p. xiv), such as double consciousness, in order to sustain systemic oppression. Situated within the emancipatory research tradition, SP contributes to the unravelling of double consciousness. Unlike other phenomenological traditions that simply examine lived experience and the structures of consciousness through the long interview (Moustakas, 1994), SPM considers data holistically. Meaning, SPM is not simply based on a long interview transcript used for data analysis. Rather, it better captures racial realities as the lived experiences of the colonized cannot be completely

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reduced through traditional data gathering methods. Data, under SPM, is something to be experienced, researched, and learned through community dialogue and self-investigation of consciousness – all of which expand beyond the degree to which the richness of lived experience can be captured in simple interview transcriptions. For example, Fanon (1952/1967) explored the psyche of the colonized Negro man not by conducting long interviews with participants but by investigating the larger systemic racism embedded in the colonization of Martinique. He drew upon his feelings as a Black man to deeply explore the psyches that may justify interracial coupling and facilitate the internalization of racism in Black minds. He connected the colonized racist world to those who are most impacted by the historico-racial context. We mark this as a departure from a history of research that has often exclusively benefitted the researcher – sociogeny is more than an individual problem.

Part II: application procedures of sociogenic phenomenology methods for educational leadership Engaging in SPM requires an understanding that this method is underpinned by a particular ontological perspective, an epistemological position, and an approach to research design with defined tenets. Though SPM defines specific emancipatory tenets for conducting research, it is not a prescriptive, step-bystep tool for data collection and analysis. Rather, it is an approach that informs any study’s design. An introduction to SPM’s tenets is needed before deciding on other design measures. Five tenets encapsulate the ontological and epistemological positions in a way that operationalizes the dynamics for emancipatory research methods: 1 2 3 4 5

Culturally Affirming Co-Design, Sociogenic Investigation, Healing for Liberation, Trustworthiness through SPM, and Researcher Identity, Contextuality, and Voice.

The design of research in this tradition requires thoughtful construction underpinned by these tenets. The “counterstories, and diferent ways of viewing the world” that Tyson (2003, p. 22) noted of emancipatory research are features of SPM and are embedded in the following examples.

Emancipatory tenets of sociogenic phenomenology Tenet 1: culturally affirming co-design The culturally affirming co-design tenet is based on repositioning of power between “the researcher” and “the researched.” This re-positioning has implications

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for the entire inquiry from the formulation of the research question to the reporting of findings. Academic research most often begins with a research question formulated by a researcher; followed by a review of literature that the researcher finds relevant; the design of data collection/analysis procedures, including subject/participant selection; and finally, the reporting of findings. This design process, typical in Western research, is developed from a framework acquired in doctoral training, labelled as “good research.” Dillard’s (2000) characterization of this approach as a “recipe” (p. 663) or, in this case rubric, and the researcher’s ostensible detachment from the researched is what we believe is incongruent with emancipatory research. This “recipe” positions the researcher as the liberator and the researched as a people unable to take a leading role in their own emancipation. SPM begins by developing the research question with community. This dismantles the former power dynamic (i.e. the researcher and the researched) and diminishes the possibility that a study will be detached from community needs. Traditional linear research designs as described previously are incongruent with emancipatory research. The culturally affirming co-design tenet requires a researcher to begin with community. The SPM researcher has built reciprocal relationships (Patel, 2016) to better understand the social-cultural realities within this community and to contribute to existing community-based work. In this stage of the design process, the researcher(s) and community members (or co-researchers) should remain within the phenomenological tradition, centering perceived experiences in an effort to gain insight into the multiple ways of being and knowing experienced by oppressed people of the colonized world, particularly the descendants of enslaved. University researchers will typically begin culturally affirming co-design from an imposed subfield/discipline. We consider educational leadership as an example subfield. The SPM researcher will convene a Socratic dialogue of multiple stakeholders centered around an essential emancipatory question (EEQ). For instance, an EEQ may be, “What are the important issues within our community?” The dialogue is paramount for not only culturally affirming codesign, but also for liberation through sociogenic investigation (tenet 2) and healing (tenet 3). Dialogue is an avenue that may lead to deeper explorations and the co-development of an SPM research question that is more likely to be meaningful to that community. For instance, a community within educational leadership could be considered African American doctoral students being trained in an educational policy program and local African American K-12 stakeholders. This particular community, through dialogue (stemming from the EEQ), reading, and other forms of initial discovery, may conclude that there is a need to explore the experiences of African American K-12 teachers during the initial implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), or CRP. With the SPM framework of tenets remaining in the forefront, this community begins the co-design process. Without Socratic dialogue stemming from culturally affirming co-design, researchers are unlikely to address

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the community’s central concerns. Researchers working outside of SPM may pursue queries that bring harm to the community’s priorities. Tenet 2: sociogenic investigation Marvelous discoveries occur at the equally marvelous contact of inner and outer totality perceived imaginatively and conjointly by, or more precisely within, the poet. (Césaire, 1982/1999, p. lv)

Martinican poet, politician, and teacher/mentor of Fanon, Aimé Césaire, theorized that “poetic knowledge” (p. xlii) reveals a part of the human that natural science cannot, necessitating both forms of knowledge in order to uncover truth(s) (i.e. “marvelous discovers”) about what it means to be human. This proposition, as quoted earlier, details a moment when the poet develops an awareness of a more complete reality, comprising the “inner and outer.” Transformation, clarity, and full humanity in relation to consciousness lie at the core of his proposition, which also characterizes the aim of sociogenic investigation – though we do not consider poetic knowledge to be exclusively found/formed through conventional poetry. Poetic knowledge is producible through various expressions and is a point of reference as we consider what incorporating sociogenic investigation means, entails, and delivers. An essential aspect of SPM, which distinguishes it from other genres of phenomenological research, is the treatment given to consciousness as an aspect of being that retains harmful contingencies originating from socialization and subjugation vis-à-vis the “status-ordered hierarchically structured, world-systemic order of domination/subordination” (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015, p. 4). In other words, the sociogenic experience of oppressed groups of the colonized world is a pervasive experience that operates below the surface of consciousness, and it is necessary to maintain the imposed superior and inferior roles of dominant and subordinate groups, respectively. As Wynter explained, white “is a cultural conception that is only possible as an opiate-triggering reward conception by means of the degradation of the ‘Black’” (King, 2005, p. 363). Above all, SPM enables one to better understand how we have been historically and culturally socialized under this sociogenic governing code. In the effort to deploy emancipatory research that produces substantive benefits in African American communities, an SP researcher must investigate their own sociogenic experience for a more vivid perception of one’s own lived experience and an unravelling of double consciousness. This type of self-reflection is indeed a form of redressing harm perpetuated against African Americans. In fact, in discussing leadership preparation, Gooden and Dantley (2012) noted that “self-reflection is important to addressing issues of institutional racism” (p. 249). While sociogenic investigation is indeed about selfreflection, it is unique in that it only applies to colonized individuals. There are

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significant benefits in self-reflection, but an individual risks failing to unravel double consciousness if they engage in self-reflection without an orientation toward the sociogenic principle because such a principle accounts for the colonial condition of Black people. Hence, we explore how sociogenic investigation might be utilized in our example from the previous section on CRP curriculum. Following the initial discovery session(s) in community with the African American doctoral students and K-12 stakeholders, the SPM researcher, whose role is to facilitate the co-design and co-implementation of the project, may propose a series of sessions that include a variety of exercises aimed at sociogenic investigation. While remaining open to community members or co-researchers’ suggestions of other forms of sociogenic investigation, the researcher might access poetic knowledge through poetry writing and reading, dialogue with guiding questions, and written reflection. Researchers who are not aligned with SPM and are beholden to the rubric, miss the truth(s) in the form of “poetic knowledge” that emerge from sociogenic investigation. The following image from David’s dissertation provides another example of sociogenic investigation. This exercise began as a self-affirmation activity about a young woman’s experiences as an African American student and mentee. The study provides school leaders and non-school based mentoring programs insight into designing mentoring programs for African American adolescents. The student instinctively turned the writing exercise into a poem, which ends with what we consider the beginnings of the confrontation and unravelling of the double consciousness burden – the transformation and clarity in relation to consciousness emerge at the end, demonstrating, in practice, “poetic knowledge.” Tenet 3: healing for liberation SPM moves toward liberation for African American communities. This tenet is deployed, in concert with its two adjoining tenets, as a means of addressing “traumatic psychic burden,” such as double consciousness (Du Bois, 1903/2017). Equally important, healing for liberation is a point of departure from the long history of exploitation within African American communities. Understanding the necessity of healing for liberation is to comprehend the relationship between African American double consciousness and the sociogenic code via phenomenology as a research tradition that, broadly speaking, focuses on the perception of experiences and the composition of consciousness (Heidegger, 1962/2010). Undisrupted, the burden of double consciousness, “the overrepresentation of the ethno-class Man” (Wynter, 2001), and their inherent anti-Black features are harmful to African Americans. An effort to understand the African American experience without healing threatens SPM’s emancipatory aims. Healing for liberation may be incorporated in a variety of forms. As stated earlier, the SPM conception of data expands beyond the long interview of phenomenological tradition (Moustakas, 1994). Instead of simply conducting long

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interviews, SPM focuses on data that is lived, felt, understood, and is historically and racially connected. It is necessary to move beyond traditional rubric methods, like interviews, to fully engage in SPM because how does one heal if they cannot fully investigate the larger socio-racial dynamic that influences their lived experiences? Furthermore, how does the truth(s), perceived through consciousness, come to bear if the African American community never engages in healing from double consciousness? Clearly, naming that which oppresses African American people (i.e. racism, colonization, white supremacy) are necessary steps to understanding the stories, counterstories, and realities that African Americans experience. Or, more poignantly put, researchers who apply SPM must fully recognize the trauma in order to begin a path towards healing.

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So, how does healing for liberation manifest in SPM? Healing pervades SPM design. For instance, consider how measures that include culturally affirming co-design and sociogenic investigation overlap with healing. Let us revisit the example from the previous section that considered the subfield of educational leadership. Healing begins concomitantly with the initiation of the culturally affirming co-design process. Along with serving as an opportunity to authentically co-construct research designed for relevant, substantive impacts in African American communities, culturally affirming co-design represents a redressing of and healing from a history of exploitative research practices, such as the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (Jones, 1993). Similarly, healing within educational leadership is about redressing the history of dehumanizing “educational science” that makes correlations between IQ and race (Terman, 1916) and the “culture of poverty” narrative (Payne, 2005). Sociogenic investigation offers healing from this harm through poetic writing and other forms of sociogenic investigation that generate humanizing “poetic knowledge.” Tenet 4: trustworthiness through SPM SPM is incongruent with positivism and positivism-adjacent epistemologies that state that trustworthy research claims are derived from the scientific method and that singular, objective Truth is desirable and/or even attainable. Achieving trustworthiness in SPM is tightly bound to its epistemological and ontological positions. The standard measurements of trustworthiness (e.g. triangulation) in qualitative research programs in the United States have been defined largely by Lincoln and Guba (1985). These measures seek to obtain proximity to “objectivity,” which is epistemologically inconsistent with SPM, in a similar way that these measures are inconsistent with hermeneutic phenomenology (LaViscount, 2019). For instance, Lincoln and Guba state that in conducting peer debriefing, a researcher “exposes oneself to a disinterested peer in a manner paralleling an analytic session and for the purpose of exploring aspects of the inquiry that might otherwise remain implicit within the inquirer’s mind” (p. 308). Lincoln and Guba go on to state that this “process helps to keep the inquirer ‘honest’” (p. 308). The implicit objectives in these measures conflict with the goal of SPM. As methodological traditions provide guidelines for conducting research, these guidelines contain an inextricable, but often tacit, epistemological position with disregard for those who experience double consciousness. In other words, the procedures of these traditions allow (and disallow) for particular ways of knowing as the procedures produce claims that imply a certain statement about what types of truth(s) claims are valid. For a researcher working outside of SPM, establishing trustworthiness in our educational leadership example would perhaps require triangulation through document analysis of the CRP curriculum map in order to substantiate the teachers’ experiences. The lawlike rubric takes issue with the lack of “objectivity” approaches, such as triangulation and other white methods, or

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the “tools used to manufacture empirical data and analysis to support the racial stratification in society” (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008, p. 18). Trustworthiness of findings within SPM is verified by the community. Tenet 5: researcher identity, contextuality, and voice Researcher identity and their relationship to the community in which they conduct research are of utmost concern. While it is harmful to make claims that suggest that any particular identity group is monolithic in beliefs and experiences, equally harmful is to assume there is no historical impact of research in and on oppressed communities (Smith, 1999/2012; Tuck, 2009). Distrust of research in African American communities are deeply connected to instances of mendacity and maltreatment of African Americans through research. Indeed, an African American researcher’s personal experiences with double consciousness allows them to more accurately interpret (and in ways that may resonate more with African American communities) information pertaining to African American experiences. While a white researcher may understand double consciousness in an intellectual regard, he or she cannot understand it through their [our] lived experiences. However, inasmuch as African American researchers may have personal experiences that sheds light onto the collective Black experience, there must also exist a critical understanding of how those experiences are framed within a larger context of race, white supremacy, and colonization rather than a disposition that presumes meritocracy, colorblindness, or free market ideology.

Part III: implications of SPM in educational leadership Instead of pushing students’ cultural identities, communities, ways of knowing and existing into liminal and muted spaces, we (re)imagine a curriculum in educational leadership where African American scholars are able to draw upon their “fully realized autonomy of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors” (Wynter, 2003, p. 321). Without the SPM approach, it is inconceivable that African American scholars in educational leadership would be able to contribute to the moral imperative of wholly educating African American students under a rubric that requires us [them] to cage aspects of our [their] humanity. We advocate for a curriculum that integrates SPM and its tenets because without it, research will continue to fail at unearthing truth(s) only accessible through the full humanity of African Americans. We assert that these truth(s) reflect ways of knowing and being that may inform educational theory, policy, and practice – moving toward the moral imperative and actualization of Harding’s (1974) call for Black scholarship as a vocation. African American faculty who demonstrate a critical perspective toward the rubric are vital to supporting the development of SPM researchers within this vocation. Additionally, they are vital because educational leadership training is in dire need of discourses on leadership and research design that include race matters. It is essential to understand that the experiences of African American

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scholars are a strength through which insights can be drawn in pushing forward the momentum of liberation.

Conclusion Academic research is broadly understood to have the aim of improving the world through the broadening of knowledge, uncovering the ills of the world through critical investigation, and informing practice across a multitude of fields. These visions are greatly unfulfilled within oppressed, and particularly African American communities. Academic research has a history of causing harm in this community. We assert that redressing these shortcomings will require transformative approaches that support doctoral students as they work toward new paradigms through new methods (Jeffers & Fournillier, in press), such as SPM. SPM builds upon our [their] identities and relationships, which we believe are necessary for uplifting our [their] communities. Indeed, SPM aims to shift the discipline of educational leadership through altering research training so that it functions in response to and alongside one’s community. While we have both challenged the rubric, albeit in our different roles and relationships to power, we know that David’s questioning of the rubric through his dissertation and through his designing of SPM is where the courage lies. His experiences with double consciousness, as well as our theoretically informed (Wynter, 2001, 2003) navigation of the order, pushes us to work towards a more humanizing approach to educational research. If we, as critical researchers, continue to turn a blind eye to the beauties that African American researchers bring to educational research then we are no better than the racists who denied our [their] emancipation over 200 years ago. Time to recognize.

References Brenkman, J. (1987). Culture and domination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Causey-Konaté, T. (2018). Sankofa crossing: To Katrina and back. In T. Causey-Konaté & M. Montgomery-Richard (Eds.), Called to Sankofa: Leading in, through, and beyond disaster – A narrative account of African Americans leading education in post-Katrina New Orleans (pp. 15–43). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Césaire, A. (1999). Lyric and dramatic poetry: 1946–82 (C. Eshleman & A. Smith, Trans., 2nd ed.). Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia (Original work published 1982). Dantley, M. E. (2002). Uprooting and replacing positivism, the melting pot, multiculturalism, and other impotent notions in educational leadership through an African American perspective. Education and Urban Society, 34(3), 334–352. Davis, B. W., Gooden, M. A., & Micheaux, D. J. (2015). Color-blind leadership: A critical race theory analysis of the ISLLC and ELCC standards. Educational Administration Quarterly, 51(3), 335–371. Desjarlais, R. (1997). A critical phenomenology. In Shelter blues: Sanity and selfhood among the homeless (pp. 24–27). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dillard, C. B. (2000). The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen: Examining an endarkened feminist epistemology in educational research and leadership. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(6), 661–681.

62 David F. LaViscount, Elizabeth K. Jeffers Du Bois, W. E. B. (2017). The souls of Black folk. Brooklyn, NY: Restless Books (Original work published 1903). Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). New York, NY: Grove Press (Original work published 1952). Freire, P. (2017). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic (Original work published 1970). Gooden, M. A. (2012). What does racism have to do with leadership? Countering the idea of color-blind leadership: A reflection on race and the growing pressures of the urban principalship. Educational Foundations, 26, 67–84. Gooden, M. A., & Dantley, M. (2012). Centering race in a framework for leadership preparation. Journal of Research on Leadership Education, 7(2), 237–253. https://doi. org/10.1177/1942775112455266 Harding, V. (1974). The vocation of the Black scholar and the struggles of the Black community. In Institute of the Black World (Ed.), Education and the Black struggle: Notes from the colonized world (pp. 3–32). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of spirit (A. V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press (Original work published 1807). Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and time (J. Stambaugh, Trans.). Albany, NY: Suny Press (Original work published 1962). Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (Original work published 1931). Hycner, R. H. (1985). Some guidelines for the phenomenological analysis of interview data. Human Studies, 8(3), 279–303. Jeffers, E. K., & Fournillier, J. B. (2020). Epistemological defiance: Troubling the notion of authorship, collaboration, and re-presentation in dissertation research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2020.1852484 Jones, J. H. (1993). Bad blood: The Tuskegee syphilis experiment (2nd ed.). New York, NY: The Free Press (Original work published 1981). Kant, I. (2004). Critique of pure reason (J. M. D. Meiklejohn, Trans.). New York, NY: Barnes and Noble (Original work published 1781). King, J. E. (2005). Race and our biocentric belief system: An interview with Sylvia Wynter. In J. E. King (Ed.), Black education: A transformative research and action agenda for the new century (pp. 361–366). New York, NY: Routledge. King, J. E. (2017). 2015 AERA presidential address morally engaged researchers dismantling epistemological nihilation in the age of impunity. Educational Researcher, 46(5), 211–222. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. LaViscount, D. F. (2019). Inside the black box of mentoring: African-American adolescents, youth mentoring, and stereotype threat conditions. University of New Orleans. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2622/ Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. E. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lomotey, K. (1993). African-American principals: Bureaucrat/administrators and ethnohumanists. Urban Education, 27(4), 395–412. Lopez, K. A., & Willis, D. G. (2004). Descriptive versus interpretive phenomenology: Their contributions to nursing knowledge. Qualitative Health Research, 14(5), 726–735. McKittrick, K. (Ed.). (2015). Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morris, A. D. (2015). The scholar denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Moustakas, C. (1994). Phenomenological research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Newkirk II, V. R. (2017). Introduction. In W. E. B. Du Bois (Ed.), The souls of Black folk (p. xiv). Brooklyn, NY: Restless Books. Patel, L. (2016). Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to answerability. New York, NY: Routledge. Payne, R. K. (2005). A framework for understanding poverty (4th ed.). Highlands, TX: aha! Process. Rabaka, R. (2010). Against epistemic apartheid: W.E.B. Du Bois and the disciplinary decadence of sociology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). London: Zed Books. Terman, L. M. (1916). The measurement of intelligence. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tillman, L. C. (2004). African American school principals and the legacy of Brown. Review of Research in Education, 28, 101–146. Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409–428. Tyson, C. (2003). Research, race, and an epistemology of emancipation. In G. R. López & L. Parker (Eds.), Interrogating racism in qualitative research methodology (Vol. 195, pp. 19–28). New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. Warren, C. (2018). Ontological terror: Blackness, nihilism, and emancipation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Watkins, W. H. (2001). The White architects of Black education: Ideology and power in America, 1865–1954. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Woodson, C. G. (2010). The miseducation of the Negro. Las Vegas, NV: IAP Publishing (Original work published 1933). Wynter, S. (1995). 1492: A new world view. In V. L. Hyatt & R. Nettleford (Eds.), Race, discourse, and the origin of the Americas: A new world view (pp. 5–57). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press. Wynter, S. (2001). Towards the sociogenic principle: Fanon, identity, the puzzle of conscious experience, and what it is like to be “black”. In M. F. Duran-Cogan & A. GomezMoriana (Eds.), National identities and sociopolitical changes in Latin America (pp. 30–66). New York, NY: Routledge. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). Unparalleled catastrophe for our species?: Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations. In K. McKittrick (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (pp. 9–89). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zuberi, T., & Bonilla-Silva, E. (2008). White logic, white methods: Racism and methodology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

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A fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability as a theoretical method to investigate ‘difficult knowledge’ Michalinos Zembylas

Introduction This chapter explores how Giorgio Agamben’s theory of biopower and Judith Butler’s work on political vulnerability function as methodological ‘tools’ to investigate difficult knowledge. The notion of ‘difficult knowledge’ has been proposed by Deborah Britzman (Britzman, 1998, 2000, 2013; Britzman & Pitt, 2004; Pitt & Britzman, 2003) to denote the affective and epistemological challenges in teaching and learning about/from social and historical traumas. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss Agamben’s and Butler’s theoretical approaches as methodologies that enable scholars and educators to explore the topic of difficult knowledge and enrich its theorization in education. It argues that these approaches helps us think more critically and reflexively not only about how and why difficult knowledge is constituted but also how and why difficult knowledge can be ethically, politically and affectively engaged in more nuanced ways. Agamben’s theory of biopower invokes a scrutinization of taken-for-granted perspectives about power and the body. In this manner, Agamben’s theory can be applied to enrich understandings of the historical, political, ethical and affective dimensions of difficult knowledge, precisely because of the ways Agamben helps us pay attention to how power and the body work together. Agamben’s contribution, then, has a methodological function insofar as it offers an analytic lens through which to reconfigure difficult knowledge by taking into consideration the implications of the body-power entanglement. Similarly, Butler’s approach to political vulnerability also challenges taken-for-granted perspectives about power, bodies, materiality, trauma and grievable lives. As Riach, Rumens and Tyler (2016) advocate, a Butlerianinspired methodology which is premised upon a performative ontology opens methodological possibilities for developing a critical and self-reflexive analysis. These openings, Riach and her colleagues argue, formulate spaces of exploration that have the potential to undo assumptions about the coherence of subjectivities and the normative conditions upon which they depend. Butler’s approach, therefore, functions methodologically by enabling us to challenge normative categories when we investigate issues emerging from engaging with difficult knowledge (see also, Zembylas, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019).

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A methodological synthesis of Agamben’s and Butler’s approaches – which I call here a fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability – makes an important intervention to the central concern that drives this chapter, that is, to understand how these approaches work methodologically to offer a more nuanced “analytical front” (Foucault, 1997, p. 51) about difficult knowledge in education. Critical recognition of the epistemological and ontological grounding of theories is important in understanding how different approaches might frame attempts to theorize various topics in education such as difficult knowledge. Importantly, our theoretical choices function as critical methodological tools insofar as they enable us to delve deeper into the historical, ethical and political dimensions of educational topics and therefore to change the grounds of our claims and interests. The present chapter is organized in the following manner. The first part revisits Britzman’s notion of difficult knowledge, highlighting its contribution in thinking about traumatic representations in the classroom, while recognizing some of the limitations of its psychoanalytic grounding. The next part considers Agamben’s theory on biopower – with a particular emphasis on his notions of bare life and the camp; the purpose here is to provide an overview of these notions to show how his approach functions methodologically to theorize biopower. Then, I discuss Butler’s approach to political vulnerability, again to highlight how her theorization works methodologically to analyze the issues of subjectivity and trauma that are central to difficult knowledge. The last part of the chapter discusses how a combined framework of Agamben’s and Butler’s approaches, that is, a fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability, offers critical methodologies that enable the theorization of more nuanced ethical, affective and political ways to engage with difficult knowledge.

Difficult knowledge Britzman (1998) has initially used the term ‘difficult knowledge’ while discussing how the Diary of Anne Frank is taught in school curriculum as part of Holocaust education. She has pointed out that the diary provides an opportunity to raise difficult questions about the learner’s painful encounter with victimization, aggression and hatred. Britzman has used ‘difficult knowledge’ to signify both representations of social and historical traumas in curriculum and the learner’s encounters with them in pedagogy (see also Pitt & Britzman, 2003). What is essentially ‘difficult’ about knowledge that stems from trauma is the experience of “encountering the self through the otherness of knowledge” (Pitt & Britzman, 2003, p. 755), namely, the moments in which “knowledge appears disturbingly foreign or inconceivable to the self, bringing oneself up against the limits of what one is willing and capable of understanding” (Simon, 2011a, p. 433). Britzman’s theorization is grounded in psychoanalytic theory and specifically on the unconscious processes (e.g. deferred action, transference, symbolization) that seem to construct difficulty when facing knowledge of trauma

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and suffering. As I noted elsewhere (see Zembylas, 2014), although Britzman’s analysis does not miss the explicitly political nature of difficult knowledge, it does not offer us a political and activist orientation. This is in part because the construct of difficult knowledge is pedagogically oriented rather than politically driven. If we want a more explicitly ethical or political orientation of theorizing difficult knowledge, other theoretical approaches – such as the ones discussed in this chapter – could complement psychoanalytic perspectives. In my earlier analysis of Britzman’s theorization of difficult knowledge, I identified three important elements that are present in her psychoanalytic reading of difficult knowledge (Zembylas, 2014). The first element in Britzman’s theorization of difficult knowledge concerns the representations of social and historical traumas and the realization that these representations can never signify all of the emotions as well as the consequences resulting from traumatic events. To put this differently: it is impossible to find ways that do justice to the signification of conflict, violence, loss and death. The second element in Britzman’s theorization of difficult knowledge has to do with the way that representations of trauma are felt, understood and interpreted by the learner. As Simon (2011a) explains: “Difficulty happens when one’s conceptual frameworks, emotional attachments and conscious and unconscious desires delimit one’s ability to settle the meaning of past events” (p. 434). This means that difficult knowledge is situated in the learner’s own psychic history and the conflict between his or her inner and outer world. Finally, the third element of Britzman’s theorization of difficult knowledge has to do with the pedagogical treatment of the learner’s affective dissonance and loss. In facing affective dissonance and loss, teachers and learners are confronted with the impossibility of un-doing the harm and suffering that has taken place. Britzman (2000) suggests that by making trauma pedagogical, learners can develop some hope and reparation rather than being stuck in despair and the work of memorializing loss. Subsequent work in recent years has further developed theorization of ‘difficult knowledge’, mostly drawing on psychoanalytic perspectives, in the context of museum exhibitions (e.g. Failler, Ives, & Milne, 2015; Lehrer, Milton, & Patterson, 2011; Simon, 2011a, 2011b), social studies (e.g. Garrett, 2011), art education (e.g. Cohen-Evron, 2005), language and literature (e.g. Tarc, 2011), social justice education (e.g. Sonu, 2016; Taylor, 2011), human rights education (e.g. Milne, 2015) and history education (e.g. Farley, 2009; Matthews, 2009). The scholars who have further deployed and developed the concept of difficult knowledge have made significant contributions that widen our understanding of how to make trauma pedagogical and how to theorize traumatic representations of difficult issues in ways that take into consideration the ethical, affective, and political implications. For example, Farley’s (2009) theorization builds on Britzman’s psychoanalytic work by highlighting the affective force of difficult knowledge and its impact on examining individual and collective emotional forces and encounters in contexts of conflict. Farley’s point is that the affective force of difficult knowledge and its signification implies “having to tolerate the loss of

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certainty in the very effort to know” (ibid.). A similar argument is made by Simon (2011a, 2011b) who suggests that a pedagogy that accommodates difficult knowledge would have to entail uncertainty, disruption and conflict in how affective dissonance is understood. Also, Matthews (2009) draws on psychoanalytic theory to examine how one’s present-day attachments to historical objects (e.g. excitement with Hitler’s car) “repeat the dynamics of earlier psychical conflicts, including the conflicts of learning to find the self in the world” (p. 52). Matthews suggests that the process of coming to find one’s self through the difficult time of adolescent development is entangled with historical objects and narratives. What Farley, Simon and Matthews highlight through the use of psychoanalytic theory is that learning is inextricably linked to the uncertainty and complexity that organize our affective responses to difficult knowledge. Furthermore, Taylor (2011) draws on psychoanalytically informed research to examine the qualities of global justice education that render teaching and learning both paradoxical and difficult. These difficult qualities include, for example, the psychic struggles of helplessness, the ethical implications involved, and the limitations of arguments about common humanity. Taylor suggests that pedagogies of difficult knowledge include tolerating the inadequacies and uncertainties of learners’ responses as well as the loss of mastery and hope. Also, Tarc (2011) theorizes “the intrapersonal and inter-political dynamics of psychical and social reparation” (p. 350), advancing the idea of what she calls the ‘reparative curriculum’ – an attempt to develop and sustain reparative relations in the context of education. Drawing on psychoanalytic and curriculum theory to analyze processes of psychical and social reparation, Tarc extends Britzman’s (2000) work to suggest that psychical theories of reparative learning might supplement calls for political and ethical interventions in histories of trauma. All in all, Britzman’s pioneering work has offered the provocation to engage with the construct of difficult knowledge – a construct that is shown to have influenced theoretical work around teaching and learning social and historical trauma. Taken together, this body of work is inspired by Britzman’s psychoanalytic lens to investigate difficult knowledge and its pedagogical implications. However, if we are seeking to further address difficult knowledge as an ethical and political project that inspires social action for change, then psychoanalytic perspectives need to be enhanced with other theoretical insights. The next two parts of the chapter explore the insights offered by Agamben and Butler.

Agamben, bare life and the camp In its broadest sense, biopower is understood as power over life. In his Homo Sacer trilogy (Agamben, 1998, 2002, 2005), Agamben offers a reformulation of Foucault’s formation of biopower. Foucault (1990, 2003, 2007) used the term ‘biopower’ to designate the mechanisms through which disciplinary strategies (enforced by producing docile bodies within sites such as the prison, the school and the hospital) were replaced in modern times by a biopolitics whose power

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was the regulation of the life of populations. Two important constructs that are used by Agamben to formulate his theory of biopower are ‘bare life’ and the ‘camp’. In Homo Sacer, Agamben (1998) suggests that the first move of classical Western politics was the separation of the biological and the political, as seen in Aristotle’s separation between life in the polis (i.e. bios, the political life) and zoē (i.e. biological life) or bare life, as Agamben calls it. As he writes: “The entry of zoē into the sphere of the polis – the politicization of bare life as such – constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought” (1998, p. 4). According to Agamben (1998), the separation of zoē and bios is constituted by the simultaneous exclusion and inclusion of bare life. That is, the exclusion of biological life from political life is at the same time an inclusion, because zoē is there as that which is excluded: it is included by the very process of exclusion. As Agamben explains: The fundamental categorical pair of Western politics is not that of friend/ enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoē/bios, exclusion/ inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion. (1998, p. 8) Agamben thus asserts that all power is by its nature biopower that is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception and determine who lives and who dies. For Agamben (2002), Auschwitz represented the classic example of this process, in which human bodies had been declared merely to be biological, hence allowing their erasure without any consequences for the perpetrators. Insofar as its inhabitants were stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life, the camp was also the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation. (1998, p. 171) When zoē is included through an exclusion from political life, then bare life (naked life) is produced. Agamben goes as far as claiming that, “Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (1998, p. 181). Governments, for example, suspend essential civil liberties in times of social crisis and decide who can be excluded and who can be included. In this sense, the logic of the camp is transformed into a form of sociality and is generalized (ibid., pp. 20, 174–175); consequently, the camp signifies a state of exception that is normalized in the contemporary social space (ibid., p. 166). In other words, Agamben argues that the logic of the camp is

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extended beyond the concentration camp into the broader society, a society in which the state of exception and bare life become the norm. In this sense, concentration camps become the fundamental paradigm of biopolitical power. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben (2002) considers whether it is possible to bear witness to Auschwitz, arguing that survivors bore witness to something that was impossible to witness, because language was inadequate to express the shattering experience of the camp. This shattering experience constituted a silence between what was said and unsaid. The concentration camp was an unspeakable experience signifying the impossibility of bearing witness to the annihilation of life. However, for Agamben, witnessing involves not only becoming aware of the unspeakable experience and its consequences but also participating in the active process of transforming this experience by being vigilant or by acting on behalf of the victims. Bearing witness, then, implies taking responsibility to become a transformative agent of awareness and reception of others’ trauma. In particular, Agamben argues for a conception of ethics and biopolitics as bearing witness to the victimization and destruction of human life. Therefore, assuming the task of bearing witness in the name of those who cannot speak is essentially a task of bearing witness to the impossibility of witnessing. Despite the critiques over Agamben’s use of the camp and bare life, suggesting that he makes several problematic assumptions about power and biopolitics, Jaworski (2012) suggests that it is important to pay attention to Agamben’s methodological approach, namely how he grounds theoretically the biopolitical constructs he uses such as bare life and the camp. At the heart of Agamben’s approach, points out Jaworski, is the idea of the paradigm. In The Signature of All Things: On Method, Agamben (2009) explains his methodological approach to biopolitics by arguing that he uses the term paradigm not to produce a universal theory of the camp. Rather, as Jaworski (2012) explains: [Agamben] uses the camp to trace its normative history precisely because concentration camps did not emerge from thin air. Rather, they emerged from a legal accommodation of the sovereign exception rather than random and accidental lawlessness. . . . In this sense, his approach to paradigm is methodological rather than methodical in so far as he uses the concept to unpack how the camp came into being, and why it was allowed to exist. For Agamben (2009), a paradigm is an example or an analogy used to explain the intelligibility of a phenomenon or historical event. (p. 355, added emphasis) In other words, Agamben (2009) emphasizes that a paradigm cannot exist outside a specific historical context. Thus, traumatic events (e.g. the Holocaust) cannot be represented in essentialist terms or as ahistorical events that are above and beyond history and time, but rather as phenomena to be theorized and understood in historical and political terms. It is in this sense, argues Jaworski, that a paradigm represents a ‘research design’, namely, a methodological

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approach to analyze the historical and political conditions that have led to traumatic events (2012, p. 356). The use of the camp and bare life enables scholars and educators to theorize the notion of difficult knowledge as a process in which learners are called upon to become witnesses of unspeakable events in history. This sort of witnessing though must avoid any ahistorical notions of ethics and politics, precisely because learners neither stabilize the one who is witnessed within prescribed categories of knowledge nor assimilate him or her to where the learners come from. The constructs of the camp and bare life, therefore, may function as useful methodological ‘tools’ in that they draw attention to the fact that difficult knowledge constitutes an engagement with history that aims to interrupt all totalities and fixed categories about trauma, history, the self and the other. If we pay attention to what makes knowledge difficult in each historical context – that is, how the camp and bare life make witnessing a thorny and complicated experience – then perhaps we will be able to reconsider the ethics and politics of vulnerability (I expand on this idea in the next part of the chapter). Most importantly, theorizing difficult knowledge through Agamben’s lens prevents a teleological and ‘happy ending’ account of redemption – that is, assumptions that traumatic affects and experiences can eventually be transcended. Thinking with Agamben’s methodology of the camp and paradigm to reconsider difficult knowledge as a form of witnessing tells us that there is no easy transcendence of difficult knowledge just as it is not easy to overcome traumatic affects and experiences. A major contribution of Agamben, then, is not to teach us that difficult knowledge ought to recover a history of traumatic experiences through merely ‘representing’ or ‘understanding’ the manifestations of traumatic events; rather, what is needed is to make these difficult affects and experiences for both primary and secondary witnesses the point of departure for a new level of ethical responsibility and political community.

Butler’s work on political vulnerability In this part of the chapter, I draw upon the work of Judith Butler (2004, 2009) because she pushes us to rethink psychoanalytic paradigms and the challenge that psychic elements pose to the prospects of ethical and political transformation (and vice versa). Butler’s interest in political vulnerability in recent years makes a profound contribution to formulating a political and activist orientation for difficult knowledge (Zembylas, 2014). In particular, Butler’s work allows for the emergence of fruitful pedagogical openings that enable us to consider difficult knowledge from an action-oriented perspective without disavowing the psychical problematics embedded in this effort. In Butler’s work following September 11, she is especially concerned with grief and how we are bounded emotionally to others in ways that interrupt our illusions of self-autonomy. As she writes in Precarious Life:

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What grief displays is the thrall in which our relations with others holds us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. . . . Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something . . . despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. (2004, p. 23) In this quote, Butler highlights how our afects, such as grief, show the strong entanglements between our psychic lives and the social and political consequences of those afects that often interrupt the self-centered stories we tell. Butler sketches a process of interruption that is very vivid and afectively powerful; the face, the scent, the touch and other feelings are all involved in the processes of social and political reproduction as well as in the prospects of transformation. Butler is particularly preoccupied with hierarchies of public mourning, the distinction between grievable and less grievable lives (see also Butler, 2009), and the repudiation of grief in the very discourse that seeks to redress it, thus exposing how we are all confronted with what we cannot control: our own vulnerability. As she writes, each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies. . . . Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure. (2004, p. 20) Butler argues that “we cannot . . . will away this vulnerability. We must attend to it” (ibid., p. 29) and poses new questions about the relationship of grief, violence and vulnerability: Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek resolution for grief through violence? . . . If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? . . . To foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way. (ibid., p. 30)

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In her use of vulnerability, Butler is after a social and political theory that renarrates grief as a point of departure to do justice to the lives of others. Admittedly, her theory does not tell us precisely how we do this – as with much political theory – it just says we need to do it. Importantly, precariousness, for Butler (2004), is about a “common human vulnerability” (p. 30); in other words, it is relational, thus it offers the basis for ethical responsiveness to others. In this manner, precarity is the gateway to nonviolent relationality and empathy; I oppose violence and injustice done to others, because I can empathize with them – because I realize that under other circumstances, violence and injustice could be aimed at me (Michel, 2016; Ruti, 2017; Millar, 2017). This is not to suggest, however, that Butler sees vulnerability as the same for everyone regardless of contextual or social distinctions (e.g. race, class, gender, etc.) that make some lives “more grievable” than others (2004, p. 30; see also Butler, 2009). Butler’s theorization of grief and mourning and especially her critique of the hierarchies of grief related to war on terror highlight how “certain forms of grief become nationally recognized and amplified, whereas other losses become unthinkable and ungrievable” (2004, p. xiv). Importantly, Butler acknowledges that we are not equally vulnerable and oppressed, but rather vulnerability is distributed unequally throughout the world. As Ruti (2017) explains, Butler does not only pay attention to the unequal distribution of precariousness, but also highlights how global structures of power often “make it difficult for us to acknowledge, let alone empathize, with the precariousness of those who do not inhabit our immediate, intimate lifeworld” (p. 97). In other words, as Butler observes, social and political norms prevent us from mourning the suffering (or death) of those who are deemed to be different from, or inferior to, ourselves. In Frames of War (2009), Butler expands her theorization of precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency and exposure, emphasizing the political implications. As she writes: Hence, precariousness as a generalized condition relies on a conception of the body as fundamentally dependent on, and conditioned by, a sustained and sustainable world; responsiveness – and thus, ultimately, responsibility – is located in the affective responses to a sustaining and impinging world. (p. 34) Here, Butler suggests that ‘frames of war’ establish “domains of the knowable” (p. 6) that “produce norms of recognizability” (ibid.). These norms, as she argues, operate at the level of social and political afect, as shown from the differential afective responses to the sufering of lives globally. Precariousness for Butler, then, is a social and political condition of being diferentially exposed to others and their sufering. Therefore, the description of the world in terms of grievable and ungrievable lives is sustained through networks of social and political afect.

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Butler’s approach is important methodologically because it creates openings for a political analysis of vulnerability and an ethical encounter with the other’s precariousness. As she explains, the frames of war act as a regulatory norm of social and political affect, exposing “precisely the rationale that supports a certain kind of war effort to distinguish between valuable and grievable lives on the one hand, and devalued and ungrievable lives on the other” (2009, p. 22). Therefore, she argues that we should “critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others” (2004, p. 30). The critical evaluation of the conditions of vulnerability is a way out of the dilemmas of identity in discussions of difficult knowledge, offering a point of departure for reconsidering ‘our’ and ‘their’ trauma. Inevitably though, given that there are socio-political norms and ways that discriminate between grievable lives, we might often be unable “to respond ethically to an unrecognizable other because they are unable to see the body before them or to hear its address” (Lloyd, 2015, p. 228, author’s emphasis).

A fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability as a theoretical method So far, I have described Agamben’s and Butler’s approaches and how they can be employed methodologically to analyze the ethical, affective and political implications of traumatic legacies of the past. In the last part of this chapter, I will attempt to synthesize these approaches as methodologies to further explore the topic of difficult knowledge. The question that drives my analysis is: Does a fused theory of Agamben’s approach to the camp and bare life and Butler’s work on political vulnerability create spaces that can be pedagogically productive so that students and teachers who engage with difficult knowledge can critically recognize themselves as agents for ethical and political action? In other words, how can Agamben’s and Butler’s approaches be mobilized methodologically as tools that expand our critical engagement with difficult knowledge? As noted earlier, previous work on difficult knowledge has mainly used psychoanalytic tools to theorize this topic. Here I want to build on this work by drawing on the ideas outlined by a fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability as a theoretical method and consider the implications for enriching theorization of difficult knowledge. Butler’s approach on political vulnerability resonates with Agamben’s theorization of the camp and bare life in that ontological vulnerability is seen a process of materializing and differentiating meaning, effect and affect, depending on social norms that render meaning, effect and affect intelligible within each historical context (Jaworski, 2012, p. 359). Butler’s view that “the critique of violence must begin with the question of the representability of life itself” (2009, p. 51, original emphasis) urges us, as educators, to consider more seriously the challenges of knowing certain lives in their precariousness. As she asks: “What allows a life to become visible in its precariousness

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and its need for shelter, and what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this way?” (ibid.). Similarly, Agamben’s theory of the camp and bare life draws attention to the historical conditions that make a life to become bare life beyond fixed (e.g. national) categories. Both Agamben’s and Butler’s politically oriented work offers us a critical analysis of vulnerability and how it can inspire an action-oriented solidarity in engagements with difficult knowledge. Vulnerability is understood as openness to an encounter with the Other, which provides the point of departure for ethical transformation. Tinning (2018), for example, argues that displaying Difficult Matters in museums – namely, issues that are violent, tragic, traumatic and painful and, therefore, are difficult to deal with such as war, genocide and human rights violations – involves a critical consideration of the norms of vulnerability at play in particular situations. Her analysis acknowledges the ethical and pedagogical challenges and possibilities in such teaching-learning relations – for example how museum professionals may involve visitors as vulnerable beings in order to encourage ethical transformation. With the help of Butler and Agamben, this pedagogical framework can create valuable openings to explore the complexities of personal and collective stories of vulnerability as well as the possibilities of ethical and political transformations in different situations in which difficult knowledge is engaged (e.g. museums, schools, public spaces). Butler’s concepts of grief and loss as mutual vulnerability and Agamben’s analysis of the camp to bear witness to the impossible offer us the tools to rethink collective responsibility for each others’ life. For example, as Taylor (2011) points out, using Butler’s theory to analyze how certain affects are socially and politically normalized “can lead to particular solutions that seek to disrupt circuits of indifference” (p. 18). I would also argue that Agamben’s theory of biopower questions the very notions of humanity beyond concentration camps which make possible the generalization of the logic of the camp. A fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability, then, seems to suggest a pedagogy of difficult knowledge that not only challenges established norms of recognition that underpin our habits of whom to grieve or not, but also creates new ‘meanings’ about others and, therefore, new forms of ethical sociality and political relationality with them (Zembylas, 2017, 2018). Such pedagogy implies that “in order to know differently we have to feel differently” (Hemmings, 2012, p. 150); that is, knowing and feeling differently are strongly interrelated.

Applications to socially just teacher education This dynamic theorization of difficult knowledge – that is, one which takes into consideration issues of trauma, subjectivity, vulnerability, inclusion/ exclusion and affect, to name a few fundamental constructs involved – has important pedagogical and curricular implications. For example, a fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability as a theoretical method can be applied

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to teachers finding it difficult to discuss issues of race and homophobia or teachers’ emotional reactions to engaging in politically different ideologies. A theoretical method that wishes to develop self-criticality, ethical responsibility and the prospects of political transformation in engaging with difficult issues needs to create conditions for teachers so that their affective investments are strategically engaged. By showing empathy to teachers’ emotional reactions in engaging with difficult issues, the conditions are created step by step to address these issues while recognizing the complexities of personal and collective stories of vulnerability, regardless of where they are coming from. Needless to say, empathy can easily become ‘empty’ when it remains at a superficial level by removing emotion from the call to action and by framing the conversation in terms of simplistic and essentialist moral categories such as that of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ or ‘friend’ versus ‘enemy’ (Chouliaraki, 2008). Empty empathy resorts to a sentimental discourse of trauma and vulnerability that evokes pity for the other-sufferers rather than compassionate action, leading learners to voyeurism and passivity (Zembylas, 2013, 2017). Attention to shared vulnerability, then, is not enough, if as (teacher) educators we wish to invent pedagogies of difficult knowledge that inspire protest at injustice or transmute into compassionate action that ‘radicalizes’ solidarity. Radicalization of solidarity requires that participants of a learning experience (e.g. teachers, students) recognize their shared complicities too, that is, the capacity to injure others and bear responsibility for others’ vulnerability. In other words, an argument of shared vulnerability is not completely unproblematic, if it fails to recognize shared complicities (Zembylas, 2014, 2018). A focus on both shared vulnerabilities and shared complicities acknowledges that there are asymmetries of trauma, responsibility and injustice – just as Agamben’s and Butler’s attention to bare life and vulnerability teaches us. A discourse of shared vulnerabilities and shared complicities neither eschews questions of material suffering nor obscures issues of responsibility and injustice; on the contrary, it highlights both the symmetries and the asymmetries of vulnerability and complicity. That is, although the experience of vulnerability may be more or less universal, the discourse of vulnerability raises important critical questions such as “Vulnerable to whom? In what terms? Whose responsibility is it? What can be done to change this?” in order to dismiss the possibility of sliding into a sentimental recognition of potential ‘sameness’ (Zembylas, 2013). Without this double realization – that is, we are all vulnerable but not in the same manner and that we have shared (yet asymmetrical) complicities in others’ suffering and trauma – our understanding of difficult knowledge will fail to realize its potential for affective solidarity and transformation. All in all, a fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability as a theoretical method highlights two important insights that function methodologically to enrich our theorization of difficult knowledge: first, while acknowledging the universality of bare life and vulnerability, we should not lose sight of their particularity; second, bare life and vulnerability need to be historicized rather

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than psychologized so that we can evaluate the link between vulnerability and oppression or social injustice. That is, it is important that efforts to ‘translate’ ethics and politics of difficult knowledge into a pedagogical proposition are accompanied by a reformulation and recontextualization of the meaning(s) of the constructs involved (e.g. bare life, vulnerability), which as I argued, with the help of Agamben and Butler, can offer more productive pedagogical engagement with difficult knowledge.

Concluding remarks In this chapter, I have suggested that a fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability could function as a theoretical method to explore difficult knowledge. As Jaworski (2012) has suggested, “It is important to think with theoretical thinkers . . . thinking through their ideas rather than about them” (p. 361, original emphasis). Thinking through Agamben’s ideas of the camp and bare life highlights the importance of studying the historical and political conditions and trajectories of such ideas; this is crucial to using these ideas to reconfigure difficult knowledge in different settings in education and beyond. Similarly, thinking through Butler’s ideas of political vulnerability emphasizes that it is important to pay attention to the complexities and tensions involved within the contexts in which traumatic experiences emerge, as there are no universal theoretical approaches about political vulnerability. A fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability as a theoretical method, then, has important implications on producing more theoretical research for the field of education that other traditional methods cannot. In particular, a fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability makes possible the theorization of what and how difficult knowledge is constituted within each context – just as what constitutes bare life or vulnerability – while taking into consideration the contextual social and political norms. Theorizing difficult knowledge in light of a fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability enables us to see that traumatic experiences (e.g. genocides, racisms, wars and conflicts) require a more nuanced understanding of the consequences of the emotional burden carried by teachers’ and learners’ affective investments to particular ideologies (e.g. racism, nationalism), especially when the desire for empowerment and humanization seems to be rejected or eroded. An ongoing challenge for educational researchers is how to find new methodological and theoretical ways of exploring difficult knowledge as points of departure to create openings for ethical and political transformation. I view this challenge as a persistent struggle for inventing new ways of considering how certain theories work to advance our methodologies of identifying and handling difficult knowledge with care, sensitivity and criticality. A fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability is just one of those ways; there are numerous others that might enable scholars and educators to think differently about topics such as difficult knowledge and invent productive pedagogical engagement with them.

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References Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2002). Remnants of Auschwitz: The witness and the archive (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). New York, NY: Zone Books. Agamben, G. (2005). State of exception (K. Attell, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Agamben, G. (2009). The signature of all things: On method (L. D’Isanto & K. Attell, Trans.). New York, NY: Zone Books. Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Britzman, D. P. (2000). If the story cannot end: Deferred action, ambivalence, and difficult knowledge. In R. I. Simon, S. Rosenberg, & C. Eppert (Eds.), Between hope and despair: The pedagogical encounter of historical remembrance (pp. 27–57). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Britzman, D. P. (2013). Between psychoanalysis and pedagogy: Scenes of rapprochement and alienation. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(1), 95–117. Britzman, D. P., & Pitt, A. (2004). Pedagogy and clinical knowledge: Some psychoanalytic observations on losing and refinding significance. JAC, 24(2), 353–374. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When life is grievable. London: Verso. Chouliaraki, L. (2008). Mediation as moral education. Media, Culture & Society, 30, 831–847. Cohen-Evron, N. (2005). Students living within violent conflict: Should art educators “play it safe” or face “difficult knowledge”? Studies in Art Education, 46(4), 309–322. Failler, A., Ives, P., & Milne, H. (2015). Introduction: Caring for “difficult knowledge” – Prospects for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, 37(2/3), 100–105. Farley, L. (2009). Radical hope: Or, the problem of uncertainty in history education. Curriculum Inquiry, 39(4), 537–554. Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality, volume one: An introduction. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1997). What is critique? In S. Lotringer & I. Hochroth (Eds.), The politics of truth (pp. 23–82). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (M. Bertani & A. Fontana, Eds.). New York, NY: Picador. Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (M. Bertani & A. Fontana, Eds.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Garrett, H. J. (2011). The routing and re-routing of difficult knowledge: Social studies teaches encounter When the Levees Broke. Theory and Research in Social Education, 39(3), 320–347. Hemmings, C. (2012). Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation. Feminist Theory, 13(2), 147–161. Jaworski, K. (2012). The methodological crisis of theorizing genocide in Africa: Thinking with Agamben and Butler. African Identities, 10(3), 349–365. Lehrer, E., Milton, C. E., & Patterson, M. E. (Eds.). (2011). Curating difficult knowledge: Violent pasts in public places. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Lloyd, M. S. (2015). The ethics and politics of vulnerable bodies. In M. S. Lloyd (Ed.), Butler and ethics (pp. 167–192). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Matthews, S. (2009). Hitler’s car as curriculum text: Reading adolescents reading history. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 7(2), 49–85.

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Michel, N. (2016). Accounts of injury as misappropriations of race: Towards a critical black politics of vulnerability. Critical Horizons, 17(2), 240–259. Millar, K. M. (2017). Towards a critical politics of precarity. Sociology Compass, 11(6), 1–11. Milne, H. (2015). Human rights and/or market logic: Neoliberalism, difficult knowledge, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, 37(2/3), 106–124. Pitt, A., & Britzman, D. P. (2003). Speculations on qualities of difficult knowledge in teaching and learning: An experiment in psychoanalytic research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(6), 755–776. Riach, K., Rumens, N., & Tyler, M. (2016). Towards a Butlerian methodology: Undoing organizational performativity through anti-narrative research. Human Relations, 69(11), 2069–2089. Ruti, M. (2017). The ethics of precarity: Judith Butler’s reluctant universalism. In M. Donker, R. Truscott, G. Minkley, & P. Lalu (Eds.), Remains of the social: Desiring the post-apartheid (pp. 92–116). Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press. Simon, R. I. (2011a). A shock to thought: Curatorial judgment and the public exhibition of “difficult knowledge”. Memory Studies, 4(4), 432–449. Simon, R. I. (2011b). Afterword: The turn to pedagogy: A needed conversation on the practice of curating difficult knowledge. In E. Lehrer, C. E. Milton, & M. E. Patterson (Eds.), Curating difficult knowledge: Violent pasts in public places (pp. 193–209). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Sonu, D. (2016). Forgotten memories of a social justice education: Difficult knowledge and the impossibilities of school and research. Curriculum Inquiry, 46(5), 473–490. Tarc, A. M. (2011). Reparative curriculum. Curriculum Inquiry, 41(3), 350–372. Taylor, L. (2011). Feeling in crisis: Vicissitudes of response in experiments with global justice education. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 9(1), 6–65. Tinning, K. (2018). Vulnerability as a key concept in museum pedagogy on difficult matters. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 37, 147–165. Zembylas, M. (2013). The “crisis of pity” and the radicalization of solidarity: Towards critical pedagogies of compassion. Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 49, 504–521. Zembylas, M. (2014). Theorizing “difficult knowledge” in the aftermath of the “affective turn”: Implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(3), 390–412. Zembylas, M. (2016). Affect theory and Judith Butler: Methodological implications for educational research. In M. Zembylas & P. Schutz (Eds.), Methodological advances in research on emotion and education (pp. 203–214). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Zembylas, M. (2017). Teacher resistance towards difficult histories: The centrality of affect in disrupting teacher learning. In C. Peck & T. Epstein (Eds.), Teaching and learning difficult histories in international contexts: A critical sociocultural approach. New York, NY: Routledge. Zembylas, M. (2018). The ethics and politics of precarity: Risks and productive possibilities of a critical pedagogy for precarity. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 38, 95–111. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9625-4 Zembylas, M. (2019). Butler, Judith. In P. Atkinson, S. Delamont, M. A. Hardy, & M. Williams (Eds.), SAGE research methods foundations [Online]. https://doi.org/10.4135/97815264210 36745329

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Uncovering internalized whiteness through Critical Race counterstories Navigating our experiences in the state of Texas Socorro Morales, Sonya M. Alemán, and Enrique Alemán, Jr.

Introduction Critical Race theorists understand what is at stake in the United States is white supremacy – the social structure that fabricates “races” and creates racial hierarchies based on these fabrications – always placing whites at the top (Allen & Liou, 2019). White supremacy ensures that whites are always the ones in power, despite the fact that the majority of the world’s population is non-white (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017). Ideologies of whiteness are the various manifestations of white supremacy, including colorblind ideology, meritocracy, and institutional policies that privilege white bodies over all others, notably the notion of whiteness as property (Harris, 1993; Matias, 2016). In order for this racial project (Omi & Winant, 1993) to sustain itself amidst shifting demographics – like those that edge, for example, Texas nearer to a majority-Latina/o/x state – non-white individuals become integral players in manifesting white supremacy. In other words, white supremacy functions both because whites and non-whites internalize and replicate this system. As Critical Race theorists and faculty members teaching within this broader social and political context at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) with a majority Latina/o/x student body in the U.S., we see and feel the effects of this particular iteration of whiteness daily, particularly the ways that white fragility and whiteness manifest in our classrooms (DiAngelo, 2018), in our communities, and in Latina/o/x institutions as racialized Brown bodies seek proximity to whiteness (Matias, 2020). This chapter centers our experiences as Chicanas and a Chicano living and working in San Antonio, Texas, at an HSI. Specifically, we draw from Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Race counterstories to illustrate the intimate connection between theory and methods for scholars of color within the field of education (DeCuir-Gunby, Chapman, & Schutz, 2019; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). CRT provides a framework from which to analyze the historical and continued pervasiveness of white supremacy, whiteness as property,

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and racism as endemic to our everyday lives and experiences. We contend that in using CRT to analyze all structures and articulations of whiteness and white supremacy, it is impossible to separate the theory that guides us (racism as endemic) from the method of telling stories that unmask and debunk the dominant, deficit narratives about our communities (counterstories) that are rooted in a white supremacist social structure. Though CRT is the broader, overarching framework that guides this chapter, we also draw from Latino Critical Theory (LatCrit), particularly because the context that we are examining is largely Mexican American centric. In essence, the counterstory we present in this chapter illustrates that critical theories can function as methods and that critical scholars should continue to take them up as legitimate forms of research (Brayboy & Chin, 2019). Importantly, we also note that while Latina/o/x scholars have skillfully employed CRT and counterstories to document various proliferations of whiteness in educational systems (Delgado Bernal & Villalpando, 2002; Solorzano & Yosso, 2001, 2002a, 2002b; Yosso, 2006), CRT and counterstorytelling has been infrequently used to chronicle how People of Color either align themselves to whiteness or are lured and co-opted by its power. In other words, People of Color can be co-opted by white supremacy and as a result, so too can theoretical methods such as CRT’s counterstorytelling. Because of this, we caution that folks should be wary of how these methods are being employed. Solorzano and Yosso (2002a) and others (Haney López, 1997; Trucios-Haynes, 2000) reiterate that “people of color often buy into and even tell majoritarian stories” (p. 5), but this chapter extends CRT theories and counterstorytelling methodology to illuminate this particular articulation. We situate the experiences that we draw from in this chapter within the context of Texas, a Republican state that has a Latina/o/x population demographic similar to that of California, a Democratic state. Our aim is to show the ways that whiteness manifests itself within this majority-Latina/o/x state. White supremacy is deeply embedded in Texas history and politics and as a result have largely impacted the socialization of people who identify as Latina/ o/x and Chicana/o/x – that is, the subtraction of their language, the loss of an ethnic identity, and the expectation that they will assimilate into whiteness. Next, we expand upon our use of CRT counterstorytelling methodology as a means of highlighting how this approach is a form of embodied theory and therefore, theoretical inquiry. In the next section, we offer a counterstory that allows us to uncover the ways that Chicanas/os/xs and Latinas/os/xs uphold and normalize whiteness, as well as how HSIs and other majority Latina/o/x institutions are implicated in white supremacist matrices of power. Drawn from our experiences working and living in Texas, this counterstory allows us to signal, theorize, and, hopefully, disrupt the internalization of whiteness as it manifests within a context that is predominantly Latina/o/x, and, more specifically, majority Mexican and Mexican American. We conclude by reiterating the interconnectedness of Critical Race theories and its counterstorytelling method – in other words, the ways that CRT as a theory also serves as a

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method from which to deconstruct white supremacy and whiteness. Furthermore, we argue that using CRT and counterstories as both the theory and method can inform, disrupt, and challenge majoritarian narratives – even those told and maintained by Brown bodies and institutions.

Counterstorytelling as a theoretical construct Critical Race counterstories function as a way to center the narratives of the multiply marginalized (Cook & Dixson, 2013; Matias, 2013; Solorzano & Yosso, 2001, 2002a, 2002b; Yosso, 2006). Derived specifically from Critical Race Theory (Bell, 1992; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017), counterstories provide insights into the lived realities of communities that experience intersectional oppressions (Crenshaw, 1991) and help situate moral and ethical questions tied to our understandings of these oppressions. In particular, however, “[c]ounterstories make the study of race so salient and dynamic because they unveil intricate nuances embedded in everyday life” (Matias, 2013, p. 292). That is, counterstories serve as a useful pedagogical tool that illuminates what oppression, but more specifically racism, feels like. They function to subvert the status quo and not only “make the invisible visible” (Brayboy & Chin, 2019, p. 52), but furthermore push us to reimagine the role of the marginalized within a racialized, hierarchical structure that privileges whiteness. Counterstories also function to connect communities together who share similar experiences with oppression as a means of providing support and validation – recognizing that their experiences are shared. Aligned with women of color feminists who have long argued that the body is a site of developing theory and resistance (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983), we argue that counterstories are theoretical tools that illuminate our lived realities. In other words, counterstories function as theory – they help us uncover, challenge, make sense of, and process the various oppressions we face and live through. Counterstories function as embodied theory because they reflect experiences that are lived and breathed in the everyday. Though many scholars have written about the process of developing counterstories, there is no empirical formula that fits what a counterstory is. Suffice it to say, counterstories do not neatly fit within the limited empirical definitions of data and thus it behooves us to consider what is the methodological process of counterstories. Thus, counterstories are not merely another form of empirical method to be used by whomever – they are specific to experiencing oppression and function pedagogically to help us better understand that oppression. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Solorzano and Yosso (2002b) note that whites are not the only ones who tell deficit, majoritarian narratives about racism, sexism, and other “isms.” They argue that People of Color can and do tell these deficit narratives as well. Matias (2016) argues that People of Color can also embody and be indoctrinated by whiteness, noting there can be several reasons for this including (1) survival and (2) believing they will have some protection against whiteness. We agree with Matias that oftentimes People of

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Color can perceive a false sense of security that comes with aligning themselves with whiteness. What has been less theorized within the realm of counterstorytelling is how People of Color, and in our case, Brown folks, respond to other Brown folks who have internalized whiteness. In other words, there are few counterstories that explicitly examine what the internalization of whiteness can look like and furthermore, how one might respond to or make sense of that internalization. Bell (1992) in his infamous parable “Space Traders” included a character by the name of Dr. Gleason Golightly who is intended to represent a person of color who has internalized whiteness and acts as a token for white folks especially since Golightly is a Black, conservative economics professor. Though “Space Traders” is not considered a counterstory, we bring this example in because several CRT scholars have previously suggested that People of Color can certainly be used in the service of whiteness and to the detriment of themselves. Thus, our hopes in this piece was to create a counterstory that more explicitly centers a dialogue regarding internalized whiteness by Brown people and places. Meaning, the counterstory we offer is a model of how to methodologically apply counterstories in ways that reveal whiteness rhetoric. We do so because we find it concerning that approximately 28% Latinas/os/xs nationally voted for 451 in the 2016 election, while 34% did so within the state of Texas (2016 Election Results). Voting for 45 was in stark contrast to the ideals of what is best suited for Latinas/os/xs, especially when he ran a presidential campaign that was anti-Latina/o/x. Though we certainly pinpoint white supremacy as the disease affecting all of us, albeit differently depending on whether you are white or a person of color (Matias, 2016), we feel there is a need to continue pushing the conversation regarding the effects of the internalization of whiteness by Brown people. Furthermore, we argue that counterstories, given their ability to relate nuance in ways that can be accessible, should center internalized whiteness by People of Color as a means of further theorizing what this looks like, feels like, and what we may decide to do about it.

Application of counterstory as method of exposing internalized whiteness Arrival to Texas “That is a beautiful sight. I know we are back home now,” said Dr. Malaquías Tamez to his wife Dr. Esperanza Tamez, as the first Whataburger restaurant became visible on the outskirts of El Paso. His excitement had remained high during the long drive back home, but his giddiness became more apparent as he continued chatting to his wife. “You know – we will get back to Texas nearly 20 years to the day that we were married in San Antonio,” he announced to the kids for what seemed like the 20th time during their trip. They were returning to be faculty members at one of the largest Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) in the country. With

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four additional degrees, three kids, three cross-country moves, and a dog, they were now headed back to the capital of Tejano music and bean and cheese tacos. Specifically choosing to work at a university with such a high percentage of Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x students, many of whom are the first in their families to attend college, the Tamezes were having a full-circle moment, returning as seasoned professors who hoped to work with the local Mexican American intelligentsia and community leaders. Ixchel’s drive to Texas a month later was mostly uneventful. She tackled the 21-hour drive alone, energized by the security of her new position as an incoming assistant professor to the same university. Ixchel was both excited and nervous about her move to the southwest, in particular because her roots are in California. Being a queer, first-generation college, second-gen immigrant, low-income Chicana from Fontana, Ixchel never even knew what a graduate degree was until the end of her sophomore year in college – and yet, here she was, moving across the country for a faculty position at an HSI. She anticipated feeling at home amongst Texas’s largely Latina/o/x population. Indeed, the demographic similarities between Texas and California quelled some of her nerves about relocating. For example, although California is a more populous state, both Texas and California have approximately 52% Latina/o/x students in their public school K-12 system (California Department of Education, 2018; TEA, 2018). It was only on the last 75 miles into San Antonio along Texas’s interstate highway 35 that her serenity was jarred. A billboard posted alongside the highway caught her attention. It read, “California? Too late. Texas still great. Vote Republican.” Struck by this initial introduction to Texas, Ixchel began to wonder what it would be like to teach a predominantly Latina/o/x classroom with Republican political leanings. How would her curriculum rooted in notions of racial and gender justice be received by Brown students whose political views favored an individualistic, free-market, neo-liberal perspective? Early into the semester Descended from five generations of native-born South Tejanos – gente from south of San Antonio but north of the Rio Grande – was a source of pride for Malaquías, also known as Dr. Tamez, an incoming professor to Alamo University. With the lore and mythologies about the Alamo (Acuña, 1988; Montejano, 1987; Ramos, 2019), the murderous Texas Rangers (Johnson, 2003), and the King Ranch – what had once been the “biggest ranch in the world” (Hollandsworth, 1998) – most people new to Texas were struck by the Texas-sized and Texas-centric culture. But after returning home, Malaquías acutely sensed the hegemonic racism, patriarchy, and internalized oppression that afflicted the majority Brown population in South Texas. At the beginning of the semester, he attended a gathering of superintendents that reminded him of the importance of moving back to prepare the

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region’s next generation of school leaders. There, he noticed his colleague Chuck Duvall, a senior professor in his department, greeting many school district leaders. When Chuck saw Malaquías walk into the educational regional center, he waved him over to introduce him. “Dr. Tamez,” he said as Malaquías approached, “this is Dr. McCandless, the leader of this group of school superintendents.” Malaquías recalled that McCandless had just been reelected to his second term as chair of this organization of superintendents from the south Texas region. His thick Texas twang spoke for the organization in the media, at the legislature, and at statewide conventions. Shortly after exchanging pleasantries, Malaquías observed Dr. McCandless’s commanding presence as he circulated the room, watching as other superintendents yielded physical space to him. Malaquías did a quick tally. Although he recognized a good number of Latino district leaders, of the 55 superintendents in the room, only 14 were Latina/o/x. Of those 14, only three were Latina. “Let’s get down to the business,” McCandless ordered, interrupting Malaquías’s thoughts. “We have a full agenda, including discussing the new accountability measures that will go into effect this academic year.” As McCandless moved through his talking points, Malaquías noted that the majority of their meeting was dominated by the voices of two to three white males. In a state where over half of all enrolled public school students are Latina/o/x, and in a county with over 60% of its public school enrollment identified as Latina/o/x students, the most powerful voices at the table were 70% white and 88% male. A well-publicized report published in San Antonio’s daily newspaper earlier that year revealed decades-long inequities in access, opportunities, and educational attainment for Latina/o/x students, yet not one item agenda addressed them. Furthermore, even though at least three of the districts in this region housed a federal detention site – or what some activists more accurately describe as “concentration camps” – within their boundaries, the superintendents did not consider their roles as educational leaders regarding the humane treatment of children. No one called for a discussion of these two vitally important policy issues. Although McCandless gave an opportunity to amend or add to the agenda, no one objected, and the meeting proceeded. As he surveyed the room, Malaquías saw that the Latino superintendents were assembled on the right side of the room, while the three Latina superintendents were scattered throughout. Although few in number, Malaquías expected at least one of the Latina/o/x leaders to question the absence of a discussion of the migrant children, or even mention the negative impacts standardized test scores have on Latina/o/x communities. Instead, he observed an erasure of policy issues that had direct impact on Latina/o/x-Chicana/o/x student success, such as the lack of opportunities for first-generation students who want to pursue higher education, or the separation of children – namely Indigenous and Brown – who were being held in hieleras by for-profit companies

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that were being rewarded handsomely by government contracts. Why weren’t school leaders advocating for the well-being of those children, too? Despondent, Malaquías waited for and walked out with the two newest Latina/o/x superintendents, Dr. James Sanchez and Dr. Alice Guajardo after the meeting. Both were known as outspoken leaders. He met the two at a back-to-school event at his university and had lunch with each of them his first few weeks on the job. Malaquías asked, “Was this your first superintendent regional meeting?” When they nodded, he continued, “What did you think?” Both superintendents smiled and paused awkwardly. They referenced the highly top-down nature of the process for getting on the agenda, and although they had previously met many of the school district leadership in the county, they mentioned that it still struck them how white and male the space was. After speaking for a few minutes about the test scores in their district, Malaquías broached the topic that most bothered him. “Why didn’t anyone bring up the separation of immigrant children from their families?” he interjected. “I’ve been told to not rock the boat and to play nice, and for sure don’t be seen as militant,” Dr. Guajardo chimed in. “As one of the very few Latinas in the room, you have to pick your battles. Most of the men in that room are conservative. There is no benefit to me or my district to call them out in that space.” “But what about your colegas? There are other Latino superintendents who could have said something, gone on the record?” Malaquías pressed. “Look, no one has to tell me how to feel about this. It’s very distressing,” Dr. Sanchez said forcefully. “But we have to be smart about this. Whether we like it or not, the ‘good old boy’ network is real and it’s powerful and pushing against them could cost us our jobs.” Malaquías sensed Sanchez’s defensiveness. He changed the topic and asked them both about their families in South Texas and what brought them to San Antonio. Their experiences were very similar. They were first in their families to leave home, attend college, and to then complete graduate degrees. Like him, they decided early in their careers to enter the field of education and saw it as an opportunity to give back and to transform community. On the way home, Malaquías could not help but think about how deeply entrenched white supremacy undergirds all policy, educational and economic development renewal strategies in the heart of Mexican American South Texas. *** With jittery fingers, Esperanza Tamez logged onto the classroom computer. She breathed a sigh of relief as her newly issued password was accepted and looked up to survey the students shuffling into the classroom. Since earning her Ph.D. six years ago, Esperanza had imagined herself in such a space, teaching students whose eyes, faces, and sounds echoed those of her siblings, primos,

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and former classmates. During that time, she taught at a Research I institution in the Rocky Mountain West, a campus whose demographics mirrored the predominately white student populations of other Research I institutions across the U.S. Having been raised in a majority-Mexican American community in South Texas and having attended a small, private, Catholic HSI as an undergraduate, Esperanza attributed her strong sense of identity and self-assurance to those formative years where a bicultural and bilingual identity was the norm. She held onto her goal of teaching at a minority-serving institution and providing that type of validation and belonging to students like herself. Today was the first day of realizing her dream, teaching at an emerging Tier I school that served a population of 56% Latina/o/x students. By mid-semester, Esperanza made a disconcerting observation. She detected an overwhelming lack of knowledge among her students about the histories and experiences of Mexican American, Chicana/o/x, and/or Latina/o/x communities. For instance, when discussing the evolution of Chicana/o/x art, Esperanza asked, “Who graduated from the high schools in town where students walked out in 1969?” as a way to localize this artform. Students were unaware walkouts had even occurred in San Antonio.2 When examining the motivation for corridos like the Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, students had little to no understanding of the bigotry, terror, and misery anti-Mexican violence corridos addressed. She asked, “How many lynchings of Mexicans or Mexican Americans occurred in Texas?” Upon this, students were shocked to hear that Latinas/ os/xs were even targeted in this way. It seemed that every cultural expression discussed – ballet folklórico, danza Azteca, Spanish colonial writings, murals, reggaetón, Tejano music – revealed a disturbing lack of knowledge. In order to provide the necessary context for the cultural expressions of Latina/o/x communities, Esperanza found herself adjusting her syllabus to accommodate discussing these historical moments, experiences, and figures. “¿Como te va, Esperanza?” Citlali Montez, Esperanza’s colleague, greeted her after one of her class periods. They were meeting for lunch to check in with one another. “Pues, en casi todo bien,” she replied, after they found a nice shaded table. “I am a bit taken aback by how disconnected my students are from their racial, ethnic, and cultural histories. My experience growing up in South Texas included these narratives, but my students are hearing them for the first time in my class and it is not the starting point I imagined being at an HSI in a predominantly Brown city. At times, it feels like I am back in the Rocky Mountain West teaching a classroom full of white students who don’t know the difference between a Mexican American and a Guatemalan.” Citlali chuckled. “I know what you mean. As a product of many of the public schools our students here attend, I can tell you that they know shockingly little about the struggles their antepasados faced just so they could attend this very university.” “Could you tell me more about that?” Esperanza asked. Citlali continued, “Well, the HSI we worked at only resulted after decades of tireless efforts by various stakeholders in the Mexican American community.” She explained it

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took a lawsuit and legislative order to rectify how the largely working-class Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x communities making up the majority of one of Texas’s largest cities had been “underserved by higher education” (de Oliver, 1998, p. 274) for years, since the majority of these families “could not afford to send their children to an out-of-town university” (p. 274). The legislative bill authorizing the construction of this institution indicated it should be located at a site accessible to the “socioeconomically underprivileged populations of the inner city” (p. 277) which were – and still are – majority Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x. Despite this pledge, the campus was built in 1969 at the city’s outer suburban fringe, closer to the city’s relatively affluent white populations. It would take another lawsuit filed by MALDEF3 in 1987 to demonstrate that this particular suburban campus had yet to meet the needs of the city’s and region’s Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x population. As a result, a satellite campus was finally built in the city’s urban core in 1997, amidst a predominately Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x neighborhood. This second site was where Esperanza’s office was located. “There are 120,000 college students enrolled throughout the city in six universities and five community college campuses and all but one of the privates has at least 50 percent of its student body identifying as Hispanic. We have this huge population of Latina/o/x students in higher education and they arrive to our campuses not only not knowing their own histories but also having under-resourced opportunities to take classes about their histories, identities, and experiences.” Esperanza made a mental note to share this conversation with Malaquías that night on their after-dinner walk with their dog, Chavo. Looking at her calendar, she was reminded they planned to meet with Ixchel the following morning and wondered how her transition might be going. Los tres On her way to meet with Esperanza and Malaquías for a research meeting, Ixchel wipes the small droplets of sweat from her eyebrows that developed on her walk from the parking lot to campus. While both the humidity and the anxiety about what happened with her student, Eduardo, during last week’s office hours bothers her, she looks forward to sharing with Esperanza and Malaquías to gain their insight. As Ixchel walks into their reserved meeting room, Malaquías looks up and says, “Right on time!” in a loud voice as he looks up from his laptop. Esperanza also looks up and smiles warmly. Esperanza closes her laptop and leans slightly forward, asking “How are you?” “Eh, there have been better days,” Ixchel responds with a slight chuckle, less out of nervousness or anxiety and more out of the sheer ridiculousness that is white supremacy. “There is something that happened during my office hours last week that I would like to share with you both. It concerns one of my students, Eduardo.”

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Both Malaquías and Esperanza furrow their eyebrows. As he brings a cup of coffee up to his mouth, Malaquías asks first, “what happened?” “Well, to add context to this story, Eduardo is a visibly dark-skinned Latino. This detail is actually quite relevant,” Ixchel says and then pauses for a drink of her water bottle. “Two weeks ago, he actually walked out of my class for reasons that weren’t very clear to me. I have consistently noticed that Eduardo is fidgety in class. He makes faces, sighs loudly, and displays body language that conveys to me his clear annoyance with the topics that we discuss in class, all of which are related to research, but particularly topics that challenge traditional Western ways of thinking about research. That means that we discuss issues tied to race, racism, and other forms of oppression. At the same time that he is annoyed, he has become increasingly vocal in displaying his opposition. He identifies as a conservative and repeatedly says in class that he doesn’t like ‘liberal professors who don’t teach all sides.’ I’m okay with being challenged in the classroom because, of course, that is part of the point – for us to engage in critical dialogues and challenge each other, even when it feels uncomfortable. However, the pattern that I have noticed with him is that he challenges me with no substantive evidence. . . . In fact, I am very confident that he is not reading the materials at all because he can’t articulate what the main points of the readings are.” Ixchel takes a pause. “Yeah, that’s definitely happened before,” Esperanza replies, as she sets down her tea. “In my case, there have been male students and, notably, male students of color, that are clearly uncomfortable with me as the professor. As the book Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia points out, women of color faculty are consistently questioned for their knowledge of course material, their handling of classroom discussions, and their overall capability to serve as competent individuals in their respective fields in relation to their male counterparts” (Gutiérrez y Muhs, Flores Niemann, Gonzalez, & Harris, 2012). “Was there a particular thing that he said to you when you met with him during office hours in terms of why he doesn’t like the course material?” Malaquías asks. “Yes and no. Yes, as in it’s clear that he doesn’t like the course and no as in his evidence supporting specifically what he doesn’t like about it outside of it being ‘liberal’ is nonexistent. For example, I did mention to him the discussion that we had in class regarding the Tuskegee Syphilis Study,4 and he told me that they also withheld treatment from white men before they did that with Black men. However, when I asked him to expand on that, he didn’t actually have concrete evidence,” Ixchel concludes. “Thus far, any time I mention racism as leading to particular outcomes, such as health disparities [(Flores, Gaxiola Serrano, & Solorzano, 2019)], he’s very insistent that it’s not racism – it’s mindset. In other words, he advances the ‘use your bootstraps’ mentality.” Both Esperanza and Malaquías sigh as Ixchel finishes talking. All three of them sit silently for a few seconds, hearing only the low hum of the air conditioner and the occasional whizzing by of cars from the main street.

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“It’s unfortunate to have had that experience in an HSI, in a predominantly Brown city. I wish I could say that it was unique to you, but our time back in Texas has reminded us that raza reinscribes whiteness, too,” Esperanza said. She relayed how off-putting it was to have a classroom with a majority of Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x students who have been disconnected from their own identity and histories. “I have been trying to make sense of this over these past few weeks and I have reminded myself of how this disengagement is deliberate. It functions as a tool for reproducing a white Eurocentricity, even in a majority Brown city,” Esperanza added. “It helps me focus my frustration not at my students, but rather at the insidious machinations of whiteness and colonialism that uphold oppressive conditions in this state.” “Precisely,” interjected Malaquías. “The history of whiteness in Texas is indeed perverse – most notably, the segregation of Brown people based on racist practices and furthermore punishing them in schools and society for speaking Spanish and having Spanish surnames [(Stolen Education, 2013)]. I’ve had people say to me on various occasions that their parents did not speak Spanish to them – even if their parents were fluent – because they feared what would happen to their children, how they would be excluded.” “A number of my students have never been taught the segregationist history of Texas.” Malaquías continued, “This is really no different than how history is taught more generally [(Loewen, 2018)], but it has a particular feel in Texas given the demographics of the state, its proximity to the border, and the current political climate that continues to denigrate migrants and their families” (Pérez Huber, 2009, 2016). “However, despite knowing this social/political history,” Esperanza interjected, “I realize that I had an idealized image of what it would be like to live and work in a predominantly Brown space after surviving in the white space of academia for so long – where whiteness is almost always perpetuated by white folks – that I was taken aback when Brown folks manifest it inside my classroom, in my department, and at this HSI.” “I think you are voicing something that I have been wrestling with since moving here,” Ixchel said, then took a breath. “I was genuinely excited to live and work here and I have been feeling – I don’t think disappointed is the right word – but, like, my expectations were not being met. Certainly, I have been feeling unsettled – especially after the experience with Eduardo,” Ixchel replied with a sigh. “I am sure it was not only confusing, but also quite hurtful,” Esperanza said gently. “Yes – I would say it was,” Ixchel responded. “There is something uniquely painful about the type of wound these iterations of whiteness cause when perpetrated by the hand of a fellow community member. Even worse, Eduardo ended up reporting me and the contents of my class directly to the Dean, articulating that I offered only biased perspectives. I am sure that if I was a white man, Eduardo would have taken up no issues with my class.”

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While Esperanza snaps a lid off a small plastic container filled with red and green grapes and offers them to both Malaquías and Ixchel, she says, “I know these regular pláticas allow us to deshogar ourselves [(Flores Carmona, Hamzeh, Bejarano, Hernández Sánchez, & El Ashmawi, 2018)] and that they function as a means of ridding ourselves of the toxicity we absorb as we move through academia – and so I hope now that you have shared and we have listened there is some affirmation and relief you feel,” she said, directing her gaze to Ixchel as she reached for some grapes, “But it is also making me realize the need to theorize the affective consequences of white racial oppression by Brown folks as a byproduct of internalized racism and internalized colonization that Ixchel is articulating.” Malaquías leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head. He shut his eyes, momentarily. After a few seconds, he opened them and leaned forward, now resting his forearms on his thighs. “I do believe you have a point, Esperanza,” he began. “There is a good amount of scholarship from various disciplines and fields – communication, sociology, education, cultural studies – that examine the ways whites benefit and uphold whiteness. Scholars of color have been doing this work for years and now with the many white scholars who have taken up this work, this discourse has reached the mainstream.” He paused, took a sip of his coffee, and continued. “There is also substantial research about how People of Color are adversely affected by white supremacy and racism, but I am hard-pressed to find significant work that speaks to the ways People of Color uphold whiteness and/or colonial logics and what it is like for People of Color who are working to dismantle those ideologies to uncover resistance from that front.” “Ixchel,” Esperanza jumped in, “how do you feel about us collaborating on doing what Malaquías is suggesting?” Ixchel sat pensively for a few minutes, and then began nodding. “I know where we can start. Let’s look to Critical Race Theory’s counterstory methodology. I think it can help us document what we just expressed here.”

Conclusion One purpose of this chapter was to illustrate how the theoretical, methodological, and analytical tools offered by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Latino Critical Theory (LatCrit) provide a way to discuss and make sense of all forms of racism, whiteness, and white supremacy. In particular, we established how the interlinked theoretical tools of CRT and its counterstorytelling method can result in narratives and counterstories that function as embodied theories. In effect, we posit that critical methods and theories, such as CRT, produce insights about the world that traditional empirical research alone cannot produce because these traditions teach that valid research should be separate and disconnected from the researcher (Smith, 2012). As previously stated, we align ourselves with women of color feminists who have long written that the body is a site of theory creation – an approach devalued and ignored by

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traditional empirical research methods. Without acknowledging how the body lives and creates theory, we erase the stories, lives, and narratives of people on the margins. A second objective was to deconstruct the articulation of whiteness by individuals and institutions that are Latina/o/x identified or centered. Brayboy and Chin (2019) write that “research begins with experience and commitment to justice, which necessarily means combating, subverting, or examining relationships of power. This starts with white supremacy and colonization” (p. 51). Thus, as Critical Race theorists, our approach to research will always examine relationships of power that uphold and reproduce white supremacy in its myriad forms, including the ways that it is imagined and approximated within our own Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x communities. We understand these forms of internalized racism as being connected to the way that communities of color are systematically taught to devalue themselves (Matias, 2016). Counterstories traditionally provide a format for which to convert the lived realities of People of Color into narratives that can be used to understand the intricacies of white supremacy and whiteness in different contexts. The counterstory offered here initiated a conversation that has yet to be addressed via this methodology – the co-option of white supremacist logics and discourse by Latinas/os/xs and Chicanas/os/xs and the challenges Chicana and Chicano scholars face in disrupting that enactment. The counterstory constructed in this chapter, thus, provides valuable and concrete insights into the ways that white supremacy is reproduced within Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x communities. Not only does our counterstory highlight the specifics of whiteness reproduction at the individual level, such as when Eduardo, a dark-skinned Republican Latino, embodies meritocracy, but it also demonstrates how it operates at the macro levels, such as how public schooling maintains a docile Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x workforce – that is, how a Eurocentric curriculum taught in predominantly Brown schools by Brown teachers and administrators in a bilingual and bicultural city still ensures that Latina/o/x are denied access to their own histories in ways that would substantially empower them. This was evidenced when the majority of Esperanza’s students illustrated no clear indication of their own histories. The removal and detachment from cultural and ethnic identity in schools for communities of color has a clear history, not only nationally, but specifically in Texas. As noted in the counterstory, we do not place blame on Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x communities in Texas for being stripped of their identity, but rather we understand the colonial logics and underpinnings of that separation as tied to the material realities endured by these families over generations – punishment in school, school segregation, underfunded schools, the Texas Rangers (a white vigilante group) harassing Chicana/o/x communities, and even lynchings of Mexicans across the state. Plainly, our communities have been whipped into whiteness. Other examples of how ideologies of white supremacy are maintained by Latinas/os/xs and Chicanas/os/xs with decision-making power include

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Malaquías’s experience in the meeting for superintendents. Although there were a select few Latinas and Latinos in the room, they obliged their token status by not challenging the status quo, ignoring the needs of Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x youth in the state. The university’s spotty history of serving the Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x students of its city and region – including the current lack of investment and resources in building pipelines to recruit students from the predominantly Latino/a/x and Chicana/o/x schools located in the same neighborhood as the campus – further indicates the superiority and hegemony of whiteness even among one of the state’s largest Hispanic-Serving Institutions. A CRT counterstory method in this chapter allowed us to theorize the instances of internalized whiteness by Brown folks that we have experienced in Texas. Specifically, it provided us a methodological solution to discuss these complex issues in narrative format, thus making counterstories an effective research method and pedagogical tool. Our aim in analyzing how Brown folks reinscribe whiteness serves to not only document how context and place factor into manifestations of whiteness (in our case Texas with its particular history), but furthermore is intended to continue to challenge whiteness within Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x communities, particularly given their increasing population growth. As Critical Race scholars we argue that the seductiveness of whiteness remains highly intact, even when living in contexts that are predominantly of color.

Notes 1 45 refers to the 45th president of the United States. 2 In 1969, there were nationwide walkouts in both K-12 and higher education regarding the substandard education People of Color were receiving at the time. Though the focal points for these walkouts tend to be Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA, there were also a number of walkouts that occurred in San Antonio. 3 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. 4 The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is a notorious research experiment that spanned over the course of about 30 years. For this particular study, 600 Black men (the majority of whom were diagnosed with syphilis) were recruited with the promise of receiving treatment for their ailments. The true purpose of the experiment was to watch what happened when the men with syphilis did not receive treatment. However, these Black men were falsely led to believe they were in fact receiving treatment when they actually were not (for more info see Brown, 2017).

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Brayboy, B., & Chin, J. (2019). A match made in heaven: Tribal critical race theory and critical indigenous research methodologies. In J. DeCuir-Gunby, T. Chapman, & P. Schutz (Eds.), Understanding critical race research methods and methodologies: Lessons from the field (pp. 51–63). New York, NY: Routledge. Brown, D. (2017, May 16). “You’ve got bad blood”: The horror of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. The Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/news/ retropolis/wp/2017/05/16/youve-got-bad-blood-the-horror-of-the-tuskegee-syphilisexperiment/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d3964fdd25d4 California Department of Education. (2018, July 10). Fingertip facts on education in CaliforniaCalEdFacts. Retrieved from www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/cb/ceffingertipfacts.asp Cook, D. A., & Dixson, A. D. (2013). Writing critical race theory and method: A composite counterstory on the experiences of black teachers in New Orleans post-Katrina. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(10), 1238–1258. Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. DeCuir-Gunby, J., Chapman, T., & Schutz, P. (2019). Understanding critical race research methods and methodologies: Lessons from the field. New York, NY: Routledge. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction (3rd ed.). New York, NY: New York University Press. Delgado Bernal, D., & Villalpando, O. (2002). An apartheid of knowledge in academia: The struggle over the “legitimate” knowledge of faculty of color. Equity & Excellence in Education, 35(2), 169–180. de Oliver, M. (1998). Geography, race, and class: A case study of the role of geography at an urban public university. American Journal of Education, 106(2), 273–301. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Flores, A. I., Gaxiola Serrano, T. J., & Solorzano, D. (2019). Critical race theory, racial stratification in education, and public health. In C. L. Ford, D. M. Griffith, M. A. Bruce, & K. L. Gilbert (Eds.), Racism: Science and tools for the public health professional. Washington, DC: APHA Press. Flores Carmona, J., Hamzeh, M., Bejarano, C., Hernández Sánchez, M. E., & El Ashmawi, P. (2018). Pláticas~Testimonios: Practicing methodological borderlands for solidarity and resilience in academia. Chicana/Latina Studies, 18(1), 30–52. Gutiérrez y Muhs, G., Flores Niemann, Y., Gonzalez, C., & Harris, A. (Eds.). (2012). Presumed incompetent: The intersections of race and class for women in academia. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. Haney López, I. (1997). Race, ethnicity, erasure: The salience of race to LatCrit theory. California Law Review, 85(5), 57–125. Harris, C. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106(8), 1707–1791. Hollandsworth, S. (1998, August). When we were kings. Texas Monthly. Retrieved from https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/when-we-were-kings/ Johnson, B. H. (2003). Revolution in Texas: How a forgotten rebellion and its bloody suppression turned Mexicans into Americans. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Loewen, J. (2018). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong (2nd ed.). New York, NY: The New Press. Matias, C. E. (2013). Who you callin’ White? A critical counter-story on colouring white identity. Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 16(3), 291–315. https://doi-org.libweb.lib.utsa.edu/ 10.1080/13613324.2012.674027 Matias, C. E. (2016). Feeling white: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

94 Socorro Morales et al. Matias, C. E. (2020). Surviving Becky(s): Pedagogies for deconstructing whiteness and gender. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books: An Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield. Montejano, D. (1987). Anglos and Mexicans in the making of Texas, 1836–1986. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (1983). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1993). Racial formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Pérez Huber, L. (2009). Challenging racist nativist framing: Acknowledging the community cultural wealth of undocumented Chicana college students to reframe the immigration debate. Harvard Educational Review, 79(4), 704–730. Pérez Huber, L. (2016). Make America great again: Donald Trump, racist nativism and the virulent adherence to white supremacy amid US demographic change. Charleston Law Review, 10, 215–248. Ramos, R. (2019, February 19). The Alamo is a rupture. Guernica. Retrieved from www. guernicamag.com/the-alamo-is-a-rupture-texas-mexico-imperialism-history/ Sensoy, O., & DiAngelo, R. (2017). Is everyone really equal? An introduction to key concepts in social justice education (2nd ed., pp. 23–34). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). London: Zed Books. Solorzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2001). Critical race and LatCrit theory and method: Counter-storytelling – Chicana and Chicano graduate school experiences. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(4), 471–495. Solorzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2002a). A critical race counterstory of race, racism, and affirmative action. Equity & Excellence in Education, 35(2), 155–168. Solorzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2002b). Critical race methodology: Counter-storytelling as an analytical framework for educational research. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 23–44. Stolen Education. (2013). Produced by Alemán, Jr., E., & Directed by Luna, R. Documentary. Texas Education Agency. (2018). Enrollment in Texas public schools, 2017–18 (Document No. GE18 601 06). Austin, TX. Trucios-Haynes, E. (2000). Why “race matters:” LatCrit theory and Latina/o racial identity. Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, 12(1), 1–42. Yosso, T. (2006). Critical race counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano educational pipeline. New York, NY: Routledge.

6

Phenomenology of racial embodiment Method and the study of white humanity in education Gardner Seawright

Introduction The experience of school is intimately tied to race. In educational research though, the actual experiences of racialization have rarely been analyzed as such. The real-time, embodied, and felt moments of whiteness in school have not received the analytic attention they deserve. There is a wealth of research carefully explicating the ways that educational structures work to recreate white supremacy, such as those detailing the relationship between racial inequity and issues ranging from segregation, tracking, and unequal school funding, to testing, biased curriculum, and discipline policies (Au, Brown, & Calderón, 2016; Gillborn, 2005; Lewis & Solórzano, 2006; Slater & Seawright, 2018; Tyson, 2011; Vaught, 2011). Educational research has also thoroughly examined white teacher identity and the link between the psychology/ideology of white supremacy and teachers’ conceptions of education (Allen, 2004; Applebaum, 2010; Boucher, 2014; Matias, 2013a; Marx & Pennington, 2003; Picower, 2009; Jupp, Berry, & Lensmire, 2016). While both ideological and structural forms of white supremacy do indeed influence the lived experience of school, there is yet to be a concerted push within educational research to understand racialized experiences in terms of their embodied, quotidian, real-time, and existential dynamics (Seawright, 2018). To facilitate such an engagement with race and the existential variables of school-life requires a shift in analytic scale. For instance, structural theories of white supremacy used to analyze systemic trends conceptually operate at a supra-individual level. Meanwhile, analyzing the psychological/ideological forms of whiteness analyzes at the interior reflective/cognitive level. Neither work for an existential interrogation of whiteness. Studying the existential dynamics of race requires a focused look at how race unfolds through social interaction, which necessarily involves an attention to the social significations that give meaning to interaction. The relationally dependent social significations that facilitate racializing interactions are coconstitutive with macroscopic social understandings that operate beyond any single interaction. For instance when a white teacher offers up a stricter form of discipline to a student of color because they need to “take responsibility”

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for their actions (Margonis, 2016), or when a teacher harbors a deficit view of students of color (Valenzuela, 1999), those teachers are putting to work both the psychology and social structure of white supremacy. Both the psychology and structure of white supremacy come to life in real time through embodied interaction. So, to fully understand the dynamics between race and schooling, educational researchers must also understand the human experience at the core of white supremacy. This is not a dismissal of the importance of structure and psychology, but an attempt to understand how whiteness organizes social life across its many levels. Rather, in advocating for an expansion of analytic possibilities within the study of whiteness education I am seeking an analytic space where the object of knowledge can be the conditions of being human (Wynter, 2001, 2003). An analytic space is needed where the epistemological and ontological nuances associated with how race happens in real time within intimate, intersubjective, and embodied social fields is the intended focus (Seawright, 2018). In turning towards the existential variables of race we, as a field of researchers and practitioners, open up our understanding of what whiteness looks like in the classroom and potential ways to disrupt it. As educational researchers develop studies aimed at grappling with the existential variables associated with racialization in schools there must be a concerted effort to expand the methodological repertoire and draw upon traditions that have been left out of positivist-centric conceptions of “research.” Such a shift not only requires a reorientation to the focus of research, but also a fundamental reconsideration of how research is approached, designed, and carried out, which includes how meaning is made from “data” broadly conceived. As part of this methodological expansion I suggest turning to philosophers like Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Linda Alcoff, George Yancy, Sara Ahmed, Frank Margonis, Alia Al Saji, and Emily Lee who have contributed a collection of thoughts interrogating the embodied relational dynamics of race, gender, and coloniality. To this, researchers should give greater consideration to the use of the philosophical field of phenomenology as method in general. In particular though, I propose phenomenology of racial embodiment (PRE) as a critical method designed to engage the epistemological and ontological nuances associated with experiencing life conditioned by what I call white humanity. White humanity serves as an analytic that draws attention to the ways a social system of white supremacy curates the quality and condition of being human, while PRE serves a method to study it. Through PRE, the quotidian aspects of race and its embodied, visceral, relational, temporal, and spatial aspects can be analyzed on their own terms. This chapter illustrates how to put PRE to work as a method. First, using the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Sylvia Wynter I present white humanity as an analytic through which to consider the need for PRE as a method. Following this, I provide an overview of the philosophy of phenomenology, and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and a review of phenomenology racial embodiment as propelled by Frantz Fanon, Linda Alcoff, and other contemporary

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thinkers. For the second half of the chapter I work through a recent research project guided by PRE. This project focuses on the ways that space and student voice become intersubjectively racialized in mundane classroom interactions. Working through this example highlights the ways by which PRE functions as a method across the research process. In conclusion I discuss how PRE applies to further research.

Research on antiracism, whiteness, and white humanity: theoretical and methodological precursors W.E.B. Du Bois (2003) once pondered, “But what on earth is Whiteness that one should so desire it? Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that Whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” (p. 56). In this short quote Du Bois jumps from individual desire to ownership over the earth in a matter of two sentences. This is not sloppy or flamboyant writing. Nor is it Du Bois merely expressing his frustration with the virulent persistence of structural white supremacy. In this quote, he is giving voice to his theory of whiteness that conceptualizes the racial hierarchization of the United States as maintained through institutional, political, and economic discrimination, as well as through social, epistemological, and ontological dynamics of everyday life. For Du Bois, whiteness is a normative social system that saturates all aspects of the “White World.” Du Bois is suggesting that being white, and being counted as a proper member of the White World, corresponds with a seemingly naturalistic access to ownership over the earth (silently but clearly). Implied in this theory of whiteness is a necessary relationality that situates the mere fact of being a person of color as tantamount to trespassing on the white man’s ontological property. In other words, being a person of color in a white world doesn’t really count as being human, because being human is a condition reserved for white people and white people only. Along these lines, PRE is continuing in a Du Boisian tradition as it is intended to offer a robust illustration of the ways that the “great maelstrom of White civilization” organizes social life (Du Bois, 2001, p. 100). Up to this point, the antiracist and whiteness studies in education literature have not directly wrestled with the relational and existential nuances of race and education. For years, antiracist educators and scholars studying whiteness have developed many pedagogical strategies to ameliorate racial inequities in schools. These scholars have devised strategies to engage the fact that communities of color are less represented in curriculum (Au et al., 2016), that students of color are more frequently taught in facilities with fewer resources (Buras, Randels, Salaam, & Students at the Center, 2010; Vaught, 2011), by teachers with less experience, and are being disciplined at three times the rate of their white peers (Civil Rights Data Collection, 2011), and are thusly introduced to a school-to-prison pipeline (Lewis & Solórzano, 2006; Wald & Losen, 2003). Moreover, these scholars have rigorously attended to the concomitant

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psychological effects of living and learning in such a racist environment (see Matias, 2016b). Corresponding to this, the movement for antiracist education has maintained a clarion call for the United States’ majority white teaching force to develop a “critical consciousness.” Such a critical consciousness is intended to come on the heels of an honest engagement with the racial history of the United States, stripping bare the realities of systemic white supremacy and interrogating one’s relationship to it (Applebaum, 2010; Matias, 2013a). This includes white teachers working to understand their students outside of normative deficit perspectives (Picower, 2009; Sleeter, 2001) in addition to interrogating their “white selves” in the face of privilege and complicity in a system of whiteness (Applebaum, 2010; Matias, 2013a). Within antiracist education there has been an implicit assumption that if a teacher thinks in antiracist ways they will subsequently act in antiracist ways. Such an approach elides the complex dynamics of social interaction and assumes what I have called a cognitive-centric analytic that relies on a reflective understanding of the self and the system of racial injustice (Seawright, 2018). Cognitive-centric analytics are not faulty; they just aren’t up to the task of making meaning from existential conditions. Epistemologically, cognitivecentric analytics situate the locus of concern in a reflective realm; as in, the way people are thinking about an issue will be the focus of critical analysis. In this way, the object of knowledge in these studies is the mind (see Matias, 2013b). These studies aim to unearth the way epistemologies of ignorance are operationalized within a system of whiteness. Studies reflective of this approach work with teachers to interrogate racializing social epistemologies (Mills, 1997, 1998) and how they ultimately come to bear on teachers’ sense of self and their “common sense” ideas about the social world. This interrogation is done in hopes of cultivating a more social-justice-oriented outlook (Applebaum, 2010; Hytten & Warren, 2003; Matias, 2013a; Marx & Pennington, 2003; Picower, 2009; Thompson, 2003). Similarly, studies focused on elucidating the dynamics associated with being white, which implicitly have an ontological analytic character, also tend to rely on reflective sources of meaning-making. This can be seen in research that falls under the umbrella of first- and second-wave white teacher identity studies, which see the cultivation of antiracist identity (i.e. self-conception or idea of the self ) as the precursor to antiracist action (for a thorough review of this literature see Jupp et al., 2016). Again, studies like these are not faulty, they are the foundations on which whiteness studies exist. But, they are also emblematic of methodologies that primarily derive meaning from, and situate interventions within, a place of “thinking-about” whiteness. What’s more though, these studies have also laid the groundwork for identifying the need for additional levels of analysis to build a more complex understanding of how whiteness works in educational contexts. Indeed, some whiteness scholars have been arguing for a more dynamic approach to the field for years (McCarthy, 2003; Lensmire et al., 2013; Jupp &

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Slattery, 2015), and, in addition to PRE, there are increasing examples of scholars pushing the methodological boundaries. For instance, the use of affect theory is gaining traction in whiteness theory and being used to ask questions similar to those herein about how whiteness is ultimately felt (Matias & Zembylas, 2014; Matias, 2016). Further, some scholars have turned to new methods such as duo-ethnography to more closely analyze the relational aspects of race and whiteness (Agosto, Marn, & Ramirez, 2015; Hummel & Toyosaki, 2015). There are also several articles conceptualizing how whiteness is operationalized within a social field, and how this is complementary yet distinct from its structural and psychological effects (Lewis, 2016; Ohito, 2020; Seawright, 2017, 2018; Walton, 2017). And, finally, there is a recent edited collection focused solely on elucidating educational case studies of embodied forms of sociocultural difference (Travis, Kraehe, Hood, & Lewis, 2018). While there has yet to be a collective push toward specifically analyzing the real-time existential dynamics of whiteness and white supremacy, the research landscape is ready for growth. PRE shifts the locus of meaning-making toward the real-time social aspects of teaching and learning, and the ways that race shapes the act of teaching in the moment of teaching. So, in as much as antiracist education is concerned with cultivating empowering educational relationships that ameliorate socially imposed forms of inequity, PRE demands a dogged attention to how these forms of inequity get folded into the lived and visceral relational dynamics of pedagogy. As a method, PRE serves as vehicle through which to ask and answer research questions. But, since it is a new method for the field of whiteness studies in education it is beneficial to consider the analytics – the objects of knowledge – that would organically extend from PRE. With this in mind, before diving into more depth concerning what PRE is, I would like to first present white humanity as an analytic applicable to PRE, as well as one that is illustrative of new conceptual territory to be approached through it. White humanity Phenomenology of racial embodiment is fundamentally concerned with the way that race impacts daily lived experience. As a method then, PRE looks to the social field in which experience unfolds in order to understand it. But, since the majority of the existing conceptualizations of whiteness operate at either a macroscopic or psychological level of analysis, how does PRE’s shift in analytic scale impact the theorization of whiteness? In the departure from the macroscopic framing of structural accounts of whiteness, as well as the interiorized focus on identity found in psychological approaches, educational research needs to consider white humanity. As an analytic, white humanity draws focus to the ways that a social system of whiteness curates the quality and condition of being human. Following Sylvia Wynter (2001, 2003), focusing the object of knowledge on being human serves as a

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realignment away from structural theories that understand power as something that gets foisted upon people toward one that sees systems of power as having their roots in the way that violence is socially enacted (Wynter, 2001, 2003). Wynter (2001) suggests that racial discrimination must be engaged in terms of a “sociogenic principle” that acknowledges the fundamental relationship between racial identities and being human (p. 30). In other words, racialized forms of identity, mind, and/or consciousness are inherently phenomena that must be examined as part of an intersubjective social field (Wynter, 2001). Wynter (2003) explains further that the ontological conditions that set the stage for racializing experiences are consistent with hierarchized “genres of being human” (p. 264). At the top of the hierarchy, maintaining an ontological supremacy, is what Wynter (2003) simply calls “Man” – which corresponds to the particular Anglo-European-Christian social morphology that we would now call whiteness and maleness (p. 327). Due to the way that the white model of humanity is simply seen as the natural state of being, the genres of being human exhibited by Africans and Indigenous North Americans have been perceived as not-being, at least not in a human way (see also, Mills, 1997). In this way, Wynter’s theorization here echoes Du Bois’s conceptualization of white ownership over the earth. An analytic focus on white humanity expands concerns for whiteness into a realm where macroscopic trends of racial inequality intersect with daily human living. Giving consideration to quotidian human existence provides an analytic alternative to structural and psychological approaches that can seem disconnected from the materiality of everyday teaching (Seawright, 2018). However, it is important to recognize that the concept of white humanity does not exist in between a binary of structural and psychological understandings of race. Rather, white humanity is intended as a tool to disrupt this false binary and illustrate what exists underneath both structure and psychology. In suggesting that white humanity is underneath racialized forms of social structure and psychology I seek to illuminate the degree to which human experience is a prerequisite to both structure and psychology. In this way, the human experience of concern here is not an individualized form of experience, but rather, an intersubjective one. Meaning, in order to analytically consider the experiential foundations of structure and psychology, experience qua experience must be understood as intersubjective phenomena. This is to say, there is no structure without collective human experience, and there is no individual psychology without a social world to engage with, and with PRE, the social world becomes the locus of concern.

Detailing phenomenology of racial embodiment (PRE) Phenomenology of racial embodiment (PRE) is a mode of inquiry through which to question the existential dynamics of race on their own terms. Like any method, PRE serves as a framework for asking questions, gathering data, and analyzing said data; offering guidelines for what could be included as data,

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and then, how to make sense of it. In this way, PRE, as a research method, is fundamentally about providing a unique epistemological and ontological lens that anchors meaning-making in the lived-in intersubjective world. Genealogically, PRE can trace its roots back to the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968, 2012) and the Martinican philosopher Frantz Fanon’s (2008) critique of his work. Since the publication of Fanon’s (2008) Black Skin, White Masks, PRE has been expanded by contemporary thinkers like Linda Martín Alcoff (2006), who was the first to actually use the term; as well as Lewis Gordon (1995), George Yancy (2014), Sara Ahmed (2007), Emily Lee (2014), Alia Al-Saji (2001), and others. While these thinkers are crucial for engaging with the racial aspect of PRE, to fully understand the embodiment aspect of it we have to go back to Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to the larger field of phenomenology is the phenomenology of embodiment, which identifies meaning as something that comes to life through active engagement within an intersubjective world. Intersubjectivity is the understanding that who we are as humans, our subjectivity, is not an individualized condition, but rather predicated upon a relational existence. Meaning, who I am cannot be disentangled from the material and fleshy world I live in and those I interact with; and, what’s more, the nature of the world I exist in is constituted by the collective action of those people living in it with me. In this sense, the intersubjectivity at the core of PRE is better understood as an intercorporeality, because it is not just that the human self is co-constituted vis-à-vis relationships, but is also rooted in material embodied engagement (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). This conception of intercorporeality shapes the epistemological and ontological outlook of PRE. Epistemologically, intercorporeality suggests that how we come to know is through embodied engagement within a particular social world that reflects its ideological, ethical, and relational preconditions (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). Similarly, the ontology of intercorporeality suggests that being is inseparable from the worlds we exist in. From an intercorporeal perspective then, to understand how humans come to know and be one must study the social field in which they exist (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). Fanon (2008) did not disagree with this, but he did identify a serious oversight in Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualization: race. In his critique, Fanon extends Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeality by accounting for the ways by which humans come to know and be in particularly racialized ways. Expanding upon this, Linda Alcoff (2006) suggests that the racializing social norms are extended through “habits of perception” that correlate with enfleshed racial assumptions and a coded visual registry that informs “reactional capacity, epistemic reliability, moral condition, and, of course, aesthetic value” of a person based on skin pigmentation, shape of eyes and nose, hair type, perceived gender and sexuality (p. 191). Alcoff is quick to remind that we do not see these social habits, we perceive through them. Emily Lee (2014) describes further that such habits are the embodied reflection of structural forms of oppression; structural forms of racism do not only exist in terms of laws and institutions, or as conscious or

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unconscious belief about different racialized body features, but become sedimented in the “very way one lives in one’s body, in one’s body movements” (p. 247). What this means is that within systems of whiteness relational conditions exist beyond the control of any one individual, but nevertheless implicate each individual in the way that certain bodies are treated. Following from a conceptualization of white humanity, whiteness, then, shapes the quality and condition of being human on a daily basis, with some bodies being treated as full humans while others are racialized in a way that inspires dehumanization – all of which transpires under the guise of mundanity. The everyday intercorporeality that sits at the core of PRE serves to frame asking, approaching, and answering questions of race. In order to illustrate what PRE looks like in action, next is an excerpt from a qualitative study of how whiteness curates the relational conditions of a classroom.

Racialized voice: a case example of PRE applied Ashton and James All eyes were on Ashton and James as they offered their assessment of the class conversation. During every full-class dialogue Miss Alexander would ask two students to keep track of conversational features like “active participation,” “acknowledging previous speakers,” “connectivity,” “kindness,” “focus,” and “sophistication.” As the pair got settled in front of the class, Ashton, a white male student, got things rolling with his take on the class’s participation; he perched on a small rectangular table, and James, a Black male student,1sat in a chair next to him. This task of evaluating peers was always reluctantly accepted. Ashton and James were no different. Their uneasiness with evaluating their peers was evident in the slow walk to the front of the classroom, and in the way their peers in the audience smirked, or rested their hands over their mouths as if unsure of how things would go. Ashton finished his initial assessment of student participation unimpeded, uninterrupted. Now it was James’s turn: “You know, I agree with that . . .” “Little louder,” Miss Alexander interjected from across the room with a hand cupped over her ear. “I agree with that.” James enunciated, louder, followed by a cluster of giggles and snickers from friends, breaking the audience’s silence. Miss Alexander offered a smile in return that reflected the general affability in the room. James continued with a breakdown of how well his fellow students connected their points of conversation. Ashton, too, continued. And their peers patiently and quietly listened, while Miss Alexander quickly answered a question from a fellow teacher who had stepped in without disrupting either of the presenters. As the fellow teacher was leaving the room, Miss Alexander turned her attention back to James who was in the middle of presenting the score he had given to focus.

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She interjected, “Louder ,” this time accompanied with the twin gesture of cupping both ears. Increasing his volume again, James restated, stretching his neck a little to enunciate, “For focus , I gave an eight.” This time with fewer giggles, but with a few head-nods from the rear of the classroom near the teacher. A friend sitting across from James offered a small gesture of solidarity, raising her eyebrows as if to question what was going on. James continued, “And, for most of the. . . . Never mind,” his voice drifting down to a smaller vocal register. “Huh?” Miss Alexander asked, again, cupping one ear, leaning forward on her thigh as she was now sitting on top of a desk, “You gave a what for focus?” “An eight,” James clarified, after dipping his head slightly and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Ok, great. Tell us about focus, Ashton.” Ashton continued, uninterrupted and heard. As he concluded Miss Alexander asked, “How about Sophistication, how’d we do?” Both James and Ashton began to answer at the same time, then both momentarily stalled until James suggested, “No, you go ahead, go ahead.” Ashton finished presenting, and was followed by James, who was able to finish without any further interruptions. Voice is the most conspicuous way that teachers and students interact with one another. Voice also serves as an ideal example for demonstrating how PRE allows educational researchers to newly consider classroom conditions. For instance, in approaching the dynamic between Ashton, James, and Miss Alexander I cannot simply focus on the words being spoken. As a method, PRE demands that research draws meaning from the intercorporeal condition of the moment. What this means is that speech is not merely the vocalized representation of an individual’s intended message. Voice is an embodied phenomenon; it is the act of speaking – whether it be through vocal projection, sign language, or augmentative and alternative communication. It is the body that “speaks” and expresses communication with compounding meanings attached to cadence, prosody, physical gesture, and comportment (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 203). In this way, one’s voice is underwritten by the social meanings ascribed to the body – what Hortense Spillers (1987) calls the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (p. 67) – which ultimately include race (Sekimoto & Brown, 2016). When a person speaks, their message is not simply propelled by objective intent, it fuses with the embodied social realities of the speaker (e.g. race, class, gender, and ability) (Sekimoto & Brown, 2016). Every speech-act (Schultz, 2010), or even moment of silence (Zembylas & Michaelides, 2004), is a reflection of how it is to be in the moment. So, to understand how race may have influenced this interaction between Ashton, James, and Miss Alexander, attention must be given to the ways that the experience of the classroom is curated by white humanity; and how the quality and condition of being in that space is informed by white supremacy.

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Crafting PRE The narrative of Ashton, James, and Miss Alexander is a small sample from a larger audio-video-based qualitative case study of how white humanity shapes the relational conditions of the classroom – I wanted to know what whiteness really looked like within mundane classroom relationships. The design of this study is fundamentally informed by PRE and the phenomenological tradition more broadly. Like other projects that put phenomenology to work in qualitative settings (see Vagle, 2014; Van Manen, 2014), there was no prescribed set of tenets detailing how to bring the philosophies associated with PRE into the study of classroom relationships. Instead, those interested in drawing upon PRE must first consider the lived world in which they are striving to be immersed in (e.g. classroom, school bus, after-school program, etc.), and then excavate the locus of meaning-making that could be deployed in the study. In other words, what are the epistemological, ontological, and temporal variables of the study (see Seawright, 2018). Mark Vagle (2014) considers this process a “craft”; as in, creating a phenomenological study, and specifically explicating the sources of meaning-making at play, is more of a creative endeavor than one that requires strict adherence to a set of methodological rules. As a philosophical discipline though, phenomenology does present a broad, frequently debated, set of methods for questioning and directly engaging the meaning-making of the lived world. Without diving too far into the nuances of these debates, the big takeaways can be categorized into general principles that apply to studies using PRE: meaning must be rooted in the phenomenal world, the lived-in and experienced aspects of life (what counts as a real phenomenon is one of those things up for debate; see Seawright, 2018), and explicitly conceptualizing how meaning is made within this context is part of the process. For instance, this study required an interrogation of the meaning (both epistemological and ontological) of voice vis-à-vis the social signification of race, embodiment, time, and social space. Following from this method, and in keeping to my original question, the goal of this study was not positivistic. The goal was never to definitively prove that a certain subset of classroom behaviors operationalize whiteness. The purpose of the study was to illustrate and dive into the relational and existential variables associated with the social system of white supremacy. And, in turn, interrogate the enfolded ontological, epistemological, and temporal dynamics that constitute the everyday manifestations of this social system (Seawright, 2018). In moving toward the goal of diving into the social world of Miss Alexander’s classroom I chose to utilize audio-visual recording as a way to revisit moments of observation. More important than the technical method of gathering data, though, is how that data is subsequently engaged and wrestled with. To this, I present the audio-visual data in the form of a phenomenological narrative (as seen earlier) intended to draw attention to the intercorporeal condition of Miss Alexander’s classroom. This process reflects one that is central to

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any phenomenological analysis, which requires the gathering of “experiential accounts” stemming from observation, or other sources like narrative material, stories, anecdotes, or literary examples that may serve as a “resource for phenomenological reflection” (Van Manen, 2014, p. 311). Consistent with this, phenomenological narratives are thick, descriptive, semi-poetic (literary) recreations of classroom moments. Again, these narratives are not intended to serve as a veridical representation. Instead, like many case studies, the goal of the narratives is to promote reflection in the reader, opening up opportunities for the reader to connect and draw common meaning from the situation (Stake, 1995, p. 42). To this, the narrative serves as both a source of analysis, and a foil for phenomenological reflection in the reader, ideally encouraging the reader to identify with commonalities embedded in this unique interaction. In Ashton, James, and Miss Alexander’s narrative, the reader is being asked to consider the ways that student speech is an embodied act, and ultimately impacted by relational conditions that can create racialized barriers to fully being in the classroom.

Voice and white humanity A student’s capacity to speak reflects the degree to which their social space is curated to embrace or diminish their being. For white students, as they step into a classroom there is an equilibrium between how they speak and the modes of speech most desirable, while students of color are faced with the tacit understanding that their modes of speech will be implicitly made suspect or lessthan in contrast to those with white voices (Sekimoto & Brown, 2016). This remains true whether the grammar and enunciation of the student of color aligns with a language of power like Standard American English (SAE) or that of another like Black English Vernacular (Sekimoto & Brown, 2016). Even in cases when a student of color speaks in white ways (i.e. SAE) in white spaces they still are not fully afforded the assumptions affixed to embodied forms of whiteness; that is, the intelligence, truth, and credibility so typically given to white men (Sekimoto & Brown, 2016). The racial disparity in voice becomes obvious in the interaction between Ashton, James, and Miss Alexander. Ashton and James were both standing in front of a quiet classroom presenting their assessment of a class conversation. During Ashton and James’s presentation Ashton was not once interrupted or asked to speak up. Ashton and James initially projected a similar volume during this interaction, with both registering comparable decibel levels in the audiovisual recording. But by the end of the presentation, after repeatedly being asked to be “a little louder,” James ended up speaking quieter than Ashton. It was as if the more James attempted to speak the more unwelcome his speech seemed to be. In this instance, James’s way of being in the classroom apparently did not match the mode of being necessary to be heard. James’s voice was preempted by white humanity.

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A similar ontological dynamic was on display with Ashton and James’s respective levels of comfort. James demonstrated signs of physical discomfort during his exchanges with Miss Alexander: subtly keeping his head down, occasionally sighing, and rubbing the bridge of his nose. All the while, Ashton exhibited a comparative ease with speaking. The degree to which a student is made to feel at ease is racially influenced and can be understood in terms of what modes of being are most welcome within a particular space. The social space of a classroom can develop an orientation through which racially privileged white bodies are made to feel in-place and welcome while students of color are made to feel out-of-place, and at times unwelcome. This sense of being in-place corresponds with a student’s capacity to extend the self into the social space of the classroom – it corresponds with a student’s level of comfort with being in a specific social world. Shannon Sullivan (2006) suggests that “White people consider all spaces as rightfully available for their inhabitation of them” – a white person is generally free to act upon the world in a seamless, continuous fashion, while a Black person is a generally compelled to merely accept the few possibilities imposed upon them (p. 144). This ontological expansiveness does not mean that white folks can do whatever they please, but that under the social dynamics of a white world the mode of being a human unique to whiteness is the default for the dominant social world, thus making a white person’s movement through the world all the more seamless (i.e. the social conditions associated with white humanity). The expansiveness of white humanity creates lived-in classroom conditions where mundane racial dehumanization exists as an acceptable – and unremarkable – aspect of school. In this way, it is simply a usual part of the classroom that students of color may exist in tension and unease with speaking. This unease, in turn, corresponds with a potential anxiety surrounding not being heard – think of James’s trailing off after repeated requests to speak up. This is not because Miss Alexander’s classroom is uniquely conditioned to whiteness. Quite the contrary, Miss Alexander works tirelessly to create a critical pedagogical space, but nonetheless must deal with the social weight of normativity that is brought into and enacted in her classrooms in ways beyond her immediate control.

Conclusion: opening up phenomenology of racial embodiment Highlighting the way in which the racialization of voice is a coextensive with mundane moments of classroom interaction begs the practical question of, so what now – how would I, as a teacher, act differently in a similar scenario? Ultimately, this question forecasts the primary contribution that phenomenology of racial embodiment could have for whiteness studies in education. It demands that antiracist teachers and scholars come back to a critical

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consideration of teaching as it unfolds in real time, and the problems/potential embedded therein. For instance, let’s consider that maybe Miss Alexander actually did not hear her student in this moment. If she could not hear him, is it not her responsibility to ask James to speak up? If she does not ask him to speak up, and she indeed did not hear him, then a decision to not ask James to speak up would result in her actively participating in ignoring a student of color. I feel that it is fairly obvious to say that ignoring any of your students is bad practice, but particularly so with regard to students who have been historically silenced in schools (Cammarota & Romero, 2006). Though, through her consistent asking of James to speak up Miss Alexander reinforces relational conditions in which he is not fully welcome. As Miss Alexander struggles to hear James she is doing so with the intent of hearing him. Due to the way that the relationality of the classroom is conditioned though, this becomes a strained task that ultimately reinforces an orientation in which being Black is coextensive with being out-of-place. This moment lives in a sort of pedagogical paradox. Moreover, this situation illustrates one of the central reasons that research methods must be expanded in whiteness studies, because there are times where there are no-win scenarios in classroom race relations, and a teacher must understand how to move on from that. In this way, the racialized conditions of voice reflect the motivating questions and potential contribution of using phenomenology of racial embodiment as method. Instead of being focused on pedagogical prescriptions for this particular type of situation a teacher must take responsibility for the situation (Lee, 2014). What this entails is reorienting the pedagogical concern towards a consistent endeavoring for a relational condition that may prevent similar scenarios. In other words, while you may not be able to fix these exact moments, a teacher can cultivate an awareness of such moments and use it as an impetus to cultivate a space in which voices of color can flourish instead of being diminished – a space where white ways of being do not hold total ontological sway. An awareness of this type must be phenomenological in nature or risk being subsumed into cognitive-centric approaches to lesson-planning and classroom management. The awareness being suggested here is a visceral and reflexive awareness, a real-time attention to the body, interactive tempos, and relational habits that default to whiteness. The goal of such an awareness is to stall, breakdown, challenge, and over time choreograph new relational conditions. This sort of awareness is assisted through experiential illustration, through bringing these paradoxes to life for teachers to wrestle with, and engage similar dynamics in their own classrooms. A strength of PRE is doing just this – capturing and engaging mundane lived moments that frequently go unseen and unacknowledged, which is absolutely needed as a bolster to educational research methods that so frequently draw upon cognitive-centric and reflective methods. With this in mind, the further implications of PRE are similarly

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situated in that additional research could provide an in-depth level of illustration of exactly what white humanity looks like in everyday classrooms. It could illustrate further instances in which white bodies are given ontological privilege and identify the corresponding situational variables in order to suppress them. Keeping in mind that phenomenological research relies on cultivating a relationship with the reader, this research could help inspire a pedagogical phenomenology of practice in which teachers actively consider the relational state of things as they teach. What this practice and its corresponding research could additionally help reveal is what Alia Al-Saji (2014) calls phenomenological hesitation, those moments that force a teacher to pause and take responsibility for the situation, and start to facilitate what George Yancy (2014) calls the “breakdown” of habit (p. 62). As a method, phenomenology of racial embodiment offers the rare ability to question the racialization of educational experience on its own terms, while offering a glimpse into the mundanity of whiteness in classrooms.

Note 1 James self-identifies as a Black student, and I refer to him as such rather than an “African American” student or generalized “student of color.”

References Agosto, V., Marn, T., & Ramirez, R. (2015). Biracial place walkers on campus: A trioethnography of culture, climate, and currere. International Review of Qualitative Research, 8, 109–126. https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2015.8.1.109 Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8, 149–168. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1464700107078139 Alcoff, L. M. (2006). Visible identities. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Allen, R. L. (2004). Whiteness and critical pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(2), 121–136. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2004.00056.x Al-Saji, A. (2001). Merleau-Ponty and Bergson: Bodies of expression and temporalities in the flesh. Philosophy Today, 45, 110–123. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday200145Supplement13 Al-Saji, A. (2014). A phenomenology of hesitation: Interrupting racializing habits of seeing. In E. S. Lee (Ed.), Living alterities (pp. 133–172). New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Applebaum, B. (2010). Being white, being good. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Au, W., Brown, A. L., & Calderón, D. (2016). Reclaiming the multicultural roots of US curriculum: Communities of color and official knowledge in education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Boucher, M. L. (2014). More than an ally a successful white teacher who builds solidarity with his African American students. Urban Education, 51, 82–107. Buras, K. L., Randels, J., Salaam, K., & Students at the Center. (2010). Pedagogy, Policy, and the privatized city: Stories of dispossession and defiance from New Orleans. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Cammarota, J., & Romero, A. (2006). A critically compassionate intellectualism for Latina/o students: Raising voices above the silencing in our schools. Multicultural Education, 14(2), 16–23.

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McCarthy, C. (2003). Contradiction of power and identity: Whiteness studies and the call of teacher education. Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(1), 127–133. https://doi. org/10.1080/0951839032000033572 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). New York, NY: Routledge. Mills, C. (1997). The racial contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mills, C. (1998). Blackness visible: Essays on philosophy and race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ohito, E. O. (2020). Fleshing out enactments of Whiteness in antiracist pedagogy: Snapshot of a White teacher educator’s practice. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 28(1), 17–36. Picower, B. (2009). The unexamined whiteness of teaching: How white teachers maintain and enact dominant racial ideologies. Race Ethnicity and Education, 12(2), 197–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613320902995475 Schultz, K. (2010). After the Blackbird whistles: Listening to the silence in classrooms. Teachers College Record, 112(11), 2833–2849. Seawright, G. (2017). Common relationality: Antiracist solidarity, racial embodiment, and the problem with self-possession. In A. Means, D. Ford, & G. B. Slater (Eds.), Educational commons in theory and practice (pp. 167–187). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Seawright, G. (2018). Questioning the white body: On applying a phenomenological mode of inquiry to whiteness studies in education. Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(10), 911– 934. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2018.1522007 Sekimoto, S., & Brown, C. (2016). A phenomenology of the racialized tongue: Embodiment, language, and the bodies that speak. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 5(2), 101–122. Slater, G. B., & Seawright, G. (2018). Putting homo economicus to the test: How neoliberalism measures the value of educational life. In K. J. Saltman & A. J. Means (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of global educational reform (pp. 371–388). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Sleeter, C. E. (2001). Preparing teachers for culturally diverse schools research and the overwhelming presence of whiteness. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 94–106. https://doi. org/10.1177/0022487101052002002 Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. Diacritics, 17(2), 65–81. Stake, R. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sullivan, S. (2006). Revealing whiteness. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Thompson, A. (2003). Tiffany, friend of people of color: White investments in antiracism. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(1), 7–29. https://doi. org/10.1080/0951839032000033509 Travis, S., Kraehe, A. M., Hood, E. J., & Lewis, T. E. (2018). Pedagogies in the flesh. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Tyson, K. (2011). Integration interrupted: Tracking, Black Students, and acting White after brown. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Vagle, M. D. (2014). Crafting phenomenological research. New York, NY: Left Coast Press. Van Manen, M. (2014). Phenomenology of practice. New York, NY: Left Coast Press. Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S. – Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Vaught, S. E. (2011). Racism, public schooling, and the entrenchment of white supremacy: A critical race ethnography. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

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7

Visually mapping totality Fredric Jameson’s Greimassian square Tyson E. Lewis

Introduction Fredric Jameson is, without a doubt, the most important Marxist theorist in the United States. Although situated within the literary field, his book Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1974) helped introduce the Frankfurt School to an English-speaking audience and thus paved the way for a revitalization of Marxist-inspired theory within a North American context. Later, his book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992) provided a conceptual framework for periodizing the postmodern as a symptom of more basic economic transformations in the composition of capitalism. Yet despite Jameson’s acclaim, he is rarely cited in critical research in educational theory. This is paradoxical as I have demonstrated Jameson’s own long-standing investment in the question of pedagogy (Lewis, 2009). In this short chapter, I want to address this oversight by turning to Jameson’s unique theoretical methodology, and in particular, his use of the Greimassian square as a tool for critical inquiry. What makes the use of the Greimassian square so important is how it visually shows Jameson’s thought process in action. In this sense, it is not only theoretically productive but also educationally revealing, throwing light on how Jameson constructs his complex and internally differentiated notion of totality.

Jameson’s project Before turning to the square, I want to first outline Jameson’s methodological principles: name the system, always historicize, and finally, think dialectically. Drawing on a wide spectrum of Marxist literary theory, Fredric Jameson summarizes his own political problematic with the following clarion call: “We have to name the system” (1992, p. 418). Here his emphatic inflection is placed on the verb “to name” as an act of representing the totality of social relations with their multiple, internal contradictions. Of course, this totality is unnamable and always escapes representation. Yet, for Jameson there is an imperative to attempt the impossible through a process of totalization. While this might at first be seen as a failure of the dialectical imagination and thus a dead end (as

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postmodernist valorizations of the partial and the fragmentary might suggest), Jameson discovers a positive valence hidden within this failure that rests on the distinction between totalization as an indefinite process and totality as a completed and thus absolute endpoint. He summarizes, Indeed, if the word totality sometimes seems to suggest that some privileged bird’s-eye view of the whole is available, which is also the Truth, then the project of totalization implies exactly the opposite and takes as its premise the impossibility for individual and biological human subjects to conceive of such a position, let alone to adopt or achieve it. (1992, p. 332) In this sense, totalization is always already a “partial summing up” (1992, p. 332). Such partial summing up is essential for three reasons. First, abstraction from the immediacy of fragmented and phenomenologically limited experience through totalization enables us to grasp historical trends, and thus “map” the present in relation to the past. This might be considered the epistemological use of totalization. Second, it is only against a map of the totality that the “promise of resistance” (1992, p. 400) can be rekindled. Resistance is always resistance to or against something. Without totalization, resistance will remain inevitably partial and limited, unable to zoom out to see the broader system as a whole. Third, totalization concerns the dialectical relation between the present and the past, but also includes emergent trends that arise against a background. In this sense, totalization opens itself up to the future. For Jameson, this future has a utopian dimension, which itself is more of an open-ended process of imagining forms of life beyond capitalism than it is a blueprint for the perfect society. The second methodological imperative is “Always historicize!” (1981, p. xi). As Jameson summarizes, this slogan is “the one absolute and we may even say ‘transhistorical’ imperative of all dialectical thought” (1981, p. xi). The particular form of totalization that is at stake in historical thinking concerns the precarious status of periodization. If we want a sense of historical difference, we cannot not afford to risk periodization (even if it is reductive). Periodization rests on determining large-scale shifts in cultural logic across cultural, social, and economic spheres of life. “Cultural logic” is a difficult notion in Jameson’s work and may be described as a hegemonic set of norms (acting as a kind of tractor beam or gravitational forcefield organizing a dispersed set of practices around its magnetic core) or a particular structure of feeling (that permeates or saturates an historical moment) or even an apparatus organizing knowledge/ power (so that certain forms of knowing take precedence). In any case, it is the stated goal of periodization to shed light on the relationship between dominant, residual, and emergent (as Raymond Williams might say) dimensions of a cultural logic, including (and most importantly) the logic of the present. Underlying the last two methodological principles is a more basic imperative: think dialectically. There are many ways to define dialectics, but for

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Jameson, it is essentially a way to thematize the movement of contradictions. Or perhaps we could say map contradictions within a system. In this context, mapping would refer to both the space and time of contradictions. But what is a contradiction? Here we can cite Jameson’s analysis of contradictions verses antinomies. He writes, the structuralist perspective always grasps contradiction in the form of the antinomy: that is to say, a logical impasse in which thought is paralyzed and can move neither forward nor back, in which an absolute structural limit is reached, in either thought or reality . . . it is the unmasking of antinomy as contradiction which constitutes truly dialectical thinking as such. (2009, p. 43) In other words, dialectical thinking is the unmasking of a fixed and static antinomy as a mobile, dynamic process that contains within it the seeds of its own transformation. Stated diferently, dialectical thought takes an initial opposition that appears to be a deadlock and discovers within it a restless negativity that jumpstarts a process. This process must take into account its own conditions of possibility, and thus always involves critical self-reflection. There is no point outside the process that is stable. This is precisely why the “system” discussed previously is never complete, never fully totalizable as there is no point outside of its own internal contradictions (no perfect bird’s eye vantagepoint) from which to perfectly capture its complexity. Finally, dialectical thinking is not, for Jameson, synthesis or sublation (as in the classical Hegelian model). Instead, it is rather a mapping of permutations that emerge when one puts in motion an antinomy. Or, dialectical thinking is the internal diferentiation of contradictory possibilities that rest, latent and under-developed, within any reified binary. While Jameson is emphatic in his insistence on naming the system and, in turn, historicizing this system in terms of periodization, the very possibility of attempting this two-pronged theoretical project is in a state of crisis not because of the inadequacies of Marxism but rather because of the state of representation itself. The cultural logic of late capitalism, postmodernism, has made it increasingly difficult to represent totality, culminating in a disorienting effect and political uncertainty. Globalization – in all its immensity and sublimity – becomes an impossible object whose attending cultural logic revels in fragmentation and localization. Without an ability to name the system, political action is set at a distinct disadvantage. Jameson contends that Marxism in the postmodern era of global capitalism demands an aesthetic or cultural turn, a turn towards “cognitive mapping” as an aesthetic and cognitive solution to the problem of orientation. Based on Kevin Lynch’s work, the cognitive map for Jameson charts relations not simply in the city but in the “global village” of late capitalism, revealing the underlying circuits that create a transnational economic system in an innovative and comprehensive narrative structure. Such a map represents the

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contradictions within capitalism through aesthetic forms that do not ideologically resolve the contradictions but rather present them in relation to history as an absent yet omnipresent determinant. Jameson’s mapping strategy is in sum dynamic (in which the very narrative of the map contains a necessary temporal dimension), exploring the constantly shifting, dialectical relations between the positive and negative movements of society as a whole. In other words, cognitive mapping decisively counteracts the ludic tendencies in postmodernism by articulating heterogeneity into a dialectically mediated totality. Jameson summarizes: An aesthetic of cognitive mapping – a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system – will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representation dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice. (1992, p. 54) Cognitive mapping is pedagogical precisely because it concerns itself with the dual function of naming the system and the cultivation of the perceptual, imaginative, and cognitive abilities necessary to place this system within a properly historical framework. The map must strive for totality (including the utopian moment poised at the very edge of the capitalist system) while simultaneously building towards a new notion of learning and interacting with the world that is at its heart revolutionary.

Greimassian square The importance of mapping informs much of Jameson’s work, including his interest in Greimassian squares. These squares are, on my reading, a schematized heuristic for mapping out various dialectical contradictions that are residual, dominant, and emergent within a given system. They therefore are a concrete pedagogical tool for naming the system, historicizing, and thinking dialectically. Before I turn to Jameson’s description of the square, it is important to introduce the logic informing the structure of Algirdas Julien Greimas’s square as such. In its most basic form, the square is a way of increasing the number of analytical classes stemming from a single, oppositional pair of terms. The square multiplies from two to four to eight total positions. This multiplication starts with a single opposition (A vs. B where B is the negation of A), out of which is generated a pair of contraries (not-A vs. not-B). Further combinations then ensue resulting in metaterms. Vertical metaterms include the complex term (A + B) and the neutral term (not-A + not-B, or the negation of two negations), while the horizontal metaterms include positive and negative deixes. One can think of the vertical metaterms as contradictory syntheses and the deixes as intensifying a term by affirming a certain value and negating the opposite of that term.

116 Tyson E. Lewis Complex Metaterm term A

term B

Positive Deixis

Negative Deixis

term not-A

term not-A

Neutral Metaterm Figure 7.1 Generic Greimasian Square

Given this structuralist description, it might be surprising that it is a tool used by a Marxist interested in naming the system, historicizing, and dialectical thinking. Indeed, the square seems rather fixed, stratified, and therefore seems to exclude a temporal dimension so important for Jameson’s theoretical and political projects. Yet, in Jameson’s hands, the inanimate square suddenly springs tolife. Jameson summarizes his understanding of the square as follows: I have suggested that other traditions may find this schema interesting if they entertain the hypothesis that it constitutes a virtual map of conceptual closure, or better still, of the closure of ideology itself, that is, ideology as a mechanism, which, while seeming to generate a rich variety of possible concepts and positions, remains in fact locked into some initial aporia or double-bind that it cannot transform from the inside by its own means. (2019, p. 350) Here, the square represents a cultural logic of a period, mapping out the permutations that are possible within a finite frame. Yet this very closure of the square-as-map also contains a utopian point of transformation, wherein the outer terms (metaterms) themselves can become fulcrums for further dialectical processes that might escape the ideological barriers illustrated by the parameters of the square. In this sense, the square, first and foremost, functions to name the system. “A system,” writes Jameson, in this sense is at one and the same time freedom and determination: it opens a set of creative possibilities (which are alone possible as responses

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to the situation it articulates) as well as tracing ultimate limits of praxis that are also the limits of thought and imaginative projections. (1994, pp. 129–130) The square reveals the system’s macro tendencies by organizing a plurality of heterogeneous and seemingly disparate elements and styles. Likewise, the square can be thought of as a spatialized representation of a temporal process of dialectical thinking. In Jameson’s hands, the square unfolds in a dynamic and dialectical motion, multiplying terms from inside of an initial set of oppositions. The square is, in this sense, infused with a restless temporality. But even more importantly, the square itself ought to be read as a partial summing up of positions, terms, or signs within a given cultural logic such that historicization of a period becomes a possibility. In short, the square becomes a way of representing the unrepresentable totality of positions ofered up within a cultural logic – it therefore makes a historical period (and its internal contradictions) appear. And like cognitive mapping more generally, the Greimassian square has a “pedagogical function” in that one can use this visual device to map out and to articulate a set of relationships that it is much more confusing, and much less economical, to convey in expository prose, and these humbler pedagogical capacities of the semiotic square may not be the least index of its importance. (2019, p. 351) In short, the square economically conveys dialectical complexity in an easily accessed visual graph. It therefore has pedagogical value. But I would venture to add that this value is not simply for the audience or reader of a completed work. Indeed, it has pedagogical value to the theorist him or herself. It is a research tool insofar as it is also a pedagogical tool helping one think through contradictions emanating from within a given oppositional pair. Jameson argues as much when he describes, in some detail, his own use of the square to sharpen his dialectical thinking skills. In particular, he highlights three crucial moments in using the square. First, is the inaugural decision, not merely about the terms of the binary opposition to be expanded and articulated in the square as a whole, but also, and above all, the very order in which those terms are arranged; it makes a fundamental difference, in other words, whether the founding binary is ordered as white versus black, or as black versus white. The square is in this sense not symmetrical but temporal or positional. (2019, p. 351) Elsewhere, he also highlights the “difculty in beginning in any nondogmatic way” (1994, p. 131) and suggests that one must start from a position with some

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intuitive feasibility. Such feasibility must not be predetermined by the particular interests of the theorist, but rather must be faithful to the problematic of the research itself. The second important recommendation for conducting research with the square is that the primary, internal terms “need to be conceived polysemically, each one carrying within it its own range of synonyms, and of the synonyms of its synonyms” (2019, p. 351). This rule of thumb introduces semiotic slippage into the square so that the square is never fully totalized (only a practice in totalization). At the same time, this recommendation maintains that the semantic richness of the terms not be bracketed out completely, as the key to the square and its organization might rest in the multiple meanings that are possible within the terms as they begin to alchemically interact with one another. And finally, the last piece of methodological advice Jameson gives is to pay close attention to the final term, or neutral metaterm. For Jameson, this is the “place of novelty and of paradoxical emergence” within the square. For him, “it is always the most critical position and the one that remains open or empty for the longest time, for its identification completes the process and in that sense constitutes the most creative act of the construction” (2019, p. 352). Interestingly, he writes that it is the “place of the great leap, the great deduction, the intuition that falls from the ceiling, from heaven” (2019, p. 352). It is as if the final term in the construction of the square does not usher forth from the researcher’s subjectivity, but rather is the result of the workings of the square itself. The neutral metaterm is a point of novelty in which something reveals itself that is beyond the capacities of the researcher to conceptualize on his or her own. In short, the neutral metaterm is precisely the educational moment within the production of the square where the researcher is taught something new or different. The work of the researcher is to carefully arrange the other terms so as to open a space or a clearing within thought for the arrival of this crucial, mysterious negation of two negations to arrive and set the square in motion once again toward a utopian possibility. This leads us to the question of accuracy. How does one assess the validity of the square? What is the “proof ” that any square is preferable over any other square? Jameson offers the following advice: A certain conviction that you are working in the right direction comes, I think, when the traits of semes of the semiotic square begin to accumulate interesting synonyms from different systems. . . . The moment in which a seme from one kind of movement begins to coincide with that of another is a kind of discovery procedure, which, far from reconfirming what we know (or think we know) already . . . leads to new interpretations. (1994, p. 131) In other words, we know a square is on the right track if it teaches us something that surprises or disarms us. “Proof ” that a square is somehow more or less accurate comes from its capacity to produce new, unprecedented, and

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unanticipated insights as the terms interact, and in particular, as the neutral term makes a shocking appearance. As with all of Jameson’s work, the Greimassian square itself cannot escape history, but must be placed within history as both symptom of and solution to a representational crisis of postmodernism. If postmodernism is a logic that makes historicization increasingly difficult, colonizing time with space, then the Greimassian spatialization of temporality in the form of a structure or graph is a symptom. At the same time, Greimassian squares must be “true” in some sense – as they can be adequate diagnostic tools for mapping contradictions within a given cultural logic. Simply put, the spatial logic of postmodernism itself makes the spatial form of the Greimassian square pedagogically useful, or intelligible. Only by virtue of being a symptom can the square be a solution to the problem of historicization. Jameson writes, postmodernism “constitutes something like the conditions of possibility for the conceptualizing and articulation of the new theoretical system [of Greimassian semiotics]” (2019, p. 359). On this reading, the square not only shows us – the audience – the internal complexity of postmodern cultural logic, but also (and in a dialectical leap of critical self-reflexivity) the very conditions of its own possibility (the spatialization of postmodernism itself) within this cultural logic. So, what would be an example of the use of the Greimassian square? There are many possible examples to choose from in Jameson’s work, yet they are difficult to replicate without also going into great detail concerning the narrative that accompanies them or the problematic which Jameson is addressing in a given context. Bearing these points in mind, I can nevertheless briefly summarize the square which Jameson develops to account for contemporary architecture in a chapter titled “The Constraints of Postmodernism.” In this square, Jameson is concerned with organizing a diversity of architectural styles within the postmodern period. The square is organized around certain problems that High Modernism totality

Innovation

Dirty Realism

Deconstruction

replication

part/element

Critical Regionalism Figure 7.2 Jameson’s use of a Greimasian Square to map postmodern architectural styles

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emerge in relation to the primary opposition between totality and innovation on the one hand and replication and part on the other. The partial resolution – always incomplete and unsatisfactory – of these internal problematics can be found on the outer rim of the square in the vertical metaterms – high modernism (Le Corbusier) and critical regionalism (Michael Graves) – and horizontal metaterms – dirty realism (Rem Koolhass) and deconstructionism (Peter Eisenman). The complex term high modernism offers the background against which postmodern styles emerge as various forms of negation, rebellion, and inversion. Because of this, the formative qualities of high modernism – including totality and innovation – are the starting points for the square. On the left, Jameson places Koolhass as a properly postmodern rethinking of “totality” as a surprising combination of the organic and the mechanical producing structures incorporating a multiplicity of heterogeneous and semi-autonomous elements that seem to lack a solid ground and yet nevertheless articulate with one another. While this might seem like a high modernist gesture, Jameson is quick to point out that it must be thought in relation to a properly postmodern theme: replication. For Koolhass, replication concerns the internalization of the chaos of the city into the design of his buildings. Even if the turbulence of the streets infiltrates Koolhass’s architectural aesthetic, his buildings do not merely topple over into the vernacular of their surroundings. Instead, this replication is mediated through a totality, producing a stylization of the city that is as distinct as it is integral to the metropolis it serves. The result is what Jameson describes as “dirty realism.” Importantly, this architectural type is, for Jameson, innovative yet also constrained by postmodernism, ultimately “consistent with the freedom of the market itself ” (1994, p. 143). On the right, we find deconstructionism as a combination of innovation and part. In terms of innovation, Jameson finds within high modernism’s formalism a slow and steady “nonstructural negation of its own system” (1994, p. 162). Here, innovation does not refer to the high modernist emphasis on unique personal style and grand, radical breaks so much as the postmodern emphasis on parts over totalities. Innovation, for Eisenman, comes about through the irreconcilable layering of parts into a discontinuous ensemble. The unusual combination of innovation and parts leads to Jameson’s final insight: that Eisenman’s architecture produces the possibility of a new kind of postmodern historical narrative. This narrative is not a grand narrative (as with high modernism), but is a pluralization of narrative possibilities. This is a possibility through this “the present invents its own past” out of fragments (1994, p. 182). Such narrative plurality replaces any sense of history as composed of facts with a process in which history institutes a “simultaneity of multiple worlds” (1994, p. 183). Jameson thus leaves this side of the square with some ambivalences: In opposition to the cultural logic of postmodernism as a whole (which resists historicization), Eisenman’s architecture injects a seed of historical differentiation and speculation, yet it is unclear whether or not such micro-histories (so many fictions layered on of one another) enables the audience to map out a process

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of totalization (or periodization) so necessary for political action to become possible. But most importantly is the critical regionalism that emerges from within the stylistic postmodernism of Michael Graves. What happens when totality and innovation are abandoned (and thus any connection to high modernism severed)? What happens when we are left with nothing more than replication and scattered parts divorced from any transformative notion of the new? While this might seem like an architectural dead end, Jameson’s square provides a surprising twist. As the neutral term, critical regionalism is the negation of two negations. It therefore contains within itself both a negation of high modernism but also of postmodernism (as found in dirty realism and deconstructionism). For instance, along with the postmodern, critical regionalism refutes the high modernist emphasis on the avant-garde and strong utopianism of the new as well as a fear of universalizing and homogenizing processes of identity reification. At the same time, it equally is suspicious of postmodernism’s rejection of the notion of periodization (and thus historical teleology). Critical regionalism seeks a certain deeper historical logic in the past of this system [of postmodernism], if not its future: a rearguard retains overtones of a collective resistance, and not the anarchy of trans-avant-garde pluralism that characterizes many of the postmodern ideologies of Difference as such. (1994, p. 191) In short, Jameson finds in critical regionalism an architectural attempt to wrestle with both the historical logic of postmodernism’s past and its future. While rejecting strong utopianism, it contains within itself a weak utopianism pushing outward beyond the constraints of the postmodern toward a diferent kind of collective political project – a collective project that is now gravely under threat as post-Fordist corporations adapt swift strategies to invade and capitalize on regional diferences. As Jameson writes, “Critical regionalism” ofers up “a conceptual proposal” that is “geopolitical” in that it seeks to mobilize a pluralism of “regional” styles (a term selected, no doubt, in order to forestall the unwanted connotations of the terms national and international alike), with a view toward resisting the standardizations of a henceforth global late capitalism and corporatism, whose “vernacular” is as omnipresent as its power over local decisions. (1994, p. 202) To summarize, the square presents us with the architectural logic of late capitalism that contains residual elements (of modernism) and emergent, utopian elements (of critical regionalism) that constitute the internal complexity of the “system” of available architectural forms in the present. As such, the totalization of the period opens itself up to the emergence of a horizon of possibilities that

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gesture beyond the period. The “proof ” or validity of the square is to be found in (1) how its terms seem to fall into place, each calling forth the others as if by some kind of internal logic that dialectically unfolds before the researchers and (2) how the resulting neutral metaterm can teach something that was not known before.

An application of the Greimassian square for educational research I will conclude with my own Greimassian square. At the risk of being labeled narcissistic, I will attempt to map out the totality of my own theoretical project as it has shifted over the years. Using the square to think about my own work has been valuable in the past for shedding new light on old ideas and how these ideas articulate to form a constellation that converges and diverges around certain concerns and concepts. In this sense, the square has indeed “taught” me something surprising about my own writing that I would like to share. To begin, the first terms in the square are learning (A) and testing (B). On my account (Lewis, 2015, 2017a), learning is a particular educational logic that can be characterized as a teleological process oriented toward and guided by a specific, predetermined end. A simple example can illustrate this point: I want to learn to play Go, and this orientation then helps organize a series of learning experiences, each of which can be evaluated along the way in relation to how well they help me reach the predetermined goal. The nature of the goal is open-ended and can include anything from learning skills to simply learning about the self (critical-self reflection). Contrary to learning, we find testing. In a certain sense, one can think of a test as an interruption of the process of learning. It is essentially a point of reification, or stilling, in which the learning process is made concrete, objectified, and rendered into a product. Combined Standardization/Life-Long Learning learning

testing

Exo-Pedagogy

Risky Exposure

protocoling

studying

Potentialism Figure 7.3 Educational application of Greimasian Square

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into a complex metaterm, learning and testing produce two possibilities. First, there is standardized testing in schools. Although learning is process oriented, its teleological thrust makes it amenable to the reifying nature of testing, and vice versa. The two can thus complement each other, producing an incessant feedback loop between learning and testing. In this sense, we can speak of the hegemonic educational logic of late capitalism as a learning-testing regime (Backer & Lewis, 2015). Within such a regime, what is valued is precisely what can be assessed via a test, and a test becomes a measure of what can and ought to be learned. The educational self, on this view, becomes a self that is measurable, self as an output, or self as recognizable to itself through an actualization of its potentials in a certain predefined form. The other possible result of combining learning and testing outside the school is the rise of the life-long learner. This learner is an entrepreneurial self who must pull him- or herself up by the bootstraps and continually learn new skills to compete within flexible labor markets. Here the test is the labor market itself, which passes judgment over the entrepreneurial self in terms of assessing employability. The contrary of learning is studying (not-A) and the contrary of testing is the protocol (not-B). Studying, as I have elaborated (Lewis, 2015, 2017a), is essentially a non-teleological process that is not oriented toward goals (ends) but is rather a pure means, an educational experience of potentiality as such. Phenomenologically, learning is experienced in terms of growth or development – approximating an end gives it a sense of purpose. Study, on the other hand, has an intense (if not addictive) sense of purposiveness without a purpose, and hence, is not experienced in relation to growth or development so much as stupefaction or vertigo. Because of this, study is interminable and immeasurable. Protocols (Lewis, Friedrich, & Hyland, 2018) are tests that suspend the test’s criteria for success and failure. They are, in other words, tests that do not reify products over process and as such cannot measure outputs. Instead, protocols put something at risk in such a way as to open a space of experimentation. Whereas tests arrive at the completion of an experiment, producing verifiable knowledge as to what has been learned along the way, a protocol suspends its relationship to any notion of completing an experiment, assessing development, or producing evidence. Protocols, in short, suspend, deactivate, and render impossible metrics or the tallying up of “findings.” When combined, testing and studying produce a metaterm: education as risky exposure. Education on this model concerns the submitting of the self to a test that tests one’s freedom by betraying conventions of the self. It is a betrayal of definable subject positions within a given social and economic order in order to abandon one’s self to one’s “test-drive” (Backer & Lewis, 2015). In this sense, studying renders inoperative the reifying tendencies of testing in order to release testing from measurement according to predetermined success conditions. It reappropriates testing for real experimentation as a moment of exposure of the self to difference beyond itself. At the same time, testing gives studying a new sense of risk taking (as one must risk a betrayal in order to truly test the limits of the self).

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On the opposite side of the square, we find a combination of learning and protocoling. In my past work, I have referred to this as exo-pedagogy (Lewis & Kahn, 2010). In this case, learning has a teleology oriented toward the overcoming of anthropocentrism through zoomorphic prototyping. Exopedagogical learning is an exodus from the constraints of the human, and is therefore oriented toward the posthuman as a utopian horizon. Zoomorphs are forms of life that do not abide by any fixed binaries separating and dividing life against itself (human vs. animal, for instance). What is learned through exopedagogy is a lesson in the power of the body to take flight from the predefined parameters of the human in the name of another form of life. Learning thus becomes a dynamic process of posthuman learning while protocoling takes on a teleological dimension always pushing the human beyond itself into the open that exists between humans and non-human others. Finally, in the neutral position we find an educational logic that results from a combination of protocoling and studying: potentialism (Lewis, 2017b). Potentialism releases potentiality from any notion of measurable outputs or developmental teleologies. It is therefore not aligned with development (lifelong learning), risky exposure, or posthuman overcoming. Instead, potentialism is an educational logic that recursively turns us toward an experience of our potentiality to learn. Stated differently, it concerns the experience of the very potentiality to think, act, be without thinking, acting, or being without exhausting this potentiality in any one actualization. It is an indeterminate state of educational life best characterized as an impotential act, or an act that de-actualizes itself so that potentiality reveals itself without exhausting itself in the form of a testable assessment. There is no exposure here toward difference destabilizing the self from the outside, nor is there any overcoming of the self on the road to a posthuman future. Instead, there is an idling of such processes of exposure and overcoming so as to re-turn to a more basic and primordial question concerning the very potentiality to think, act, or be. As the negation of two negations, potentialism suspends the teleology of learning as well as the reifying notion of testing while also suspending the exposure and exodus of the central metaterms. What results is an educational logic that lets idle the identifiable features of educational life without passing beyond such life. It is a radically minimal educational experience presupposed yet unthematized by all other forms of educational life. In this sense, there is a utopianism here that is radically weak: suggesting that when the studier hits upon his or her potentiality, educational life as such can be radically rethought beyond the terms defining the square.

Conclusion In sum, the Greimassian square, as deployed by Jameson, has helped reveal the internal system within which my own thought has been working over the last two decades. And in the process of visually mapping this totality, the square also points toward new horizons of possibility. The lesson here is thus twofold. First,

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surprising and unanticipated relationships between seemingly disparate projects come to light as a result of this mapping experiment. Spatial or territorial distinctions between the domains of my thought suddenly become animated by overlapping and crisscrossing terms that speak to a temporal process of dialectical relations that move in and out of one another with a restless, internal propulsion. Second, the question of the status of the map itself remains an open question: How is the map’s educational value a symptom of and solution to the very terms that it throws into relief? In other words, how does the map itself? It would seem that the map reveals itself at the X in the center of the square, thus retaining a minimal autonomy from its content while at the same time offering up a formal potentiality that, as suggested earlier, is capable of pole vaulting the research into another educational dimension precisely because rather than in spite of its radical weaknesses. Because of the totalizing nature of the Greimassian square – including its ability to map itself – Jameson’s visualization strategy is an invaluable methodological tool for any critical project, enabling us to imagine complex permutations and relations that exist between competing power dynamics and oppositional structural logics that exceed the capacity of any given philosophical system, ideological position, or particular data set to fully capture.

References Backer, D. I., & Lewis, T. E. (2015). Retaking the test. Educational Studies, 51(3), 193–208. Jameson, F. (1974). Marxism and form: Twentieth-century dialectical theories of literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jameson, F. (1981). The political unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jameson, F. (1992). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jameson, F. (1994). Seeds of time. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Jameson, F. (2009). Valences of the dialectic. London: Verso. Jameson, F. (2019). Allegory and ideology. London: Verso. Lewis, T. E. (2009). Too little, too late: Reflections on Fredric Jameson’s pedagogy of form. Rethinking Marxism, 21(3), 438–452. Lewis, T. E. (2015). On study: Giorgio Agamben and educational potentiality. New York, NY: Routledge. Lewis, T. E. (2017a). Inoperative learning: A radical rethinking of educational potentialities. New York, NY: Routledge. Lewis, T. E. (2017b). Study: An example of potentialism. In C. Ruitenberg (Ed.), Reconceptualizing study in educational discourse and practice (pp. 8–22). New York, NY: Routledge. Lewis, T. E., Friedrich, D., & Hyland, P. (2018). Organizing a studious conference for public experimentation. Visual Arts Research, 44(1), 1–12. Lewis, T. E., & Kahn, R. (2010). Education out of bounds: Reimagining cultural studies for a posthuman age. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Cultivating culturally situated theorizing in educational research Challenging imperialistic curriculum and training Kakali Bhattacharya

Introduction I have always occupied middle spaces of belonging and not belonging within academia and beyond. In academia, I have had to create theoretical and methodological medleys to align my work with my culturally situated ontoepistemologies. In this chapter I discuss the pathways I followed to be in integrity and harmony with myself, and to give myself some reprieve from various interconnected structures of oppression. In sharing my pathways, I present a self-created emergent theory as method, describe its applicability, and share how such a method fills the void I encountered in my academic journey as an educational researcher. I describe how I applied this theory in three different contexts and how such work can cross multiple boundaries, even as I present it as situated within my own experiences. I begin with a narrative exposition to provide the backstory that culminated in the creation of this framework. Next, I explain the framework and a heuristic of six applicable tenets, which stands in its own liminality between ontoepistemic understandings and application. The final two sections of the chapter present application exemplars and discuss possibilities.

Philosophies of inquiry, qualitative research, and empiricism I grew up in India for the first 14 years of my life. I then moved to Canada, where I completed high school, my undergraduate degree, and a post-graduation diploma. I subsequently entered the U.S. as a graduate student. As a doctoral student at the University of Georgia, despite dense readings in philosophies of educational and qualitative research, I found myself unsettled and lost in my effort to carve out a path for a culturally situated inquiry and to identify the means to traverse it. I did not see my ethnic, cultural, and/or transnational identity within such scholarship. My advisor instructed me to take classes in theory and philosophy, which led me to read the work of many

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dead white French men (Bové, 1990; Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, 1987; Derrida, 1974; Foucault, 1970, 1977). As a student with Indian heritage at a predominantly white institution, I already felt dislocated, uprooted, and marginalized because discourses in relation to my identity, culture, and history were never presented. I remember submitting a response paper for a particular week’s reading in which I described the distance I felt from the scholar’s written perspective. My professor gave me a B, noting, “Lots of people read this scholar’s work and find value.” Through this interaction I learned that these scholars’ works were viewed as so universally applicable that I dare not question them or even acknowledge my experience of distance. I was expected to interpret this distance as indicating a deficit in my intellectual abilities, not the lack of universality of these scholars’ works. Yet, I did not internalize this deficit thinking because I came from a family with an abundance of academics and university graduates in multiple generations. I fully acknowledge that belonging to such a family provided me with privileges through various social structures in India, including those of caste, class, and religion. While my privileges made me complicit with the oppression of many people in India, when I crossed oceans and came to the U.S., most of those privileges were erased. As I read applied works in which scholars used theory as a method, I encountered concepts like rhizoanalysis (Alvermann, 2000) and rhizome and rhizovocality (Honan, 2007; Jackson, 2003), informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Using the figuration of a rhizome, an underground stem without a defined center, like ginger root, the authors argued for decentering, nonlinearity, working through tracings in the messiness, and engaging in multiple, nomadic lines of flight (Braidotti, 1994; Leach & Boler, 1998). This work privileged an understanding of free movement, figuratively albeit, without interrogating barriers of such nomadic travels that could deterritorialize and reterritorialize multiple discursive planes/terrains. However, I could not reconcile myself to the nomadic nature of rhizoanalysis, passing from one terrain to another, as many people in the world do not enjoy such unrestricted travel, not even in their imagination, due to centuries of slavery and colonization. While advocating for rhizoanalysis and rhizovocality, did these scholars consider the challenges faced by those with different histories and privileges? Still, as a graduate student, I appreciated the ways in which the continental philosophers allowed me to think deconstructively, break apart binaries, challenge foundational assumptions, and unsettle that which was commonly regarded as stable. Not until years later would I come to understand that certain groups of people can live with a theoretical unsettling, especially when the materiality of their lives is settled and anchored and they do not have to live in the fear of their lives or homes being uprooted. To cultivate that understanding, I journeyed into postcolonial, anti-colonial, transnational (feminist), and decolonial discourses. Those whose work I relied on most heavily in understanding postcolonialism (and sometimes poststructuralism and postmodernism, as these were

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the currency at my university) were Chandra Mohanty (1991, 2004), Ania Loomba (2002), Edward Said (1994), Kamala Visweswaran (1993), Lubna Chaudhry (2000), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1993), Rey Chow (2002), Mitsuye Yamada (2002), Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994), and Trinh Minh-ha (1989, 1990). From these scholars, I learned that forces of imperialism, colonization, and globalization have divided the world hierarchically, silencing the subaltern and strongly reinforcing the binaried discursive terrain of us versus them in the flow of goods, knowledge, and labor across the world. I occupied a liminal space between what was taught to me that bore academic currency in my discipline and what I sought out to be more intelligible and culturally resonant. I often collaged multiple theories together to explore a possible path for my research, as none fully encompassed the juxtaposition of diaspora, transnationalism, decoloniality in the Global South, and methodological possibilities in educational research. Postcolonial, postmodern, or poststructural discourses did not instruct me on methods of educational research. Hungry for methodological guidance, I found Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999/2002) foundational text, Decolonizing Methodologies. This text shaped my career trajectory, as Smith traced the violence of research, colonialism, scientific inquiry, and the Western imposition of intellectual superiority on Indigenous populations. How had I missed learning this history of scientific empiricism? Certainly when the National Research Council identified what would count as research (Shavelson & Towne, 2002), specifically scientific research, it omitted all the dark histories of empiricism in favor of counting, predicting, and generalizing – an approach opposed by many qualitative researchers, but none from a decolonial perspective (Cannella & Lincoln, 2004; St. Pierre, 2002). At conference after conference, panels of esteemed scholars debated philosophies, empiricism, educational research, and qualitative inquiry. Yet no one ever positioned a conversation about the colonial structure of research and its associated myopic, hegemonic understanding of empiricism. Scholars like Peshkin (1988, 1993) and Spradley (1979, 1980) tried to legitimize the call for empiricism by providing a rationale for the goodness of qualitative research, elucidating the role of subjectivity in qualitative research and offering charts and tables laid out in a step-by-step manner to describe a process that is, by all accounts, messy, non-linear, iterative, and never truly prescriptive or replicable in its entirety. Terms like validity, reliability, credibility, and generalizability were reconceptualized within the discourse of qualitative research and assigned alternate meanings (Creswell, 1997). However, rather than elevating qualitative research, such moves situated it as a soft science, playing second fiddle to quantitative research. This positioned qualitative research as lacking value, until qualitative researchers decided to deal with these issues as moments of crisis in qualitative inquiry (Denzin, Lincoln, & Smith, 2008; Smith, 2005), and open up critical and Indigenous ways of doing qualitative inquiry. While the history of qualitative research was illuminating for me, I was mindful of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999/2002) alarming account of knowledge

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construction in the West. Smith reminds us to interrogate the relationship between the genealogical foundations of disciplines and classical and Enlightenment philosophies that resist engaging with knowledge systems outside their worldviews. For me, this meant that should I construct a methodology that deviates from those that are privileged in academia, I would be under the gaze of empiricism. How would I bypass marginalization and silencing to bring forward a belief system that is transnationally located within my heritage? Transnationalism, at a rudimentary level, describes those with connections to two or more nation states, either through migration (Riccio, 2001) or, as I have argued elsewhere (Bhattacharya, 2009a), through the influence of technology. Transnational people shuttle between the historical, social, political, and cultural conditions of multiple nation states within the broader context of colonialism, patriarchy, xenophobia, and other interrelated structures of oppression. With technology so ubiquitous today, and given the large population of second- or third-generation children of migrants, the concept of transnationalism and the meanings of origin and home have become problematic (Bhattacharya, 2017; Chawla, 2014, 2015). I entered a state of deep crisis, perplexed about how to position myself in this space of educational research. Educational research, by and large, is white. The curriculum is white, most of the educators are white (I had no educators of color in my undergraduate or graduate education), and the leadership and policymakers are mostly white. Where white educators could refuse empiricism or methodology of any sort (Koro-Ljungberg, 2015) and be supported for their departure from tradition, this option was not readily available to me. I was held to a different standard of accountability, and in some ways, it seemed that I spoke for my entire culture through my single study, despite my efforts to actively resist this. During my doctoral studies, as I learned which theories to privilege, I was also being widgetized and automatized, parroting theories like a robot – theories that were not resonant but gave me the false illusion of currency. Around this time, I discovered the works of Gloria Anzaldúa and other feminist scholars of color (Anzaldúa, 1987/1999; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 2002) and was especially moved by them. Anzaldúa introduced me to the concepts of hybridity and mestiza consciousness, which offered helpful framing devices as I considered my own border crossings along with those of the transnational Indian women participating in my study.1 Kamala Visweswaran (1994) taught me the valuable skills of moving in and out of ethnographic narratives and theorizing and troubling existing structures of knowledge production. Lubna Chaudhry (2000) illuminated the messiness and ethical implications of fieldwork when one operates from a cultural insider/outsider position. Negotiating the privileged academic terrain and the one created by people who shared my ancestry confused and inspired me. It was at this time that I conceptualized de/colonizing with a slash as a way of framing the messiness of transnational existence. We desire a utopian freedom without having to be in relationship with colonizing forces. Yet we struggle against, resist,

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accommodate to, and become complicit with various colonizing and other interconnected structures of oppression. The slash indicated a movement, a shuttling, a sense of un/settling, and the discovery of relations and practices within such shuttling as moments of anchoring. I framed my work from this hybridized space while attending to the complications of my positioning as a cultural insider/outsider researcher. I stated: As a transnational scholar in training in the U.S., I am painfully aware of my complicated positioning in conducting research on other female Indian graduate students. I realize that despite my best intentions to de/ colonize my work, I cannot remain neutralized in what I produce because it is always already colonized through my British/Indian/Canadian/U.S. upbringing, training, and presentation of my work in the colonizer’s language to Western academia. Put another way, I write in English to capture the experience of people whose language of communication is a hybridized form of Hindi and English already in its colonized package. I write to translate the cultural productions of experiences of “Others,” unwittingly taking on the role of a “Third World” broker in a format acceptable in Western academic gatekeeping. These complicated situations and actions continue to create im/possibilities in which I exist, function, interrogate, and abandon thoughts, beliefs, and epistemologies. (Bhattacharya, 2009b, p. 108) From this complicated middle space, which ofered few examples of ontoepistemic or cultural resonance within theoretical or methodological scholarly work, I often had to pastiche together multiple frameworks to conduct inquiry that would be valued in qualitative and educational research communities. For example, my dissertation was framed through de/colonial ontoepistemologies and further informed by postcolonialism, postcolonial feminism, transnationalism, transnational feminism, and Anzaldúan notions of border crossings. While I did not have specific methodological guidance from these interwoven and entangled framings, I had to find a middle ground between empiricist and high theory surveillance of my work. The empiricists required me to structure my work in ways that would illuminate all the pathways in my inquiry and the processes of traversing them, preferably acknowledging and not deviating too much from tradition. The high theory advocates, who valued theory-driven inquiry without any prior blueprint for methodology, urged me to discard all traditional approaches in favor of remaining open to what emerges out of the wreckage that remains after I deconstruct foundational assumptions. Riding this middle space between empiricism and high theory, I felt discomfort with both these approaches of inquiry. I decided to trace this discomfort to embark on a journey of un/learning. If deconstructing is what I do, then why could I not deconstruct what was presented to me as foundational knowledge, breaking it apart to see what rises from the ruins? In the next

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section, I highlight discoveries that arose from these ruins that allowed me to mitigate the pastiching of multiple frameworks in favor of ontoepistemologically and culturally congruent framing.

Par/Desi framework: centering South Asian diaspora The expectation that I would find congruity with continental philosophers despite our cultural and ontoepistemic distance is a mark of the colonization that governs academia, normalizing Western knowledge-making and positioning whiteness as superior to all else. I learned quickly that in preparing conference presentations, if my title identified the population with whom I was working, my entire audience would consist of three or four Brown Asian people. It was as if what I had to say was irrelevant because it was culturally situated. Yet the reverse was not true. What continental philosophers and white qualitative research scholars had to say was rarely understood within the confines of its social, cultural, and historical context. Deleuze and Guattari (1983) did not interrogate their whiteness, nor did Creswell (1997) position his whiteness in writing his text. Yet Deleuze and Guattari are widely valued by theory-driven qualitative methodologists and educational researchers, while Creswell is equally valued by those who fetishize empiricism. Caught outside these polarized yet popularized discourses, I belonged to neither. As an emerging scholar of color, the theoretical voice I sought to cultivate was deemed undesirable, lacking currency during my doctoral training. I understood the hierarchy that insisted that I develop a theoretical voice that centered and privileged the already-privileged white philosophers and qualitative researchers. Whiteness was presented as inherently desirable and ubiquitously applicable, demanding that I create an intelligibility and intimacy with it despite its incongruence with my knowing, being, and materiality. Eventually I learned that by focusing solely on the issue under investigation without identifying my population in my conference paper titles – thereby enacting self-censorship – people would attend my talks. For example, if I wanted to discuss the fluidity of the consent form in qualitative research, people would attend as long as I did not reference working with transnational Indian graduate students in the U.S. Centering the fluidity of the consent form signaled a postmodern sensibility intersected with empiricism. This intersection was palatable to an academic audience, but it came at the cost of erasure. By erasing the cultural situatedness of my work, the structures and agents of educational research compelled me to perform my own ethnic and racial erasure. As someone from a once-colonized nation the British invaded and remained in for 300 years, this move seemed eerily familiar. I was replicating the moves of my colonized ancestors, as though it were genetically encoded in me to participate in my own oppression. I thought of Smith’s (1999/2002) and Spivak’s (1990) urging to consider the strategic use of postcolonial (i.e., the critique of colonialism and its pervasive presence) moves within the academy.

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Additionally, Spivak (1990) reminds us that how we are being listened to matters. She states: For me, the question “Who should speak?” is less crucial than “Who will listen?” “I will speak for myself as a Third World person” is an important position for political mobilization today. But the real demand is that, when I speak from that position, I should be listened to seriously; not with that kind of benevolent imperialism. (p. 59) I realized that when I spoke as a student of color in predominantly white spaces, I was listened to with a sense of benevolent imperialism but not taken seriously. This is where Lorde’s (1984) reminder that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house became poignant. I began to chart a path of un/learning and deep self-excavation (Anzaldúa, 2015), realizing that healing is a critical part of doing anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-oppression work. Disrupting, resisting, and experiencing multiple forms of oppression are toxic for the body, mind, and spirit. We must therefore create dialogic spaces in which the oppressed can discuss these issues. I began to cultivate a hybridized voice that was at once theoretical, embodied, and empirical, yet did not fit within any specific predetermined structures in qualitative or educational research. After nearly 14 years of this un/learning, I constructed a framework I call the Par/Desi framework. Desi is a contested term, referring to people who have in/voluntarily migrated from various South Asian countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and others with varied histories. Par, in multiple Indian languages, identifies someone who is not our own, outside our family circle. Pardesi refers to someone from a foreign land, who is therefore not from the homeland. As I explained recently, “I do not impose this label on everyone, but rather acknowledge the existence of a group who use this label as a way to come together as a community in our collective struggle, liberation, and healing” (Bhattacharya, 2019b, p. 211). In activating my culturally situated ontoepistemic and theoretical voice, I explained: Par/Des(i), for me, represents a Desi person who shuttles between multiple subject positions, crossing borders to move between and occupy both “First and Third” world discursive realities. Pardesis are often portrayed in popular Indian media as either fair-skinned or white people who are privileged, embraced, desired, and longed for by the Desis. Par in Hindi, Bengali, and other Indian languages signals those who are Other, not part of the family, and separate from the self. Yet, the depiction of the Pardesi as privileged comes at the cost of situating the Desi as inferior within colorism and whiteness-centered discourses. If Desi is indigenous, then Pardesi is the colonizer, automatically creating a binary relationship between Desi and Pardesi. The representation

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of Par/Des(i) offers a way to blur these binaried boundaries, center Desi ontoepistemologies, and create relationality and movement between internalized discourses of colonization and de/colonial desires. Constantly in a state of flux, a Par/Des(i) framework highlights the movement of transnationals between national discursive subject positions, internalized colonizing perspectives, and resistance to the colonizing materiality of western superiority. (Bhattacharya, 2019b, p. 183) Having already conceptualized de/colonizing with a slash to represent a hybridized transnational shuttling, the Par/Desi framing ofered a more culturally grounded approach, using non-English words that triggered years of cultural discourses that were embedded in our memories, narratives, literature, media, entertainment, and other heritage-based resources. I created six tenets of this Par/Desi ontoepistemic orientation (Bhattacharya, 2019b, pp. 184–185), summarized as follows: 1

Re-membering Desh We re-member Desh (homeland) as nostalgic, static, and romanticized. This tenet focuses on re-memorying a static Desh that signifies simultaneously belonging and isolation, intersected with shifting privileges.

2

Par/Des(i): the more desirable Other? Reflecting on the messy consequences of colonization, this tenet focuses on the interplay between indigeneity, homeland, invader identity (the identity of the colonizers and how such identity can be internalized and normalized), the desired foreigner, the desired foreign land, and experiences of hostility and isolation in foreign lands. Also embedded in this tenet are issues of internalized colonization, casteism, colorism, homophobia, Islamophobia, classism, ableism, sexism, and other forms of oppression that are not simply artifacts of the invaders’ cultural histories and practices. Therefore, shuttling between the Par and Desi subject positions yields messy negotiations in which we may simultaneously be oppressed and enact oppression.

3

Home is permanently deferred This tenet refers to a fleeting and problematic understanding of and relationship with home, especially for those who cross oceans. Home is no longer just a physical dwelling, especially when a return to that dwelling reveals shifts in both those who return and those who remained, creating a constantly evolving, fleeting, and deferred relationship with home. Desis who were born and raised in the Global North are frequently questioned about where they are from, indicating that they cannot claim an unproblematic relationship to home within such lands. Home in this context

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becomes a desire, an imagination of a romanticized and utopian picture, something that may not be present in the current moment. Such an aspiration is not entirely attainable under various colonizing and other oppressive forces, and our relationship with it is continuously in flux: constantly reconceptualized, recalibrated, and reimagined. 4

Beloved and problematic communities Our communities can be sites of survival, strength, and resistance. Critical to this tenet is how much work we have done to bring awareness to our internalization of oppression – including but not limited to colonization, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, casteism, classism, Islamophobia, and so on – and how much freedom we have afforded ourselves to imagine alternate and transformative realities and futures. We are always moving between being part of a beloved community and resisting communal disciplinary gazes and structures.

5

Commodification of multiculturalism and diversity This tenet calls for the vigorous interrogation of the commodification of multiculturalism and diversity, which are too often limited to tokenization or identity politics. The framework helps eliminate such detrimental practices and opens spaces for dialogue, action, and policy-building within higher education and beyond.

6

Communal healing as our priority Communal healing is an utmost priority for our transformative futures. The hybridity, liminality, and shuttling embedded within the Par/Des(i) framework offer opportunities for our communities to meditate on healing while being responsive to our diversity, dialoguing across differences, and crafting possibilities for solidarity and common agendas. Our solidarities should employ multipronged approaches to work with/against/through oppressive structures, identify interventions, and engage in and enact communal healing.

In creating this theory – now to be used as method, I have negotiated the messy middle space between fetishizing empiricism and privileging high theory. This framing grounds experiences and materiality while abstracting six broad tenets. It creates space for transnational theorizing, which is implicated not only through my own experiences as presented here but also through the experiences of many others within and beyond my cultural group who find themselves in similar liminalities. I nurtured the theorizing voice that was silenced in graduate school, making space for that voice to emerge to make certain implications for inquiry that were previously dismissed. I collected the pain points that arose for me over the years and pinned them cartographically on my paths, creating a map for navigating the terrain of educational research and qualitative inquiry. I secretly

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hoped these cartographic moves would facilitate testimonials of a deep metamorphosis in how we approach qualitative inquiry within the context of educational research. Yet such optimism also bears the risk of disappointment. I desire to reject colonial and imperialistic structures of inquiry, yet I fail to detach myself from these oppressive structures. I believe in the collective works of those who challenge the empire such that even when we are tethered to the empire’s influences and infrastructures, our energies and talents can move us forward to spaces and ways of knowing that the empire cannot imagine. My evidence for this conviction comes from my ancestors, who sustained their optimism and belief for 300 years before they ousted the British from India.

Applications I have applied this framework as a method in three instances by: (1) revisiting my dissertation data; (2) analyzing two popular South Asian cultural narratives in the U.S.; (3) writing autoethnographically. In my dissertation, I re-read through a Par/Desi lens the experiences of international students from India experiencing their first year of graduate education in the U.S. (Bhattacharya, In Press). In this reading I fleshed out the ontoepistemic negotiations of a connection to home, lack of belongingness in a foreign country, and that which is lost in the liminality of crossing oceans. This was not a linear, step-by-step exercise. I had to feel my way through it, with my own experiences as well as those entrusted to me by others. I reviewed the six Par/Desi tenets to look for cartographic possibilities and identify points of convergence. For example, an internalized narrative of the superiority of whiteness and colonial masters creates an aspiration to be in the proximity of whiteness. Yet the participants’ experiences of violence when in proximity to a desired whiteness created continuous instability and unsettling, influencing a re-membering of a home that never existed. In this re-membering, participants glorified a sense of home, clinging to cultural elements they had never attended to or aligned with while in India by re-imagining them as something retained and internalized. Neerada was never religious or spiritual, but she began to align with nationalist discourses, downloading Hindu chants from the Internet and cultivating rituals she had never participated in or experienced personally while in India. Yamini began to cook Indian food to retain aspects of her cultural memories, although by her own account her diet in India consisted of pizza, burgers, and pasta, supplemented occasionally by home-cooked food prepared by her mother or paid staff, which she frequently rejected. In my re-reading, I re-analyzed how the participants’ experiences are a re-membering of homeland, negotiating with their aspirational whiteness and their own minoritized positions. Highlighting Neerada’s and Yamini’s other experiences, I began to trace how they negotiated their belongingness in their local Indian student community and academic discipline. When

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Neerada faced a crisis and needed a refuge outside of her local Indian student community, and requested to stay in my tiny apartment, I re-read that experience through a need for individual and communal healing from multiple oppressive gazes. In my autoethnography (Bhattacharya, 2019c), I highlighted my experiences as a teenager after migrating from India to Canada. Immersing myself more deeply in Par/Desi ontoepistemologies, I re-read that data through a direct Bengali cultural lens (my direct cultural lineage) and a broad South Asian lens. Such reading provided a deep interrogation and exposition of how aspirational whiteness, re-membering homeland, and a permanently deferred sense of home create not only cultural imbalance and unsettling, but also such extensive cultural erasure that an entire generation of transnational Desi youth prefer to camouflage their heritage in favor of belongingness in predominantly white cultural spaces. I used writing, meditation, and being in community with likeminded friends, authors, and family members as my method of inquiry for this project, which further highlighted the need for individual and communal healing. In my reading of South Asian narratives in popular culture (Bhattacharya, 2019d), I explored a 2017 documentary titled The Problem with Apu that problematized the character of Apu in the TV series The Simpsons (Melamedoff, 2017) and a Netflix special featuring a biographical account of comedian Hasan Minhaj (Storer, 2017). The Simpsons creators maintained that they were inspired by a character from the works of award-winning filmmaker Satyajit Ray named Apu, who was a free-spirited child raised in poverty who became a sensitive man of the world. When questioned about the grotesque caricature of Apu in The Simpsons, Dana Gould, head writer of the series, explained that they considered what might be funny, without concern for cultural sensitivity. Hari Kondabolu, who wrote and starred in the documentary, reminded viewers that there were no writers of color in the room, nor were there other South Asian representations in popular media when the show began to gain popularity, to challenge such a caricature. Multiple second-generation South Asian community members in the documentary reported being bullied in school, with the bullies referencing and mimicking Apu as a racialized slur. Hasan Minhaj noted how the U.S. Constitution has been differentially applied to South Asian Muslims in the U.S., tracing his experiences in K-12 education and the violence his family endured in post 9–11 California. Using a Par/Desi lens, I examined the commodification of multiculturalism through benevolent imperialism and communal gazes. My Par/Desi reading demonstrated the pain of shuttling, of not belonging, which disrupts one’s sense of equity, dignity, and place and creates cognitive dissonance. Minhaj’s experiences demonstrate the pain of a Desi kid growing up in the U.S. to understand that equity is not something he could access easily, even if it is the law of the land. Juxtaposing these narratives with multiple Par/Desi tenets, the need for healing again became salient.

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While this framing method is culturally situated, it can be applied outside of the South Asian context. For example, inspired by this method, researchers could engage in inquiry in multiple ways that either break from or modify established approaches to create more culturally situated alternatives. For example, we could abandon formal interviews in favor of kitchen table conversations, and replace focus groups with walks in gentrified neighborhoods to understand the intersectionality and lived realities of multiple structures of oppression. Justice-oriented scholars could use this framing to analyze culturally situated understandings of dislocation, lack of belongingness, communal solidarity and gazes, and the need for healing. Collectively, we could abandon a linear process of inquiry and bring all parts of ourselves that we might previously have censored into sense-making of a phenomenon in educational research. We could use resources outside of academia to demonstrate the boundary crossing value of theoretical readings and disrupt the practices that privilege the knowledgemaking that occurs in academic spaces. To these ends, multiple doctoral students are currently using this method to highlight South Asian experiences in the U.S. This group of emerging scholars reports that this method gives them language and pathways through which to change direction and advocate for both a focus and a mode of inquiry that do not concede to the empiricism fetish nor situate themselves as inferior to high theory work. I am also co-editing a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education that focuses on scholarship informed or implicated by a Par/Desi framework.

For whom is this theory? Concluding thoughts Educational research, especially qualitative inquiry, is deeply immersed in whiteness-oriented ontoepistemologies. The countries that produce such work are predominantly white, as are the authors who are privileged and celebrated within discourses of qualitative research and the philosophies of inquiry that inform qualitative work. With academic gatekeeping, it is arduous to insist congruency with work that emerges from non-white cultural perspectives when we have been force-fed a whiteness-centered curriculum and taught to devalue culturally situated theoretical and methodological voices. Worse, we have used these normalization moves to erase and silence ourselves, our colleagues, and our students simply because many of these oppressive moves are so normalized that it requires ceaseless vigilance to become aware of and dismantle them. I recommend that readers who find themselves in between the empiricism fetish and the privileging of high theory find their own terrain and theoretical voice. To do so, one might lean on the scholarship and moves presented in this chapter. Additionally, one can move beyond academic discourses to identify valuable community-based knowledge construction. Perhaps we are always already colonized and oppressed, and therefore never completely free from enacting violence toward ourselves and others. But even with such complicity, complacency and helplessness are not options for many

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of us who are gravely concerned about the ways in which lives are devalued and suffering is normalized locally, nationally, and globally. For that reason, we, as educational researchers, need to move beyond what we were taught, enact a process of un/learning, trace our cultural histories and heritage, and find the courage to do risky work with a theoretical method that may even come from the streets (Bhattacharya, 2019a). I have created a framework out of frustration that the existing ones did not represent the lived conditions of those who might find themselves as transnationals due to in/voluntary migrations. While all transnationals do not have identical experiences or demonstrate their agency similarly, this framework begins a conversation in educational research that has been silenced for far too long. The field of education is increasing in diversity (Han, 2013; Turner, González, & Wood, 2008) among both students and educators, who confront daily the effects of racism, xenophobia, ableism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, and more. The interconnections among these structures call for a multidimensional, intersectionally framed understanding of the ways they play out in people’s lives. Perhaps not everyone can find full resonance in this theory as method, but it nevertheless provides educational researchers with an approach for dealing with messy complexities and complicities that traditional empiricist methods can neither recognize nor engage. Additionally, high theory approaches to inquiry often become lost in minutiae, refusing methodology and dismissing a closeness with the embodied, raw centering of human experiences. Those of us who seek culturally situated, just theoretical influences on our inquiry can use this framing, or elements of it, to cultivate our own theory-driven frameworks for inquiry. There is no prescriptive format for inquiry to which researchers must adhere, as the colonial masters and western knowledge-makers purport. Inquiry and its design, execution, analysis, and representation can arise from a culturally situated framing that ontoepistemically rejects restrictive boundaries and imagines expansiveness and generativity. This is how we create our own paths, reject savioristic thinking, and create deep metamorphosizing conditions to change the direction of our journey.

Note 1 I was studying how transnational Indian women navigate the overt and hidden structures and curriculum of higher education in their graduate studies in the U.S.

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Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Masumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S., & Smith, L. T. (Eds.). (2008). Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Derrida, J. (1974). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of human sciences. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Grewal, I., & Kaplan, C. (Eds.). (1994). Scattered hegemonies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Han, K. T. (2013). “These things do not ring true to me”: Preservice teacher dispositions to social justice literature in a remote state teacher education program. The Urban Review, 45(2), 143–166. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-012-0212-7 Honan, E. (2007). Writing a rhizome: An (im)plausible methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(5), 531–546. Jackson, A. Y. (2003). Rhizovocality. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(5), 693–710. Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2015). Reconceptualizing qualitative research: Methodologies without methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Leach, M., & Boler, M. (1998). Gilles Deleuze: Practicing education through flight and gossip. In M. Peters (Ed.), Naming the multiple: Poststructuralism and education (pp. 149–172). Bergin & Garvey. Loomba, A. (2002). Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York, NY: Routledge. Lorde, A. (1984). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. In Sister outsider: Essays & speeches by Audre Lorde (pp. 110–113). Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press Feminist Series. Melamedoff, M. (2017). The problem with Apu [Documentary]. Minh-ha, T. T. (1989). Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Minh-ha, T. T. (1990). Cotton and Iron. In R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. T. Min-ha, & C. West (Eds.), Out there: Marginalization and contemporary cultures (pp. 327–336). New York, NY: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press. Mohanty, C. T. (1991). Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo, & L. Torres (Eds.), Third world women and the politics of feminism (pp. 51–80). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mohanty, C. T. (2004). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moraga, C. L., & Anzaldúa, G. E. (2002). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color. Berkley, CA: Third Woman Press. Peshkin, A. (1988). In search of subjectivity – One’s own. Educational Researcher, 17(7), 17–22. Peshkin, A. (1993). The goodness of qualitative research. Educational Researcher, 22(2), 23–29. Riccio, B. (2001). From “ethnic group” to “transnational community”? Senegalese migrants’ ambivalent experiences and multiple trajectories. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 27(4), 583–600.

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Said, E. (1994). Orientalism. London, UK: Vintage Books. Shavelson, R., & Towne, L. (2002). Scientific research in education. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Smith, L. T. (1999/2002). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. New York, NY: Zed Books Ltd. Smith, L. T. (2005). On tricky ground: Researching the native in the age of uncertainty. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 85–107). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Spivak, G. C. (1990). The post-colonial critic: Interviews, strategies, dialogues (S. Harasym, Ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Spivak, G. C. (1993). Can the subaltern speak? In P. Williams & L. Chrisman (Eds.), Colonial discourse and postcolonial theory (pp. 66–111). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Spradley, J. P. (1979). The ethnographic interview. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Group. Spradley, J. P. (1980). Participant observation. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Storer, C. (2017). Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming king [Netflix]. St. Pierre, E. A. (2002). Science rejects postmodernism. Educational Researcher, 31(8), 25–27. Turner, C. S. V., González, J. C., & Wood, J. L. (2008). Faculty of color in academe: What 20 years of literature tells us. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 1(3), 139–168. https:// doi.org/10.1037/a0012837 Visweswaran, K. (1993). Predicaments of the hyphen. In S. A. D. Collective (Ed.), Our feet walk the sky: Women of the South Asian diaspora (pp. 301–319). San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Visweswaran, K. (1994). Fictions of feminist ethnography. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Yamada, M. (2002). Invisibility is an unnatural disaster: Reflections of an Asian American woman. In C. Moraga & G. Anzaldúa (Eds.), This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color (pp. 35–40). Berkley, CA: Third Woman Press.

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Synthesizing theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative research Metasynthesis as a methodology for education Kip Austin Hinton, Alcione N. Ostorga, and Christian E. Zúñiga

Introduction Reviews of research have increased in importance as research centers, universities, foundations, and governments desire to aggregate “what the research says” about any given problem or topic. Unlike studies that report new data, review articles rely on pre-existing data which is then combined to achieve some larger understanding. Whether within education, health sciences, or engineering, every attempt to present “evidence-based” or “best practices” should be based on research results spanning multiple investigators, multiple approaches, and multiple research subjects (Jenson, Clark, Kircher, & Kristjansson, 2007). Additionally, by adding together the approaches, methods, findings, and claims of many different researchers, patterns that may have gone unnoticed within a single study can emerge, leading to innovations for a topic or phenomenon (Thorne, Joachim, Paterson, & Canam, 2002). Over the past decade, qualitative metasynthesis (Sandelowski & Barroso, 2006) has developed within health sciences as something of a qualitative counterpart to quantitative meta-analysis. Qualitative metasynthesis is a methodology that focuses on a single topic or subfield, and aggregates the results of many studies into broad, research-supported findings and theories. In this chapter, we theorize, define, and demonstrate an expanded iteration of metasynthesis. While the methodology of Sandelowski and Barroso should and will continue for circumstances that call for aggregative understandings of strictly qualitative research, there is also a need for synthesis of theories, concepts, and data spanning research that is theoretical, and qualitative, and quantitative. We will illustrate that need, and how it can be met using a framework of metasynthesis. This chapter begins by summarizing the widely used methodologies to review published research, specifically the annotated bibliography, the literature review, and meta-analysis.1 This is followed by a look at key features of qualitative metasynthesis as currently used within health sciences, and an explanation of how and why it can be expanded into a theory-based methodology

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that can accommodate and promote understanding of theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative data. Next is an explanation of how our metasynthesis was implemented: we use our project on border pedagogy for teacher preparation (BPTP) to explain how metasynthesis was refined to understand the real issues faced by teacher certification programs in the borderlands (Ostorga, Zúñiga, & Hinton, 2020). We conclude by discussing future possibilities for metasynthesis as a method, including its potential to develop dialogue between theoretical research, qualitative research, and quantitative research.

Review methods Literature review and annotated bibliography A literature review could be a name for a standalone paper, or for a common section within a larger paper. It seeks to review previously published research about a topic. Published studies are briefly summarized, and often explained in relation to each other, in something of a narrative form (Feak & Swales, 2009; Urquhart, 2011). A literature review is organized to evaluate or explore relevant concepts and ideas. However, it does not need to be conducted in a manner that is transparent, systematic, or comprehensive. In fact, literature reviews can constitute part of an author’s argument, intentionally referring to research that, on balance, tends to support the author’s claims and/or biases. Near the end of the literature review, the findings of the reviewed studies may be non-systematically combined into general conclusions about the topic. Unwarranted conclusions about what the literature says could be identified during a peer review process, but even this is likely to consider only face validity, or whether a claim seems plausible on the surface. Authors have substantial leeway in the framing of reviewed studies (Dellinger, 2005). An annotated bibliography can be functionally similar, and it can be thought of as a form of literature review. But annotated bibliographies do not need a narrative to weave together ideas from separate studies. Instead, each previous study is separately summarized, and sometimes evaluated (Hong, 1996). Compared to a literature review, an annotated bibliography might be more methodologically transparent, such as by including an explanation of how the literature was found, though this is not a consistent feature. They may also be more comprehensive, and in some fields, large annotated bibliographies can be found for certain topics. As a result of these features, an annotated bibliography can have the appearance of greater validity and authority, as they sometimes present themselves as analogous to a card catalog, or to reference books such as encyclopedias. In the past, before mass access to electronic databases, inclusion or exclusion from an annotated bibliography could have an influence on which research gets read. Importantly, the annotated bibliography allows each reviewed article to stand alone, and (unlike literature review and other review methods) does not substantially combine, synthesize, or conclude.

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Meta-analysis While the literature review remains prominent across many fields, the annotated bibliography receded somewhat (with the exception of medicine (Hong, 1996)), which may or may not be related to the popularity of meta-analysis (O’Rourke, 2007). Meta-analysis is an attempt to make the review of literature systematic. Quantitative meta-analysis is by far the most prominent form of meta-analysis, so much so that when most people say “meta-analysis,” they almost exclusively mean quantitative meta-analysis. This type of review may narratively summarize previous research, similar to what a literature review does, but the focus is on the numbers (Jenson et al., 2007). The core of quantitative meta-analysis is a statistical combining of research subjects, findings, and effect sizes.2 And where a literature review may switch between related themes that are relevant to the topic, a quantitative meta-analysis must be more focused. If a study is not similar enough to produce findings that can be at least partially combined, it will likely not be included. The process of locating and including previous research is usually explained. Quantitative meta-analysis includes a methods section showing specific steps taken. There may be details such as a table with the features of each study, so that the reader understands why they are included and how they are comparable to each other. Additionally, there is explanation of the statistical procedures followed during the metaanalysis. Qualitative meta-analysis is a newer and (so far) less popular form, that seeks to mimic the analytical process of quantitative meta-analysis, comparing and combining ideas from previous qualitative research, without the statistical comparison and aggregation possible in quantitative work (McCormick, Rodney, & Varcoe, 2003). Sandelowski and Barroso’s qualitative metasynthesis Like meta-analysis, qualitative metasynthesis is a form of systematic review. Sandelowski and Barroso (2006) situate their methodological approach in the context of the growth of interest in qualitative research. They explain that “practice disciplines,” including health sciences and education, have special interest in various qualitative methods. Sandelowski and Barroso mention studies on historical, cultural, political, and discursive factors that influence healthcare in various ways. Within health sciences such as nursing, as within some areas of education, qualitative research is now accepted in some of the prominent journals of the field (Malterud, 2019). Despite this prominence, qualitative research has never ceased to be attacked and criticized by some who have a quantitative preference. Any non-quantitative researcher is familiar with the insults, recounted by Sandelowski and Barroso – “not generalizable,” “non-representative,” “subjective,” “neither reliable nor valid” (p. 2). It is explained by Sandelowski and Barroso that qualitative research has case-bound idiographic validity, and an ability to reveal unexpected details that cannot or have not been understood through numbers. Glaser and Strauss

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(1967) first expressed the concern that qualitative studies were becoming islands, too disconnected from each other to build into a larger significance; while some became popular and much read, the majority fade from memory. Just as qualitative research struggled with mass isolation of knowledges, quantitative research began aggregating itself through metasynthesis, combining multiple studies and claiming increased validity by way of aggregated effect sizes. Qualitative research synthesis was specifically a response to this situation. Sandelowski and Barroso developed this methodology for what they call the metasynthesis of qualitative studies. As with other review methods, qualitative metasynthesis seeks a larger understanding of the field’s knowledge about a topic. Like quantitative meta-analysis, it does so in a systematic way. Qualitative metasynthesis has been described as a dialogue with and between published studies (Zimmer, 2006). Today, qualitative metasynthesis is a robust methodology with specific steps, which have evolved and improved over time. A crucial part of the process is to create a typology to identify the studies to include, such as in Sandelowski and Barroso’s (2003) metasynthesis of qualitative research on women with HIV in the United States: • • •

The studies must be on the topic of HIV-positive women. The studies must have human subjects who are HIV-positive women. The studies must use qualitative means of gathering data about HIV-positive women. (p. 908)

In a search of databases, we may see how studies of the topic can be identified through searches. This search stage is crucial. Ludvigsen et al. (2016) warn of the risk of non-exhaustive searching, and offer guidelines to more fully capture the literature about a given phenomenon. The other criteria, about research subjects and type of data gathered, can be filtered by reading the methods sections. Notably, prominent types of methods are intentionally excluded by qualitative metasynthesis: • • • • •

Mixed-methods combining qualitative and quantitative methods; Quantitative research; Discourse analysis; Hermeneutic analysis; Analytical essays.

It can be argued that these exclusions are appropriate. There is ease with the uniformity and comparative possibilities of only considering qualitative data. In this sense, it stands as a parallel to quantitative meta-analysis. It creates a valuable tool, to see the totality of relevant qualitative research in one place. However, few would argue that this exclusion is because of a lack of relevance or validity in these other types of research (especially as statisticians and theoreticians are equally ignored). Sandelowski and Barroso (2003), in fact,

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emphasize that their method’s omission of non-qualitative work should not be interpreted as a dismissal of such work (p. 908). And there are always gray areas. How mixed must the methods be in order to justify excluding the qualitative portion of data? How much generative analysis is acceptable in a study that only has minimal data coming from human subjects? While a focused method has a valuable place, there is also value to an expansive form of aggregative research, beyond qualitative metasynthesis or any form of meta-analysis developed so far. Notably, Urquhart (2011) proposes a method for metasynthesis to integrate both quantitative and qualitative studies, though it is not yet widespread; as we will explain, the continued limitation to only studies with empirical methodologies may not be most effective for a topic such as border pedagogy. A recognition of that is at the heart of our expansion of metasynthesis. Data procedures Once the studies for a qualitative metasynthesis are identified, Sandelowski and Barroso (2006) detail the analytic devices needed to create the synthesis. We create a taxonomy of findings, ordering the claims of the studies themselves. This is meant to show the semantic relations between categories (Spradley, 2016). For example, several studies may have findings that describe justifications, cause and effect, or a negative impact. Such findings are grouped together. As more studies are taxonomized, the potential categories are expanded and refined so that the similarities and differences will become visible. Sustained comparisons are used to interrogate these similarities and differences across various studies and findings, such that broad themes begin to form. Sandelowski and Barroso place importance on including in vivo concepts, referring to the frames, metaphors, or theories developed by researchers in each study, as well as imported concepts, meaning the pre-established concepts that the researchers cite and use to explain something about each study. Sandelowski and Barroso offer a simultaneous caveat and endorsement of such a systematic way of aggregating findings: Any qualitative metasynthesis of findings thus constitutes an interpretation at least three times removed from the lives represented in them: it is the synthesist’s interpretation of researchers’ interpretations of research participants’ interpretations of their lives. Clarifying the analytic devices used to create such metasyntheses thus becomes essential to demonstrating that despite being far away from participants’ lives-as-lived, these interpretations still remain close to their lives-as-told. (p. 167) An expanded metasynthesis for educational research We frame Sandelowski and Barroso’s methodology as qualitative metasynthesis, implicating that there is such a thing as a broader metasynthesis. Indeed,

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Sandelowski and Barroso sometimes refer to their own methodology as qualitative metasynthesis. We envision metasynthesis, then, as encompassing qualitative, and quantitative, and theoretical research of many types. Principally, we implemented Sandelowski and Barroso’s concept without the methods-based exclusions. We include studies that are not qualitative and that are not empirical. This opened up many possibilities for broad and bridging understandings of research. It also created the possibility of genuine synthesis between very different types of studies, creating something new on existing foundations. This broader realization of metasynthesis has shifted from its qualitative empiricism into a more theoretical framing. Empirical research remains a central part of the research base, but it does not have a monopoly on knowledge. One key factor, pointed out by Sandelowski and Barroso, is that qualitative metasynthesis only works if the topic has been frequently addressed in research questions. Yet sometimes, researchers need to learn something about a topic that has not often been addressed. In this sense, metasynthesis can be about a goal to build or understand something. The work of metasynthesis can be based on findings and claims that already exist on the margins of previous studies, and the goal may be to bring them together to paint a picture of something that has not been previously revealed. We adapted this methodology in order to suit the needs of a BPTP. Ideally, BPTP would shape certification programs that educate the types of teachers needed in borderlands elementary, middle, and high schools. While relevant concepts and techniques are visible in the literature, they had not been put together in a comprehensive way. Our metasynthesis steps, listed next, were designed to allow us to reveal a pedagogy which, in a way, already existed, scattered across the work of borderlands researchers. Our methodology is based on steps developed and implemented over decades by multiple researchers and methodologists. So while our overall process is new, it is not based on new procedures. Rather, they are adapted and integrated into this iteration of metasynthesis. For each step, we briefly summarize its elements. Readers who seek details are referred to the relevant methodological sources, including Sandelowski and Barroso (2006), Zimmer (2006), Ludvigsen et al., (2016), and implementations of qualitative metasynthesis in education research (e.g., Brown & Lan, 2015; Scruggs, Mastropieri, & McDuffie, 2007; Téllez & Waxman, 2006). 1

Matching the topic to the method. Certain phenomena or topics are suited to certain methods. Within reviews of research, more popular or established topics may be most suited to a different methodology. For example, if the researchers are specifically interested in developing best-practices claims based on effect size, and there are sufficient published studies available, quantitative meta-analysis is more appropriate. If the researchers are surveying a topic that boasts dozens or hundreds of studies which directly seek to answer something about that topic, qualitative metasynthesis is more appropriate. For topics that are fairly new or marginalized within the published literature, or for topics that draw deeply from concepts arising

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from within empirical as well as theoretical literature, metasynthesis may be the answer. Searching the literature. Researchers using metasynthesis need familiarity with both the topic and means of retrieving information. It is vital that reviews of the literature are exhaustive enough to incorporate all relevant research. In the case of education-related topics, we pursue available databases, such as EBSCO, Emerald, ERIC, Gale, Google Scholar, JSTOR, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, and WorldCat for academic books. Studies will be identified with matches based on words found in the title, keywords, or abstract. The search also expands through the references sections of studies that are marked for inclusion. While Sandelowski and Barroso offer useful guidelines, the nature of technology makes it inevitable that our approach to searching must evolve. When searches of different databases begin to turn up duplicate results, that is a sign of nearing search saturation (Jacobs, Van Moll, Kusters, Trienekens, & Brombacher, 2007; Roberts, 2015). The researchers need to read the identified studies and verify that they are relevant to the topic, and what their findings (in the case of empirical studies) or claims (in the case of theoretical studies) are. Building a typology. We sort published studies according to factors within the studies themselves. All metasyntheses are concerned with integrating findings or claims. Analyzed findings are seen as distinct from results, which Sandelowski and Barroso (2006) characterize as the mere reporting of data. If published research does not contain findings or claims, it may be impossible to integrate them. For studies with findings, we focus on the “contents and form of what they present” (Sandelowski & Barroso, p. 141). If there are multiple studies that produce similar findings or claims, the typology will integrate that as a theme. Refining the phenomenon/topic. The process of searching the literature and building the typology may reveal that the phenomenon or topic was too wide, too narrow, or not quite in line with the actual research. Refining the topic may entail the addition or removal of certain studies. Or, it may mean shifting the focus toward certain findings within identified studies. Writing metasummaries. Each included study needs to be summarized in a way that emphasizes the findings or claims relevant to the goal of the metasynthesis. This differs from the Sandelowski, Barroso, and Voils (2007) process of including and using all findings, whatever they may be, to determine the direction of the qualitative metasynthesis. Categorizing the findings. While studies may be unique, any topic with substantial published work will yield overlap in the themes of in vivo categories – the manifest claims of each study. The metasummaries are compared and combined, and themes that are mentioned in more than one study are reinforced. These become prominent categories that drive the analysis of the body of research (Bendassolli, 2013). Synthesizing in vivo and imported concepts. In order to understand the findings, we use concepts from the studies themselves. How does the

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included research understand itself? We seek to understand the studies by using the same forms of analysis chosen within the studies themselves, termed as in vivo concepts by Sandelowski and Barroso. If there are ideas that still cannot be explained, then we import additional concepts (Sandelowski & Barroso, 2006, p. 204). Integrating findings. The ultimate purpose of metasynthesis is the integration of all findings relevant to the topic. The analysis must be a comprehensive look at the findings across studies, presented in a way that organizes the information into a true synthesis.

No methodological exclusions The primary difference in our formulation of metasynthesis is that rather than consider only qualitative literature, we are including qualitative, quantitative, and theoretical literature. Any process that is going to exclude others’ work can be at risk of limiting our understanding of the topic. While there is value in focusing on certain methods for certain purposes, and while the highlighting of a marginalized methodology is often worthwhile, our specific approach is to cast a wide net for methods. Notably, this has included methods that some methodologists would dismiss as not methods at all. To show one example beyond our own study, Joyce King (2017) wrote an article that was delivered as her presidential address at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), then published in AERA’s journal Educational Researcher, an influential publication within educational research. King’s article considers Black cultural traditions, curricular violence, and racial and cultural dignity, and works to generate and expound upon new theories and frameworks including epistemological nihilation and morally engaged research. Within 18 months, King’s article had been cited by nine other peer-reviewed articles from various methodological perspectives. This speaks to both the influence and importance of this and other theoretical work. The article does not report what empiricists think of as “original data,” meaning new data that was gathered through the study’s methods. Instead, King uses data from existing publications as well as diverse sources such as personal communications, websites, and agency reports to put together a powerful argument about racism and morality. But the bulk of King’s article is not about its source data – it is about the generation of new ideas. It is theory. This type of writing is sometimes labeled within social sciences as a theoretical essay. We argue that the intellectual work and their rigor are no less valuable than a study that considers only original data from human subjects. Theoretical research, for better or worse, is frequently presented in a manner that focuses on the conceptual results of the researchers’ process, and glosses over the way those results were found. Indeed, the work of researchers such as King is unquestionably “original,” as it invents concepts and framing based on an author’s intellect, experience, and deep reflection. Theoretical research can be creative, but it should not be dismissed as speculative. Nonetheless, this type of research, as illustrated in the example from King, often does not

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explain its own methods of knowledge production. Some may argue that an explicit methods section would be unnecessary or distracting within this type of article. We are not going to insist that theory-centered authors add methods sections (the very form of which could be an unnatural imposition of empiricism). We recognize that a lack of methodological transparency is not the same as a lack of method. We also recognize that research relying on theoretical methodologies is frequently viewed (and cited) as an important foundation for new research whether theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative. Indeed, the empirical scholars who cite this research by King obviously did not exclude or ignore her due to methodology. For a hypothetical metasynthesis on Black culture and curricular violence, King’s article could be included as an important theoretical contribution, alongside qualitative and quantitative articles. For our analysis and synthesis of the literature on BPTP, we included published work in three methodological categories: theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative. Yet through metasynthesis these three categories are not understood independently, but are rather used together to build understanding of the ideas developed and used within research on our topic. The amount of published research In Sandelowski and Barroso (2003), a key motivator is the sheer volume of qualitative research on their topic of HIV-positive women. Applying their methodological and thematic exclusions, they still identified 99 relevant studies, a number they described as “too large to allow intensive analysis of each report and to undertake the methodological detailing and experimentation required of a project focused on developing method” (p. 155). So they focused their topic more, to HIV-positive mothers, in order to reduce the pool to 45 studies. It is laudable that this and other important topics have produced so many qualitative studies. But what about researchers interested in topics that have received less attention? We concur with Sandelowski and Barroso that it is crucial to have a quantity of material suitable for a project on method development. If we were not interested in the borderlands, such as if we wanted to synthesize ideas about teacher education in general, we would run into the same issue, with so many studies that deep analysis is difficult. In education research, limiting the aggregation to only qualitative research seems justified for such general topics, because there are so many completed studies and so many of them are qualitative. Whereas in comparison, border pedagogy for teacher preparation is not often investigated, and the relevant work that does exist often falls outside the limits of qualitative methods. For certain topics, in certain fields, different boundaries are needed in order to (1) create a large enough pool of studies and (2) represent the forms of the studies actually being carried out, without excluding or ignoring certain segments due to methodology. We anticipate that as interest in the borderlands grows, more research will be published on border pedagogy for teacher preparation, and a strictly qualitative metasynthesis will eventually be possible, and even necessary.

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Focus on findings’ connection to the topic In the metasummary stage, the original form of qualitative metasynthesis calls for accepting and summarizing the others’ findings, whatever they may be and whatever they may relate to. The logic of this is that the study, as a whole, was already about the topic. Therefore all findings are assumed to be relevant. We have adapted this to allow exploration of topics that are rarely addressed directly in a research question. In our example, our goal is to understand something about border pedagogy. Yet border pedagogy itself was rarely addressed directly by a research question in the empirical studies. We needed to inductively identify (often based on the theoretical framing of the study) the concepts that relate to border pedagogy, then we searched the literature for those concepts. There are studies with findings or claims that are all connected to our goal, but there are others where only certain findings or claims are relevant. This process is one of the things that makes our elaboration on metasynthesis more generative, and less empirical. No quasi-quantitative synthesis Sandelowski and Barroso have achieved important innovations in understanding and presenting qualitative research in ways that make it more accessible to researchers who apply a strictly quantitative perspective to a topic. Nursing is a field that is deeply invested in the humanity of its subjects; however, nursing is conceptually situated within the broader field of health sciences, which has a history of prioritizing quantitative views. As non-nurses, we can imagine such an emphasis could be constraining to efforts to recognize the value of qualitative work that can inform researchers and practitioners. Sandelowski and Barroso develop statistical means to calculate manifest frequency and intensity effect sizes (p. 159). This stage of qualitative metasynthesis serves to highlight qualitative research and frame it in a way that can stand alongside aggregative methods focused on quantitative methods, specifically quantitative meta-analysis. The implementation of numerical processes that Sandelowski and Barroso use to aggregate findings can at a certain level be seen as a parallel to effect size, a crucial calculation that can and does improve the validity claims made by meta-analyses. While there is of course intense valuation – including in a financial sense – of quantitative research within the broad field of education, our perspective and project arises within the overlaps of subfields in which qualitative work, especially, is influential and widely read. Theoretical research has always been a significant strand of education scholarship (e.g., Giroux, 1916; Wollstonecraft, 1792). Bilingual education, teacher preparation, and borderlands studies all boast strong traditions of qualitative research. The use of Sandelowski and Barroso’s quasi-qualitative means of aggregating data may not be as necessary or useful in all fields. The expected audience for our project – education researchers and practitioners in the borderlands or at HSIs – includes many who already

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know and use both quantitative and qualitative literature. In light of this, our methodology addresses two other imbalances: the tendency for theoretical research to be minimized or ignored in reviews of research, and the tendency for quantitative research to ignore border pedagogy. Strong theoretical synthesis In our study (Ostorga et al., 2020), we first needed to find a working definition of Border Pedagogy for Teacher Preparation. Even some of these words are contested, as there is disagreement about what counts as a border or borderlands, and disagreement about whether pre-service teachers are experiencing preparation, or education, or training. We resolved this by building uncertainty into the initial stages of metasynthesis on BPTP. There was no need for us to resolve or finalize these disagreements by ourselves. Instead, we turned to the literature. We interrogated our core topic. Border pedagogy is a concept that has been explored since the late 1980s by multiple researchers, and its application to teacher preparation, we all agreed, was the topic (though not necessary mentioned by name) of a number of journal articles and at least one edited volume by Bustos-Flores, Sheets, and Clark (2011). We first read (or re-read) the chapters from the Bustos-Flores, Sheets, and Clark book, and the pdfs which had already informed our thinking about border pedagogy. Searching specifically for publications with the phrases “border pedagogy” and “teacher preparation” yielded few results. Instead, the exemplar publications gave us keywords that we then searched in multiple databases. They also showed useful patterns. For example, beginning from our limited set, it became clear that educational research integrating border pedagogy in the U.S. tends to originate near the actual border with Mexico, especially Texas and Southern California. Additionally, some work was emerging from Colorado and Utah, areas of the U.S. that, while not along today’s geographic border, were also formerly part of Mexico. This established the geographic basis of the borderlands, as framed by Anzaldúa (1987), for our conceptualization of teacher preparation.3 There are researchers applying theories of culturally relevant pedagogy, critical pedagogy, hybrid identity, community, bilingualism, translanguaging, and transnationalism to teacher preparation across the region. We refined our search further by concentrating on research with populations that match our university and other large teacher preparation programs within the borderlands: the majority of the prospective teachers are Latinx, the majority of the instructors who prepare them are Latinx, and the majority of children who attend the districts where they will likely find jobs are Latinx. While it is worth looking at programs that develop white teachers, and programs that are implemented by white faculty, that is not our mission, either as a certification program or as researchers attempting to find a BPTP. We are interested in a pedagogy that is applicable to the demographic future of the borderlands.

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Our search of databases spanned 70 discrete search terms in six categories (listed with one example of each): • • • • • •

Identity/demographics (e.g., “Mexican American”); Geographic location (“Southwest”); Teacher education (“pre-service”); Labels of bilingual students (“emergent bilinguals”); P-12 programs (“Raza studies”); and Concepts (“funds of knowledge”).

Sociopolitical contexts of schooling

Over several months we read, discussed, and added and removed articles and books from the corpus – that is, merely containing certain words is not the determiner of whether or not the research actually relates to BPTP. The identified works were summarized using metasummary, then analyzed, coded, categorized, and synthesized into a preliminary BPTP. The elements of this pedagogy are shown in Figure 9.1. Our method takes cues primarily from Sandelowski and Barroso, who were themselves significantly influenced by grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss,

Hegemonic Political Values in the Borderlands

Xenophobia & demonization of the Borderlands

Monolingual Policies

P-12 Schools in the Borderlands

Teacher preparation program in the Borderlands

What teacher candidates experienced as students in P-12 schools

What teacher candidates need to learn

Academic achievement and cognitive development

Maximizing content knowledge (Math, science, & social studies)

Subtractive schooling

Maximizing Linguistic knowledge (Spanish & English) (oracy and literacy)

Identity development (cultural and professional)

Anti-intellectualism

P-12 Schools in the Borderlands’ accountability and top-down curriculum pedagogical mandates What P-12 students experience in P-12 schools Professional practices of teachers Professional practices of teachers to maximize cognitive and academic development Professional practices of teachers to maximize cognitive and linguistic development

Understanding and addressing the challenges of the sociopolitical context of the Borderlands

Advocacy and Agency in professional practice

Keeping the students’ cultures at the center of the teaching/learning process

Culturally relevant pedagogies

Figure 9.1 Emerging conceptualization of border pedagogies for teacher preparation. The arrows on the right edge indicate processes that are ongoing and cyclical (e.g., teachers teach children in difficult contexts, children attend college and become pre-service teachers, pre-service teachers become teachers who teach children in difficult contexts).

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1990; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We also returned to grounded theory, which guided us as our concepts, methods, and research questions evolved during the process. Qualitative metasynthesis was developed with the intent to find best practices for health sciences. Best practices are also a central concern of education research, and that is true in this border pedagogy. What we (as a field) think of as border pedagogy could be partially understood by using qualitative metasynthesis in its more established form. However, this idea of borderlands is a highly contested and theoretical concept. It may not be adequately captured by strictly empirical means. Surveying the literature while considering a more canonical qualitative metasynthesis, we collectively came to believe that, in the case of this phenomenon, to ignore or shortchange theoretical research would be to misinterpret the nature of border pedagogy. Border pedagogy involves theory and practice; yes, there is a practical component, but the theoretical component is essential. The following example studies showed how important theory is to border pedagogy: • • • • •

Toward a Pedagogy of Border Thinking: Building on Latin@ Students’ Subaltern Knowledge (Cervantes-Soon & Carrillo, 2016); In Search of a New Border Pedagogy: Sociocultural Conflicts Facing Teachers and Students along the US-Mexico Border (Calderón & Carreón, 2000); Nepantlera Pedagogy: An Axiological Posture for Preparing Critically Conscious Teachers in the Borderlands (Reza-López, Charles, & Reyes, 2014); Border Pedagogy in the Age of Postmodernism (Giroux, 1988); Education in the Borderlands: A Border Pedagogy Conceptual Model (Cline & Necochea, 2003).

In short, any attempt to understand the published literature on borderlands pedagogy would be ill-served by an attempt to exclude theoretical research. Our work on BPTP continues, and as it does, our approach to metasynthesis evolves. Metasynthesis is envisioned here as a broad way to approach new, contested, or conceptual topics. Just as we are adapting Sandelowski and Barroso’s methods to a different purpose, we expect our methodology to be a step to innovations by other researchers.

Implications Qualitative metasynthesis has seen use in the health sciences (Malterud, 2019), where it has shown potential to become a useful parallel to quantitative metaanalysis (e.g., Baumgarten & Poulsen, 2015; Cubis, Ownsworth, Pinkham, & Chambers, 2018; Vogel et al., 2019). If it continues to grow in usage, those two methodologies in tandem could provide a more comprehensive view of

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the literature – and, thereby, greater validity. Approaching a new subfield, a researcher could read quantitative meta-analysis and qualitative metasynthesis, gaining two distinct empirical views of the subfield. At the same time, emerging from a different disciplinary source, metaethnography has seen increased use as a more anthropology-oriented type of qualitative synthesis (Noblit, 2018). While its parameters are different from those we seek here, meta-ethnography includes effective ways of drawing out theory from bodies of ethnographic work (e.g., Urrieta & Noblit, 2018). Concepts from meta-ethnography can similarly provide a distinct perspective on a given subfield. We are exploring this body of work as we develop our methodology. As explained earlier, our metasynthesis method seeks a view that is comprehensive of quantitative and qualitative, as well as of theoretical research. Reaching back to one of the original concepts of the older review methods, literature reviews and annotated bibliographies, a goal in metasynthesis is to not exclude any study on the basis of methodology. Yet there are (non-methodological) limits to what is studied, and as a theoretical methodology that fully recognizes subjectivity, these will vary from researcher to researcher. Relevance is a central concern (Sandelowski & Barroso, 2006, p. 50). Studies should be excluded if the typology indicates that they are off-topic. For peer-reviewed and similar studies (e.g., dissertations), there should be no attempt to exclude any study based on alleged quality. We echo Sandelowski and Barroso’s caution against misuse of a “quality” filter as a way to ignore unorthodox or marginalized voices (p. 134). While some aggregative review may ignore research that has not appeared in mainstream academic journals, there are topics that are themselves so marginalized that they are rarely included in prestigious journals. We seek to avoid a priori prejudices and “err on the side of inclusion” (p. 50). The iterative process of metasynthesis can be used to not only allow but to actually encourage looking for sources that are off the beaten path (that said, this is not meant as an endorsement of everything found on the internet, or a blanket critique of peer-review). During our initial implementation of metasynthesis, we discovered the process could identify method-related gaps in the literature. In our case, we found an impressive amount of qualitative – especially ethnographic – research, and a range of both well-known and lesser-known theoretical research. However, very few quantitative studies with much relevance to BPTP have even been attempted; the vast majority of related quantitative work focuses on either children or in-service teachers rather than pre-service teachers. So far, only one quantitative study fully fits into our metasynthesis (Green, Tran, & Young, 2005). Among the studies that don’t quite apply to teacher education, some researchers approach the border as if it were not so different from any other region. That premise is at odds with (and arguably refuted by) the body of research on border pedagogy. Indeed, there are qualitative studies in our metasynthesis whose implications specifically name areas in need of quantitative investigation, and provide guidelines that could facilitate such research. This

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led to an important implication of our metasynthesis, which is that we need more quantitative studies to approach our region’s teachers and students using a theoretical framework informed by border pedagogy. The established aggregative review methodologies may not be well equipped to notice a gap such as this, because they tend to review studies through one particular methodological lens. When identifying gaps in the literature is useful and necessary for dissertation authors, grant applicants, and manuscript reviewers, metasynthesis may become an applicable tool. Finally, we think of that very old yet still popular review method: the literature review. We see much usefulness in metasynthesis’s systematic incorporation of three valuable and interrelated bodies of research: theoretical, qualitative, quantitative. As shown in our BPTP study, the same topic is often addressed separately through very different methods. Many of these researchers read and cite very different methodologies in their own literature review sections. For example, an experimental or ethnographic design related to new teachers on the border will often cite theoretical work by someone such as Anzaldúa. How do researchers go about determining which sources to include or exclude? Is it based on the citations found in an earlier study? Is it based on a database search, or maybe the readings assigned in a certain grad program? Is the selection process transparent, or secret? Considering the ubiquity of literature review sections, it may be too much to ask for every study to explain the methodology of its literature review. Yet some researchers may learn or invent a system for reviewing literature. We argue that even when the process is not explained, there was some sort of process. Metasynthesis could be that process. Unlike other popular forms of systematic review, metasynthesis does not attempt to limit itself to only qualitative or only quantitative. It acknowledges and embraces the importance of theoretical work, and it not only allows but encourages consultation of research beyond the author’s preferred methodologies. It attempts to fairly consider varied bodies of research, and to then synthesize them into something that is coherent and relevant to a particular research topic. We believe that education research as a whole can benefit from more opportunities for communication across methodologies. Could we build opportunities for statisticians, theoreticians, and ethnographers working on the same topic to learn from each other? When someone needs to understand something about a topic, and does not want to exclude certain methodologies, and wants an explicit, systematic process with steps that can be followed, then metasynthesis may be useful. Epilogue Though we have spent over a year being inspired by Sandelowski and Barroso’s methods, we have not used the metasynthesis name at all stages of this project. In recognition of the popularity of quantitative meta-analysis both within and beyond academia, we previously considered defining this new method as some

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form of meta-analysis. However, the popularity of quantitative meta-analysis and relative unfamiliarity of qualitative meta-analysis (McCormick et al., 2003) in concert mean that most people assume all meta-analysis is quantitative. Though such an assumption may justifiably be resented by theoretical and qualitative researchers, we have chosen not to directly push back against it. Instead, we choose to shift the focus to the aptly named metasynthesis. Though much less recognized than meta-analysis, metasynthesis builds on the general public’s growing familiarity with the concept of meta and ports it to the very well-known concept of synthesis. While some may not dwell on the distinction between analysis and synthesis, within our field of education, teachers and students often connect them with their positions within Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom, Englehart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956) – in which synthesis is more abstract and more generative than analysis. That is, synthesis means we are assembling concepts that already exist, then using them to create something new. This process, familiar to any classroom teacher who embraces projectbased learning or critical pedagogy, is an apt framing of the actual process we have followed as we have developed a BPTP. Our position is that perhaps the positivist (or at least empirical) methodologies may keep the meta-analysis name, while our effort may instead contribute to metasynthesis, simultaneously promoting the established use as qualitative metasynthesis, as well as our new form, integrating theoretical methods. After all, as synthesis is more integrative than analysis, then it stands to reason that metasynthesis would be more integrative than meta-analysis, making metasynthesis an ideal conceptual name for cross-methodological views of theory.

Notes 1 For summaries of other, less frequently used forms of reviewing published research, see Grant and Booth (2009). Meta-ethnography (Urrieta & Noblit, 2018) is an important and growing form of specifically qualitative synthesis; see our “Implications” section. 2 There are several distinct forms of statistical combination used in quantitative metaanalysis, which should not be conflated but are not the focus of this chapter (Jenson et al., 2007). 3 Referred to in the literature as teacher preparation, teacher education, teacher training, or pre-service teacher development.

References Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Baumgarten, M., & Poulsen, I. (2015). Patients’ experiences of being mechanically ventilated in an ICU: A qualitative metasynthesis. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 29(2), 205–214. https://doi.org/10.1111/scs.12177 Bendassolli, P. F. (2013). Theory building in qualitative research: Reconsidering the problem of induction. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 14(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-14.1.1851

158 Kip Austin Hinton et al. Bloom, B. S., Englehart, M. D., Furst, E. J., Hill, W. H., & Krathwohl, D. R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives, Handbook I: Cognitive domain. New York, NY: McKay. Brown, C. P., & Lan, Y.-C. (2015). A qualitative metasynthesis comparing US teachers’ conceptions of school readiness prior to and after the implementation of NCLB. Teaching and Teacher Education, 45, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2014.08.012 Calderón, M., & Carreón, A. (2000). In search of a new border pedagogy: Sociocultural conflicts facing teachers and students along the US-Mexico Border. In Ovando, Carlos & P. MacLaren (Eds.), The politics of multiculturalism and bilingual education (pp. 167–187). Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill. Cervantes-Soon, C. G., & Carrillo, J. F. (2016). Toward a Pedagogy of Border Thinking: Building on Latin@ Students’ Subaltern Knowledge. High School Journal, 99(4), 282–301. Cline, Z., & Necochea, J. (2003). Education in the borderlands: A border pedagogy conceptual model. El Borde: Retos de Frontera, 6(11), 43–57. Corbin, J. M., & Strauss, A. (1990). Grounded theory research: Procedures, canons, and evaluative criteria. Qualitative Sociology, 13(1), 3–21. Cubis, L., Ownsworth, T., Pinkham, M. B., & Chambers, S. (2018). The social trajectory of brain tumor: A qualitative metasynthesis. Disability and Rehabilitation, 40(16), 1857–1869. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2017.1315183 Dellinger, A. (2005). Validity and the review of literature. Research in the Schools, 12(5), 41–54. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York, NY: Macmillan. Feak, C. B., & Swales, J. M. (2009). Telling a Research Story: Writing a Literature Review. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Flores, B. B., Sheets, R. H., & Clark, E. R. (Eds.). (2011). Teacher Preparation for Bilingual Student Populations: Educar para Transformar. New York, NY: Routledge. Giroux, H. A. (1988). Border pedagogy in the age of postmodernism. The Journal of Education, 170(3), 162–181. Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (2nd ed.). Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press. Grant, M. J., & Booth, A. (2009). A typology of reviews: An analysis of 14 review types and associated methodologies. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 26(2), 91–108. Green, T. D., Tran, M., & Young, R. (2005). The Impact of Ethnicity, Socioeconomic Status, Language, and Training Program on Teaching Choice Among New Teachers in California. Bilingual Research Journal, 29(3), 583–598. https://doi.org/10.1080/1523588 2.2005.10162853 Hong, Y. (1996, August 25). Publishing of Annotated Bibliographies: Promises and Challenges for the 90s. Presented at the 62nd IFLA General Conference, Beijing, China. Retrieved from http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla62/62-hony.htm Jacobs, J., Van Moll, J., Kusters, R., Trienekens, J., & Brombacher, A. (2007). Identification of factors that influence defect injection and detection in development of software intensive products. Information and Software Technology, 49(7), 774–789. Jenson, W. R., Clark, E., Kircher, J. C., & Kristjansson, S. D. (2007). Statistical reform: Evidence-based practice, meta-analyses, and single subject designs. Psychology in the Schools, 44(5), 483–493. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.20240 King, J. E. (2017). Morally Engaged Research/ers Dismantling Epistemological Nihilation in the Age of Impunity. Educational Researcher, 46(5), 211–222. https://doi. org/10.3102/0013189X17719291

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Ludvigsen, M. S., Hall, E. O. C., Meyer, G., Fegran, L., Aagaard, H., & Uhrenfeldt, L. (2016). Using Sandelowski and Barroso’s Meta-Synthesis Method in Advancing Qualitative Evidence. Qualitative Health Research, 26(3), 320–329. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1049732315576493 Malterud, K. (2019). The Impact of Evidence-Based Medicine on Qualitative Metasynthesis: Benefits to be Harvested and Warnings to be Given. Qualitative Health Research, 29(1), 7–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732318795864 McCormick, J., Rodney, P., & Varcoe, C. (2003). Reinterpretations Across Studies: An Approach to Meta-Analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 13(7), 933–944. https://doi. org/10.1177/1049732303253480 Noblit, G. W. (2018). Meta-Ethnography. In Urrieta, Luis, Jr. & Noblit, George W. (Eds.), Cultural Constructions of Identity: Meta-Ethnography and Theory (pp. 34–50). New York, NY: Oxford University. O’Rourke, K. (2007). An historical perspective on meta-analysis: Dealing quantitatively with varying study results. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 100(12), 579–582. Ostorga, A. N., Zúñiga, C. E., & Hinton, K. A. (2020). Bilingual Teacher Educators at an HSI: A Border Pedagogy for Latinx Teacher Development. In J. M. Schall, P. A. McHatton, & E. L. Saenz (Eds.), Teacher Education at Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Exploring Identity, Practice, and Culture (pp. 137–155). New York, NY: Routledge. Reza-López, E., Huerta Charles, L., & Reyes, L. V. (2014). Nepantlera Pedagogy: An Axiological Posture for Preparing Critically Conscious Teachers in the Borderlands. Journal of Latinos & Education, 13(2), 107–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348431.2013. 821062 Roberts, J. M. (2015). Partnering with the community for establishment of alternate care sites during disasters or emergencies: A staff training matrix (Dissertation, University of Nevada, Las Vegas). University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV. Retrieved from https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations/2419 Sandelowski, M., & Barroso, J. (2003). Classifying the findings in qualitative studies. Qualitative Health Research, 13(7), 905–923. Sandelowski, M., & Barroso, J. (2006). Handbook for Synthesizing Qualitative Research. New York, NY: Springer Publishing Company. Sandelowski, M., Barroso, J., & Voils, C. I. (2007). Using qualitative metasummary to synthesize qualitative and quantitative descriptive findings. Research in Nursing & Health, 30(1), 99–111. Scruggs, T. E., Mastropieri, M. A., & McDuffie, K. A. (2007). Co-teaching in inclusive classrooms: A metasynthesis of qualitative research. Exceptional Children, 73(4), 392–416. Spradley, J. P. (2016). The ethnographic interview (Reissue). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Téllez, K., & Waxman, H. C. (2006). A meta-synthesis of qualitative research on effective teaching practices for English. In J. Norris & L. Ortega (Eds.), Synthesizing Research on Language Learning and Teaching (pp. 245–277). John Benjamins. Retrieved from https:// doi.org/10.1075/lllt.13 Thorne, S., Joachim, G., Paterson, B., & Canam, C. (2002). Influence of the Research Frame on Qualitatively Derived Health Science Knowledge | International Journal of Qualitative Methods: ARCHIVE. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 1(1), 1–34. Urquhart, C. (2011). Meta-Synthesis with Information Behaviour Research. In A. Spink & J. Heinstrom (Eds.), New Directions in information behaviour (pp. 37–66). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Urrieta, L., Jr., & Noblit, G. W. (Eds.). (2018). Cultural Construction of Identity: MetaEthnography and Theory. New York, NY: Oxford University.

160 Kip Austin Hinton et al. Vogel, J. A., Rising, K. L., Jones, J., Bowden, M. L., Ginde, A. A., & Havranek, E. P. (2019). Reasons Patients Choose the Emergency Department over Primary Care: A Qualitative Metasynthesis. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 34(11), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11606-019-05128-x Wollstonecraft, M. (1792). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Boston, MA: Thomas and Andrews. Retrieved from http://talebooks.com/ebooks/391.pdf Zimmer, L. (2006). Qualitative meta-synthesis: A question of dialoguing with texts. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 53(3), 311–318.

10 Agential realism Applying Barad’s ontology to reconceptualize teaching and learning mathematics for social justice Lee Melvin Peralta This chapter discusses Karen Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism and its implications for critical theoretical education research. Drawing on the concepts of intra-action, diffraction, and agential cuts, Barad (2007) approaches scientific and social scientific practices by narrowing in on their ontological dimensions while also addressing questions of epistemology and ethics. Agential realism draws heavily on quantum physics, and Barad’s most well-known publication, Meeting the University Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, contains lengthy descriptions of particles, doubleslit experiments, and Schrödinger wave functions (Barad, 2007). Despite its reliance on the language of quantum physics, agential realism has had a significant impact across fields as diverse as early childhood literacy (Taguchi, 2009; Wohlwend, Peppler, Keune, & Thompson, 2017), archaeology (Marshall & Alberti, 2014), environmental policy (Bauhardt, 2013), mathematics education (de Freitas, 2017; Palmer, 2011), urban education (Niccolini & Pindyck, 2015), and masculinity studies (Mellström, 2016). Consistent with the widespread receptivity of Barad’s work, this chapter explores how agential realism can serve as a useful research method for critical theoretical research that moves beyond a focus on the empirical. First, this chapter discusses agential realism within the context of the ontological turn in the social sciences. This chapter then applies agential realism as a research method to reconceptualize pedagogy and scholarship widely known as teaching and learning mathematics for social justice. Finally, this chapter concludes with implications of agential realism for critical theoretical research in education.

An overview of agential realism Agential realism is an ontological, epistemological, and ethical framework for conceptualizing knowledge and reality (Barad, 2007). As a trained physicist, Barad (2007) relies on the language of and experiments within quantum physics to articulate her framework. She also draws on “developments in political theory, cultural geography, political economy, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and feminist theory” to “consider the dynamic and contingent materialization of space, time, and bodies” (Barad, 2007, p. 35). Barad’s (2007)

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agential realism emphasizes the importance of the ontological, the material, and the non-human. These ideas are not unique to Barad and must be seen in the context of what is known as the ontological turn in the social sciences. This section will begin by describing the ontological turn, which serves as a necessary backdrop toward understanding agential realism. Key concepts within agential realism will then be discussed, including the ideas of intra-action and diffraction. The ontological turn The ontological turn can be understood as building on and responding to the linguistic turn in philosophy, social sciences, and the humanities (Lather, 2016). The linguistic turn frames reality as being conditioned by collectively constructed discourse (Rorty, 1967). This emphasis on discourse is a reaction toward oppressive and marginalizing perspectives that view differences among people as natural and absolute (Bennett, 2010). Some scholars, however, question the idea that all reality is mediated by language (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Butler, 1990; de Landa, 2002; Grosz, 2005; Haraway, 2003; Kirby, 1997; Latour, 2005). The ontological turn embodies a feeling among researchers who seek to study how “matter comes to matter” (Barad, 2007, p. 192). These researchers foreground differences-in-being rather than focusing exclusively on differences created through language-mediated constructions (Zembylas, 2017). Instead of regressing to the naive realism that objects have inherent properties, the ontological turn locates meaning in embodied and enacted practices (Lather, 2016). An emphasis on ontology shifts focus from a purely humancentered perspective to an emphasis on the doings, actions, and agencies of both human and non-human bodies (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Deloria, 1999; Kirby, 1997; Latour, 1999, 2005; Marker, 2018; Martin, 2017; Simpson, 2017; Watts, 2013). Scholars have pointed out the ways in which the ontological turn echoes, but often fails to cite, Indigenous thinking (Rosiek, 2018; Rosiek, Pratt, & Snyder, 2020; Sundberg, 2013; Todd, 2016; Tuck, 2014). In education research, the ontological turn has both methodological and political implications. Methodologically, the ontological turn attends to the emergent relation between researchers and subjects (Niccolini & Pindyck, 2015) and between people and spaces and materialities surrounding them (Palmer, 2011; Wohlwend et al., 2017). The ontological turn is also a political commitment to the possibilities of being and becoming inherent in matter (Barad, 2007; Massey, 2005). Many critical scholars whose research is explicitly or implicitly grounded in social constructivism promote the idea of multiple worldviews of a single world; in contrast, the ontological turn foregrounds not only multiple worldviews but also multiple worlds (Paleček & Risjord, 2012). As Zembylas (2017) states:

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the contribution of the ontological turn is that it develops a theoretical, ontological basis for a critical orientation in education and learning that can realize the possibility of shifting between different realities (or different “worlds”) as an opening that holds great implications for the quest of a radical politics that could develop a radically different world. (p. 1410) Agential realism Agential realism shares many features of the ontological turn, including a return to materiality, a recognition of multiple realities, a move toward human and non-human agency, and a skepticism toward the masterful human subject (Barad, 2007; Lather, 2016). Agential realism’s unique contribution is to provide a nuanced and transdisciplinary elaboration of how reality operates as an entanglement of human and non-human materialities (Barad, 2007; de Freitas, 2017). The double-slit experiment Agential realism’s starting point is Niels Bohr, a physicist who wrote about the philosophical implications of the double-slit experiment in quantum physics (Feynman, Leighton, & Sands, 1965). The double-slit experiment was developed to determine whether matter behaves like a particle (e.g., ping-pong balls) or a wave (e.g., ocean waves as they spread and crash into one another). Light is projected through a plate with two slits cut into it, wherein the light passing through the slits is observed on a screen behind the plate. The answer of whether light is a particle or wave can be inferred based on the pattern that forms on the screen. Under regular conditions, light exhibits a wave behavior. However, the experimental setup, or apparatus, can be adjusted to detect which photons of light pass through which slits. In this case, the pattern that forms on the screen will indicate a particle behavior. In short, when light is measured using one experimental apparatus, they are waves; if they are measured using a slightly different apparatus, they are particles. This extraordinary result in physics led physicist Richard Feynman to state it was “a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery” (Feynman et al., 1965, pp. 1–8). For Bohr, the double-slit experiment implies that reality consists of mutually exclusive conditions of possibility (Bohr, 1963). Each possibility is inseparable from the specific experimental apparatus one uses to measure reality (Bohr, 1963). Barad (2007) contrasts Bohr’s philosophy with the epistemological claim of his contemporary, Werner Heisenberg. According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, there are limits to the precision with which humans can measure certain quantities of a particle, such as the particle’s simultaneous position

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and momentum (Feynman et al., 1965). In contrast, a Bohrian account of the double-slit experiment suggests there is an indeterminacy with respect to reality rather than an uncertainty with respect to human knowledge (Barad, 2007; Bohr, 1963). Reality becomes determinate only within an experimental context. For instance, a particle’s position becomes meaningful only when a specific experimental apparatus is used to measure it. But outside an experimental context, the concept of position is incoherent, as is any property of any object (Barad, 2007; Bohr, 1963). From the double-slit experiment to intra-action Barad (2007) extends Bohr’s ideas by reading them against the ideas of scholars such as Michel Foucault. Bohr conceived experimental apparatuses as mere laboratory setups operated by a human scientist whose role was to pull levers and interpret scientific marks displayed on a screen (Barad, 2007). For Barad (2007), an experimental apparatus is any material and discursive practice that does not just observe reality but rather produces reality by demarcating boundaries within it. Barad (2007) describes Foucault’s discourse as the “local sociohistorical material conditions that enable and constrain disciplinary knowledge practices” (p. 147). Barad (2007) extends this definition by conceptualizing discourse as a more-thanhuman practice through which meaning is made. Moreover, whereas Foucault treats discourse as only weakly constrained by bodies and matter, Barad treats bodies, matter, and discourse as ontologically equivalent (Marshall & Alberti, 2014). Drawing on this extended conception of discourse, Barad (2007) states that experimental apparatuses consist of both human and non-human materialities that produce “the material conditions of possibility and impossibility of mattering; they enact what matters and what is excluded from mattering” (p. 148). In other words, experimental apparatuses do not just produce and constrain meaning, they alter reality itself by reconfiguring the nature of matter. These experimental apparatuses are inherently indeterminate until they are set against other matter (Barad, 2007). Every object and its properties are indeterminate until they are measured by an experimental apparatus – which, as previously stated, is a material-discursive phenomenon – and this holds true even for experimental apparatuses themselves (Barad, 2007). However, when objects, properties, and ideas come together, they become momentarily determinate (Barad, 2007). This is what Barad (2007) refers to as intra-action. The concept of intra-action emphasizes that things and people are not pre-defined, but they can become defined through one another: The neologism “intra-action” signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action. (Barad, 2007, p. 33)

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Consider Taguchi’s (2009) example of a lesson where elementary students are asked to construct a clay figure and turn it back into a lump of clay. A naive realist perspective would attend to the “true knowledge” associated with the successful completion of the activity (Taguchi, 2009, p. 52). This knowledge includes the quality and temperature of clay as well as the techniques of manipulation that would allow the clay to be successfully molded. In contrast, a discursive view might highlight the ways in which the clay figures might be gendered, possibly as a result of dominant discourses and cultural practices that equate human with man. Under both perspectives, students’ bodies and the clay material are treated as inherently separate, humans are seen as the sole actors with agency, and the clay is seen as a passive object. An agential realist perspective would see the children’s bodies, hands, and linguistic practices, as well as the clay itself, as being entangled with and mutually constituting one another (Taguchi, 2009). Minds, bodies, hands, and clay material are all agentic; they shape one another. Hands and clay do not interact as pre-existing entities but rather intra-act, giving one another a particular form and existence. This is not to reject the idea that discourse is irrelevant. On the contrary, agential realism relies on the idea that experimental apparatuses are material as well as discursive. As Taguchi (2009) explains, [D]iscursively thinking hands mould the clay, but the clay also moulds hands and the student’s discursive thinking. The clay with its plasticity and three-dimensional agentic qualities makes itself intelligible as clay to the students, with its specific qualities and potentialities. (pp. 58–59) Diffraction, not reflection Barad’s (2007) ontology relies on the concept of diffraction. Diffraction comes from physics to describe the way waves overlap and combine when they encounter one another or an obstruction (Barad, 2007). Similar waves combine additively – like consonant harmonies in music – whereas dissimilar waves form cancelling effects (Barad, 2007). Thus, differences among waves can produce an infinite number of possible combinations, or superpositions, transforming the waves themselves (Barad, 2007). Diffraction is thus an integral part of how different materialities become determinate through intra-action (Barad, 2007). Through diffraction, differences come to matter, and through these differences, objects and their properties emerge (Barad, 2007). This emphasis on differences and diffraction comes from Trinh Minh-ha (1988) and Donna Haraway (1992), who draw on diffraction to attend to the relational nature of differences among materialities. Diffraction “does not figure difference as either a matter of essence or as inconsequential” (Barad, 2007, p. 72) and goes beyond the traditional, Western philosophical approach of treating differences as something to be captured, assimilated, or erased (Minh-ha, 1988).

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Barad draws on diffraction to critique the optical metaphor of reflection and reflexivity prevalent in science and social science research (Barad, 2007; de Freitas, 2017; Hollin, Forsyth, Giraud, & Potts, 2017). As a metaphor, reflection is a way of studying a phenomenon that assumes an outside world that either pre-exists or is discursively constructed by an observer (Barad, 2007). Reflection emphasizes representing the world through sameness and separateness; the researcher’s goal is to mirror the world with as little distortion as possible (Hollin et al., 2017). Even critical scholars who want to examine their own activity through a process of reflexivity sometimes fail to apply this process toward their own analytical tools. As Barad (2007) states, “Turning the mirror around, as it were, is a bad method for trying to get the mirror in the picture” (p. 418). Diffraction is a description of how materialities emerge through intra-action, but it is also the methodology that Barad (2007) uses to develop her theory of agential realism. Barad (2007), for instance, reads Bohr against Judith Butler to conceptualize a new understanding of the concept of performativity, which Barad then incorporates into agential realism. Butler (1990) argues that gender is performed through repeated bodily acts through which bodies are reworked and inscribed with conventions and ideologies of the social world around us. Barad (2007) draws on the ideas of intra-activity, which she develops from Bohr’s philosophy-physics, to refine Butler’s theory of performativity. Barad (2007) points out that Butler focuses on human bodies and treats matter as a mere surface effect of human bodies. Instead, “[a]ll bodies, not merely ‘human’ bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity – its performativity” (Barad, 2007, p. 152). Barad (2007) also diffractively reads Butler’s theory of performativity against Bohr’s focus on experimental apparatuses. Whereas Bohr treats experimental apparatuses as mere laboratory setups, Barad (2007) calls into question exactly what constitutes an experimental apparatus and where bodies are located within such apparatuses. For Barad (2007), what counts as a body is a performative achievement based on specific material practices. Experimental apparatuses, then, are dynamic, open-ended, and iteratively refined and reconfigured phenomena that include laboratory equipment but also human and non-human bodies as well as concepts such as class, economics, and gender (Barad, 2007).

Applying agential realism toward teaching and learning mathematics for social justice Agential realism provides a methodology for conceptualizing pedagogy and scholarship widely known as teaching and learning mathematics for social justice (TLMSJ). This section provides an overview of TLMSJ, discusses epistemological and ontological dimensions of its contemporary articulations, and applies agential realism as a method to explore new possibilities for understanding TLMSJ.

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An overview of TLMSJ TLMSJ is an approach to mathematics education scholarship and pedagogy that centers ideas of liberation, anti-racism, equity, and social change. Larnell, Bullock, and Jett (2016) characterize TLMSJ as resting on two foundations: (1) the work of critical mathematical literacy and social justice projects advanced by Mary Frankenstein (1983) and Rico Gutstein and Bob Peterson (2013) and (2) the civil-rights-based work of Robert Moses and Charles Cobb (2001) in the Algebra Project. How teachers respond to and enact TLMSJ in their classrooms has been studied within teacher education (Bartell, 2013). Although TLMSJ began primarily in the context of K-12 education, scholars in recent years have begun to explore the use of TLMSJ in mathematics courses at the university level (Karaali & Khadjavi, 2019). The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, as part of a wide range of activities that support mathematics educators, promotes TLMSJ through teacher guides and model lessons to help teachers use mathematics to introduce and engage students in addressing issues of social injustice (Berry, Conway, Lawler, & Staley, 2020; Wager & Stinson, 2012). These guides and model lessons are part of a rich body of literature documenting how teachers have used classroom mathematics to identify and explore social issues such as lottery purchases in low-income neighborhoods (Rubel, Lim, Hall-Wieckert, & Sullivan, 2016), voter registration (Moses & Cobb, 2001), liquor stores (Brantlinger, 2013; Tate, 2013), map projections (Gutstein, 2013), and school conditions (Turner & Strawhun, 2013; Yang, 2009). TLMSJ places particular emphasis on the study of hegemonic practices that result in the marginalization or displacement of specific groups of people (Gonzalez, 2009; Leonard, Brooks, BarnesJohnson, & Berry, 2010). The goals of TLMSJ are diverse. However, certain commonalities among contemporary approaches to TLMSJ can nonetheless be identified, particularly regarding the epistemological and ontological dimensions of TLMSJ.

Epistemological dimensions of TLMSJ TLMSJ entails an epistemological commitment toward challenging traditional, widespread notions of mathematics as objective, neutral, and value-free (Frankenstein, 1983; Skovsmose, 2011). This stance mirrors scholarship across disciplines that challenge the political neutrality of mathematics (Appelbaum, 1995; Borba, 1990; D’Ambrosio, 2006; Eglash, 1997; Ernest, 1998; Fasheh, 1982; Gerdes, 1998; Gutiérrez, 2013; Hersh, 1999; Iseke-Barnes, 2000; Knijnik, 2012; Martin, 2000; Poovey, 1998; Porter, 1995; Skovsmose, 2011; Tate, 1995). Instead of elevating mathematics’ alleged purity and close connections to technology and the natural sciences (Skovsmose, 2011), TLMSJ treats mathematics as a tool to critically examine social issues, thereby bringing mathematics closer to civics education (Mauch, 2005).

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The theoretical roots of TLMSJ can be traced to Freire’s (1993) critical epistemology. Freire’s concept of conscientização draws attention to a person’s participation in his or her liberation through reading and writing the world through education (Freire, 1993). His philosophical stance draws on dialectical materialism, which is a framework “for understanding that humans can become actively conscious of both the conditions themselves and their sources, and for changing these conditions through human (social) intervention and action” (Au, 2007, p. 3). Freire’s liberatory pedagogy as applied to TLMSJ goes beyond a functional literacy that focuses on using mathematics to prepare students for the workforce (Leonard et al., 2010). Instead, TLMSJ seeks to help students use mathematics to develop a sociopolitical awareness and orientation toward issues such as critical literacy (Frankenstein, 1983), civil rights (Moses & Cobb, 2001), and sustainability (Gutiérrez, 2017). The act of incorporating social justice into mathematics education creates new opportunities for expanding students’ sense of what counts as legitimate mathematical activity (Gutstein, 2006). Ontological dimensions of TLMSJ Much less has been explicitly written about the ontological dimensions of TLMSJ. However, certain ontological assumptions can be inferred from the literature. Descriptions of TLMSJ lessons suggest that on an ontological level, mathematics is seen as a mediating tool that grants students a more critical view of reality. For instance, Frankenstein (1983) states that “when students overcome their math anxiety and learn math, they have a concrete, deep experience that ‘things can change.’ They also develop the ability to critique and they increase their questioning of the conditions in which they live” (p. 335). The lack of mathematical literacy, for instance, might lead people to believe that social welfare programs are responsible for a lower standard of living (Frankenstein, 1983). Statistical knowledge can help students see disparities in different forms of subsidies given to wealthy individuals versus poor individuals (Frankenstein, 1983; Staples, 2013). Likewise, topics such as perimeter and area, when used in the context of a quilting activity, can be used to give students artistic and literary voice in relation to a lesson on the Underground Railroad (Lipka et al., 2005). TLMSJ’s ontological treatment of mathematics does not depart from how mathematics has long been treated as a tool that provides its wielder with a more privileged view of the world. TLMSJ may be a radical epistemological project that helps students know the world in new and emancipatory ways by foregrounding the subjective, politically non-neutral, and socially constructed nature of mathematics. However, TLMSJ remains a traditionally ontological project that continues to treat mathematics as (1) human-centered, (2) primarily discursive in nature, (3) primarily cognitive, and (4) fundamentally distinct from people and the things and phenomena they describe. Figure 10.1 models this ontological treatment of mathematics within TLMSJ:

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Figure 10.1 Ontology of TLMSJ

In this view, there is a distinct reality of oppression and marginalization that has been ignored by society and that mathematics can help students reveal. Mathematics is a revelatory device that helps students gain a perspective on reality they otherwise could not achieve without mathematics. In many ways, Figure 10.1 resembles the mediation triangle developed by Vygotsky (1978), who theorized that tools such as signs and symbols mediated human beings’ experiences with the world. In a similar manner, TLMSJ treats mathematics as a conduit between human subjectivity and external reality. TLMSJ sets itself apart from traditional mathematics education by framing mathematics as a socially constructed mediating tool and by emphasizing that social justice is an important goal for mathematical activity. However, ontologically, TLMSJ maintains the status quo in mathematics education by treating mathematics as a discourse constructed by humans to serve human needs. Humans are considered to be exceptional in their freedom and willfulness as they manipulate passive mathematical concepts to uncover hidden or ignored truths about the world, particularly as they relate to the experiences of marginalized and oppressed people. As Figure 10.1 suggests, people, tools, and phenomena are treated as distinct. People act on mathematics without mathematics acting back. The role and agency of non-human materialities are not considered to be relevant toward a social justice-oriented view of mathematics education. Instead, agency is located primarily within the human mind. Applying agential realism toward TLMSJ Agential realism offers new possibilities for conceptualizing the epistemological and ontological dimensions of TLMSJ. These new possibilities do not merely represent “newness” for its own sake. Instead, agential realism provides a potential way to move beyond the ontological limitations that may be a source of tensions within TLMSJ. Gutiérrez (2017) states: In the social justice mathematics tradition, students are taught to use classical mathematics as a tool to read and write the world, in order to develop their sociopolitical consciousness and mathematical proficiencies. But, in general, the tool itself is not questioned. Recognizing the limitations of

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using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house (Lorde, 1984) leads me to argue that we must also be willing to question and reconceptualize what counts as mathematics in the first place, thereby taking up issues of epistemology and ontology. (p. 3) The use of classical mathematics as a tool to promote social justice might be one reason why scholars and teachers interested in TLMSJ have faced challenges in their work. For instance, one teacher’s attempts to conduct a lesson on the prevalence of liquor stores in South Central Los Angeles had the effect “to potentially reinforce the dominant worldview that the problem with South Central is the people who live there” (Brantlinger, 2013, p. 172). Mathematics may have had the unintended effect of perpetuating bias against marginalized communities instead of identifying the underlying causes of injustice. One possible explanation is that TLMSJ treats mathematics as a mediating tool to gain a privileged view of reality. To be sure, TLMSJ has had many successes in elevating social justice as a concern within mathematics education. However, these successes may have come at the price of reproducing a representationalist view of mathematics that sees the role of mathematics as a tool to mirror the reality of injustice. Implicit in this view is the idea that there is an independently existing world of injustice to locate and identify. This leads to potentially narrow views of injustice, such as those held by students who attribute social injustice to the actions and decisions of marginalized communities themselves. Barad’s agential realism provides a non-representational alternative for TLMSJ. Under an agential realist ontology, TLMSJ can be conceptualized as a form of intra-activity among a diverse network of material-discursive agencies. The exact meaning of the teacher, students, mathematics, and phenomena of social injustice in a TLMSJ lesson emerge by intra-acting with one another. Students act on mathematical concepts, but mathematical concepts also act back. Important questions to ask are: To what extent are students engaging in a reflexive understanding of their own mathematical activity? How does mathematics shape and become shaped by students’ bodies and by extensions of their bodies such as calculators, protractors, computers, and chalkboards (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2014)? To what extent are students conscious of the ways mathematics can dominate, what counts as mathematics, and how different mathematical practices impact themselves as well as the world of human and non-human bodies (Gutiérrez, 2017)? Moreover, agential realism asks how mathematical apparatuses render certain forms of social injustice determinate while keeping other forms of injustice indeterminate. The means of measuring the world cannot be separated from the phenomena of social injustice under investigation. Just as light is a wave under one experiment and a particle under a different experiment, inequity with respect to a particular phenomenon might take one form when approached statistically and another form when approached through a geometric lens.

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Importantly, neither form represents the single truth of that phenomenon. Within a TLMSJ lesson, a social justice issue takes its particular shape through the diffractive process of a coming together of differences among human and non-human materialities. For instance, how might a calculator and pencil, set against a student and their bodily gestures, in the context of a particular classroom space, during a lesson on a particular mathematical concept, bring forth a particular instantiation of social injustice to be discussed, analyzed, and acted on by students? By understanding the world in terms of intra-activity and diffraction, researchers are encouraged to ask to what extent students think deeply and relationally about social justice – how instances of injustice connect to systems of oppression, marginalizing discourses, material conditions, mathematical concepts, and themselves. Consider a mathematics lesson on liquor stores in South Central Los Angeles (Brantlinger, 2013). In this activity, a teacher asked non-white, low-income students in Chicago’s north side to investigate the ratio of liquor stores to movie theaters and community centers in South Central LA as part of a larger lesson on the 1992 Rodney King riots. The students used Google Maps, geometry, scaling, and measurement to compare this ratio to the ratio in an affluent Chicago suburb. They found that the proportion of liquor stores in South Central far exceeded the proportion of liquor stores in the Chicago suburb. As mentioned, some students took a deficit view toward people in South Central, with one student stating, “All they do is drink” (Brantlinger, 2013, p. 171). Brantlinger (2013) stated that next time, he would open up the political whole-class conversation and invite the students to share their thoughts on claims such as “All they do is drink.” Leonard et al. (2010) analyzed the lesson from the vantage point of culturally responsive teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Tate, 1995), noting that Brantlinger could have encouraged students to first explore data drawn from their own communities to make the social justice connection as intended. Agential realism would build on the analysis of Brantlinger (2013) and Leonard et al. (2010) by noting that the lesson deals with an issue bound up with the tools used to measure it. Intra-action would ask to what extent students reflect on why they are using certain geometrical concepts and what effect these concepts have on them. How does a tool such as Google Maps shape the nature of reality? How does it shape where our eyes move and influence what we believe to be true? For an agential realist, the issue of analyzing liquor stores is not just about opening up a political conversation or collecting data from one’s community. Instead, analysis entails rendering the issue of liquor stores determinate through intra-active, boundary-making practices among teachers, students, pedagogical theories, bodies, chalkboards, protractors, and physical gestures, to name a few. Moreover, the distribution of liquor stores is itself better understood as a volatile mix – a diffraction – of alcohol bottles, profit motives, highway systems, housing prices, physical dependencies, legislation, economic theory, race, gender, and architecture. By attending to the complexity and entanglement of phenomena, agential realism can help TLMSJ broaden the range of

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places to look for sources of harm and oppression as well as broaden the sources of tools to address them. TLMSJ not only promotes equity outside of the classroom but also within it (Leonard et al., 2010). TLMSJ can empower students from marginalized backgrounds by imbuing them with an increased sense of agency and motivation (Leonard et al., 2010; Tate, 1995). An agential realist approach to TLMSJ would extend these efforts by asking how TLMSJ not only reshapes students’ knowledge and perceptions but also reshapes students ontologically. For instance, how might a classroom conversation on liquor stores performatively shape the meaning of students’ bodies, particularly the bodies of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students? How might this lesson make black and brown bodies intelligible in new ways? How might this lesson and other TLMSJ lessons help enact new categories and ontologies of race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability that may not be present in a traditional mathematics lesson? These questions build on the work of scholars such as Danny Martin, Maisie Gholson, Rochelle Gutiérrez, Robert Berry, Uenuku Fairhall, Tony Trinick, and Tamsin Meaney, among many others, whose research includes studying the mathematical experiences of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students (Berry, 2008; Fairhall, Trinick, & Meaney, 2020; Gholson, 2016; Gholson & Martin, 2014; Gutiérrez, 1999; Martin, 2012; Meaney, 2010). Martin (2012), for example, argues that the mathematics education research community should pay greater attention to what it means to learn mathematics while Black by studying the “complex relationships among cognitive, non-cognitive, structural, institutional, and ideological factors influencing patterns of participation and socialization as well as achievement outcomes among Black children” (p. 49). By attending to complexity, Martin (2012) combats essentializing explanations for negative test score outcomes among Black students. Rather than rejecting this line of research, an agential realist approach to TLMSJ would seek to extend Martin’s (2012) emphasis on sociocultural context by attending to the ways bodies and non-human materialities come to matter in TLMSJ. The potential limitations of an ontological reframing of TLMSJ must also be considered. For instance, Gholson (2019) addresses an Indigenous project to reformulate mathematics in terms of people’s relationship to land, which Gutiérrez (2017) calls mathematx. Gholson (2019) argues that this project may inadvertently re-inscribe anti-Blackness. Although mathematx seeks to reestablish meaningful connections to land, water, humans, and non-humans, there remains an open and uneasy question about whether mathematx can engage in such ontological reimaginings while also giving sufficient attention to the uneven geographies experienced by marginalized students, especially Black populations for whom there exists an erroneous assertion that they lack geography (Gholson, 2019). Likewise, agential realism, which highlights the role of bodies and non-human materialities, must also address the uneven topographies by which bodies and non-human materialities are experienced by marginalized populations or else risk promoting Eurocentrism and antiBlackness in TLMSJ.

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Implications for critical theoretical research The theory of agential realism offers a viable method for challenging hegemonic social structures that moves beyond the dichotomy in empirical social science research between the passive objectivism of a soon-to-be-discovered reality (scientific realism) and the relativist nominalism of a constructed world (social constructivism) (Rosiek, 2018). Under an empirical approach, a researcher gathers data about the world through observation and interprets this data through a lens based on particular theoretical commitments. Exactly what is considered to be data varies across empirical studies depending on their operational, categorical, and conceptual use (Borgman, 2015; Creswell, 2014). However, commonalities can be found in the ways that data are treated as “representations of observations, objects, or other entities used as evidence of phenomena” (Borgman, p. 28, emphasis added). From both positivist and constructivist lenses, data captures or reflects the physical or social world, thereby enabling the uniquely agential observer to understand reality in more approximately accurate ways. Under an agential realist approach, the lines between gathering, interpreting, producing, and using data are blurred because the act of measuring the world materially changes it (Barad, 2007). Data are “lively intra-acting ontologies that are in relation and connection with all bodies beyond them” (DixonRomán, 2017). Data should not be understood just by their content but also by their relation to other ontologies of bodies, measuring apparatuses, technological hardware, and space and place (Dixon-Román, 2017; Loukissas, 2019). Through agential realism, data collection does not need to be confined to instruments such as interview transcripts, participant observations, and surveys. Instead, the question of what counts as data should be replaced by an emphasis on the material-discursive conditions that make phenomena intelligible and render certain knowledges determinate (Dixon-Román, 2017). Critical theoretical research, which studies the material-discursive conditions of structural inequity and social injustice, therefore plays an important role in speaking back against the representationalist logics of scientific realism and social constructivism that undergird the empiricism favored within education research. Moreover, whereas scientific realism and social constructivism are fundamentally at odds with respect to the notion of objectivity, agential realism subscribes to a notion of objectivity that respects the performative impact of social practices (Barad, 2007). An agential realist view of objectivity occurs within a framework of pluralist realism where the observer and observed diffract to create disruptive interactions from which concepts emerge (Barad, 2007). These concepts are articulations of material arrangements, which are constituted by human agency as well as the agency of a world that is not necessarily bound by our constructions of it (de Freitas, 2017). Everything is agentic including non-human materialities (Barad, 2007). This agency is expressed in the form of boundary-making practices that render certain aspects of an open-ended world determinate. Consider an example by

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Bohr invoked in Barad (2007) involving a person using a stick to navigate a dark room. If the stick is held tightly, the stick registers as an extension of the human body, serving as part of the measuring apparatus to feel around the room. If the stick is held loosely, the stick becomes the object being measured and does not become part of the measuring apparatus. This example highlights that boundaries are real, but they are also made through one’s choice of apparatus. The idea that the world is actively reconfigured by the material-discursive experimental apparatuses that measure it is what Barad (2007) refers to as bodies making an agential cut in the world. The notion of an agential cut, along with the concepts of intra-action and diffraction, lead to two other implications of agential realism toward critical theoretical education research: encouraging ontological flexibility and re-introducing ethics into critical theory. This chapter concludes with a brief discussion of each. Ontological flexibility As a theoretical methodology in educational research, agential realism offers an ontological flexibility that can help researchers understand a phenomena’s multiple realities (Rosiek, 2018). Rosiek (2018), for instance, proposes a flexible conception of institutionalized racism in schools by drawing on agential realism. Many analytic frameworks exist for theorizing racism in schools, including individual bias and micro-aggressions, public policy, Marxist analyses of unequal material and economic conditions, and post-structural critiques grounded in discursive signifiers of status (Rosiek, 2018). Rosiek (2018) states that “[t]he problem with choosing any one of these analytic options is that doing so committed the project to treating the other aspects of the reality of racism in this context as if they were derivative or of marginal significance” (p. 413). Agential realism allows all of these theoretical frameworks to describe the reality of racism (Rosiek, 2018). The idea is not to say that all the accounts are simultaneously true or that agential realism can serve as some kind of totalizing framework. Instead, just as light takes on different realities (i.e., particle or wave) depending on the measuring apparatuses used to measure it, “racism is a phenomenon whose ontological nature is dynamic (not static) and agential (not passive). . . . The reality of racism is multiple and changes based on our intra-action” (p. 414). Researchers might likewise take note of the various ways that TLMSJ can be conceptualized. Instead of focusing exclusively on the epistemological dimensions of TLMSJ, researchers can also try to understand the shifting and dynamic ways in which TLMSJ is ontologically taken up by educators and institutions. Rosiek (2018) states, “the challenge is not that a veil of language or ideology separates us from the objects of our study, but that our ethnographic inquiries are focused on ontologically moving targets” (p. 417). TLMSJ can be considered an “ontologically moving target” toward which researchers should seek to apply multiple frameworks. There is no one true characterization of TLMSJ just as there is no one true characterization of light. TLMSJ, as a phenomenon, depends on the material and discursive apparatuses used to conceptualize

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it. This view encourages new and expansive ways of theorizing TLMSJ that moves beyond empirical studies of TLMSJ. For researchers engaging in critical theoretical education research, agential realism underscores that the world changes just as much as our knowledge of it changes. That the world is ontologically dynamic and open-ended highlights the role of experimentation in theoretical research (de Freitas, 2017). Because different experimental apparatuses create different agential cuts in the fabric of reality, and because theories are experimental apparatuses made up of human and non-human materialities, theorizing has the capacity to effect change (Barad, 2007; de Freitas, 2017). Instead of seeking to reflect the true nature of reality, theorizing is a performative practice that can make real that which it describes (Barad, 2007; Butler, 1990). Theorizing is just as much an ideational and ideological project as it is a material and generative one contingent on bodies, objects, and space and place (de Freitas, 2017). Thus, a significant contribution of agential realism toward critical theorizing is the idea that theory can help researchers attune to the ontological multiplicities of reality while simultaneously participating in its emergence. Ethico-onto-epistemology Although agential realism emphasizes the agency of non-human materialities, humans nevertheless play a role in the world’s intra-activity. Far from being mere passive observers of an external reality, humans are responsible for the questions they pose and how they approach them (Barad, 2007; Hollin et al., 2017). Questions, along with the multiplicity of approaches for answering them, do not merely provide a reflection of reality; they reconfigure it by giving rise to new possibilities for the world (Barad, 2007). These agential cuts involve instantiating particular worlds, but they also necessarily entail exclusion (Barad, 2007; Hollin et al., 2017). Exclusion is a central part of Barad’s philosophy, which says that when an experimental apparatus renders one world determinate, another world is necessarily rendered indeterminate. This focus on exclusion generates questions of ethical responsibility. Because different material-discursive arrangements produce different configurations of the world, and because we have agency within these arrangements, we are accountable for our part of the entanglements we weave and the exclusions we create (Barad, 2007). Because “neither is anything and everything possible at any given moment,” we cannot avoid our ethical responsibilities (Barad, 2007, p. 177). The blurring of boundaries between knowing, being, and ethical responsibility constitutes what Barad (2007) calls ethico-onto-epistemology. In a TLMSJ lesson on liquor store distributions, for instance, the tools used to approach the lesson are not just a matter of knowledge or being, they also entail making choices that will foreground concerns such as race, capitalism, intersectionality, social psychology, and decolonization. TLMSJ becomes determinate through the material-discursive apparatuses used to understand it. These apparatuses include theoretical tools, measuring devices, the bodies of

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students and professors, university buildings, and so forth. This complex and entangled web of materialities creates an infinite number of possibilities for the world, and these possibilities entail ethical obligations. Critical theoretical research in education therefore must be seen as an ethical practice. This ethics is not the purely epistemological notion that judges people’s actions at a distance based on their consequences (Barad, 2007) or based on concepts of obligation, intentionality, value, or utility (de Freitas, 2017). Critical theoretical research is a matter of reflexivity and relational thinking that not only matters but also has the capacity to decide what matter comes to matter (Barad, 2007).

Conclusion This chapter reviewed the implications of agential realism as a critical theoretical research method in education. First, this chapter provided an overview of key concepts within Barad’s ontology, which draws on quantum physics. For Barad, physics is not merely a metaphor; rather, agential realism is an articulation of how the world actually is an open-ended set of possibilities whose instantiation is contingent on the intra-activity among human and non-human materialities (Barad, 2007; de Freitas, 2017; Hollin et al., 2017). Second, this chapter applied agential realism to TLMSJ. Barad’s agential realism brings into focus tacit assumptions about the ontology of mathematics and social justice issues embedded in TLMSJ pedagogy and scholarship. Intra-action and diffraction create new possibilities for conceptualizing TLMSJ as an entanglement of teachers, students, mathematical concepts, pedagogical techniques, social justice frameworks, and human and non-human bodies. This conceptualization encourages scholars and teachers to interrogate, explore, and build upon pre-existing frameworks within mathematics and social justice education when studying TLMSJ. Third, this chapter discussed implications of agential realism for critical theoretical research in education. By moving beyond the dichotomy of scientific realism and social constructivism embedded in empiricism, agential realism brings theoretical research back to the realm of the “real” without falling into the trappings of naive realism. Barad does this by treating the world as a plurality of realities that become instantiated through experimental apparatuses, which are themselves material-discursive phenomena. For educational researchers engaged in critical theoretical work, agential realism demands that we closely attend not only to the ideational but also to the material nature of reality and that we understand how both natures are entangled. The goal is not to describe an external reality but rather to attune to our ethical obligations in how our theoretical work produces our world.

References Appelbaum, P. (1995). Popular culture, educational discourse, and mathematics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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178 Lee Melvin Peralta Frankenstein, M. (1983). Critical mathematics education: An application of Paulo Freire’s epistemology. Journal of Education, 165, 315–359. Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Gerdes, P. (1998). On culture and mathematics teacher education. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 1, 33–53. Gholson, M. (2016). Clean corners and algebra: A critical examination of the construction of Black girls and women in mathematics. Journal of Negro Education, 85(3), 290–301. Gholson, M. (2019). Navigating Mathematx on selfsame land through the settler-native slave triad in the U.S. context: A response to Rochelle Gutiérrez. Proceedings of the 10th international Mathematics Education and Society conference (pp. 139–143). Hyderabad, India. Gholson, M., & Martin, D. B. (2014). Smart girls, Black girls, mean girls, and bullies: At the intersection of identities and the mediating role of young girls’ social network in mathematics communities of practice. Journal of Education, 194(1), 19–33. Gonzalez, L. (2009). Teaching mathematics for social justice: Reflections on a community of practice for urban high school mathematics teachers. Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, 2(1), 22–51. Grosz, E. (2005). Time travels: Feminism, nature, power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gutiérrez, R. (1999). Advancing urban Latina/o youth in mathematics: Lessons from an effective high school mathematics department. The Urban Review, 31(3), 263–281. Gutiérrez, R. (2013). The sociopolitical turn in mathematics education. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 44(1), 37–68. Gutiérrez, R. (2017). Living mathematx: Towards a vision for the future. In E. Galindo & J. Newton (Eds.), Proceedings of the thirty-ninth annual meeting of the North American chapter of the international group for the psychology of mathematics education (pp. 2–26). Indianapolis, IN: Hoosier Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators. Gutstein, E. (2006). Reading and writing the world with mathematics: Toward pedagogy for social justice. New York, NY: Routledge. Gutstein, E. (2013). Math, maps, and misrepresentations. In E. Gutstein & B. Peterson (Eds.), Rethinking mathematics: Teaching social justice by the numbers (pp. 189–194). Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools. Gutstein, E., & Peterson, B. (Eds.). (2013). Rethinking mathematics: Teaching social justice by the numbers. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools. Haraway, D. (1992). The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, & P. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 295–337). New York, NY: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press. Hersh, R. (1999). What is mathematics, really? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hollin, G., Forsyth, I., Giraud, E., & Potts, T. (2017). (Dis)entangling Barad: Materialisms and ethics. Social Studies of Science, 47(6), 918–941. Iseke-Barnes, J. M. (2000). Ethnomathematics and language in decolonizing mathematics. Race, Gender, & Class, 7(3), 133–146. Karaali, G., & Khadjavi, L. S. (Eds.). (2019). Mathematics for social justice: Resources for the college classroom. Providence, RI: MAA Press. Kirby, V. (1997). Telling the flesh: The substance of the corporeal. New York, NY: Routledge. Knijnik, G. (2012). Differentially positioned language games: Ethnomathematics from a philosophical perspective. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 80, 87–100. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491.

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11 Toward a transgressive decolonial hermeneutics in activist education research Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores

Introduction This chapter aims to advance transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH) as a theoretical method in activist education research. Broadly speaking, TDH works at the intersections of decolonial, hermeneutic, and collective action theory. It surfaces from the critical ethnographic study I conducted in Honduras where I engaged in participant observation for 18 months in the university student movement. Although hermeneutics did not strictly form part of my research, the “multi-voiced interpretative praxis” (Fúnez-Flores, 2020, p. 154) inspired by Lincoln and Cannella (2009) and Santos’s (2018) interpretation of social movements as sites of knowledge production encouraged me to consider the ethico-political implications of interpretation. TDH thus evolved into a transgressive mode of interpretation entangled with social struggles. It contests the ontological and epistemological commitments and empirical methodological models of the natural sciences, namely as they are adopted paradigmatically in the human sciences. Further, it disrupts the idea that interpretation is a mode of discovering the meaning of texts and affirms rather that interpretation, understanding, reflection, and comprehension are modes of being and becoming within a living context. In the follow sections I explicate transgressive decolonial hermeneutics’ (TDH) ethico-political, theoretical, and methodological tenets and discuss how they enable the reinterpretation and hence the theorization of student activism vis-à-vis higher education reform.

Transgressive decolonial hermeneutics Transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH) is a theoretical and methodological modification of Maldonado-Torres’s (2002) “transgresstopic critical hermeneutics” (p. 293). The former draws from concepts advanced by Latin American decolonial theory and extends the interpretation of texts to collective action. TDH departs from the latter’s philosophical transgression of texts and shifts toward the ethico-political and pedagogical transgressions enabled by interpreting collective action and its concomitant discourses and practices. Further, it aims to unsettle the ontological, epistemological, and methodological

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limitations imposed by hermeneutics’ Eurocentrism and positivist/empirical textualism, namely as it refuses to engage in ethico-political dialogue with others to comprehend and indeed learn from the texts and contexts outside of Europe and its Anglo-American extension. TDH is therefore characterized by “a fundamental impulse to transgress the space of the other and even one’s own space” (Maldonado-Torres, 2008, p. 233). It is transgressive since it maintains that “spaces are not fixed epistemological grounds, and that transaction between spaces [and peoples] function as enabling conditions for self-understanding and (self)-critique” (Maldonado-Torres, 2002, p. 301). My participation in, modest contribution to, and learning from the university student movement in Honduras are the underlying reasons why I am advancing TDH as a theoretical method in activist education research. Decolonial tenet TDH takes a decolonial point of departure to refer to a broader social totality reconceptualized as the modern/colonial capitalist world-system (Grosfoguel, 2007). This perspective transcends political-economic paradigms maintaining the nation-state as the central unit of analysis. The ontological assumption of a broader social totality, moreover, unsettles the methodological nationalism prevalent in the social sciences (Patel, 2017), particularly in education research insofar as it prevents the interpretation of higher education institutions as simultaneously implicated in and reciprocally structured by local, regional, and global contexts. Methodological nationalism, more importantly, effaces the possibility of conceiving of knowledge, curriculum, pedagogy, theory, and methodology as geopolitical instruments constitutive of existing imperial/ colonial relations within and between nation-states. It may seem counterintuitive to think of the curriculum within a broader context since public education in the United States is seemingly structured by the national, state, and local government. In Latin American contexts, however, why do the so-called international and global trends in higher education result in mimicking the academic standards, governance practices, pedagogies, theories, and methodologies developed in Western Europe and Anglo-America? Does the curriculum, then, play an instrumental role in legitimizing dominant knowledge systems or epistemes while invalidating others? To answer these questions, we must critically examine “whose internationalization” we are referring to (Paraskeva, 2016). Indeed, schools and universities – especially their curricula and governance structures – are integrated into a larger ensemble of sociocultural and political economic relations of power. It suffices to consider international financial institutions, academic standardization, accreditation processes, and ranking systems, as adopted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to reveal the inextricable relationship between power and knowledge (Torres, 2009). Within the context of neoliberal globalization, these mechanisms become geopolitical instruments which sustain the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. It is thus that TDH refers to social

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totality to interpret the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural implications of these entanglements, while simultaneously transgressing the methodological nationalism delimiting researchers’ geographic compass to the nation-state and the dominant theories and methodologies therein. The notion of a context (whole) is dialectically related to its texts (parts). Here, wholes and parts are understood as heuristic devices since social reality is not divided or bounded so clearly in practice, that is, in concrete everyday lived experience. The particular is understood vis-à-vis a complexly configured whole in which heterogeneous texts, contexts, social institutions, histories, and collective memories intersect, contradict, contest, or complement each other. A university, for instance, is only superficially understood if the social totality of which it is a part is ignored. The constellation of texts and practices constitutive of universities such as policy, curricula, governance structures, accreditation processes, private-public partnerships, and knowledge production are therefore not only nationally implicated. Indeed, beyond the national context, the university is intertwined with a broader context of neoliberal globalization, that is, the contemporary re-articulation of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. This re-articulation does not result in a fixed whole but rather in a partially fixed complex ensemble of hegemonic social relations of power, discourses, and practices in which the political, economic, pedagogic, cultural, and epistemic overlap (Gramsci, 1971). Articulating itself as the hegemonic social totality, it demarcates, on the one hand, a Eurocentric geography of reason, and, on the other, a wretched colonized space of non-being, nothingness, and ignorance (Fanon, 1963). This imperial geopolitical position sustains what Dussel (1993) refers to as the myth of modernity which naturalizes the West’s power and apparent superiority over Others. At best, the Other is systematically hidden from the modern imaginary. At worst, the Other represents modernity’s negative image, becoming thus the savage, undeveloped, Third World, illegal alien waiting to be civilized, Westernized, developed, deported, incarcerated, or educated. The coloniality of power, knowledge, and being In relation to the modern/colonial perspective or social totality discussed earlier, decolonial theory advances at least three interrelated concepts that assist in the interpretation of neoliberal higher education reform. The primary concept is the coloniality of power which is sustained by “a cognitive model, a new perspective of knowledge within which non-Europe was the past, and because of that inferior, if not always primitive” (Quijano, 2000, pp. 533–580). This concept enables the reinterpretation of universities as simultaneously structured by and constitutive of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. It is not surprising that universities were established in Latin America in the first half of the 16th century. Higher education in the Americas, therefore, has always been an integral part of a larger, globally entangled imperial/colonial project. Indeed, without the university’s complicity in producing the knowledges, values, and

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subjectivities which sustained other institutions (e.g., religious, political, and economic), it would be difficult to imagine the longue durée of colonization (Braudel & Wallerstein, 2009). Through education, a selected few from the colonized population became complicit in buttressing imperial/colonial asymmetries of power. Rama (1996) maintains that the “lettered cities” and universities of Latin America were perfectly designed to form colonial subjectivities. These lettered cities were the intellectual nodes of domination intricately linked to imperialism/colonialism. Colonialism was, and continues to be, sustained by learned men who ruled by pen and paper, that is, through the symbolic hegemony entangled with the materiality of colonial life. Contemporarily, universities continue to be instrumental spaces in which dominant discourses and practices are deposited to perpetuate dominant ways of knowing and being. This last point leads to the coloniality of knowledge (Mignolo, 2011), which refers to the epistemic dimension of colonization and the systematic invalidation and destruction of other knowledges. Today, this cognitive model articulates itself through the internationalization and globalization of higher education reform. Further, the coloniality of knowledge unveils the reasons why European and Anglo-American ways of knowing are portrayed as universal and superior while other knowledge systems are rendered provincial, inferior, and traditional. Here, the notion of superiority and inferiority refers to the coloniality of being. Wynter (2003) describes the coloniality of being as the overrepresentation of the dominant “ethnoclass” which positions White men at the center of the historical stage of progress and development (p. 268). The coloniality of power, knowledge, and being are therefore inextricably intertwined and implicated in one another, enabling thus the conceptualization of racebased social classification as the central axis around which the modern/colonial capitalist world-system is articulated. Race becomes an effective device that is simultaneously a product and producer of epistemic and ontological structures of domination. Understanding race as a device, that is, as a socially constructed instrument of control and domination, however, does not make racism any less real. Recognizing, in the liberal sense, that different races do not exist, following a colorblind and post-racial ideology, does not elude the fact that its concrete implementation continues to structure race-based social relations of power within and between societies and institutions. Lugones (2007) advances the coloniality of power by intersecting it with what she calls the coloniality of gender. Here, race and gender become the two central categories used to classify and measure the purity, sub-humanity, masculinity, heteronormativity, and non-being of people dwelling on both sides of the modern/colonial divide. This resonates with Crenshaw’s (1989) conceptualization of the multiple ways bodies are marked, read, and positioned distinctly within a field of power according to race, gender, class, and sexuality, as well as nationality, religion, and language. Race and gender establish the epistemic invalidation of those who are read as inferiorly positioned by these markers. The coloniality of knowledge enables the interpretation of race and gender as

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instruments of control implicated in the hierarchization of bodies, knowledges, languages, regions, continents, universities, and education systems on a global scale. The modern/colonial classification and inferiorization of people by race and gender, therefore, positions White heteronormative males as the only valid producers of knowledge, namely, those who think and write in English in the Global North. This hierarchy of knowledge renders all that is expressed, known, and interpreted outside of its conceptual hegemony as traditional, a euphemistic term that hides the colonial logics demarcating non-Eurocentric epistemologies as backward and stagnant. Methodological and ethico-political tenets TDH adopts Mignolo’s (2000) pluritopic hermeneutics, a knowledge praxis that engages in meaningful dialogue with the extant plurality of topoi or places of understanding hidden by Eurocentric and Anglo-Americentric interpretive frameworks, methodologies, and pedagogies. By thinking with and from other places (institutions and contexts) of understanding or geographies/ cartographies of reason (Gordon, 2011), TDH underscores the plurivocal and ethico-political dimensions of interpreting from systematically excluded texts and contexts. Further, it does not reduce texts to a singular or objective, universal meaning but rather underscores their shifting significance vis-à-vis local, institutional, national, regional, and global contexts (Ricoeur, 1974). TDH does not, however, propose epistemological relativism or subjectivism where “anything goes.” Following Ricoeur (2007), TDH instead oscillates “between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism” (p. 160). Subjective interpretations, in this sense, are implicated in the political ontology of concrete social practices, institutions, and contexts (Fúnez-Flores & Phillion, 2019), and are conceived here as the constellation of intersubjective relations of power paradoxically constitutive and derivative of social totality. Moreover, TDH transgresses conventional hermeneutics’ textualist, spatialgeographical, linguistic, and conceptual limits. The latter tends to enclose itself in the monotopical discourse ostensibly spoken from nowhere, hence universalizing the broader monologic narrative of Eurocentrism and AngloAmericentrism. As a result, this bounded hermeneutic practice, enclosed in the particularity/spatiality of Europe and the United States, is engrossed in unethical interpretations inasmuch as it is incapable of engaging in dialogue with other modes of interpretation and places of understanding. Although not observed by Dilthey (1972) explicitly, he nonetheless indicates that interpretation “remains partial and can never be terminated” (p. 243). According to my transgressive reading of this text, hermeneutics is a contested practice and is contingent upon place or locus of enunciation from which all words and worlds are spoken and created (Mignolo, 2011). European reason is not the exception, despite its self-proclaimed superiority over others. TDH hence opposes these unethical distortions by engaging in socially, politically, and culturally situated interpretations that unsettle the notion of abstract universals. It opens a path

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toward concrete universals (or the pluriversal), that is, toward a world in which many worlds or places of understanding may coexist (Grosfoguel, 2013). TDH presupposes, therefore, that the interpretation and theorization of the world are always already contested and interwoven with places, bodies, institutions, histories, collective memories, and enduring social struggles immersed in fields of power. Above all, TDH aims to position itself as a counterhegemonic mode of theorizing insofar as the focus is not only the myriad conflicts of interpretation unfolding in academia but also the discourses and social practices of resistance and re-existence being articulated by social movements.

Reading and interpreting the neoliberal university Referring to the social totality of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system assists in interpreting the ways in which university students, as well as academics, are commodified or thingified through neoliberal education reform. If we consider the labor of undergraduate and graduate research assistants and academics in Latin America as they engage in fieldwork to extract data for other academics in the Global North, we find that it is analogous to the extraction of natural resources (Lander, 2008). This analogy reveals that epistemic extractivism and epistemic racism are constitutive of the modern/colonial capitalist worldsystem (Grosfoguel, 2013). The former extracts so-called data and situated ways of knowing to further develop and universalize theory even in academic spaces purporting to do otherwise (Todd, 2016). The latter adds a racist dimension that completely disregards the intellectual production of Black, Brown, and Indigenous thinkers within and beyond academia, while their concepts are appropriated for personal gain. Tuck and Yang (2012) brilliantly discuss these knowledge practices as moves toward innocence, “which problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity” (p. 3). These extractivist practices are integral to capitalism and colonialism, accurately conceptualized by Indigenous scholar and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson as an “extraction-assimilation system” (Klein, 2013, para. 11). Universities, in this regard, perform as extraction-assimilation systems of domination that enforce efficient epistemic extractivist practices. The coloniality of research practices enables the extraction and analyses of “data,” subsequently repackaged into commodifiable theory. This extractivist practice, once again, parallels the way raw materials are extracted and manufactured into commodities, which are subsequently shipped back to the Global South for consumption. Latin American autonomous universities, for instance, transfer publicly funded resources and knowledges not only to the private sector but also to “public” world-class universities whose imperial reach (Lander, 2008), in turn, provides services to the global knowledge economy for a reasonable price. Higher education is thus implicated in the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being. Here, one may conceptualize coloniality as an enduring violent pedagogical act which systematically subjugates and destroys other interpretations to the degree in which the colonized Other views and interprets the world through

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the colonizer’s eyes, conceptual networks, theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and epistemological/ontological assumptions. The images reflected by these distorted lenses are precisely the negative representations of Others. It is not surprising that colonization goes hand in hand with the destruction of Other lifeworlds through genocide, ethnocide (e.g., expulsion, forced conversion, boarding schools, and missions), and epistemicide (e.g., burning of madrassahs, libraries, codices, and bodies, as well as curriculum reform) (Grosfoguel, 2013). One may argue that the dominant curriculum is nothing more than an imperial doctrine expressing a war-like knowledge system justifying the destruction of other knowledges. This destructive process may very well be conceived as the imperial/colonial geopolitics of the curriculum, since knowledge is transformed into an instrument of control and domination. Notwithstanding these colonizing effects, the collective memories and histories, as well as the “hermeneutical resources of colonized cultures” continue to resist this pedagogical, epistemic, and ontological violence after five hundred years of Euro-modern colonialism (Maldonado-Torres, 2008, p. 232). By intentionally stepping outside of Eurocentric and Anglo-Americentric modes of understanding, TDH thus enables us to think from and with excluded places and peoples.

Applications: reading university student activism through TDH Researchers using TDH may reinterpret university student activism and neoliberal higher education reform (as well as other forms of collective action and policies) beyond, yet always already implicated with, the nation-state. For a more complex interpretation, there are several contexts, varying in scale, that must first be considered. Methodologically, TDH requires at least three steps to theorize the expression of collective action/texts in relation to context. First, to interpret and indeed theorize university student activism within a broader context, as opposed to reducing it to a local expression of institutional discontent, the primary ontological point of departure is the social totality of the modern/ colonial capitalist world-system. It is the backdrop against which higher education reform and student activism are interpreted, without which our interpretations would only perpetuate the methodological nationalism TDH seeks to avoid. Second, the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being assist in interpreting and reconceptualizing the entanglement between the immediate sociopolitical context, higher education reform, and resistance. Inasmuch as neoliberal reforms are instrumental in maintaining coloniality, the emergence of collective action and articulation of social movements resisting these reforms, and the knowledges, practices, and values expressed therein, are also manifesting, in subtle ways, a decolonial political project. By theorizing from the living sociopolitical context in which education institutions are reformed and contested, university governance and curriculum reform, for instance, are conceptualized more clearly within a broader field of power and resistance. Third, researchers

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employing TDH must seriously consider interpreting the tensions expressed within a particular institution. The interpretation of these antagonistic expressions is necessitated to link the institutional textures (governance-power), texts (curriculum-knowledge), and actions (practices of resistance) with the immediate sociopolitical context and social totality. The diverse actors breathing political life into the university, who are involved in implementing, resisting, or remaining indifferent to neoliberal higher education reform, are central to the interpretation of the institutional milieu. An important caveat to consider is that these steps must not be understood procedurally. Indeed, one may begin anywhere in the hermeneutic process insofar as the institutional and immediate sociopolitical contexts are interrelated with the social totality of which they are an integral part. All contexts are therefore always already interconnected with other contexts, localities, and institutions. One may very well begin with step three, at the microlevel with the institutional tensions expressed by the actors involved and proceed to interpret these tensions in relation to the immediate sociopolitical context and subsequently to the broader social totality. For conceptual clarity, this complex hermeneutic circle is composed of three concentric circles. The outer circle represents the social totality of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system enclosing the remaining inner circles. The middle circle represents the immediate sociopolitical national context, while the inner circle delimits a particular educational milieu or institution, including its diverse actors, texts, discourses, and practices. Reading and interpreting higher education reform through TDH must, therefore, consider how each context (broader social totality, immediate sociopolitical context, and particular institutional milieu) is dialectically related to one another. TDH thus enables the theorization of universities vis-à-vis the social totality of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system, the immediate sociopolitical and institutional context, and the actors interpellating and thus contesting and inscribing meanings to the former three interrelated contexts discursively, politically, and pedagogically. When one context is emphasized to the detriment of the others, however, student activism and higher education are, at best, reduced to analyzable units, brute facts, and bits of information. At worst, student activism is reduced to a reaction to the latter rather than an entangled process transcending the institutional milieu and immediate sociopolitical context. It is thus that TDH aims to unveil the paradoxes of the modern/ colonial reconfiguration of neoliberal globalization through higher education reform, in one instance understood as a totalizing force, and, in another, a force met with a multiplicity of resistance, subject positions, and discourses articulated in a wide range of social movements. From particular institutions to social totality After the coup of 2009 in Honduras, neoliberal higher education reform sought to reconfigure the sociopolitical and institutional context according to the logics of coloniality. Here we observe how the social totality of the

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modern/colonial capitalist world-system reconfigured itself materially through the nation-state and ideologically through higher education. We also note the emergence of university student activism within an increasingly polarized sociopolitical context. In the process of resisting the neoliberal recolonization of the university, student activists opened alternative educational spaces to read, discuss, and interpret education policies, including the constitutional rights for which previous student movements struggled. They unlearned dominant interpretive frameworks and learned how to cocreate knowledges, pedagogies, and intellectual political cultures of their own. Student activists countered the global designs aimed at transforming the university into an efficient factory or maquila capable of producing cheap commodities and passive consumers of knowledge, as well as possessive and politically indifferent individuals. Undoubtedly, producing possessive individuals is the dominant curriculum’s primary goal; it is its modern/colonial raison d’être. Within the postcoup context, it is not surprising that insurgent practices are met with counterinsurgency and state repression. Collective action, as the recently passed Penal Code in Honduras reveals (Congreso Nacional, 2019), is forbidden and punishable by the State, making young rebellious bodies and minds “crimes against the public order” (p. 126). While neoliberal reforms reconfigured university governance and curriculum, university student activists organized themselves into democratically governed student associations according to academic program, department, and college. These associations created the necessary conditions to articulate a broad-based social movement that would counteract these authoritarian tendencies and expressions inextricably linked to the dictatorial sociopolitical context established after the coup. Student activist associations and other student collectives organized massive protests and university occupations that paralyzed public higher education at a national level in 2016 and in 2017 (Vommaro & Briceño-Cerrato, 2018). Collective action, however, is not only that which is manifest and easily observable from a distance, that is, that which is empirically verified and quantifiable. University students also engaged in activist work in latent forms, which is less appealing to social movement research, which is focused more on delimiting the causes and effects of collective action. They spent their days reading and interpreting higher education policies and curricula with fellow activists and thus collectively producing knowledge subsequently shared through social media (facebook.com/UNAHEstudiantes). These collective texts are often ignored in the literature – that is, the meticulous collective interpretations, discussions, reflections, autodidactic processes, and pedagogies of resistance that form part of student movements. Behind any social movement, collective intellectual work is involved. Researchers guided by instrumental interpretive frameworks, however, tend to ignore said knowledge practices. Social movements, as Angels Davis (2012) observes, are also frequently misinterpreted through a messiah complex, an individualistic frame that reduces collective action to an individual figure or icon (e.g., Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks,

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Nelson Mandela, and Ernesto Guevara). TDH, on the other hand, situates its interpretation contextually and from a rearguard position, thereby carrying the potential to alter activist educational research by thinking alongside and knowing with – as opposed to knowing about – the knowledges and practices born in social struggles. Important to note is that student activists’ knowledge practices translate into politico-pedagogies once their critical readings of the university are shared with the broader community (e.g., through WordPress journals such as unahestudiantes.org). “Little schools” (escuelitas), as students refer to their workshops, public forums, and assemblies in which students, professors, and representatives of other social movements participate (e.g., the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH)), are the undertheorized pedagogical and ethico-political dimensions of university student activism. Consider the following statement shared by a student activist facilitating a workshop organized for freshman students interested in learning about and participating in the student movement: “The students participating in this workshop will learn reciprocally from one another since all knowledge is collective” (Fúnez-Flores, 2020, p. 141). Here knowledge becomes intersubjective and sociopolitical, aimed to be cocreated ethically with others and shared pedagogically. This is diametrically opposed to the individualist and universalist conception of epistemology constitutive of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being. Student activists’ interpretations and collective action thus deconstruct and reconstruct the meanings assigned to higher education, thereby disrupting the idea that learning is a means to pursue an individualist and meritocratic notion of success. Certainly, these alternative educational spaces are small pedagogical openings through which an insurgent decolonial curriculum begins to emerge. These close readings of student activism indicate that TDH is not simply another methodology academics need to consume. It is rather a praxis engaged researchers embody as they theorize with, from, and alongside social struggles manifested in and beyond educational institutions. As indicated previously, TDH entails a transgressive ethico-political interpretation of collectively written texts and contexts. It is through these collective expressions, as Holloway (2010) illustrates, where flashes of light of hope assist in reimagining alternative ways of being together in an uncertain world. Theorizing or interpreting collectively written texts permits us to envisage, even if for a fleeting moment, an alternative to the neoliberal/neocolonial university and a future horizon from which a radical democracy may emerge. What is more destabilizing to coloniality, which is dependent on indifference and possessive individualism, than a collective interpretive praxis? Inasmuch as student activists have reinterpreted and acted upon the university to change its indifference and authoritarian governance structure, they have also created the conditions of possibility of decolonizing the university which has, for nearly five centuries, served as a partially fixed nodal point articulated to the modern/colonial capitalist worldsystem. Through TDH, theorizing the possible disarticulation of the university

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from the modern/colonial matrix of power thus becomes a counterhegemonic and decolonizing practice.

Theoretical implications In articulating the theoretical method of transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH), I realized that, if decolonial theory is to transcend the literary criticism of postcolonial theory, it must refuse to be academicized and completely institutionalized for it to stay in touch with the places of understanding from which it emerged. It must not decontextualize itself from ongoing sociopolitical and cultural struggles, independent of how unfashionable it may seem in academic circles dominated by “post” philosophies, theories, and methodologies that may unjustly label these arguments as excessively humanist or Marxist. Further, decolonial theory ought to go beyond hermeneutic practices that solely engage in theoretical dialogue with border thinkers already established in academia. Instead, decolonial scholars must position themselves as rearguard theorists (Santos, 2018) – that is, as transgressive decolonial hermeneuts – as they work alongside non-academic activist intellectuals and collective actors who are building a decolonial future in the present by cocreating discourses and social practices of resistance and re-existence. A salient point to observe regarding higher education is that we cannot decolonize the university curriculum if an undemocratic and indeed colonial governance structure remains intact. This observation is too often omitted from discussions around the decolonization of higher education and public education in general (Bhambra, Nişancıoğlu, & Gebrial, 2018; Grosfoguel, Hernandez, & Velasquez, 2016). Decolonial work, furthermore, is more than a hermeneutic practice aimed at citing established decolonial scholars. Indigenous activist intellectuals in Latin America thinking and acting to make another world possible also criticize dominant modes of decolonial interpretation since decolonial work is frequently reduced to academic work (Cusicanqui, 2012). The decolonization of the university and of social relations of power must, therefore, be born out of collective struggles. Claiming to decolonize knowledge without first taking into serious consideration the concrete struggles creating the conditions of possibility of decolonizing the university’s ontological, epistemological, methodological, pedagogical, and political economic commitments, will only result in personal gain as decolonial scholarship integrates itself into the political economy of ideas emanating from privileged epistemic, social, institutional, and geographic positions. I recognize the contradictions of making these claims as I, too, am feeding into a modern/colonial structure that consumes and assigns exchange value to knowledge. This contradiction is part of the double bind researchers employing TDH will encounter. Researchers must learn to navigate these contradictions intentionally, tactically, and strategically in order to contest academic spaces and their entanglement with colonial social structures that implicate the university as well as the geopolitics of knowledge sustained by publishing

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companies. Bhattacharya (2020), for instance, reflects about the political economy of knowledge and her place in academia as she refuses to align herself with dominant “post” philosophies, theories, and methodologies. She recalls Yvonna Lincoln asking her, “What will you achieve by giving up your seat at the table? Exactly what will you change?” The metaphoric table is often used as if gaining a seat at this exclusive table in some way adjusts the structural inequalities in place. Maybe the table is fortified by our liberal recognition and multicultural inclusion, or perhaps gaining a seat at the table is the first step in “changing the terms of the conversation” and dismantling the table to make it anew (Mignolo, 2011, p. 161), one that revolves around the ethico-political principles of pluralism, power of difference, and radical democratic equivalence (Mouffe, 2020). Like Bhattacharya’s reflective response to these questions, I, too, “have yet to find an answer” (p. 2). In times of empire perhaps no one is innocent; however, we are not all equally complicit. To reduce our complicity, TDH offers an alternative to engage in decolonial theoretical work through its transgressive ethico-political commitment and modest contribution to strengthening social struggles discursively and practically. The following suggestions may be a good start for researchers interested in employing TDH: communicating analyses and interpretations in accessible language through alternative media; becoming a rearguard intellectual always positioned as a learner behind a movement; working alongside social movements and activist intellectuals to strengthen their struggle – as opposed to claiming to be part of the vanguard intelligentsia (Santos, 2018); collaborating in activist research projects off the academic grid; and recognizing that being an ally to a social movement also implies sharing concrete risks with collective actors while also acknowledging one’s privileged position.

Methodological implications Previously, I referred to Eurocentric and Anglo-Americentric places of understanding that claim neutral, objective, acontextual, and solipsistic epistemic positions. The imperial epistemological position echoes Haraway’s (1988) “conquering gaze from nowhere” (p. 581). Similarly, decolonial scholar Castro-Gomez (2005) reconceptualizes dominant epistemic positions as the hubris of a zero-point epistemology, which enunciates the objects to be known while hiding the locus or place from which all words and worlds emerge. The monotopical researcher, in this sense, behaves as the Deus absconditus (hidden god) who sees and knows all things without ever being seen. TDH, however, departs from these god-like acts of knowing and objectifying, which simultaneously sustain imperial logics and perpetuate the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being. It transgresses the univocal presuppositions of the absolute meaning of texts and contexts by thinking from other places of understanding and sites of resistance. Univocity or certitude is not only manifested in quantitative research. These epistemological assumptions are implicitly adopted by research practices in

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qualitative inquiry. The description, explanation, and analysis of data is underscored at the expense of alternative interpretations that transgress the boundaries of collecting (extracting) and analyzing (breaking down) brute facts. One may easily forget that facts depend on the institutions and social contexts in which they emerge. In other words, there are institutions that change the facticity of each fact, datum, or text (Searle, 2006). Empirical qualitative researchers, in this sense, are not immune to the potential pitfalls that “obscure the need to ground and test theoretical excursions and abstractions from the data in the structures of the context in which they are produced” (Delamont et al., 2010, p. 753). The data effectively collected by the interviewer, for instance, are transcribed to produce a copious supply of facts about the interviewee’s lived experiences, thoughts, teaching practices, et cetera. What is often ignored, particularly when interviews outweigh other methods such as TDH, is the relational, situated, and interactional dimensions of communication. The transcript, in other words, omits the “setting’s discursive conventions” that are implicated in the way the interviewee narrates their life according to the situation (Gubrium & Holstein, 2008, p. 247), that is, the narrative environment in which the interviewer intervenes. One may argue that the data materialized in the form of an interview transcript silence the hermeneutic process involved, since what is obscured is the ways in which the interviewer and interviewee simultaneously participate in reading, interpreting, and creating the interactional context. Brute facts, therefore, tend to hide the empirical qualitative researcher collecting data within a particular social context or institution. The analysis of data and the themes that apparently emerge therefrom tend to negate the existence of social institutions and contexts in which said facts/data are expressed. TDH’s ontological commitment, in contrast, takes as an ontological point of departure the social totality to read and interpret the ways in which education institutions, policies, reforms, curricula, knowledge practices, interpretations, and collective action transgress or perpetuate the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. This ontological assumption also assists in unsettling the methodological nationalism extant in education research. By countering the search for certainty, data collection is no longer portrayed as the search for observable objects and facts but rather as a historically, contextually, sociopolitically, and culturally situated knowledge practices in which researchers participate to contest, reconfigure, or perpetuate dominant discourses and institutions. Remaining impartial or objective is not an option. William James was perhaps right when he stated that “you can’t pick up rocks in a field without theory” (Agar, 1980, p. 23). Today, however, rather than submitting to already existing theories, it is more urgent to advance alternative theories and modes of interpretation that enable the conceptualization of the interrelationships between contexts, institutions, and human action. For a more profound interpretation of specific actions, situations, texts, and contexts, TDH proceeds dialogically from a rearguard position to learn from, theorize alongside, and contribute to the myriad of social struggles creating

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the conditions of possibility of articulating counterhegemonic discourses, knowledges, practices, and institutions. The aim is not to privilege or recenter theory as method over empirical research but rather to point to the limitations of the latter while theoretical frames are currently being unsettled. As Mannheim (1936) expressed long ago, the problem lies in the fact that “in certain disciplines empirical investigation goes on as smoothly as ever while a veritable war is waged about the fundamental concepts and problems of the science” (p. 103). Empirical research thus is employed as though the interpretation of the world were fixed instead of being continuously transformed symbolically by emerging sociohistorical and cultural interpretations and materially by political economic forces. Moreover, ontological and epistemological assumptions are always already informing data collection, analysis, and interpretation, not to mention the formulation of empirical research topics. The search for certitude through empirical research thus hides the hermeneutic process of understanding, a process that is expressed in everyday knowledge practices. Empirical verification, therefore, disregards the radical, political, and transgressive potential of reinterpreting/retheorizing the world and rewriting discourses, institutions, and social practices. It assigns scientific value to that which is observable, classifiable, measurable, and conformable to dominant theories and methodologies. Knowledges, lived experiences, and collective action are reduced to bits of information and are subsequently fixed and forever enclosed in a theme. The knower, in this sense, captures all that is to be known. These extractivist colonial knowledge practices prevent researchers from reading and interpreting the ways in which institutions, actions, and discourses intersect, transform, and implicate one another. The methodological obsession with data collection and extraction is indeed an expression of coloniality. FalsBorda (1970) warned politically engaged researchers about this obsession 50 years ago, which, according to him, would only lead to intellectual colonialism. TDH, conversely, unsettles this obsession by emphasizing that interpretation, that is, theorization, is a (geo)political act of knowing always already entangled with the social totality of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system in which social struggles unfold.

Conclusion In this chapter I have advanced transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH) as a theoretical method in activist education research. I aimed to contribute to the discussions around decolonizing methodology by intersecting the transgressive ethico-political dimensions of activist research with pluritopic hermeneutics and decolonial theory. TDH entails thinking from other places of understanding since the aim is to unsettle the exclusive, decontextualized (solipsistic), authoritative, and colonizing practices of academia. The symbolic and epistemic extraction, appropriation, and classification of other ways of interpreting and knowing the world are analogous to material extractivism. There exists, as

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I discussed, a dialectical relationship between the material coloniality of power and the symbolic coloniality of knowledge and being. I also pointed out that university student activism is not only a reaction to higher education reform. Rather, student activists transcend the institutional constraints of the university. Their organized resistance is indeed a collective expression opposing the coloniality of neoliberal discourses and practices that impose dominant ways of knowing and being. Moreover, I pointed out that universities and neoliberal higher education reform in particular are institutions and instruments of domination constitutive of the modern/colonial capitalist worldsystem. By developing an alternative interpretation of student activists’ collective action, I was able to underscore the extent to which student activists intervened in resisting the neoliberal recolonization of the university while also creating the conditions of possibility of democratizing and decolonizing the university. Reinterpreting the world through TDH hence becomes a counterhegemonic ethico-political act seeking to disrupt dominant interpretations and resist the colonization of Other places and institutions of understanding. TDH expands the notion of texts to actions and thus enables researchers to reinterpret and theorize student activism, as well as other forms of collective action, within a broader symbolic field in which discourses, institutions, and social relations of power are enmeshed. Transgressive decolonial hermeneutics thus moves toward the globally entangled social totality articulated by a multiplicity of texts, contexts, discourses, practices, interpretations, and social struggles. Lastly, taking student activism seriously through transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH) potentiates alternative ways of engaging in activist research, more relevant today with the resurgence of protests in Chile, Ecuador, Brazil, Columbia, Honduras, Haiti, and, most recently, in the United States within the context of the Black Lives Matter movement. The Americas are simultaneously the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and social movements, both of which are pedagogical events unveiling historically embedded, colonially structured, and racially coded inequalities. While the historical conjuncture of the pandemic begins to expose the coloniality of university governance and curriculum, the politico-pedagogical gestures of varying social movements provide the impetus for researchers to employ transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH) to reinterpret and hence theorize the political-economic, sociocultural, and institutional implications of an unstable, contested, and geopolitically embroiled contextual landscape.

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Braudel, F., & Wallerstein, I. (2009). History and the social sciences: The longue durée. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 32(2), 171–203. Castro-Gomez, S. (2005). La hybris del punto cero: Ciencia, raza, e ilustracion en la Nueva Granada (1750–1816). Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Congreso Nacional. (2019). Código Penal. Tegucigalpa: La Gaceta. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167. Cusicanqui, S. R. (2012). Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A reflection on the practices and discourses of decolonization. South Atlantic Quarterly, 111(1), 95. Davis, A. Y. (2012). The meaning of freedom. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Delamont, S., Atkinson, P., Smith, R., Da Costa, L., Hillyard, S., & Naoko Pilgrim, A. (2010). Review symposium: MARTYN HAMMERSLEY, questioning qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Research, 10(6), 749–758. Dilthey, W., & Jameson, F. (1972). The rise of hermeneutics. New Literary History, 3(2), 229–244. Dussel, E. (1993). Eurocentrism and modernity (introduction to the Frankfurt lectures). Boundary 2, 20(3), 65. Fals-Borda, O. (1970). Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual. Mexico City: Editorial Nuestro Tiempo. Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press. Fúnez-Flores, J. I. (2020). A critical ethnography of university student activism in postcoup Honduras: Knowledges, social practices of resistance, and the democratization/decolonization. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University. Fúnez-Flores, J. I., & Phillion, J. (2019). A political ontological approach and the decolonization of ethnographic research. In S. Sharma & A. M. Lazar (Eds.), Rethinking 21st century diversity in teacher preparation, K-12 education, and school policy: Theory, research, and practice. Switzerland: Springer. Gordon, L. (2011). Shifting the geography of reason in an age of disciplinary decadence. Transmodernity, 2(1), 95–103. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York, NY: New York University Press. Grosfoguel, R. (2007). The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political-economy paradigms. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 211–223. Grosfoguel, R. (2013). The structure of knowledge in westernized universities: Epistemic racism/sexism and the four genocides/epistemicides of the long 16th century. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 11(1), 73. Grosfoguel, R., Hernandez, R., & Velasquez, E. R. (Eds.). (2016). Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in philosophy of education from within and without. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Gubrium, J. F., & Holstein, J. A. (2008). Narrative ethnography. Handbook of Emergent Methods, 241–265. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14, 575–600. Holloway, J. (2010). Crack capitalism. London: Pluto Press. Klein, N. (2013). Dancing the world into being: A conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson.Yes Magazine. Retrieved from www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2013/03/06/ dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson/ Lander, E. (2008). Neoliberal science. Tabula Rasa: Revista de Humanidades, 9, 247–283.

198 Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores Lincoln, Y. S., & Cannella, G. S. (2009). Ethics and the broader rethinking/reconceptualization of research as construct. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 9(2), 273–285. Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia, 22(1), 186–219. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2002). Postimperial reflections on crisis, knowledge, and utopia: Transgresstopic critical hermeneutics and the “Death of European Man”. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 25(3), 277–315. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2008). Against war: Views from the underside of modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mannheim, K. (1936). Ideology and utopia. New York: Harvest Books. Mignolo, W. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mouffe, C. (2020). The return of the political. London: Verso. Paraskeva, J. M. (2016). The curriculum: Whose internationalization? New York: Peter Lang. Patel, S. (2017). Colonial modernity and methodological nationalism: The structuring of sociological traditions of India. Sociological Bulletin, 66(2), 125–144. Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power and eurocentrism in Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South, 15(2), 215–232. Rama, A. (1996). The lettered city. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1974). The conflict of interpretations. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, P. (2007). From text to action: Essays in hermeneutics, II (K. Blamey & J. B. Thompson, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Santos, B. de S. (2018). The end of the cognitive empire: The Coming of age of epistemologies of the South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Searle, J. R. (2006). Social ontology: Some basic principles. Anthropological Theory, 6(1), 12–29. Todd, Z. (2016). An indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: “Ontology” is just another word for colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1), 4–22. Torres, C. A. (2009). Education and neoliberal globalization. New York: Routledge. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1). Vommaro, P. A., & Briceño-Cerrato, G. (2018). Movilizaciones de las juventudes en Honduras: La experiencia de los estudiantes universitarios de la UNAH (2009–2017). LiminaR, 16(2), 29–44. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

12 Thinking with habitus in the study of learner identities Garth Stahl and Sarah McDonald

Introduction The concept of a ‘learner identity’ has been approached from a variety of different theories and methodological approaches. Scholarship on learner identities primarily speaks to various socio-psychological concepts such as ‘meta-cognition,’ ‘self-concept,’ ‘self-regulation’ and ‘practice.’ However, from a sociological perspective, the learner is conceptualized as both agentic and able to have control over their own decisions, but also as highly relational and embedded within the social milieu. The learner is significantly influenced both by the context of education systems and the individuals within them (Reay, 2010). We focus on what habitus lends to expanding our understandings of learner identities. Explorations of habitus began as early as Aristotle and was furthered by both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl as a theory of action, where social agents are not passive, “pulled and pushed about by external forces, but skillful creatures who actively construct social reality” (Wacquant, 2011, p. 85). Drawing specifically upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus we posit some aspects scholars should consider when attempting to use habitus to theorize learner identities. During his time in Algeria, where he performed his national service, Bourdieu developed an interest in habitus (c.f. Calhoun, 2006; Schultheis & Frisinghelli, 2012) as a way of thinking about how our lives are constrained by both socio-economic positioning and social structures. This interest runs throughout his extensive work. As with most sociological approaches, to understand Bourdieu’s work it is necessary to examine how agency and power are positioned. The structures, according to Bourdieu, are a constraining framework in which meaning is derived by a social agent. Furthermore, Bourdieu argues that structural disadvantages are internalized (through socialization) and produce forms of behaviour. Therefore, Bourdieu cannot be located on either side of the agency/structure divide (Grenfell, 2008) and, through playing both sides, Bourdieu’s tools address the tensions between the two, perhaps making his research a stronger articulation of the human experience. According to Bourdieu, habitus, as a tool, can be useful in providing insight into how we are socialized from birth to both understand and participate in

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the world and how our experiences are unequal. Today, we see habitus – like other terms in Bourdieu’s oeuvre (e.g. cultural capital, social capital) – mentioned in major UK and Australian news press like The Guardian, although it is not always clearly defined. Bourdieu (1998) describes habitus as embodied – “a body which has incorporated the immanent structures of a world or of a particular sector of that world – a field – and which structures the perception of that world as well as action in the world” (p. 81). Habitus, as a major part of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, exists in relation to his other tools, specifically field and capital. The ways that we access and move through and exist within various and particular social spaces (e.g. fields) depends on our accumulations of ‘capital’ – what Bourdieu describes as authoritative recognition of capital within these fields. For example, a professor may have spent substantial time in higher education and hold multiple degrees which are recognized as capital within the ‘field’ of a university. The professor can speak about his area of expertise confidently and using particular words and those around him will recognize that he has symbolic power within that field. However, when he goes to the mechanic to pick up his car, he has entered a new field where his degrees, skills and knowledge are likely not recognized. Similarly, the mechanic, who holds a similar authority and expertise in his workplace may feel out of place in a university where what ‘counts’ as capital is different. This chapter examines the way that critical theoretical educational research has operationalized habitus – in conjunction with capitals and field – to examine how learner identities are formed in formal education settings. In considering the role of the ‘learner’ we may expect to see equal attention to pedagogic styles and enactments. However, despite Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) calling attention to what they call pedagogic actions (PA), for the most part Bourdieu sees pedagogy as “the imposition and inculcation of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary mode of imposition and inculcation (education)” (pp. 5–6). Bourdieu argues that forms of schooling are where the student – while agentic – is directly and indirectly imparted with patterns of thinking. Specifically, we focus on how habitus captures the internalization of class and how it mediates relationally to various other fields (Stahl, 2015a, 2015b; Reay, 2004). Habitus, in this sense, highlights the importance of thinking about how individuals are conditioned by not only their social backgrounds but their primary socialization. This primary socialization informs one’s formal schooling experiences contributing to the structuring of an individual’s life chances (Li, 2015). We are interested in how habitus addresses how learner identities are configured in relation to social class, which then – through the process of primary and secondary socialization – contribute to the formation and maintenance of those identities. With this in mind, the conceptual tool of habitus represents an attempt to extend understandings around internalized behaviours, perceptions, and beliefs that individuals carry with them and which, in part, are translated into the practices they draw on as they transfer to and from the fields in which

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they interact. Habitus, therefore, is not static but “permeable and responsive” (Reay, 2004, p. 434), and the dispositions formed in the habitus become layered through [in]congruous experiences. While habitus has been critiqued for being too deterministic (Jenkins, 1992; Levinson & Holland, 1996), we place this criticism off to the side. Instead we focus on educational research where habitus has been found to offer rich explanatory potential in understanding how schools socialize students to see themselves as certain types of learners and where they come to embody a certain type of learner identity validated by the institution. Given how Bourdieu worked to break down what he perceived as the false divides between theory and method, we focus on the ways in which habitus is what is being studied while also an essential tool structuring the analysis (Reay, 2004). It is important to note here that the chapter purposely adopts the language of ‘learner identity’ – as opposed to ‘student habitus’ which is more common (c.f. McKinnon, 2016; Azizova & Perez Mendez, 2019) – and we focus on learner identities in formal educational institutions as opposed to the home (Noble, 2017). Working across Bourdieu’s scholarship, as well as scholarship inspired by Bourdieu, our interest is in what theory lends to research and vice versa.

An overview of habitus Bourdieu’s tools are designed to theorize human action as a dialectical relationship between objective structures and subjective agency. This section provides a brief overview of how Bourdieu conceived of habitus and how he used it to explore and critique social structures. Bourdieu refused to conceive of individuals and structures as binary oppositions and saw individuals and conditions within society as intertwined (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 19). Habitus, in Bourdieu’s words (1977), is: the strategy generating principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations . . . a system of lasting and transposable dispositions which integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks. (p. 72) To speak of habitus is to argue that individuals, as both physical bodies and subjective identities, are structured by their experiences with the wider social world (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Therefore, our dispositions, habits and perceptions, both internally and embodied, are created by our existence within the social and physical world. Bourdieu’s theory of practice intends to show how relations of privilege and domination are produced through the interaction of habitus, capital (e.g. economic, cultural, social and symbolic) and field.

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With this in mind, Bourdieu (1997) calls attention to the habitus as having a ‘practical sense’ where: what enables one to act as one ‘should’ (dei, as Aristotle put it) without positing or executing a Kantian ‘should’, a rule of conduct. The dispositions that [habitus] actualizes – ways of being that result from a durable modification of the body through its upbringing – remain unnoticed until they appear in action, and even then, because of the self-evidence of their necessity and their immediate adaptation to the situation. (p. 139) Of course, this ‘practical sense’ is shaped by the individual in relation to their experiences. Drawing on educational research, Lareau (2003) writes about how habitus is diferentiated amongst individuals, so that there is variation amongst people in terms of their skills, knowledge, social networks such as friends, family and acquaintances, and the material such as money and possessions. As we move through the world, our capital(s) may be recognized and valued depending on the logic of the fields we encounter which, in turn, afects our social status and reputation. “He writes that the structure of strategies depends on: (1) ‘their position in the field’ (the volume and composition of capital); (2) ‘the perception that they have of the field’ (habitus); and (3) ‘the state of the instruments of reproduction’ (field)” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 101; Bourdieu, 1984, p. 125; Yang, 2014, p. 1528). Therefore, the habitus – as an internalization of external structures – requires the researcher to consider how it reacts to the solicitations of the field. Thus, using habitus as a method for critical theoretical research requires careful thinking about how individuals are engaged in a process of social learning where – over time – there is an element of mastery. Linking back to our previous example, through the process of social learning it is conceivable the mechanic can come to master the logic of the university just as the professor can become a skilled mechanic. The habitus is, after all, malleable – but this raises questions as to the adaptability of the habitus as pre-existing dispositions remain a powerful structuring force. Habitus, as a theory, highlights how “not only is the body in the social world, but also the ways in which the social world is in the body” (Reay, 2004, p. 432). Therefore, the concept of habitus calls the researcher’s attention not only to how identity is formed in social processes and maintained, modified or even reshaped by and through social relations as well as the ethos of the institutions (past, present and future) but also to the way that institutions and structures can be modified by the internalized forces of habitus. Thinking about identity in terms of both individuals and structures is important because it highlights how individuals contribute to social reproduction and how certain discourses (e.g. meritocracy, neoliberalism, humanism) become internalized. Habitus functions as an internal and individually distinctive catalogue of social experiences and movement within the social world (Costa & Murphy, 2015). For example, Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) contend that working-class

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students do not aspire highly because, through their habitus, they have internalized and reconciled themselves to the idea that, because of a lack of social, cultural and economic capital, their opportunities are limited (Swartz, 1997). Or as Bourdieu (1992) asserts, “People are not fools; they are much less bizarre or deluded than we would spontaneously believe precisely because they have internalized, through a protracted and multisided process of conditioning, the objective chances they face” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 130). This brings us to an aspect of habitus Bourdieu calls attention to but is frequently forgotten, especially by critics who consider habitus as too deterministic. Specifically, how habitus engages in “strategic calculation of costs and benefits, which tends to carry out as a conscious level the operations that habitus carries out in its own way” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 131). Researchers contend that habitus is at once the “anchor, the compass, and the course of ethnographic journey” (Wacquant, 2011, p. 81) while functioning as a ‘conceptual linchpin’ that can translate concepts with highly economic connotations into non-economic paradigms (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Whilst habitus may indeed provide a valuable compass, it remains an abstract, contradictory and contested sociological concept that took many shapes even in Bourdieu’s own writing (Reay, 2004) and remains notably difficult to operationalize in sociological research (Sullivan, 2002). This has lent to different approaches in the operationalization of habitus where there is an ‘art to its application’ (Murphy & Costa, 2015) and significant debates (Stahl, Perkins, & Burnard, 2017).

Habitus and the study of learner identities In his work on learner identities, Bourdieu established early on how students from families with higher degrees of cultural capital not only had higher rates of academic success, but also exhibited different modes and patterns of cultural consumption and expression. Analyzing the role of schooling, Bourdieu “emphasizes that schools teach students particular things and socializes them in particular ways” (Grenfell, 2008, p. 188, italics in the original). For example, in terms of the corporeality, Bourdieu noted a tendency for teachers in mid-twentieth-century France to demand their students maintain a particular mouth shape. Such practices often “directly helped to devalue popular modes of expression, dismissing them as ‘slang’ and ‘gibberish’ . . . and to impose recognition of the legitimate language” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 49). Work inspired by Bourdieu highlights how most forms of formal schooling privilege not only certain aspects of selfhood but also certain behaviours and decorum (Ayling, 2019; Watkins & Noble, 2013). As a theoretical tool, habitus has implications when one considers education as a powerful form of inculcation – promoting certain values and knowledges – where educators often engage in socializing students to norms and behaviour, or in internalizing certain dispositions, within the habitus of the learner. For example, Lareau and Weininger (2003) draw attention to how cultural capital

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is institutionalized in the form of high-status cultural signals (attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviours and credentials) which then contribute to social and cultural exclusion contending: cultural capital in school settings must identify the particular expectations – both formal and, especially, informal – by means of which school personnel appraise students. Secondly, as a result of their location in the stratification system, students and their parents enter the educational system with dispositional skills and knowledge that differentially facilitate or impede their ability to conform to institutionalized expectations. (Lareau & Weininger, 2003, p. 488) So, not only do school systems actively foster the habitus of students, but some students are more primed for particular capitals to be fostered as schools “serve as the trading post where socially valued cultural capital is parlayed into superior academic performance” (MacLeod, 2009, p. 14). However, with this in mind, it is important to note that while inculcation does occur to varying extents it is never fully realized, as education is always a secondary form of socialization. An integral aspect of Bourdieu’s approach to habitus is the cognitive construction – or cognitive structures – highlighting the co-construction which occurs between field and habitus. Cognitive structures, shaped through the “spatial and temporal organization of social life,” serve as an orientation where the state finds ways to regulate practices and, by implication, dispositions within the habitus where “cognitive ‘categories,’ . . . are thus reified and naturalized” (Bourdieu, 1997, pp. 174–175). There exists a dialectical relationship between habitus and field where Bourdieu notes, “on one side, it is a relation of conditioning: the field structures the habitus. On the other side, it is a relation of knowledge or cognitive construction” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 127, original emphasis). This is important because the school – while powerful and potent – remains a secondary form of socialization. In studying the lives of young children, Connolly, Kelly, and Smith (2009), have highlighted how cultural dispositions, which are taken for granted and fostered in children within their respective communities prior to schooling, can then underpin the way that particular dispositions within school are developed and justified.

Applications: using habitus to theorize learner identities While there is no clear roadmap to apply habitus in the study of learner identities, many have capitalized on Bourdieu’s body of work to extend knowledge of how learner identities are formed and maintained through institutions (c.f. Stahl, 2015b; Li, 2015; Colley, James, Diment, & Tedder, 2007). Costa and Murphy (2015, p. 9) write: “Applying habitus as a methodological tool means devising mechanisms through which social agents’ dispositional schemes can be identified within the fields in which they originate or transform.” Habitus, as a research tool, cannot be studied in isolation and is intended to be used relationally with a careful consideration to how capital and field contribute to the

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actions of individuals as social agents. Foregrounding this relational approach to habitus to study learner identities is a conceptual break from the field of psychology or social psychology. With this in mind, we focus our attention on how habitus has been used by researchers to explore learner identities. We briefly outline three important aspects for scholars to consider when attempting to use habitus to theorize learner identities: the institutional ideal as structuring, corporeality and the hexis and the collective and classed nature. The institutional ideal as structuring For Bourdieu, pedagogy is nearly always authoritative and tied to symbolic violence (c.f. Noble, 2017) where students are often required in obvert and subtle ways to orientate themselves to idealized ways of being in line with the demands of formal schooling. This ideal contributes to the structuring of the habitus where learners are engaged in an internal deliberation around aspiring to an ideal that may never be achievable. The habitus is thus ‘orchestrated’ (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 146) in reference to the dominant discourse of the field and is worked upon as it seeks to accrue value (c.f. Skeggs, 2004). Frykholm and Nitzler (1993) write: Students with different habitus and notions are, through linguistic market forces, subjected to sanctions and structural influence towards mental homogenization. This structural influence also applies to the teacher who, to a certain extent, is ‘forced’ to adjust his or her teaching to the dominating structures of thought. (p. 442) Stahl (2015a) draws attention to how habitus is a constant evolving negotiation, simultaneously resisting and accepting the discourses it comes into contact with as a process of negotiation. As students move through their schooling and experience diferent pedagogic processes – experiences which become layered, contributing to the formation of their dispositions – this influences their internal deliberation and how they may act. As students come to aspire to the institutional ideal, Colley et al. (2007) notes a tension between the ‘idealised habitus’ and the ‘realised habitus’ where they call attention to the “tempering effects of the realised habitus [where] students might be overwhelmed by the emotional demands of the work” (p. 489). Through a fragmented process of inculcation of values, attitudes and mannerisms, the habitus of the students is formed in relation to the field (e.g. the institutional ideal). In experiencing this secondary form of socialization, such logics may sit (un)comfortably with the primary habitus (MacLeod, 2009; McKinnon, 2016). Habitus, in this instance, as an effort to break down the agency/structure divide, allows for a deeper consideration of not only the formation of identity in relation to the social world but the tension between the ideal and the reality.

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Corporeality and the hexis Habitus is composed of a set of dispositions inculcated in the familial environment; these dispositions become embodied in the corporeal, through immersion in repetitive social practices and relations. This is what Bourdieu and Passeron (1977, p. 82) call the ‘bodily hexis.’ In Masculine Domination, Bourdieu (2001) writes: Bodily hexis, which includes both the strictly physical shape of the body (‘physique’) and the way it is ‘carried’, deportment, bearing, is assumed to express the ‘deep being’, the true ‘nature’ of the ‘person’, in accordance with the postulate of the correspondence between the ‘physical’ and the ‘moral’ which gives rise to the practical or rationalized knowledge whereby ‘psychological’ and ‘moral’ properties are associated with bodily or physiognomic indices (e.g. a thin, sleek body tends to be perceived as the sign of a manly control of bodily appetites). (p. 64) We see here Bourdieu’s attention to bridging one’s attention to the body and the pre-reflexive consciousness. For Bourdieu (1997), hexis is the “durably modified body” which is “engendered and perpetuated, while constantly changing (within limits), in a twofold relationship, structured and structuring, to the environment” (p. 144). Watkins and Noble’s (2013) research into students of Chinese, Pasifika and Anglo backgrounds and the home/school congruence in Australia explores how certain attributes become “embodied as dispositions towards learning” which they call ‘scholarly habitus’ (p. 1). This documents how the body comes to possess particular skills which are valued as cultural capital, highlighting the importance of skills such as ‘productive stillness’ which enables students to engage in particular types of learning. In determining how the learning is accessed, they note: “Composure, or the readiness to work, is fostered by the capacities for stillness, quiet and self-restraint which also underlay the ability to give sustained attention to classroom events and to concentrate on tasks” (Watkins & Noble, 2013, p. 57). This productive stillness, as a disposition, positively contributes to the student’s academic achievement though, as Bourdieu (2002) notes, “Dispositions are long-lasting: they tend to perpetuate, to reproduce themselves, but they are not eternal. They may be changed by historical action oriented by intention and consciousness and using pedagogic devices” (p. 29). Habitus, in this instance, allows for a consideration of how learning experiences become deeply ingrained on the body of the learner which, in turn, becomes valued in certain ways as agents moves through their formal schooling and beyond the classroom. The collective and classed nature Bourdieu (1990) brings attention to how habitus, in terms of individual subjects, is “not the instantaneous ego of a sort of singular cogito, but the

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individual trace of an entire collective history” (p. 91). Reay (2004) highlights how Bourdieu “views the dispositions, which make up habitus, as the products of opportunities and constraints framing individuals’ earlier life experiences” (p. 433). In this way, habitus takes on particular classed dispositions which may figure out in different ways across diverse and contrasting educational fields. Researching elite spaces, Kenway and Koh (2013) draw on Bourdieu’s State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (1989/1996) to show how class, culture and education are used as specific tools of logic, sanction and domination within Singapore’s education system. Kenway and Koh (2013) write how the state nobility of Singapore is “formed in significant part through elite education rather than through direct reproduction via economic wealth or family power” (pp. 273–274). Their work highlights how education is central to the creation or reproduction of the state nobility through the building and maintaining of the elite ruling classes. In particular, streaming, which begins in primary school, fosters learner identities which draw on hyper-competitiveness and intense cultural cultivation, so that schools increasingly become “racially and socially stratified” (p. 279). These elite schools in Singapore have emerged as a result of streaming practices, with a discourse of meritocracy underwriting “the view that those who govern are the best qualified to govern due to their ‘educational and professional qualifications and commercial success’” (pp. 279– 280). Koh (2010) refers to this as ‘Singapore habitus’ which he describes as “deeply loyal and rooted in Singapore; hard-working and obedient for the national good” (p. 280). Within these elite schools, celebratory discourses, in terms of important alumni and school achievement, foster learner identities of meritocracy and deservedness which draw on what Kenway and Koh refer to as ‘character capital,’ made up of ethical dispositions and transnationality. Therefore, in considering how social conditions influence the habitus, forms of elite schooling inculcate the learner identity toward a sense of entitlement. Turning our attention to the learner identities of the working classes, it is important to note that during Bourdieu’s career he was witness to the onset of mass schooling in France which brought about a new axis of judgement and pathologization of working-class children. Grenfell (2008) writes how working-class “[c]hildren were to blame for poor performance through lack of talent, and their parents were to blame for not providing the appropriate background – that is, the appropriate cultural capital – to succeed in school” highlighting the “lack of fit between lower- and working-class habitus and educational field” (p. 189, italics in the original). Drawing on Bourdieu, Skeggs (2004) writes how a “working-class habitus is shaped by necessity and resignation” (p. 86) where it is compelled to adapt to the dominant societal norms; she notes how if the working class are “only ever evaluated through the dominant symbolic” (p. 87), how will they ever be constituted as valued? Studying learner identities in the classroom, Reay (2006) found that working-class children recognized those students who embodied traditional working-class behaviours as ‘good learners.’ In contrast, those who embodied ‘quiet achiever’ learner identities were overlooked and, at times, marginalized, by their peers. The impact on individual learner identities was that some

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students did not view themselves as ‘clever’ though they were academically high achieving. Furthermore, other students were able to cultivate a ‘clever’ learner identity by drawing on the cultural capital afforded them by their university educated parents, as well as on their own understanding of the specific gendered and classed hierarchies of their classroom. The findings of this research speaks to how habitus, as a method of inquiry, “can be used to focus on the ways in which the socially advantaged and disadvantaged play out attitudes of cultural superiority and inferiority ingrained in their habitus in daily interactions” (Reay, 2004, p. 436). In considering how learner identities are classed “although the habitus is a product of early childhood experience, and in particular socialization within the family, it is continually restructured by individuals’ encounters with the outside world” (Reay, 2004, p. 434). Encounters with and within educational institutions have a structuring force upon the habitus. With this in mind, other scholars have considered the capacities of working-class students to draw on certain capitals to ensure their success (Archer & Hutching, 2001). These approaches differ from their more middle-class counterparts who ‘inherit’ important knowledges from various social networks including family which set them up for success. Keeping in mind the reconciling of the structure/agency divide, as a tool, habitus requires the researcher to focus on how the individual embodies a field (Bourdieu in Wacquant 1989) – or how dispositions are “inevitably reflective of the social context in which they were acquired” (Reay, 2004, p. 435). Not using the methodological tool of habitus may lead researchers to privilege notions of agency which ignore the wider influence of the social structure.

Concluding thoughts To answer what habitus can offer educational researchers, this chapter has considered some of the implications for using habitus to understand learner identities. Much of educational research drawing on Bourdieu has focused on how the learner identity is structured by both the classed dispositions of those within educational fields as well as by the educational structure itself. Habitus, as a tool to think with, requires understanding people at the level of both individual dispositions and wider social structures. It seeks to provide insight into the shaping of internalized behaviours and perceptions as well as the degree of influence from social settings (e.g. family, school, leisure). We have shown how using habitus to explore learner identities brings to the fore a conceptualization of layered dispositions based on both “opportunities and constraints” as well as “external circumstances” (Reay, 2004, p. 435). Furthermore, habitus involves a consideration of how dispositions are embodied through repetitive social learning practices as well as institutional relations, though access to these are clearly not equal. In terms of what habitus lends to our understandings of equity within unequal systems, Reay (2004) writes how, for Bourdieu, “the goal of sociological

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research is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the ‘mechanisms’ that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation” (p. 431). Educational research without a theory or method of habitus may foreground individual experiences/ choices/actions, while not properly accounting for the dialectic of both internal and external structuring forces. In research which draws on habitus, some have called attention to “transformation” or a “transformative habitus” (c.f. McKinnon, 2016). While the habitus is significantly influenced by formal education – it can, after all, be nurtured – we would guard against notions of ‘transformation,’ as the primary habitus remains a powerful structuring force not easily altered. It was beyond the scope of this chapter to properly discuss the scholarship which has sought to explore the relationship between the habitus of the learner identity in relation to gender and ethnicity though this remains a significant field of study (c.f. Archer & Francis, 2005; Watkins & Noble, 2013; Mu, 2014). Nor have we considered our own habitus and how it is “handled in the empirical application of habitus” through the process of writing (Li, 2015; Reay, 2004). Habitus works at the unconscious level, although it can also operate at a conscious level when individuals confront particular experiences which elicit a self-questioning (Reay, 2004). As researchers using habitus as theory at a methodological level, it is important to remain continually reflective concerning what habitus, as a ‘conceptual linchpin’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 120) brings to the forefront in one’s methodological approach.

References Archer, L., & Francis, B. (2005). Negotiating the dichotomy of boffin and triad: BritishChinese pupils’ constructions of “laddism”. The Sociological Review, 53(3), 495–521. Archer, L., & Hutchings, M. (2001). “Bettering yourself ”? Discourse of risk, cost and benefit in ethnically diverse, young working-class non-participants’ constructions of higher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 21(4), 555–574. Ayling, P. (2019). Distinction, exclusivity and whiteness: Elite Nigerian parents and the international education market. Singapore: Springer. Azizova, Z. T., & Perez Mendez, J. (2019). Understanding promise: Impact of state support on Latino high school student habitus. Journal of Latinos and Education. https://doi.org/10. 1080/15348431.2019.1590203 Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard university press. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). In other words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (1989, French language edition; 1996, English translation). Bourdieu, P. (1997). Pascalian meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2001). Masculine domination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

210 Garth Stahl and Sarah McDonald Bourdieu, P. (2002). Habitus. In J. Hillier & E. Rooksby (Eds.), Habitus: A sense of place (pp. 27–34), Aldershot: Ashgate. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. Sage. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Oxford: Polity Press. Calhoun, C. (2006). Pierre Bourdieu and social transformation: Lessons from Algeria. Development and Change, 37(6), 1403–1415. Colley, H., James, D., Diment, K., & Tedder, M. (2007). Learning as becoming in vocational education and training: Class, gender and the role of vocational habitus. Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 55(4), 471–498. Connolly, P., Kelly, B., & Smith, A. (2009). Ethnic habitus and young children: A case study of Northern Ireland. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 17(2), 217–232. Costa, C., & McCormack, M. (2015). Bourdieu, habitus and social research: The art of application. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Frykholm, C.-U., & Nitzler, R. (1993). Working life as a pedagogical discourse: Empirical studies of vocational and career education based on theories of Bourdieu and Bernstein. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 25, 433–444. Grenfell, M. (2008). Pierre Bourdieu: Key concepts. Durham: Acumen. Jenkins, R. (1992). Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge. Kenway, J., & Koh, A. (2013). The elite school as “cognitive machine” and “social paradise”: Developing transnational capitals for the national “field of power”. Journal of Sociology, 49(2–3), 272–290. Koh, A. (2010). Tactical globalization: Learning from the Singapore experiment. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal Childhoods. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lareau, A., & Weininger, E. B. (2003). Cultural capital in educational research: A critical assessment. Theory and Society, 32(5/6), 567–606. Levinson, B. A., & Holland, D. C. (1996). The cultural production of the educated person: An introduction. In B. A. Levinson, D. E. Foley, & D. C. Holland (Eds.), The cultural production of the educated person (pp. 1–56). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Li, H. (2015). Moving to the city: Educational trajectories of rural Chinese students in an Elite University. In C. Costa & M. McCormack (Eds.), Bourdieu, Habitus and social research: The art of application (pp. 126–151). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. MacLeod, J. (2009). Ain’t no makin’ it. Philadelphia, PA: Westview Press. McKinnon, J. (2016). Breaking bad habitus: Using devised performance to challenge students’ perceptions of themselves as students. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 21(4), 535–550. Mu, G. M. (2014). Heritage language learning for Chinese Australians: The role of habitus. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 35(5), 497–510. Murphy, M., & Costa, C. (2105). Introduction. In M. Murphy & C. Costa (Eds.), Theory as method in research: On Bourdieu, social theory and education (pp. 1–15). Abingdon: Routledge. Noble, G. (2017). Learning with Bourdieu: Pedagogy, cosmology and potty training. In L. Adkins, C. Brosnan, & S. Threadgold (Eds.), Bourdieusian prospects. Abingdon: Routledge. Reay, D. (2004). “It’s all becoming habitus”: Beyond the habitual use of habitus in educational research. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(4), 431–444. Reay, D. (2006). “I’m not seen as one of the clever children”: Consulting primary school pupils about the social conditions of learning. Educational Review, 58(2), 171–181. Reay, D. (2010). Identity making in schools and classrooms. In M. Wetherall & C. Talpade Mohanty (Eds.), The Sage handbook of identities (pp. 277–294). London: Sage.

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Schultheis, F., & Frisinghelli, C. (2012). Picturing Algeria: Pierre Bourdieu. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Skeggs, B. (2004). Exchange, value and affect: Bourdieu and “the self ”. The Sociological Review, 52(2), 75–95. Stahl, G. (2015a). Aspiration, identity and neoliberalism: Educating white working-class boys. Abingdon: Routledge. Stahl, G. (2015b). Egalitarian Habitus: Narratives of reconstruction in discourses of aspiration and change. In C. Costa & M. McCormack (Eds.), Bourdieu, habitus and social research: The art of application (pp. 21–55). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stahl, G., Perkins, R., & Burnard, P. (2017). Critical reflections on the use of Bourdieu’s tools “In Concert” to understand the practices of learning in three musical sites. Sociological Research Online, 22(3), 57–77. Sullivan, A. (2002). Bourdieu and education: How useful is Bourdieu’s theory for researchers? The Netherlands Journal of Social Sciences, 38(2), 144–166. Swartz, D. (1997). Culture and power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: The Chicago Press. Wacquant, L. (2011). Habitus as topic and tool: Reflections on becoming a prize- fighter. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 8, 81–92. Watkins, M., & Noble, G. (2013). Disposed to learn: Schooling, ethnicity and the scholarly habitus. London: Bloomsbury. Yang, Y. (2014). Bourdieu, practice, and change: Beyond the criticism of determinism. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45, 1522–1540.

13 Theorizing with assemblage Context and text in youth studies Thomas Albright and Korina M. Jocson

Introduction Research with and for youth has been generally dominated by humanistcentered approaches. While these approaches remain valuable, there are nuances methodologically that may be further illuminated by an ontological or posthumanist lens in education. For instance, a posthumanist undertaking of youth studies focusing on youth participatory action research may take into account nonhuman agents that often go unacknowledged in humanist-centered projects. Similarly, youth studies focusing on youth literacies may present new insights into what is produced on the page or what meanings one can gather from text and in what contexts they occur. Critical theoretical methods as the overall premise of this volume can offer lines of flight for engaging in analysis respective to our research interests. Posthumanist research disrupts the hegemony of Western humanism and the centrality of Man (Wynter, 2003), allowing for more complex examinations of institutions, power, and relationality. In this chapter, we draw principally on assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) to suggest alternative ways of paying attention to text and context in youth studies. We also borrow from dialogism (Bakhtin, 1935/1981, 1984) to point out influences of literary criticism in our thinking. As we will illustrate, our entangled thinking created an assemblage both in coming together for purposes of writing this chapter and in the re-reading of YPAR and youth literacies as examples in our work. It goes to show that we are not separate from the thing itself.

What is assemblage? In line with difference and becoming, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage provides a lens for seeing the complicated entanglement and co-constitution of bodies, events, or phenomena. Assemblage offers new insights into becoming, recognizing that all are in process, always territorializing and deterritorializing. Those entanglements are a sticky constellation of forces, be they human, nonhuman, and/or discursive. For example, youth spaces such as classrooms, afterschool settings, or internet sites are not pre-existing but are the constant moving together and moving apart of objects, practices, bodies, sounds,

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feelings, technologies, and affects. Assemblage does not prioritize a humanistcentered approach but rather recognizes that each component of the entanglement has agency. With the guidance of such theory, assemblage widens our analytical frame of reference – to reimagine what can be seen as data and to rethink our relationship to data. The application of assemblage disrupts notions of linearity all too common in empirical qualitative studies. Our aim in this chapter, then, is to present assemblage in creating possibilities for reimagining text and context particularly within youth studies. In other words, what is the sticky constellation of forces that produce certain texts, and how are those texts entangled with other human, nonhuman, and discursive bodies? Similarly, what entangled bodies coconstitute the context and how does the context come to co-constitute those bodies? Borrowing from literary criticism and posthumanism offers new methodological possibilities for repositioning and examining discourses, human and nonhuman bodies, and learning environments, among others. Assemblage is an entanglement of various bodies that territorialize and deterritorialize (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Territorialization sharpens boundaries while deterritorialization destabilizes (DeLanda, 2006). Not only does an assemblage territorialize and deterritorialize, it ruptures binaries (Braidotti, 2018). Assemblages produce territories and these territories are not just space, but “they have a stake, a claim, they express” (Wise, 2015, p. 78). The assemblage is “a sticky constellation of a multiplicity of forces producing an event, situation, or composite grouping or body” (Dixon-Román, 2017, p. 36). The sticky constellations are not just bodies, “but also qualities, affects, speed, and densities” (Wise, 2015, p. 84). There is an emphasis of assemblage as an entanglement of multiplicities. Multiplicities can be bodies (human, nonhuman, and discursive), affects, speeds, etc. These multiplicities come together producing something new (Strom & Lupinacci, 2020). For example, in our coming together to write this piece our multiplicities came together producing a new entangled assemblage. Beyond seeing the assemblage as a thing, “it is the process of making and unmaking the thing, a process of arranging, organizing, fitting together” (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012, p. 747). Within this making and unmaking, we know what an assemblage is by understanding its function, what it does (Wise, 2015). The agency of the assemblage is owed to the “vitality of the materialities that constitute it” (Bennett, 2010, p. 34). To demonstrate this notion of territorializing and deterritorializing, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) put forth the entanglement of a wasp and orchid. The orchid deterritorializes by tracing the wasp, and the wasp reterritorializes the orchid by taking its pollen. Here, the wasp plays a role in the orchid’s reproductive process; it is becoming. Thus, there is a becoming-wasp orchid and becoming-orchid wasp. This is a rhizomatic becoming, a new assemblage. Such an example illustrates that territories are not fixed. They are always being made and unmade, producing and rupturing assemblages. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) note the significance of rhizomes or a way of thinking about non-hierarchical entry and exit points for data, representation, and analysis. There are six characteristics of the rhizome: (1–2) “connections

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and heterogeneity” – every part is connected to another part and they do not have to be the same nature; (3) multiplicity – no “relation to the One as subject or object”; (4) signifying rupture – “there is a rupture . . . whenever segmentary lines explode into lines of fight”; and, (5–6) “principles of cartography and decalcomania . . . perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways” (pp. 7–12). There is no beginning or end, only a becoming. Rhizomes spread horizontally and “each germination marks a new system and one cannot assign an origin or end-point” (McMahon, 2015, p. 50). This work allows us to move away from arborescent (e.g., trees, hierarchy, binary) representations of relationships to ones like that of the becoming-wasp orchid mentioned previously. To more concretely articulate what an assemblage may look like, we pull from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) classical discussion of the book as assemblage, A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. (p. 3) Rather than seeing a book as a self-contained entity, the notion of assemblage allows us to see how the collection of multiplicities (forces, qualities, afects, speeds, events, situations, composite groupings, systems of signs, etc.) territorialized and came to matter. The territorializing does not concretize the book, but rather that assemblage is in constant flux, territorializing and deterritorializing. The assemblage has a “distinctive history of formation” and a “finite life span” (Bennett, 2010, p. 24). There is always a becoming.

Assemblage as complicating educational settings We argue that a turn to assemblage in method and analysis is a turn toward that becoming. To us, assemblage is relevant to the understanding of text and context in youth studies. As noted, much of the work in youth studies is humanistcentered. While we respect and appreciate this work, posthumanist scholarship and assemblage allow for the accounting of those bodies and agents that may have otherwise gone unrecognized. Assemblage allows us to see the complexity of our systems of complicated entrapments and possibilities within, with, and through discourse, discursive practices, our bodies, relations between bodies, relations with nonhuman bodies, etc. (Davies, 2018). To briefly discuss this complexity we take note of the voice as assemblage (Mazzei & Jackson, 2019; Mayes, 2019) and envision a classroom as assemblage (de Freitas, 2012). Often within youth studies we position voice as emanating from conscious and self-contained entities. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) remind us of our always-complicated entanglement with others, as they noted in their writing of A Thousand Plateaus, “since each of us was several, there was already

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quite a crowd” (p. 3). As we are thinking, speaking, and writing our words are never wholly our own. Voice is entangled with objects, affects, bodies (human, nonhuman, and discursive), and theories (Mayes, 2019). The words, utterances, and statements are rhizomatic assemblages – lines of flight – making and unmaking other assemblages. Mazzei and Jackson (2019) place “voice within the material and discursive knots and intensities of the assemblage” (p. 67). The voice as practice is inseparable from the other bodies. This complicating of voice forces us to make particular moves. We must (1) pay attention to the “spatial and temporal dimensions of voice,” (2) not evoke representationalist positionings of voice as data, and (3) reimagine interviewing (e.g., how are the elements entangled in certain ways at certain moments?) (pp. 75–76). Like the voice, our learning environments (e.g., classrooms, afterschool spaces, online platforms, homes, streets, etc.) are rhizomatic assemblages (de Freitas, 2012). Honing in on the example of a classroom we can recognize that there are many different agents (human, nonhuman, and discursive) playing a role within that assemblage. The blackboards, desks, handouts, discourses of teaching and studenting, announcements over loud speakers, posters in the space, student scribblings on desks, pens, pencils, and disciplinary forces all play a role in the classroom assemblage (de Freitas, 2012). Agency is not just in the hands of the humans, but is also distributed amongst the various bodies (see Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010). By widening our view of agents and their entanglements, we account for our understanding of the various lines of flight produced by the multiple assemblages. As has been noted, assemblage complicates notions of individuality and the human as self-contained. The notion of rhizome ruptures conceptions of linearity by demonstrating how all are always in-process and becoming, no beginnings or ends (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Assemblage disrupts the human-centered work in youth studies by allowing for a widened acknowledgment of the agents involved and encourages posthumanist framings. Humans are but one agent within the assemblage; they are not the center. For the classroom as mentioned, students scribbling on the desks, loudspeaker announcements, and posters within and outside the classroom all add to our understanding of youth engagement. One would be remiss to overlook the role they play. As Mazzei and Jackson’s (2019) work on voice demonstrated it is not just that the text or context is an assemblage, but so too is the act of conducting inquiry. As Fox and Aldred (2015) noted, the research-assemblage is entangled with the phenomena under examination. The research-assemblage includes the bodies, researchers, events being studied, methodological tools (e.g., surveys, interviews, recording technologies, data analysis software, etc.), models, and theories guiding the research (Fox & Aldred, 2015). Within the research design there is attentiveness to intra-action (Barad, 2007) between assemblages. How do bodies come to be entangled, and what is produced from those entanglements (e.g., the territorializing and deterritorializing)? Data collection calls for a nuance of alertness to a variety of bodies (human, nonhuman, and discursive) and those that appear to be animate and inanimate. Data analysis also requires

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that we not only look at bodies, but how those bodies come to be and what is territorialized or deterritorialized via the assemblage (Dixon-Román, 2016; Fox & Aldred, 2015). Similarly, data analysis also necessitates recognition that the researcher is entangled with the assemblage and findings (Fox & Aldred, 2015). There is no outside; the researcher is entangled with that which they study (Barad, 2007). That said, traditional empirical research that may not place considerable weight on this entanglement qua assemblage as method can overlook deeper meanings regarding specific phenomena studied.

Re-reading YPAR and schooling assemblages: example 1 In theorizing assemblage within the context of youth studies we explore one session of a YPAR project from a 9th grade Ethnic Studies class during the 2017–2018 school year. To understand the classroom space is to first understand the larger school context. Vantage High (all names in this project are pseudonyms), located in western Massachusetts, serves approximately 1,200 to 1,300 students and 72% of those students identify as Latinx. Over the last 20 years, the school’s student racial demographic has shifted quite dramatically. Despite this change, the teaching force within the school has stayed overwhelmingly white. Public narratives (online news articles, student protests, teacher/student MI testimonials), discipline data, and school observations have indicated a deep racial rift within the school. The school was under state receivership as a consequence of the state labeling the school chronically underperforming. Thomas (first author) was involved with a teacher professional learning community in the school, and within that professional learning community multiple teachers had mentioned that the state takeover added pressure to their classrooms (e.g., more teacher observations and administrative pressure for teachers to raise state test scores). One of the necessary steps of engaging with assemblage is the move to displace humans as the only agents within an entanglement and recognize wider actors and multiplicities. In thinking about the school context as assemblage, the entanglement of the school’s racial divide with the state pressure to turn the school around produced a tense school climate. This tension spilled over into the 9th grade Ethnic Studies classroom. Nancy, a first-year Ethnic Studies educator, was leading the endeavor. Nancy was new to the school, but not to teaching. Prior to coming to Vantage, Nancy taught for eight years at a neighboring school and took an eight-year hiatus following that experience to focus on parenting. The 2017–2018 school year was Nancy’s return to teaching. Nancy was one of the few teachers of color within the school. Reflecting upon her experience, Nancy stated, “it was hard working in the school, as racism was everywhere and I felt very little support as a teacher of color.” As Allan (2004) reminds us, teaching and continuously learning to teach is not a linear process nor an arrival at a fixed goal, but is a journey, a wandering, with various lines of flight. Each wandering and line of flight creates new assemblages and new learning. This wandering illustrates the notion of

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rhizomes and pushing against linearity and arborescent (e.g., tree-like, hierarchical, binary) frameworks that often permeate traditional research processes and methods. A second consideration of applying assemblage is a pushing against linearity and recognizing the messiness of rhizomatic lines of flight. Too often within schools there is a focus on the instructional core: the teacher, the student, and the content (see City, Elmore, Fiarman, & Teitel, 2009), without an acknowledgment of the agency of the nonhuman actors. In viewing teaching through assemblage, it complicates our notions of agents and actors within the context. Teaching as assemblage requires a reconsidering of the role of the various agents – the humans, nonhumans, and discourses (Strom, 2015). The teaching is shaped by all of the agents – the classroom, the handouts, the texts, the students, the technology, etc. They are not disconnected; they are entangled. For example, within Nancy’s class, Nancy’s identity (a new Ethnic Studies educator, a returning teacher after a long hiatus, and woman of color), the students (teenagers first entering high school, their experience within and orientation towards schooling), the context (an Ethnic Studies course, the class having over 30 students), content (YPAR, Ethnic Studies, texts, handouts, etc.), and other nonhuman agents played an active role in producing the territorialized assemblage. Thus, a third consideration is that assemblage requires a reimagining of what is considered data, the relationship between data and researcher, and a recognition that all are entangled. Moving from the school to the classroom, we recognize the class as rhizomatic (de Freitas, 2012). Within each class session, and from session to session, there are various rhizomatic lines of flight. As has been noted, the classroom is composed of various bodies (human, nonhuman, and discursive) that move together and apart, territorializing and deterritorializing. The assemblages include the desks, students, pens, computers, papers, schooling language, teacher, texts, “as well as disciplinary forces whose power and agency are elicited through various routines and references” (de Freitas, 2012, p. 562). The routines, references, and administrator-teacher-student hierarchy entangle to demonstrate that power is not distributed evenly in the school or classroom assemblage (de Freitas, 2012). Nancy had over 30 students in her first period class. Near the end of the year, Nancy introduced YPAR to the class and the youth took on various YPAR projects in an attempt to make change within the larger community. Students conducted projects on topics ranging from depression and suicidal ideations among youth to expanding the reach of Ethnic Studies in the high school. Within the classroom there were various lines of flight as students would demonstrate acts of being engaged/disengaged, excited/bored, and active/passive. To more deeply explore the issue of assemblage in the context of youth studies we look at one session within the YPAR project. Prior to this specific session, the youth had already learned about YPAR (e.g., the work being youth centered, participatory, research based, and leading to action addressing a problem), created their project ideas, and started conducting research on their topic.

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During this session, Nancy was introducing a handout to the students. Nancy briefly spoke to the students about the contents of the handout and how it was simply to be used as an aid and was not a graded assignment. This handout had a variety of tools for the youth to utilize. There were Venn diagrams, places to create action plan timelines, lined space to write thoughts, open space to draw, and a variety of other tools for mental organizing. Nancy had spoken to Thomas about the handout and stated her intention was to provide the youth a document that allowed for them to express their ideas in a variety of ways. However, when Nancy gave students the handout they almost immediately went to filling out the handout like an assignment. Rather than looking at the handout as a tool to help guide their process, the students engaged with the handout as if it were an assignment. As one student Samantha noted, “Honestly, I am just trying to fill this out to get a grade.” Other students attempted to go section by section filling out the handout. As the researcher in the space, Thomas was confused and had to take a step back to ruminate on what was happening. Did the teacher not introduce the handout in an accessible way? Did the students not correctly interpret Nancy’s introduction? Did the students not understand what they were doing in their YPAR projects? Did Nancy not provide adequate explanations and examples of YPAR? In hindsight, these initial reflections were saturated with humanistcentered approaches. I was specifically focusing on the students and the teacher. I neglected the handout, the larger discursive apparatuses, and the other nonhuman agents at play within the assemblage. After stepping away from the work and re-reading the classroom space through a posthumanist lens Thomas was able to see a different interplay of actors. Assemblage as method demands a new way of engagement. One is entangled with a variety of agents and must account for the entanglement. Rather than looking at the session as a failure of the teacher or students, Thomas recognized a specific assemblage of teacher, student, handout, schooling discourse, and various other nonhuman agents. As Taylor (2013) reminds us, “objects and bodies are entangled intra-active forces in the spatial assemblage of the classroom” (p. 694). The handout was an agent in the assemblage. The handout had thing-power, “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennett, 2010, p. 6). The handout intra-acted with the students, teacher, and discourse of schooling to produce a schooling assemblage. A schooling assemblage is an intra-action of various entangled bodies that produces and reinforces traditional modes of hierarchy, students as passive rather than active agents in their education, and emphasizes prescriptive entanglements. During a conversation with Samantha, the aforementioned student, she expressed that “YPAR is just another school activity, I don’t think we can change society.” In further discussing schooling, Samantha noted, “I am so used to being told what to do.” This statement was not unique as other students made similar claims. For example, another student Nicole said, “Damn . . . no

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one has asked me that question before.” Another student Derrick noted, “in most classes . . . it [curriculum] is standardized . . . we aren’t unique.” Schooling as shared through students’ experiences is prescriptive and inflexible. For much of their experience in schools they have either been lectured at or told to fill out handouts. Critical scholars have noted how schools often operate as a tool for social regulation and reproduction (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Patel, 2016; Vaught, 2017). This schooling emphasizes standardization. Schools often “side-step student agency” (Rombalski, 2020, p. 3). So, when these students were provided the space and autonomy to conduct youth-centered work, they were also entangled with the larger discursive apparatuses of schooling, their schooling experiences, and the other nonhuman agents in the space. Rather than seeing the handout as a tool, the students engaged with it as an assignment; that is, the handouts they were given in schools were mostly treated as assignments. Thus, the thing-power of the handout worked in service of schooling. In other words, the handout was working in service of schooling and being entangled with the students, teacher, students’ experiences in school, and the discourse of schooling. These entanglements produced a schooling assemblage. We would have missed the complicated entanglement of the more-than-human intra-action if we did not frame the work through posthumanism and acknowledge the assemblages at play.

Re-reading youth poetry and literacies as assemblage: example 2 Apart from schooling assemblages, our coming together in this writing is an example of a textual assemblage. Thinking together has produced an assemblage that enables us to also recognize the intra-actions within this endeavor and, thus, the mutually constituted text as part of the analysis. The previous example of YPAR pushes our entangled thinking to a re-reading of related work centered on youth poetry. Korina has conducted various studies that focus on the literacy practices of young people across educational contexts. One context in particular is through June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program in Northern California. Youth poets in the program revealed not only the power of writing but the specific ways in which poems generate a sense of meaning-making in shaping youth’s identities (Jocson, 2008). The view of literacy as ideological and situated within context is influenced by sociocultural theories of learning. For this segment, it is important to show the relevance of dialogism and the notion of carnival in processes of becoming that are central to theories of assemblage, to illuminate in part how they advance our understanding of text and context in youth studies. Integral to poetry as a medium of expression is the notion of utterance and heteroglossia. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin (1981) defines heteroglossia as “multiple social discourses” or ways of seeing the world made up of

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alien words, “shared thoughts,” and “points of view” that weave “in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others” (p. 276). The word, for Bakhtin, is a concrete living utterance shaped by various historical moments in dialogically agitated social environments. Directly related to the formulation of one’s language, this notion of utterance explains how alien words become appropriated, adapted, and owned. It shifts away from formalism to give attention to the way words are born in social context and also extends structuralism’s linguistic model to emphasize that there exists a relationship between individual speakers and texts. According to Bakhtin, The word in language is someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. (1981, pp. 293–294) This articulation of owning one’s words, a social yet private act of the speaking subject, is useful to understanding how authoring through dialogic interaction takes place. It emphasizes the dialogic nature of language use by recognizing the role of others from whom speakers or writers have learned the words or the anticipatory language of those whom they are addressing or answering in particular social spaces (Bakhtin, 1986, 1990). The non-sequential or horizontal dimension in the dialogic interaction characterizes the complexity of their similarities and diferences in the exchange. At the intersection where subject, addressee, and context meet are the ambivalent elements where words as textual units are absorbed and transformed. As such, the interplay between textual and social spaces is deemed central to the process of becoming literate, to manipulate language and other signs, in ways that reveal the diferent social interests (Volosinov, 1973) and ideological becomings of individuals in their environments (Bakhtin & Medvedev, 1978; also see Freedman & Ball, 2004). Ideology in this sense is at the heart of the struggle over signs and meanings. Here, words as dynamic social sign systems are treated as situated within historical contexts, thereby rendering utterances as intricately shaped by existing social relations. Individuals’ social interests and ideological becomings reflect the class struggles present in communities as they share words, cultural symbols, and values to extend possibilities for communication, learning, and development. Take, for example, a child who grows up in a working-class multilingual household will not only pick up words and phrases (i.e., utterances) over time but will also develop ways of being and becoming in the world through the lens of particular cultural symbols and practices that may or may not be consistent

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with those of the dominant culture (i.e., English-only movement in the U.S.). Simply put, there is much complexity behind a seemingly simple uttered word. In Bakhtin’s view, the nature of the novel – or novelness – represents three concepts related to dialogism: polyphony, chronotope, and carnival. The first, polyphony (or multiple sounds), relates to heteroglossia and utterance as shaped by specific historical moments. The second, chronotope, refers to time and space, the axial ground essential for concretizing events, giving material form to representation, and “permitting the power of art to do its work” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 250). The intrinsic connectedness between time and space is laden with emotions and values to allow the flesh of narrative events in the represented work to enter the world of the reader or listener and thereby participate in the creation and renewal of the text. This connectedness also binds the novel as literary work to its temporal and spatial relationship with actual reality, or what Bakhtin calls the continual mutual interaction between the real and represented worlds. The third concept of novelness, carnival, emphasizes the embodiment of otherness. Carnival represents a historical phenomenon as in carnival events and, in literary form, is associated with breaking form in the spirit of free thinking. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin (1984) draws a parallel between the novel and the body. He describes the body as a living entity, as becoming, as grotesque, as different, and as continually created or re-created by the world, similar to the novel as intertextual and conceived from a web of relationships with the world. The novel in this light is said to be carnivalesque as it attempts to make the familiar strange, while also distinguishing itself as original from larger bodies of literary work. Most salient to us in drawing on Bakhtin’s work are the literary tendencies that relate to dialogism or specifically the construction of words and meanings through dialogic encounters. Specific to youth literacies, for example, poems produced by youth, inclusive of spoken word performances, are influenced by others’ voices and writing styles with some utterances drawn directly from existing literary texts. A re-reading of youth poetry in the manner described here is without a rereading of our own processes of becoming as writers, thinkers, and collaborators within youth studies. For instance, while attuned to dialogism and the ways utterances are lifted from others’ words or derived from literature, Korina also recognizes the assemblages that influence one’s writing and how they materially and discursively shape the text produced. What might a post-humanist approach to youth poetry yield to help expand theory and practice in literacy studies? How might a consideration for literacies as assemblage shift how we understand the text produced or the context in which it is produced? How might a consideration of our own processes of becoming influence how we view text and context in youth studies? Next is a poem Korina wrote in response to a critical race moment some years ago. It serves as an example to echo curricular material from June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, in particular a racial profiling prompt that many youth poets, students, and student-teacher-poets including Korina

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herself encountered in the program. It also serves as a heuristic for what possibilities may come when everyday experiences become living entities for analysis and exchange. The untitled poem is as follows: When are racist and sexist jokes Not racist and sexist? One could argue They depend on context, person, or tone To whom? Too many have let their guards down Dangerously assume jokes are only jokes Subtle ones, at best, betwixt. Comfortability and camaraderie Inevitably soft laughter in between The privileged (in this case a middle-aged White Man) does not realize the joke, the ramifications Of the joke or transparency through which The joke reveals itself. Normalcy Of ignorance and another (non)sense Of entitlement privilege the teller to say What is really on his/her/their mind There are untold stories, here Stones still unturned. It is time Once again to rage about curiosities, The elephant in the room. It is time To revisit the past. Otherwise, we risk A chance of bequeathing dangers We have known for generations All bets are on the table. In stepping back to think about the various intra-actions that shaped what is revealed in the poem, Korina has asked herself (and perhaps you – the reader – might do the same), “How does this particular moment of writing, of everyday living, of racialized and gendered experience continue to inform the ways I engage youth literacies in my work? What might be missed when my own processes of becoming and enfolding possibilities remain in the sidelines of theory and research?” Even the questions posed within the poem remain relevant and are worth re-asking at this juncture in U.S. history – with a presidential election underway and a potential for change toward racial and social justice. The questions also become all the more important in the midst of a continued global health pandemic. Again, Bakhtin’s dialogism provides an important frame for further theorizing with assemblage in youth studies.

Implications for research in youth studies Posthumanism and assemblage destabilize the hold of humanist-centered research by providing the acknowledgment and analysis of rhizomatic relations,

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nonhuman agents, and becomings. For researchers interested in youth studies, they can help to generate new questions, embolden analyses, and just as important enable a more nuanced lens into examining institutions, power, and relationality that may be missed in only employing traditional approaches. As the poem reminds us, “all bets are on the table.” The re-reading of youth text and context via a posthumanist framing illustrates the complexity of educational contexts. There are various bodies that are constantly intra-acting, moving together and apart, territorializing and deterritorializing, making and unmaking assemblages. Beyond a humanist-centered framing, what we have presented here (an assemblage in itself) complicates understanding of the various bodies and their agency. For example, in Thomas’s work, if there were to solely be a humanist-centered approach, then there would have been an oversimplification of the context and bodies intra-acting. Any intervention to follow this research would have fallen short as it would not have recognized the nonhuman agents and the entanglement of the various bodies. The posthumanist framing allowed for a re-reading of the space to see the agency of both the handout and the larger discourse of schooling and how those agents were entangled with the youth. In Korina’s work, if poems on the page were strictly treated from a humanist, sociocultural lens, then there would be missed opportunities for considering intra-actions and the moments still folding at the time of the writing. What are those intra-actions and moments, and in what ways do they shape (how we view or treat) youth’s literacies across various social and educational spaces? In what ways can they better illuminate text and context in the study of schools and schooling generally, or literacy practices of youth specifically? From what we have argued, a posthumanist framing can help to illustrate how we as researchers are always a part of the phenomenon being studied. Because, simply, we are not outside of any project. A posthumanist framing enables us as researchers to pay attention to agential bodies that often go unacknowledged in traditional humanist-centered approaches.

References Allan, J. (2004). Deterritorializations: Putting postmodernism to work on teacher education and inclusion. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(4), 417–432. Bakhtin, M. (1935/1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. Bakhtin. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his world. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1990). Art and answerability: Early philosophical essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M., & Medvedev, P. (1978). The formal method in literary scholarship: A critical introduction to sociological poetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum Physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

224 Thomas Albright and Korina M. Jocson Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York, NY: Basic Books Inc. Braidotti, R. (2018). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities. Theory, Culture, & Society, 1–31. City, E., Elmore, R., Fiarman, S., & Teitel, L. (2009). Instructional rounds in education: A network approach to improving teaching and learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davies, B. (2018). Ethics and the new materialism: A brief genealogy of the “post” philosophies in the social sciences. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39, 113–127. de Freitas, E. (2012). The classroom as rhizome: New strategies for diagramming knotted interactions. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(7), 557–570. DeLanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. New York, NY: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dixon-Román, E. (2016). Algo-ritmo: More-than-human performative acts and the racializing assemblages of algorithmic architecture. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(5), 482–490. Dixon-Román, E. (2017). Inheriting possibility: Social reproduction and quantification in education. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Fox, N., & Aldred, P. (2015). New materialist social inquiry: Designs, method, and the research-assemblage. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 18(4), 399–414. Freedman, S., & Ball, A. (2004). Ideological becoming: Bakhtinian concepts to guide the study of language, literacy, and learning. In S. W. Freedman & A. F. Ball (Eds.), Bakhtinian perspectives on language, literacy, and learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jocson, K. M. (2008). Youth poets: Empowering literacies in and out of schools. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Mayes, E. (2019). The mis/uses of “voice” in (post)qualitative research with children and young people: Histories, politics and ethics. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32(10), 1191–1209. Mazzei, L., & Jackson, A. (2012). Complicating voice in a refusal to “let participants speak for themselves”. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(9), 745–751. Mazzei, L., & Jackson, A. (2019). Voice in the agentic assemblages. In N. Denzin & M. Giardina (Eds.), Qualitative inquiry at a crossroads: Political, performative, and methodological reflections (pp. 67–79). New York, NY: Routledge. McMahon, M. (2015). Difference, repetition. In C. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze key concepts (pp. 42–52). Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Patel, L. (2016). Pedagogies of resistance and survivance: Learning as marronage. Equity & Excellence in Education, 49(4), 397–401. Rombalski, A. (2020). I believe that we will win! Learning from youth activist pedagogies. Curriculum Inquiry, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2020.1749515 Strom, K. (2015). Teaching as assemblage: Negotiating learning and practice in the first year of teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 66(4), 321–333. Strom, K., & Lupinacci, J. (2020). Putting posthuman theories to work in educational leadership programmes. In C. Taylor & A. Bayley (Eds.), Posthumanism and higher education: Reimagining pedagogy, practice and research (pp. 103–121). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, C. (2013). Objects, bodies and space: Gender and embodied practices of mattering in the classroom. Gender and Education, 25(6), 688–703.

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Vaught, S. (2017). Compulsory: Education and the dispossession of youth in a prison culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Volosinov, V. N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language. New York, NY: Seminar. Wise, J. (2015). Assemblage. In C. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze key concepts (pp. 77–87). Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

14 Using critical race spatial method to understand disparities in controlled choice plans Amos J. Lee and Alice Y. Lee Introduction Racial inequality within U.S. schooling is a time-honored tradition. Never has the U.S. provided an equal or fair education to Black and Brown students. While questionable improvements have been made due to massive social protest (e.g., Civil Rights Movement), these gains rarely stood the test of time. Currently, schools are resegregating at an alarming rate (Orfield, 2013). The educational opportunity gap also continues to grow as school funding, housing, and economic disparities continue to widen along racial lines (LadsonBillings, 2006). When it comes to education, students of Color are clearly getting the short end of the stick whereas their white counterparts are receiving resources and privileges in exorbitant amounts. And yet, this is not a new phenomenon. Even the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, though heralded as a great equalizer, still had racially inequitable consequences because the ruling never interrogated the root causes of racial disparity (i.e., white supremacy). In failing to interrogate white privilege and white parental resistance to desegregation (Roda & Wells, 2012), the lasting result was the loss of Black teachers, administrators and control of school boards by Black communities (Bell, 1980; Tillman, 2004). Since white parental privilege meant the prevention of equally bussing white children into Black majority schools, Black children and their families faced the brunt of being bussed into unfamiliar hostile terrain filled with white students, white teachers, white administrators, and white school boards (Bell, 1980; Tilman, 2004). Therefore, making small equity-oriented changes to an enormously large, white-dominated education system continues to ignore the massive systemic privilege held hostage by white parents (Roda & Wells, 2012). While 65 years have passed since the passage of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), segregated schools still remain the norm within U.S. public schools (Frankenberg, Ee, Ayscue, & Orfield, 2019). History teaches us that as a result of desegregation efforts, white families fled urban areas to surrounding suburbs to set up their own publicly funded school systems (Rothstein, 2017). White families were supported by the courts in keeping their school districts segregated (i.e., Milliken v. Bradley ruled that schools were not responsible for segregated conditions if they did not purposefully discriminate against students of Color). Furthermore,

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local, state, and federal governments were also complicit in upholding and promoting racist policies meant to support segregation and a hoarding of resources in white communities (Rothstein, 2017). To adequately address and critique the complicity of governing bodies upholding white privilege and promoting segregation, education-based methods must continue to adapt as well. Therefore, in this chapter, we explicitly call for a different approach, using a critical race spatial method (CRSM), that affords new areas of inquiry into education-based problems that traditional empirical studies do not. We particularly hone in on the topic of controlled choice models since this topic is often explored through quantitative studies that do not factor in the permanency of racism within the research designs. Throughout this chapter, we will draw on an amalgamation of critical race theory and a critical spatial perspective to offer a novel theoretical method that we call critical race spatial method (CRSM). CRSM offers a way to explore, examine, and critique school inequity as it relates to space, geography, and segregation. We begin then by first explaining the education-based problem that we are seeking to understand through CRSM.

Area of inquiry: what is controlled choice? Controlled choice is a policy and practice that seeks to ameliorate school segregation by using curricular add-ons, with the hope of enticing white parents and their children into segregated schools. This policy is based on a neo-liberal approach, which emphasizes that creating a competitive market for education will naturally weed out “underperforming” schools (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2013). Parents will, in turn, not send their children to schools that are “underperforming” and thus, under-chosen schools will respond by improving their practices in order to attract more parents and their children (i.e., customers). Controlled choice, by design, believes that competition is the key to attract families instead of understanding schools as a public good (e.g., fire departments, health departments) in which everyone can benefit. Under a market-based (i.e., neo-liberal) controlled choice system, the onus of desegregating schools often falls onto Black and Brown majority schools that are forced to fight for the enrollment of white families by offering: before and after care, foreign-based field trips, brand new facilities, bilingual education (e.g., Chinese, French), Western-centered arts (e.g., orchestra, band, ballet), STEM-related curricula, gifted programming, or the International Baccalaureate (e.g., magnet schooling) (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Orfield & Frankenberg, 2013). These shiny objects have focused on the needs and desires of white parents to provide their children with the best education that free public schools have to offer. When confronted with the question of whether or not these practices benefit students of Color, the response is often as follows: 1

Attracting white children and their parents into majority non-white schools will also benefit the Black and Brown children there.

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Black and Brown students in segregated schools will get the benefits of the new curriculum and new opportunities used to attract white parents into their school. Black and Brown students will also benefit long term from having an integrated school and all the resources that white parents bring.

But what happens when funding for programs end and white parents have the social mobility to move their children to other schools? What happens if white parents do not take the bait and choose not to attend these newly designed schools? Who benefits from this structure and policy? While some may argue that a carrot is more efective than a stick, what happens if white parents don’t like the carrot ofered and with no threat of the stick (i.e., mandated desegregation), choose to only apply to white majority schools? By not seriously contemplating these questions, school districts continue to waste expensive resources on white-centric school assignment practices that compound racial disparities. In our application of CRSM to controlled choice policies, we center our attention on a school district located in Champaign, Illinois and situated next to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This school district has had a long legacy of segregated schooling conditions and has tried different approaches to desegregate its schools. Studying this school district affords us the opportunity to employ a critical race spatial method to unearth the racialized spatial inequities embedded within the school’s surrounding geography. Particularly salient to CRSM is Champaign’s controlled choice model (2002) that was lauded, at the time, as being able to overcome school segregation by incentivizing Black majority schools to white parents. Yet, with the passage of time, little has changed for Champaign and the program, once lauded as innovative, continues to fail in redressing segregated schools.

Critical race spatial method: theoretical constructs We draw on an amalgamation of critical spatial perspective (CSP) and critical race theory (CRT) as two theoretical frameworks that inform our critical race spatial method (CRSM). Critical race theory provides the necessary framework to understand the all-encompassing nature of race and racism that is embedded within every institutional and cultural fabric of American life (LadsonBillings & Tate, 1995). Critical spatial perspective provides a robust framework that informs us of the ways that social hierarchies govern the geographic placements within our society (Soja, 2010; Vélez & Solórzano, 2017). Both theoretical frameworks together provide a strong understanding of the ways that racial inequality is permanently embedded in the spatial geography of a community. This intersectional approach assumes that both racial and spatial realities are intricately tied to one another. Without exploring, understanding, examining, and critiquing the ways that racial realities are embedded within geographic conditions, addressing issues of controlled choice inequities will fall short of

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systemic change. In our case, when analyzing controlled choice policies, we center race and its impact on the geohistorical and geopolitical realities of the community. We combine these two approaches to work in tandem as we attune to the ways in which race and space play out in school assignment practices. Critical race theory Critical race theory emerged as both an explanatory and analytical framework that centers race and racism (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). The field emerged due to the persistent elusiveness of racial equality in the U.S., even after major U.S. Supreme Court decisions (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education) were passed with hopes of leveling the playing field. In response, law professors such as Derrick Bell, Mari Matsuda, Neil Gotanda, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Crenshaw made key intellectual contributions that helped form the movement. Their contributions theorized about the shortcomings of the judicial system in rectifying racial inequality and the persistent nature that racism has within core U.S. institutions. As summarized from (Lee & Lee, in press, pp. 82–83) the core CRT tenets are as follows: •

• • •

CRT posits that race and racism are endemic within everyday life, have a permanency within U.S. society/institutions, and are so commonplace that only the most egregious forms of racism are acknowledged, thus deemphasizing all other forms of racism present in daily life. CRT argues that under a system of white supremacy, whiteness has value and racism is used to maintain a racial hierarchy in which white people dominate. Progress made for People of Color, particularly Black and Brown communities, is achieved only when it “converges with the interests of whites” (Bell, 1980, p. 523). CRT challenges notions of dominant views that substantiate ideologies rooted in ahistorical notions (e.g., slavery ended a long time ago and no longer affects us today, the law is neutral and fair to all people regardless of race).

These core tenets provide the framework for interpreting and analyzing school assignment policies known as controlled choice for what they are: a racist neoliberal (market-driven) policy that continues to reinforce whiteness as property by succumbing to white educational demands and interests at the detriment to Black and Brown students. In addition, CRT tenets allow for an in-depth examination in understanding the ways in which school assignment policies continue to be held hostage by white educational interests. However, while CRT is a useful explanatory framework in understanding how race and racism are central to education, the role and function of spatial realities are not clearly integrated. Therefore, critical spatial perspective ofers an additional theoretical construct useful in analyzing issues of school segregation that are embedded in the local geography of a community.

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Critical spatial perspective To understand how to use a critical race spatial method (CRSM) in investigating spatially related inequities, we begin first by describing the lineage of a critical spatial perspective. Ideas foregrounding the role of space and/or geography within power structures have multiple lineages (bell hooks, 1990; Foucault, 1986; Said, 1978). However, we choose to specifically emphasize a lineage that stems from Soja’s (2010) work, particularly as his ideas seek spatial justice. Seeking spatial justice by understanding the human struggle over geography and explaining the consequences of geography are essential in understanding Soja’s (2010) work. More specifically, Soja’s critical spatial theory is an “explanatory spatial perspective” that theorizes about the ways in which social justice is both created and maintained through geographic spaces (p. 2). In our understanding of controlled choice practices, having this spatial awareness means understanding the geographic consequences of a specific school location and also the ongoing struggle that is socially enacted and collectively produced in that particular space (e.g., school building). However, Soja’s ideas do not explicitly articulate the persistent and ubiquitous nature of racism in the U.S. Therefore, we intersect Soja’s critical spatial perspective with an explanatory framework for how race functions in the U.S. (critical race theory) to provide an understanding that when it comes to racial justice, there is “always a relevant spatial dimension” (Soja, 2010, p. 32). Racist housing practices, for example, have spatial consequences: segregated schools. Segregated schools were constructed out of an unjust and racially biased geography that did not randomly appear. They have both a history and a lineage within a community. Together, Soja’s critical spatial perspective combined with critical race theory forms our critical race spatial method (CRSM), which seeks to understand, examine, and ameliorate unjust racial geographies and the consequences that both race and space bear on segregated communities of Color.

Critical race spatial method: methodological implications What constitutes data in CRSM? Traditional empirical approaches in analyzing and interpreting controlled choice data focus on whether school assignment policies and practices create desegregated conditions in schools. These traditional approaches, however, do not consider the ways in which the data can lead to skewed notions of desegregation. For example, if a Black and Brown majority school has self-contained gifted classrooms that are predominantly white and affluent, the school may appear to be desegregated because of the racial diversity present in the school. This data is misleading, however, because it does not account for the segregated circumstances that continue to privilege white students within the school. While the school as a whole may seem racially diverse, in-school segregation can still flourish (Mickelson, Bottia, & Southworth, 2008). In this regard, using

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a critical race spatial method departs from these traditional empirical paradigms of analyzing data and posits a different way forward. CRSM does not view data collection as a static or neutral process. Rather, we argue through CRSM that data is in fact evidence used or created (i.e., racial mapmaking) to investigate and expose the inherent racial biases seen through the spatial realities of an education system. In our school of choice case, we use CRSM to transform relevant information into evidence that exposes how race and racism are inextricably ingrained in school assignment practices. The evidence should provide a lens into understanding how race and space work in conjunction with each other to produce and sustain inequities within a school system. Under CRSM, the target is information that provides evidence of a racialized geography that continues to marginalize students of Color. Evidence found by employing CRSM should provide more clarity regarding the unjust intersections between race and space such as how a district chooses where to build its schools or better understanding segregation patterns within a community. Through CRSM, educational researchers then can begin to identify structural issues and suggest how to repair a broken system by targeting racialized spatial inequalities that are oftentimes hidden from plain sight. Application of CRSM The application of critical race spatial methods (CRSM) is employed to investigate how racism and spatial injustice persist in policies that impact the lives of children of Color, and generate new ideas and theories of how racialized spatial injustices continue to exist. Using CRSM, we can spatially understand through visuals (e.g., maps) the nature of racist policies and procedures embedded within school of choice practices. GIS systems and existing maps have been utilized to analyze race and historic racism in schools (Morrison, Annamma, & Jackson, 2017; Vélez & Solórzano, 2017). Through CRSM, we extend the repertoire of using maps by centering mapmaking on specific intersections of race and space. While other forms of critical race spatial analysis (Morrison et al., 2017; Vélez & Solórzano, 2017) exist, which “utilizes maps in powerful ways to spatially analyze the role of race and racism in the historical and contemporary context of schools” (Morrison et al., 2017, p. 11), we present CRSM as a complement that focuses on generating maps to explore spatial realities in ways that target racial inequities embedded within geographic spaces. In our case, CRSM goes beyond exposing the role of race and racism in socio-spatial realities, and instead generates new ideas that question the pursuit of desegregation within a system (i.e., judicial, state, local, and federal governing bodies) that privileges white families. A wide range of assumptions also support the use of controlled choice policy in desegregation efforts. In our work, using CRSM, we specifically target these assumptions and precepts held to support and advocate for a school of choice model for student assignment into schools. We aim to show not only the ways

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in which school assignment practices fall short in desegregating schools and in meeting the educational needs of families of Color but equally challenge the idea that desegregation is what will produce equity for children of Color. Using CRSM, we create maps using a process we call racial mapmaking, to think about the ways that school of choice can never work within specific locales. CRSM-generated maps challenge the narrative of color-blind, neoliberal policies being able to rectify racism embedded within school of choice decisions. This counter-narrative rejects the premise that racism in school assignments can be rectified by making schools into commodities with varying educational opportunities. Critical race spatial method (CRSM) also helps us understand that de facto segregation in schooling is not a random phenomenon but intentionally and systematically practiced (e.g., housing prices, racial makeup of neighborhoods, school locations). Geography is not neutral. Boundaries are not simply spatial markers but point to historic and systemic power differences in lived experiences. Therefore, desegregation requires rectifying white parents’ racism when selecting schools for their children. Without this fundamental understanding of how white supremacy is embedded within every aspect of schooling, anti-racist transformation and new imaginings are not readily possible.

Modeling CRSM application on school of choice policies We illustrate critical race spatial method (CRSM) using Amos’s research of Champaign school district and their use of controlled choice (i.e., school of choice) in their school assignment processes. We employed CRSM to create racialized maps that presented a lived reality that challenges the notion that controlled choice models can rectify embedded geographic racism. We also employed CRSM to see the ways in which white supremacy continues to function within geographic realities. While we present what may seem like traditional empirical data sets, we apply CRSM to the numerical information to theorize about racism and how white supremacy is embedded deep within the local landscape. CRSM also explores the historical context of school referendum outcomes which illuminate the ways white interest convergence governs how many and where new schools are constructed. Contextual background Champaign school district was selected for its long history of a controlled choice program that began in the early 2000s under a court-mandated consent decree. This consent decree required Champaign schools to address multiple issues related to educational inequity for Black students (e.g., discipline, special education placement, gifted enrollment, etc.), as well as rectifying segregated schools in the north end of the community. Champaign schools responded with a controlled choice plan to remove the arbitrariness of previous school

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assignment practices, which were found to maintain segregated schools – majority Black in the north side and majority white in the south side. The new policy was aimed at attracting white parents into Black majority schools situated in the north end of town, while also giving Black families greater access to white majority south end schools. In the 2000s, Champaign’s controlled choice plan was heralded as innovative and dynamic for using educational programs (e.g., STEM, International Baccalaureate, Self-Contained Gifted Programs) to draw white families into north end schools. Subsequently, the gains made in the early 2000s were short lived and in 2019 the schools in the north end were once again segregated with a Black majority. Given the persistent nature of segregated schooling, we model for the reader how we use CRSM to challenge the assumptions based on Champaign’s failed controlled choice policies. We offer the following three examples to model the ways in which we employed CRSM. Example 1: racial mapmaking and segregated demographic history We used critical race spatial method (CRSM) to create a map that shows the amalgamation of a core critical race theory tenet of challenging the dominant view with a critical spatial perspective which understands that geography has consequences. We use the amalgamation of these ideas (what we call CRSM) to design and create a map showing the racialized geographic consequences within Champaign, Illinois. As Figure 14.1 shows, residential segregation continues to persist within the city. We created this map from a portion of The Racial Dot Map provided by the University of Virginia in order to show the persistent nature of racial housing segregation that continues in Champaign separating the north end from the south end of town. We highlight the historic north end of town (i.e., labeled as Historic North End) due to its long and rich Black history within the community. We show visually how this area continues to be predominantly Black, which we know dates back to the Great Migration. When Black families first moved into Champaign they were forced into the underdeveloped north end where white families did not live. Black families were then restricted to this geographic area through redlining and restrictive covenants that prevented them from obtaining mortgages in south end neighborhoods. This history of racism in housing continues to have geographic consequences in the present as the north end continues to be majority Black, while the south end of town continues to be majority white. This history and spatial reality then have consequences within public schools. Table 14.1 shows the continued impact that historical housing segregation has on schools situated in those neighborhoods. BTW (Booker T. Washington), Stratton, and Garden Hills are all elementary schools situated in the north end of town and are majority Black. While the consent decree and the controlled choice mandate first began in the early 2000s, the advent of time shows that in 2019, the schools on the north end

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Figure 14.1 A demographic map of Champaign, IL with 2010 Census data. This map shows the continued housing segregation in Champaign. Source: Reprinted from The Racial Dot Map, D. Cable, 2013, retrieved from http://demographics. coopercenter.org/racial-dot-map/

have resegregated. This table was generated by using CRSM to understand the consequences of housing segregation as seen through Figure 14.1 and the impact it had on schools situated within the Black majority north end. Through CRSM, we purposefully ranked the schools in the district by the percentage of white students at each school, to show the continued state of segregation within school buildings across the district with IPA being an outlier due to its bilingual status. We wanted to show that after 20 years of controlled

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1

Table 14.1 Elementary school racial demographic (2019)

Carrie Busey Bottenfield Southside Barkstall Westview Robeson Kenwood Dr. Howard BTW* Stratton* Garden Hills* IPA**

White

Black

Hispanic

Asian

Total enrollment

51 51 64 38 38 48 40 29 21 15 6 20

20 20 24 31 27 28 31 39 56 62 63 14

7 8 1 7 14 6 6 3 8 11 20 61

11 14 3 13 10 6 10 17 8 4 5 1

475 453 286 445 435 415 356 311 423 474 425 336

* North end schools ** Bilingual school Source: Data taken from Illinois Report Cards

choice policies, the schools in the predominantly Black north end still had the lowest percentages of white students. What we see, then, is that overcoming white parents’ discriminatory reluctance to send their children to Black majority north end schools is unsustainable. Traditional empirical analyses would suggest that the current incentives used in the control choice model are ineffective, and suggest other incentives to employ. However, by using CRSM, we are able to create Figure 14.1 and Table 14.1 to clarify how race plays out within geography (i.e., segregated north end), and the consequences that a segregated geography has on schools situated in traditionally marginalized neighborhoods (i.e., Black and Brown). No amount of magnet programming or new building facilities retained white parents’ interests long enough to desegregate Black majority schools in Champaign on a long-term basis. Example 2: racial mapmaking and racism embedded in spatiality We employ CRSM in our second example to provide a counter-narrative (e.g., CRT tenet) that shows how the geographic locations of schools (e.g., CSP tenet) within Champaign have always favored white families in the school of choice process. In Figure 14.2, all the elementary schools in the district are transposed onto The Racial Dot Map with the north/south end racial divide. In Figure 14.2, the majority of the schools, in 2019, are located in the south end of town within predominantly white areas. Using the intersectional nature of CRSM to investigate the history of race and space as it relates to each school building in the district, we see that the overabundance of schools in the south end of town was not by accident. For decades, referendum-approved tax dollars built brand new south end schools while leaving north end schools dilapidated.

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Figure 14.2 The location of the 12 elementary schools in Champaign school district.

While most schools including north end schools eventually were remodeled or rebuilt, the number of north end schools did not increase. The geographic consequences of listening to white educational needs meant building more south end schools that were further away from the north end of town. This historical discriminatory process then had consequences that plagued the school of choice process. As Figure 14.2 shows, the further south a family lived, the less likely they would attend a school on the north end. When reviewing the figure, this benefited white families in particular as they occupied most of the south end

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neighborhoods. Particularly, Carrie Busey, which was relocated from a more central location (IPA location) in the community to a location further south. Due to proximity factors incorporated into the school of choice process, if you live around the Carrie Busey school, you had a better chance of attending that school given all the factors used to assign students. White parents could choose, however, to instead attend a north end school by ranking it higher on their registration form; but as Table 14.1 shows, this was rarely the case. By applying CRSM to create racialized maps of where schools are placed in the community, we can visually see that Champaign’s controlled choice process was flawed from the beginning because more choices were available for white families in the south end of town. The further south a family lived in the community the lower the chances of being assigned to a north end school due to proximity issues (i.e., 1.5 mile radius from school to home). By applying CRSM, we sought to further explore the nuances between race and space by investigating how white educational interests have historically pressed for more south end schools further away from the Black majority north end of town. We thus turned to voting records to reinforce our argument of structural geographic privilege. Due to continued additions of south end elementary schools, the Black activists fought for a new school of their own that was situated in the north end. This school eventually became Stratton Elementary. The history behind Stratton showcases how benefits for the Black community (i.e., a new school) only happens when it aligns with the interests of white families. This was all too clear for the Black activists when the school district put a referendum forward to build a new north end school. Surely after all the referendums passed throughout the past few decades that purposefully built more schools on the south end of town, the Black north end would get one as well. As Table 14.2 shows, that was not the case. The original 1993 referendum failed. The public responded by stating that the bond was too expensive to pay for which resulted in the 1994 referendum, with a reduced bond. That too failed. When the school district sought community input regarding the two failed referendums, the idea was introduced Table 14.2 Three referendums pertaining to new elementary school construction

1993 Referendum New north end elementary building (11.3M bond) 1994 Referendum New north end elementary building (10.5M bond) 1997 Referendum New north and south end elementary building (21.6M bond)

Yes

No

Pass or fail

4,933

5,294

Fail

5,808

6,591

Fail

6,529

3,391

Pass

Source: https://champaigncountyclerk.com/elections/docs/referenda_1940_present_dateorder.pdf

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that if a new north end building was coupled with a new south end building, the community would approve it. This new south end school was Barkstall Elementary. Barkstall became the furthest southern location for Champaign school district, prior to Carrie Busey being relocated even further south. When employing CRSM, the information we seek is based on a critical understanding of the intersections of race and space. In this example, we see that white educational interests that play out in school placements in the community must always be appeased first before Black families get an educational need or want (i.e., new building in the north end). Traditional empirical studies would not necessarily explore the referendum data in the same way as we have done here. By using CRSM, we explore the racial/spatial context and politics in which the referendums existed. We use relevant information to pursue how racial equality for Black families only occurs when white parents structurally benefit as well. White parents’ geographic advantage in the school of choice process is not ahistorical. The white community chose to continue to build more south end schools outside of the north end even though they were not in need for additional capacity. Overbuilding south end schools thus created a paradigm in which more south end choices were available for white parents to choose from. Example 3: racial mapmaking and geographic racial privilege In our third and final example, we employ CRSM to showcase how white interests continue, over time, to have spatial material value and power in terms of keeping schools segregated by moving them further and further away from Black-dominated spaces. School districts often have short institutional memories and educational research needs to continue to show the ways in which racial inequality reproduces harm within the educational system. In 2006, the school district under the consent decree was required to increase seats in the north end. What was finally proposed by the school district can be seen in Figure 14.3. Employing CRSM, we created this map to show the two new locations the school district proposed in 2006 to meet increasing enrollment and satisfy their consent decree requirement in adding north end seats. The idea of overlaying the new proposed sites onto our demographic map was generated by our use of CRSM. As we thought about the way in which racial biases and privilege are embedded within the local geography, visually displaying the socio-spatial realities are important. While the school district used terms insinuating that the new school location would be in the north end, Figure 14.3 clearly shows the proposed site would be outside of the Black majority north end and placed in the white majority subdivisions newly built in the northwest part of town. Black activists rightfully called foul at the locations claiming that white families would be getting two brand new schools at the expense of the Black north end community. Purposefully overlaying the new proposed school sites within The Racial Dot Map show the continued power that whiteness has in public education systems. The map also shows the continued spatial advantages given

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Figure 14.3 The proposed sites for two new school buildings within Champaign school district. The X markings show the potential locations of the new schools. While one site being in the north end of town, was by design outside the Black northeast end of town.

to white families by situating schools in their neighborhoods, which then grant them a key factor in the school of choice process: home distance from the school (i.e., proximity factor). We then examined the consequences for Black families of placing schools (i.e., Carrie Busey) in the furthest south end of town. CRSM allows us to question the seriousness of Champaign’s commitment to equity when they continue to structurally advantage white families by building schools that are further away from the north end of town (i.e., Carrie Busey). Not accounting for the ways that current housing patterns impact the racial demographic of school buildings continue to demur to the needs of white families in the district. We present, in Figure 14.4, the recent ramifications of relocating Carrie Busey as far away from the north end as possible. In 2020, Figure 14.4 shows the spatial advantage for

Proximity to Carrie Busey

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80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Proximity

Black Families

White Families

Figure 14.4 2020 Carrie Busey school proximity percentages based on kindergarten choices made by families during registration.

the white families who lived closest to Carrie Busey. Out of all the families who ranked Carrie Busey as one of their choices for kindergarten, we see that 68% of white families were within 1.5 miles of Carrie Busey holding a proximity advantage in the school of choice process. For Black families, only 16% of those who chose Carrie Busey had a proximity advantage. Using CRSM, we purposefully look for information that shows the racial inequality that exists within the geographic space. Using racial mapmaking to show the location of new proposed sites calls into question the school district’s commitment to equity. Understanding school placement proposals through CRSM’s racial mapmaking affords the opportunity to confront new school proposed sites for what they are, continued structural advantage for white families.

Implications and conclusion Traditional empirical studies, on one hand, continue to use demographic data as the key indicator in whether a certain practice or policy was helpful in desegregating schools. This approach continues to examine practices (e.g., magnet schooling, gifted programs) that are used for incentivizing the choice process. If a practice or policy was not successful in desegregating schools, the researcher then moves onto a different practice or policy waiting for the right one to be applied. This assumes that it is even possible to incentivize the choice process to begin with. It is, therefore, a matter of finding the right program instead of questioning all the premises and assumptions school of choice policies make. CRSM, on the other hand, provides researchers a method that can investigate the reasons why school of choice is not realistic for particular communities who seek to desegregate their schools. Using CRSM, researchers can generate theories as to why desegregation through a school of choice paradigm is implausible by design and practice.

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CRSM also provides a method that allows us to not only interrogate raciospatial inequities but provides an avenue to generate new critiques, ideas, and lenses that ask fundamentally different questions. CRSM is generative by examining the intersection of race and space within school districts and its applications to desegregation efforts. Using CRSM also provides an avenue of debunking the accepted assumptions in a study. For example, in our case, using CRSM we question the belief that desegregation is the holy grail of educational equity for Black and Brown children. Continuing to pour time, money, and attention into desegregation plans makes children of Color wait perpetually for progress that has never come. In addition, applying CRSM to our three examples informs us that trying to find a correct incentive that will consistently convince white parents to attend non-white majority schools is a futile endeavor. CRSM, then, provides a path forward in understanding the ways in which school choice policies will never be what they were intended to be: a marketbased solution for desegregation. Only when we realize the futility of convincing white families to join Black and Brown majority schools on their own accord can we begin to shift our attention to issues that do not require the approval of white families. Proximity to whiteness does not guarantee equity. By not using CRSM, researchers will continue to study avenues of school desegregation that, from conception, are not plausible due to a lack of understanding of how race and space intersect in the school assignment process. CRSM scholars, by challenging the uplifted position that desegregation holds in our fight towards racial equality, can begin to move the equity-based conversations towards other models of combating racial inequity.

Note 1 Not 100% across the four racial groups due to leaving out two or more races in order to keep data as brief as possible.

References Bell, D. (1980). Brown v. Board of education and the interest-convergence dilemma. Harvard Law Review, 93(3), 518–533. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Cable, D. A. (2013, July). The racial dot map. University of Virginia. Retrieved from https:// demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2001). Critical race theory: An introduction. New York, NY: New York University Press. Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16, 22–27. Frankenberg, E., Ee, J., Ayscue, J., & Orfield, G. (2019). Harming our common future: America’s segregated school 65 years after Brown. Center for Education and Civil Rights. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/23j1b9nv#author hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender and cultural politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3–12.

242 Amos J. Lee and Alice Y. Lee Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–67. Lee, A. Y., & Lee, A. J. (in press). Critical race methodologies. In N. K. Duke & M. H. Mallette (Eds.), Literacy Research Methodologies (3rd ed.). Guilford Press. Mickelson, R. A., Bottia, M., & Southworth, S. (2008). School choice and segregation by race, class, and achievement. Education Public Interest Center. Retrieved from https://nepc. colorado.edu/ publication/school-choice-and-segregation-race-class-and-achievement Morrison, D., Annamma, S. A., & Jackson, D. D. (2017). Critical race spatial analysis: Mapping to understand and address educational inequity. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, LLC. Orfield, G., & Frankenberg, E. (2013). Educational delusions? Why choice can deepen inequality and how to make schools fair. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Roda, A., & Wells, A. S. (2012). School choice policies and racial segregation: Where white parents’ good intentions, anxiety, and privilege collide. American Journal of Education, 119, 261–293. Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corp. Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Soja, E. W. (2010). Seeking spatial justice. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Tilman, L. C. (2004). (Un) intended consequences? The impact of the Brown v. Board of education decision on the employment status of Black educators. Education and Urban Society, 36(3), 280–303. Vélez, V. N., & Solórzano, D. G. (2017). Critical race spatial analysis: Conceptualizing GIS as a tool for critical race research in education. In D. Morrison, S. A. Annamma, & D. D. Jackson (Eds.), Critical race spatial analysis: Mapping to understand and address educational inequity (pp. 8–34). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

15 Critical chronotopic analysis for disrupting whitewashedness in TESOL teacher education Yin Lam Lee-Johnson

Introduction Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) is a field that has a long history of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992), racialized teacher identities (Motha, 2006), colormute practices (Pollock, 2009), and whitewashedness (Lee-Johnson, 2019). The overarching claim is a silenced and hidden dimension of race that transcends curriculum design, instruction in K-12 schools, and teacher preparation. Racism is structuralized and institutionalized and yet not mentioned in teacher education and K-12 schools. For example, Baugh (2008) argues how educators “often overlook the linguistic dimension of racism in our classroom” (p. 102). Knowing that more and more students of color are placed in some form of English language program without curricula, pedagogies, or teachers prepared to address race is another example of whitewashedness. In order to disrupt whitewashedness in TESOL teacher education and U.S. K-12 public schools, this chapter draws from Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of chronotope, which sheds light on the temporal-spatial contextualities in educational milieu. I propose a new lens, Critical Chronotopic Analysis (CCA), as a theory and method to disrupt whitewashedness. When compared to an empirical study, a theoretical research method is in and of itself a theory and a method, and it provides a consistent logic-of-inquiry throughout the study. With the recent development of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the U.S. and around the world, the rights and personhood of English Language Learners of Color (ELLC) and their families face unprecedented challenges. The Trump administration’s labeling of Mexican immigrants as “drug dealers, criminals, rapists” (BBC News, 2016), calling COVID-19 “the Chinese virus and Kung flu” (Ruptly, 2020), allegations of Chinese students and scientists as thieves and spies (Fuchs, 2020), and asking congresswomen of color to “go back” to their home countries (Smith, 2019) are manifestations of the political and ideological shift towards an anti-immigrant era. Paradoxically, “The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world. Today, more than 40 million people living in the U.S. were born in another country” (Pew Research Center, 2019). Within this 40 million are people who speak languages other than English, many of whom

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were ELLCs in U.S. K-12 schools. ELLCs face double jeopardy due to their racial/ethnic identities and their “rightfully different” (Perumal, 2007) linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Whitewashedness in TESOL teacher education Whitewashedness is defined as an ideology being used to manipulate People of Color to subscribe to whiteness (Brown et al., 2003), lest face severe repercussions (see Matias, 2016a). Therefore, it is not merely about white skins inasmuch as it is a dominant racial ideology that then impacts how we all live. A person of color, for example, can also be consciously or unconsciously contributing to whitewashedness in the system. In fact, Matias (2016a) argues how People of Color may adopt whiteness ideology in ways that enact harm to other people and communities of color, albeit from different operating mechanisms than whites: like survival. Be that as it may, the likelihood for whitewashedness is higher when the stakeholders and decision makers are all white. Many educational researchers corroborate how whitewashed K-12 education and teacher education programs are in the U.S. (Ladson-Billings, 2005; Lee-Johnson, 2019; Matias, 2016b). This is compounded by the fact that the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (2020) still shows that 79% of K-12 public teachers are white in 2017–18. In-service and pre-service teachers for ELLC need teacher education programs that focus on recognizing the racial, linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic gaps between themselves and their learners. In addition, curriculum design, assessment strategies, and the teaching approaches must be transformed to better address the gaps and learning needs of ELLC, particularly, the home-school disconnect (Garcia & Kleifgen, 2010; Grant & Ray, 2019; Herrera, Porter, & Barko-Alva, 2020). Effort in recruiting and retaining certified ELL teachers is urgently needed, teachers of color in particular. Therefore the need for a theory and method to debunk whitewashedness is necessary.

Explorations of Bakhtinian theories Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian scholar, who was born in Moscow in 1895 (White, 2015). As a literary theorist, a critic, and a philosopher, Bakhtin is known for his works developed within the Bakhtin circles, which “participated in public lectures, theatre, and frequent candlelit late night dialogues about their developing ideas” (White, 2015, p. 218). His famous essays, Epic and Novel, From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel, and Discourse in the Novel, were published in his masterpiece, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. The three most important tenets introduced by Bakhtin in the book are (1) dialogism, (2) heteroglossia, and 3) chronotope. Bakhtin’s first tenet, dialogism, problematizes the dialogic and dialectic nature of human interactions through verbal and nonverbal cues. His second

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tenet of heteroglossia challenges the traditional view that objectified language and language-in-use and it reinvigorates the historical, social, and cultural contextualization of meaning that is being created in situ by the interlocutors. His third tenet of chronotope creates new insights for reconceptualizing references of time and space inside and outside of schools. As I searched for references, among the existing studies in the literature (Crossley, 2007; Flores, Lewis, & Phuong, 2018; Handsfield, Crumpler, & Dean, 2010; Rice & Coulter, 2012; Rosborough, 2016), Bakhtin’s chronotope was rarely referenced for racial justice and advocacy for minorities. Thus I see its potential of being developed into a new critical theoretical research method. Despite being insightful, Bakhtin’s chronotope alone could not account for the racism and whitewashedness that is baked in U.S. TESOL teacher education and K-12 education, as it lacks the critical perspectives required of a researcher for dismantling the whitewashed structure. As such, I draw from his tenets to create CCA, with the addition of critical perspectives defined hereafter. Thus, CCA is an amalgamation of Bakhtin’s chronotope and my perspectives of criticality. In the following paragraphs, I will explain why I chose Bakhtin’s chronotope for disrupting whitewashedness in TESOL teacher education and K-12 schools. Then I will discuss what it means to be critical in CCA.

CCA sheds light on the transnational temporal adjustments required of ELLs As mentioned, Bakhtin’s dialogism has been widely adopted for theoretical and pedagogical uses in teaching. Yet, the construct of chronotope is much less referenced but it has profound implications on TESOL teacher education. Chronotope refers to the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 84). Bakhtin (1981) analyzed various genres and ancient novels, such as the Greek romance Apuleius and Petronius, ancient biography and autobiography, the chivalric romance, etc. The notion of chronotope, according to the Bakhtin circle, is “a unit of analysis for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented” (p. 425). In other words, chronotope creates a new lens for analyzing the life histories of the characters in a story. Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope is consistent with his other propositions such as heteroglossia. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions – social, historical, meteorological, physiological – that will ensure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 428) A chronotope is heteroglossic per se as it is governed by the contextuality, and that “it insures the primacy of context over text” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 428).

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The social, cultural, political conditioning of an utterance contributes to the meaning making process, particularly when it comes to the concept of time and space. For example, an ELLC who just experienced uprooting and transplanting due to the immigration process, discovered that the U.S. school calendar is different than his or her own home country. In addition to that, the concept of wait time, break time, and class time is radically different. For example, in mainland China, the class time often involves a night self-study time at school which can last till 10 pm; in Japan, school starts in April instead of August or September (Fischel, 2006). The differences in school calendar, class time, break time, and wait time might have been normalized by white middle-class U.S.-based teachers. Nevertheless, the temporal differences require cultural adaptations and psycho-emotional adjustments, causing anxiety and depression for ELLs and their families. Most importantly, the temporal assumptions, definitions, and pedagogical decisions made around such assumptions contribute to the home-school disconnect and the marginalization of ELLC’s learning needs.

CCA sheds light on transnational spatial adjustments required of ELLs When an immigrant or refugee student goes to a public school in the U.S., the assumption is more or less a “sink-or-swim” approach. Such an approach is predicated on ideologies of cultural assimilation and whitewashing. ELLCs are often thrown into the system, which disregard their previous lived experiences in another time and space. Besides temporal assumptions, the concept of schooling in regard to space is also radically different. For example, an elementary or secondary school building in Hong Kong is closer to an inner city structure than in the U.S. These structures have a rooftop that accommodates basketball, a ping-pong table, and any other ball games, whereas a school building in U.S. suburban areas are equipped with a playground, front and backyard. These differences are often overlooked or dismissed when an ELLC enrolls in U.S. K-12 schools. However, if researchers confront the differences in spatial arrangements, they see that for any foreign-born newly arrived student an adjustment is needed. However, unlike a regular adjustment, this adjustment requires psycho-emotional counselling, and a grievance period because such changes are also losses of who they were as human beings to who they are now as ELL-labeled human beings. To further problematize the status quo of a “sink-or-swim” approach, the current assessment and monitoring protocol, including WIDA ACCESS, often includes spatial context which does not resemble the ones in ELLCs’ home countries. For example, in the Grades 2–3 Reading Test Demo (WIDA, n.d.), the theme is “Fun at the School Fair” and the first question depicts a toy stall which has a colorful display with a stuffed animal, a bouncy ball, a large balloon, and a fancy ring. The test taker will choose a toy to buy from the list with the right price range. Such representation portrays a middle-class suburban setting in regard to space and a consumerism culture that is predicated

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upon buying objects with the right price. Other images associated with the test include raffle tickets, popcorn, and a water bottle. The tasks were about purchasing items at the right price range. The hidden message conveys a strong ideological assumption of consumerism and capitalism in public school spaces. Such ideological assumption invalidates the lived experiences of ELLCs in terms of spatial arrangements, especially for ELLCs who arrived from a socialist or collectivist country or a country with less economic resources devoted to schools. Yet such ideological assumptions of middle-class whiteness in public schools continues to perpetuate through images and languages in textbooks, teaching materials, test items, and discourse strategies in the classroom. Clearly, whitewashing is happening in ELLC instruction and to measure progress of ELLCs with a whitewashed standard inherently also whitewashes the student too. Under the façade of “helping” immigrants and refugees succeed in the mainstream (white) society, instructional and assessment ideologies that conform to whitewashedness continue to be perpetuated and normalized in public schools. As such, it is necessary for educational researchers to be equipped with the lens of chronotope when examining the whitewashed ideologies that pertain to time and space.

CCA as amalgamation of Bakhtin’s chronotope and critical perspectives As explained earlier, CCA is an amalgamation of Bakhtin’s chronotope and my definition of criticality. The tenets of criticality in CCA include intersectionality, intertextuality, and reflexivity: (1) Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) delves into the intersections of race, class, gender, disability, and socioeconomic status. Crenshaw (1989) contested the traditional way of viewing race and gender as separate. She proposed an intersectional perspective, which looked at race and gender as conjoining factors when Black women were marginalized due to racism and sexism. In the same vein, teacher researchers should examine the intersectionality of the stakeholders involved in K-12 ELLC education, see the differences between them, and build bridges to accommodate the learning needs of ELLC. (2) Kristeva (1980, 1986) created the term intertextuality for the juxtaposition of two texts. Intertextuality is itself critical as it foregrounds the opportunity to create new meaning when two texts were compared and analyzed at the same time. Similarly, teacher researchers should learn to compare and contrast texts, stories, and lived experiences that pertain to ELLC by juxtaposing the texts and stories for gaining a deeper understanding of ELLC. (3) Milner’s (2007) researcher positionality discusses how researchers need to critically examine his or her own positionality in a study as this positionality will affect the interpretation of qualitative data. Reflexivity advocates for teacher researchers to critically examine his or her own positionality in teaching and research. For example, if the teaching force and researchers are predominately white, they need to rethink their racial positionality in juxtaposition to the ELLC they study. All three tenets of criticality are required of CCA researchers at all times during the research process.

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Application of critical chronotopic analysis in educational research A CCA method requires three steps: (1) Identify the explicit and implicit whitewashed temporal and spatial contextualities in K-12 milieu, (2) employ repressed stories and counterstories as data, and (3) challenge the status quo of neo-plantation ideology in teacher education and K-12 schools. Step one: identify whitewashed temporal-spatial contextualities The first step is to critically examine the existing stakeholders in education, curriculum design, classroom management, instructional content and materials, and pay attention to the hidden assumptions of time and space. The researcher should flesh out his or her own assumption of temporal-spatial assumptions in the contexts of teaching and learning. Such temporal-spatial contextualities through texts, stories, and counterstories (Yosso, 2013) should be theorized as a construct, which requires the teacher researcher to deconstruct and reconstruct through dialogic and heteroglossic reflective practices. In ELL education, the focus has been on acquiring English as a target language, often at the expense of marginalizing the linguistic and cultural diversity of the learners. Vocabulary, grammar, and the four skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) have been foregrounded in teaching. However, if one analyzes the hidden temporal assumptions behind verb tenses and aspects, it is not difficult to identify the hidden structural assumption of time. For instance, the English language has aspects such as present perfect continuous and past perfect continuous, which signify a hidden categorization and boundaries of time. Such temporal assumption may not exist in other languages such as Chinese. In addition to the linguistic aspects of learning English as a second language, oftentimes the temporal-spatial contextualities have been normalized (e.g., the assumption of school calendar, class time, and break time) through teaching practices. ELLCs might not be able to verbally express their frustration when experiencing hegemonic assumption of their acquisition of the temporal practices in the U.S., and thus the researcher needs to flesh out such hidden temporal contextualities in education milieu by intertextual comparisons of the home and target languages. Regarding spatial contextualities, how the classrooms and various spaces in the school building are arranged and constructed, and how the learner needs to move around in these spaces should be analyzed through intertextuality. For instance, students in Hong Kong and China are used to having their designated classroom so the teachers move around classrooms rather than students. How would ELLCs from such a spatial arrangement adjust to the U.S. way? How would such change contribute to loneliness and fear? Interactions with the spatial arrangements and objects require background knowledge which is predicated upon shared cultural practices. ELLCs who do not share the same cultural practices would need what kind of accommodations in the process? These are important questions for educational researchers to flesh out.

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The examples in Tables 15.1 and 15.2 for temporal-spatial contextualities are merely the tip of the iceberg regarding how such contextualities have been normalized through whitewashed practices in public schools and ELL teacher education. Critical faculty who research racial justice in a teacher education program can attest to the prominence of whitewashedness within the system from the power of administration, decisions on content and assessment Table 15.1 Examples of whitewashed temporal-spatial contextualities in K-12 ELLC education

Instructional content: textbooks, teaching materials, iPad apps

Temporal-spatial decisions and arrangements

Teacher workforce and school leadership

Temporal contextualities that could be whitewashed

Spatial contextualities that could be whitewashed

• Histories and stories that were written and told from a white perspective (e.g., the Korean War, Vietnam War, Japanese Internment Camps, and the Chinese Exclusion Act). • Content that fosters patriotism and nationalism. • Multimodal representations (pictures, illustrations, cartoons, videos) that depict consumerism, capitalism, individualism. • Worksheets, assignments, and assessment strategies designed by white educators who might have assimilation assumption. • School calendar, class time, break time, and wait time is designed for assimilation purposes. • Expected time for reading comprehension and writing is based on shared experience of white students.

• Pictures, illustrations, and written descriptions of home, school, and society that reflect a middle-class white space, either urban, suburban, or rural. • Pictures, illustrations, and written descriptions of furnishing, decorations, and equipment which reflect a middle-class white consumerism ideology. • Children picture books selected for classroom teaching depict stories that are void of linguistic and cultural diversity. • Arrangement of classroom, hallway, and school facilities that presumes individualism and capitalism in use of school spaces.

• Predominantly white teachers who consistently make decisions which explicitly and implicitly marginalize the temporal representations of minority students in the classrooms.

• Classroom arrangement and spaces allocated for educational activities, public gathering is designed by white school leaders for conforming to shared experiences among white leaders. • Equipment available for various spaces, teaching equipment such as white/blackboard, cubbies, ball game supplies, music room, etc. is designed for a shared cultural assumption of whiteness. • Predominantly white leadership in school districts and school buildings which foster shared cultural practices that foreground policies and social practices that conform to whiteness. • Predominantly white teacher workforce in the school building that marginalize the voices and decisions preferred by minority faculty.

250 Yin Lam Lee-Johnson Table 15.2 Examples of whitewashed temporal-spatial contextualities in TESOL teacher education Temporal contextualities that could be whitewashed

Spatial contextualities that could be whitewashed

Hiring and retention policies for faculty and program directors

• Hiring preferences which foreground K-12 experience in the U.S. rather than overseas living experience.

Cultural practices regarding meetings and social interactions among faculty

• Definitions of collegiality and politeness or rudeness which are referencing middle-class whiteness. • Faculty handbook that is designed by a white faculty, with the hidden assumption of hiring a white colleague. • Selection of textbooks, reading materials, and instructional content that are predominantly written by white academicians. • Instructional style in regard to use of class time and activities are based on choices made by white faculty.

• Hiring preferences which focus on the “best fit” during an interview, which has hidden cultural assumption of whiteness. • Arrangement of meeting space and socialization spaces that is designed by white faculty. • Hidden assumption of individualism in the work space that fosters closed office doors and independent work. • Arrangement of office spaces for textbooks and readings which highlights and displays white authors.

Selection of textbooks and readings for teacher candidates Instructional styles and preferences of faculty

• Arrangement of classroom equipment and class spaces is made according to the preferences of white faculty.

strategies, and everyday socialization among colleagues (see Matias, 2013; Matias, 2016b). The same is also true for K-12 ELL education (Liggett, 2009; Motha, 2006). As such, educators need to be equipped with racial criticality for contesting these white normalizations and contextualities through reflexive and reflective practices that juxtapose texts and stories (intertextuality), examination of intersectionality of the stakeholders (teacher, ELLC, school board, school leaders and administrators, university faculty in teacher education), and a critical examination of the teacher researcher’s positionality as an educator and researcher in the process. By identifying the whitewashed temporal-spatial contextualities with CCA, researchers can call out the hidden hegemonic frames inside and outside of schools and contest the home-school disconnect. Researchers who don’t use CCA may easily fall into the trap of recycling and perpetuating the whitewashed temporal-spatial assumptions in their framing and research process. Step two: employ repressed stories and counterstories as data Step two requires the researcher to define relevant information that pertains to the logic-of-inquiry as data. Bakhtin’s chronotope enables us to see

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the sociocultural complexities hidden behind normalized teaching practices through critical dialogism with the data. Researchers in CCA not only see those complexities but actively seek out stories and counterstories which are historically repressed, and such stories highlight and foreground voices which are muted, marginalized, and overlooked. For example, playground talks and dialogues, complaints from parents, stories and messages expressed through socialization events, etc. For example, at a TESOL seminar in 2020, five in-service ELL teachers were invited to speak on a panel and asked about their recent experiences in K-12 public schools. One of them mentioned, There are distinctions between the kids in school: kids born here and kids who weren’t. Kids born here share the language and culture. Kids who weren’t were bullied in schools; it was due to the terrorist attack. Kids with a last name that sounds like a terrorist and there were bullying events that happened. (Teacher X) All Chinese students stopped coming to class because they didn’t want to face the stigma that they might carry COVID-19 or were the cause of the pandemic. There were eight–ten ELLs between 9th–12th grade. It started two weeks before Spring Break. All March they participated virtually but they were not coming to school. (Teacher Y) I typed up these stories at the seminar and I found powerful temporal-spatial contextualities which warrant CCA. When juxtaposing the two stories as texts, it is evident that the livelihood of ELLCs are in question as they confront racism in schools due to their ethnic, racial, and ELL identities. The social and political contexts filled in the blanks and explained why the ELLCs were bullied and stopped going to school. These stories are a manifestation of how schools cannot be viewed as apolitical milieu. Rather, schools are locales when racial conflicts occur and where ELLCs face racism. Similar anecdotal information has been historically rejected by mainstream research as data. However, these stories carry subversive power as they empower us to see the unseen and they are made visible through the lens of CCA. Although empirical research can draw out stories from marginalized groups as data, CCA as a method looks at data differently. Instead of “collecting” these stories in a traditional sense, the researcher lives these stories through interacting with their environment. As such, CCA allows the researchers to live in real time with logic-of-inquiry because they do not see clear delineations between them as researchers and those who are identified as participants. Besides real-life stories lived by the researcher, CCA can also be applied in textual analysis for published materials such as media postings, social media threads, video ethnographic self-stories, narratives, biographies, and vignettes.

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These are all real and lived experiences which could be overlooked through mainstream empirical research. For example, in Huang’s (2013) Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir, the narrator (a 12-year-old Taiwanese boy) was waiting to put his lunch into the microwave oven in his classroom but he was grabbed by his shirt and thrown to the ground while taking his turn to heat up his lunch (p. 32). Someone said, “Chinks get to the back!” (Huang, 2013, p. 32). Huang wrote, My dad had told me about the word, and what it meant, but you’re never ready for your first time . . . I waited for Ms. Truex to get involved but she just sat on her fat ass eating lunch like David Stern watching the Malice at the Palace. (p. 32) This story is data and it is worth investigation as it reveals: (1) a racial slur that targets Chinese ELLC inside and outside of schools, (2) a racial bullying that happened during lunch time in a K-12 classroom, (3) a conversation between a Taiwanese father and son at home regarding the racial slur, and (4) a teacher in the classroom who ignored the racial bullying in situ. A researcher applying CCA will critically examine the temporal-spatial contextualities of the story (as shown in Step One), the colorblindness revealed by the teacher’s response, and the racial injustice faced by East Asian ELLCs. Such analysis is made possible by (1) critically and dialogically examining the heteroglossic nature of the temporal-spatial contextualities, (2) engaging in reflexive discourse for fleshing out biases and assumptions, and (3) analyzing the intersectionality of the ELLC in the stories. Researchers who do not apply CCA will miss the chance to deconstruct the normalized racialized teaching practices, as well as the nuances in regard to the temporal-spatial contextualities as they pertain to racism. Step three: challenge the status quo of neo-plantation ideology in teacher education and K-12 schools A CCA researcher asks questions such as: What are the existing interlocking power structures that are whitewashing ELLCs? How to emancipate the ELLCs who are stuck in the neo-plantation (Han, 2019) ideology in schools? How to decolonize TESOL and K-12 ELL education and restore the humanity of ELLCs? Both examples mentioned under Step Two unravel the status quo of domination, subjugation, and oppression that ELLCs face in K-12 schools. U.S. K-12 school districts which have newcomers’ schools, ELL staff, translators, and interpreters create a paradoxical truth of inclusivity of ELLCs. These are facades created due to the accountability required of them for fulfilling the constitutional rights of ELLCs. But when CCA is employed to dissect the stories and counterstories, the hidden power structures are revealed. ELLCs, who

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should be the focus of K-12 schools, were not being welcomed and respected. Rather, they were ridiculed due to their skin colors and national origin as of today. When I visited U.S. K-12 schools in various states before, I noticed that most classrooms have a power structure that employed a main teacher (middleclass white), with the help of a teaching aide who was a woman of color for translating, interpreting, and taking care of ELLCs. The inherent power structure resembles a neo-plantation ideology (Matias, 2015) that continues to exploit women of color as cheap slaves. “Buying and being sold into the fashionable power game will not get us saved; if we succumb to a neo-plantation attitude to please our white masters, we are only allowing white supremacy to replicate our own colonization” (Han, 2019, p. 77). As such, CCA researchers need to take a further step to disrupt the existing power structures that continue to sideline ELLCs. Efforts should be made to advocate for ELLCs so that they would not be perceived as “less than” or inadequate human beings. This is in contrast to empiricists, who continue to succumb to the neo-plantation structure in the downward spiral. CCA researchers turn the table and challenge the status quo of subjugation of ELLCs by peeling the onion of structural racism (Murray, 2015) and pressing for a racially just temporal-spatial reality through dialogism, heteroglossia, and intertextuality. Use CCA to generate further theories for disrupting whitewashedness The most exciting reward of adopting CCA is for researchers to generate further theoretical frames for disrupting whitewashedness in TESOL teacher education and K-12 ELL education. Not only does CCA empower researchers to critically examine their own positionality through reflexivity and analysis of intersectionality; CCA also empowers researchers to explore the dialogic imagination for generating further theories. Paulo Freire’s (2005) Pedagogy of the Oppressed echoes Bakhtin’s call for dialogic imagination as it inspires researchers to generate further theoretical framing for fighting against capitalistic ideologies in education. For instance, Kumashiro’s (2000) anti-oppressive education and hooks’s (1994) teaching to transgress are contemporary theories generated from the Freirean framing of critical pedagogy. Moreover, each one of these contemporary theories inspires scholars to generate further theories for investigating the oppressive systems. The power of CCA does not stop at enabling the researchers to see the unseen; it inspires researchers to create new theoretical frames for disrupting whitewashedness. For instance, the stories written regarding ELLCs facing racism in U.S. K-12 schools enabled me to unlock my dialogic imagination (Bakhtin, 1981), so that I could generate theories for flipping the power relations between ELLCs and their native-born white peers. It takes further actions and prolonged engagements for CCA researchers to confront and fight the current systems of power and privilege. Yet, with bigger challenges comes bigger rewards. CCA researchers dismantle the racialized temporal-spatial structures and reposition

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ELLCs from the periphery to the center of our attention in teacher education and K-12 education.

Implications and limitations Mezirow (1990) defined learning for adults as a “process of making a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of an experience” (p. 1). Mezirow purported that critical reflection is necessary for emancipatory adult education, which “help[s] the learner challenge presuppositions, explore alternative perspectives, transform old ways of understanding, and act on new perspectives” (p. 18). CCA is designed for teacher researchers to identify the explicit and implicit whitewashedness in TESOL teacher education. With CCA, researchers can adopt a new frame and method for disrupting the hidden ideological and pedagogical assumptions which marginalize the personhood and identity development of ELLCs. A transformative ELLC educator is a teacher who has the competency to teach language and content to ELLCs, but can also challenge the status quo of whitewashedness and advocate for the rights of ELLCs. Systemic oppression still exists in TESOL teacher education and it requires allyship and advocacy for disrupting such a deeply rooted mechanism. A CCA researcher is equipped with the “dialogic imagination” (Bakhtin, 1981) in the research process for transforming the status quo in teacher education. As hooks (1994) said, “We learned early that our devotion to learning, to a life of the mind, was a counter-hegemonic act, a fundamental way to resist every strategy of white racist colonization” (p. 2). CCA researchers are counter-hegemonic agents per se, as CCA creates a paradigm shift towards an anti-whitewashed research method. Last but not least, CCA calls for radical educators, who dare to make a difference and bring ELLCs’ interests to the table, to form allyship and create a coalition against whitewashedness in teacher education and in K-12 schools.

Limitations of CCA The following list discusses the limitations and potential pushbacks faced by CCA researchers. In teacher education context: •

•

Teacher researchers might face resistance towards the terms such as whitewashedness and research since most teacher researchers are themselves racially identified as white. As such, briefing sessions are recommended for teacher researchers to flesh out their resistance. The construct of temporal-spatial contextualities should not be limited to the examples noted in this chapter. Teacher researchers are expected to have agency and take ownership in their own definitions and critiques of temporal-spatial contextualities that exist in the teaching and assessment materials, instructional strategies, discourse patterns, and hidden ideologies perpetuated in the educational system.

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•

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As Matias (2019) mentioned, “the idea of studying whiteness in a field that has been determined to have an overwhelming presence of whiteness (Sleeter, 2001) was difficult” (p. 271). The field of TESOL teacher education is yet another subfield in education that suffers from overrepresentation of whiteness. It will be challenging for any teacher researcher of color to push the boundaries and challenge whitewashedness because such determination will face challenges from white people who do not want to relinquish white privilege. It will be important for teacher researchers of color to form allyship and join coalitions when fighting whitewashedness in teacher education.

In K-12 context: •

•

The critical chronotopic analysis foregrounds intersubjectivity and criticality between the teacher researcher and ELLs. It is not intended for a generalization of knowledge about the ELL population and it will not contribute to postulating the language acquisition pattern of ELLs in public schools. There will be pushback from district administrators, TESOL program directors, and ESL coordinators. CCA as a research method disrupts whitewashedness and in doing so, might be misconstrued as threatening because it directly challenges the existing privileges of the educational leaders who are mostly white.

Conclusion Bakhtin was a critical literacy theorist in his own time and space. His concept of chronotope offers subversive empowerment to teacher researchers. As mentioned in the introduction, TESOL teacher education is a field that has been overshadowed by whitewashedness in curriculum design, instructional standards, testing and assessment strategies, and teacher preparation philosophy. Now is the time for educators to adopt CCA to disrupt normalized whitewashedness and create new research considerations for teaching ELLCs. Now is the time for educators to advocate for making a difference in our learners’ lives. Now is the time to take action to challenge the status quo of whitewashedness and create new learning opportunities for validating the immigrant and refugee learners so that they can truly be who they are, with their linguistic and cultural assets valued and respected in schools.

References Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Baugh, J. (2008). Valuing nonstandard English. In M. Pollock’s (Ed.), Everyday anti-racism: Getting real about race in school (pp. 102–106). New York, NY: The New Press. BBC News. (2016, August 31). “Drug dealers, criminals, rapists” What Trump thinks of Mexicans. Retrieved from www.bbc.com/news/video_and_audio/headlines/37230916/drugdealers-criminals-rapists-what-trump-thinks-of-mexicans

256 Yin Lam Lee-Johnson Brown, M. K., Carnoy, M., Currie, E., Duster, T., Oppenheimer, D. B., Schultz, M. M., & Wellman, D. (2003). White-washing race: The myth of a colorblind society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 140, 139–67. Retrieved from https://chicagounbound.uchicago. edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8 Crossley, S. (2007). A chronotopic approach to genre analysis: An exploratory study. English for Specific Purposes, 26, 4–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2005.10.004 Fischel, W. A. (2006). “Will I see you in September?” An economic explanation for the standard school calendar. Journal of Urban Economics, 59(2), 236–251. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jue.2005.03.006 Flores, N., Lewis, M. C., & Phuong, J. (2018). Raciolinguistic chronotopes and the education of Latinx students: Resistance and anxiety in a bilingual school. Language & Communication, 62, 15–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2018.06.002 Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. Fuchs, C. (2020, July 9). “Definitely no.” I’m not a spy: Student describes toll of visa ban targeting China tech theft. NBC News. Retrieved from www.nbcnews.com/news/ asian-america/definitely-no-i-m-not-spy-student-describes-toll-visa-n1233324 Garcia, O., & Kleifgen, J. A. (2010). Educating emergent bilinguals: Policies, programs, and practices for English language learners. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Grant, K. B., & Ray, J. A. (2019). Home, school, and community collaboration: Culturally responsive family engagement. Sage. Han, K. T. (2019). Exploring Asian American invisibility in teacher education: The AsianCrit account. In K. T. Han & J. Laughter’s (Eds.), Critical race theory in teacher education: Informing classroom culture and practice (pp. 71–81). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Handsfield, L. J., Crumpler, T. P., & Dean, T. R. (2010). Tactical negotiations and creative adaptations: The discursive production of literacy curriculum and teacher identities across space-times. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(4), 405–431. https://doi.org/10. 2307/20779539 Herrera, S. G., Porter, L., & Barko-Alva, K. (2020). Equity in school-parent partnerships: Cultivating community and family trust in culturally diverse classrooms. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY: Routledge. Huang, E. (2013). Fresh off the boat: A memoir. New York, NY: Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group. Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in language. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (1986). The Kristeva reader. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kumashiro, K. K. (2000). Toward a theory of anti-oppressive education. Review of Educational Research, 70(1), 25–53. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543070001025 Ladson-Billings, G. J. (2005). Is the team all right? Diversity and teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 56(3), 229–234. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487105275917 Lee-Johnson, Y.L. (2019). Whitewashedness in teacher education: Intertextuality between colorblindness and the Ferguson event. Urban Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085919857803 Liggett, T. (2009). Unpacking white racial identity in English language teacher education. In R. Kubota & A. M. Y. Lin (Eds.), Race, culture, and identities in second language education: Exploring critically engaged practice (pp. 27–43). New York, NY: Routledge.

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Matias, C. E. (2013). On the “flip” side: A teacher educator of color unveiling the dangerous minds of white teacher candidates. Teacher Education Quarterly, 40(2), 53–73. Matias, C. E. (2015). “I ain’t your doc student”: The overwhelming presence of whiteness and pain at the academic neo-plantation. In K. Varner, K. Albert, R. Mitchell, & C. Allen (Eds.), Racial battle fatigue in the academy (pp. 59–68). New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Matias, C. E. (2016a). “Why do you make me hate myself?”: Re-teaching whiteness, abuse, and love in urban teacher education. Teaching Education, 27(2), 194–211. Matias, C. E. (2016b). Feeling white: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Matias, C. E. (2019). Beyond White: The emotional complexion of critical research on race. In K. K. Strunk & L. A. Locke (Eds.), Research methods for social justice and equity in education (pp. 263–274). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Mezirow, J. (1990). How critical reflection triggers transformative learning. Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood, 1(20), 1–6. Milner IV, H. R. (2007). Race, culture, and researcher positionality: Working through dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen. Educational Researcher, 36(7), 388–400. https://doi. org/10.3102/0013189X07309471 Motha, S. (2006). Racializing ESOL teacher identities in U.S. K – 12 public schools. TESOL Quarterly, 40(3), 495–518. https://doi.org/10.2307/40264541 Murray, S. R. (2015). Peeling the onion: Race, rhetoric, and satire (Unpublished master’s thesis). Baylor University, U.S.A. Retrieved from https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/ 2104/9316/MURRAY-THESIS-2015.pdf?sequence=1 National Center for Education Statistics. (2020, May). Characteristics of public schoolteachers. NCES. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_clr.asp Perumal, J. (2007). Identity, diversity and teaching for social justice (Vol. 934). Bern, Germany: Peter Lang. Pew Research Center. (2019, June 17). Key findings about US immigrants. Retrieved from www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/ Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pollock, M. (2009). Colormute: Race talk dilemmas in an American school. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rice, M., & Coulter, C. (2012). Exploring Chronotopic Shifts between known and unknown in our teacher educator identity narratives. Narrative inquirers in the midst of meaning- making: Interpretive acts of teacher educators (Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 16). Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 77–108. https://doi.org/10.1108/ S1479-3687(2012)0000016008 Rosborough, A. (2016). Understanding relations between gesture and chronotope: Embodiment and meaning-making in a second-language classroom. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 23(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2015.1121400 Ruptly. (2020, Jun 21). USA: Trumps calls Covid-19 “Kung flu” and “Chinese virus” at Tulsa Rally [Video file]. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgtf5mdL4w0 Sleeter, C. (2001). Preparing teachers for culturally diverse schools: Research and the overwhelming presence of whiteness. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 94–106. https://doi. org/10.1177/0022487101052002002 Smith, A. (2019). Trump says congresswomen of color should “go back” and fix the places they “originally came from”. NBC News. Retrieved from www.nbcnews.com/politics/ donald-trump/trump-says-progressive-congresswomen-should-go-back-where-theycame-n1029676

258 Yin Lam Lee-Johnson White, E. J. (2015). Who is Bakhtin? International Journal of Early Childhood, 47(2), 217–219. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-015-0144-y WIDA. (n.d.). University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin center for education research. ACCESS Grades 2–3 Reading Test Demo. Retrieved August 29, 2020 from https://wbte. drcedirect.com/WIDA/portals/wida/ott2?index=3&adminId=596372&displayOTT=Sa mple+Items&display=Sample+Items Yosso, T. J. (2013). Critical race counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano educational pipeline. New York, NY: Routledge.

16 Postformal method for critical education research Tricia Kress and Robert Lake

Introduction: confronting time in educational research One of the great paradoxes of conducting empirical research is the Western construct of time which is dominated by a progress narrative of perpetually moving forward, away from antiquity towards civilization (Bury, 1980). “Progress” is made as “new” knowledge is “discovered” and gaps in the knowledge archive are filled (Patel, 2015). Yet, while documenting the present, empirical researchers are always scribing the past. Reality continues moving further away from the moment in time captured by the data, as the researcher is ostensibly making “progress”. Time is reduced to past-future, collapsing the present into nothing more than the moment when the researcher captured what was in order to recalibrate the course for forward movement to some unnamed (perhaps illusory) future destination. Furthermore, when time is cast as linear, the multiplicity of reality is parsed apart, isolated into separate timelines, which means critical intersections, interactions, and reactions between events are easily discarded or overlooked. Research of this sort is akin to driving a horse with blinders down a straight path. Supposedly, each linear knowledge path, documented completely will contribute to a composite picture of the totality of knowledge. However, linear research prohibits complex understanding of the world because it cannot account for the spaces in between different knowledge threads, and it cannot anticipate the unexpected crossings of knowledge paths and the trajectories they might yield. Linear research might prevent someone from exploring and identifying intersections between disparate social phenomena. Consider, for instance, the inaccuracy of scientific modeling projections of the impact on the coronavirus pandemic on African nations (Chow, 2020) and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on African American populations in the United States (Millet et al., 2020). In the first instance, we see scientific research skewed by racist assumptions about “developing” African nations as “uncivilized”. In the second we see a “developed” and “civilized” nation with greater viral spread, overall mortality rate, and disproportionate impact on Black communities. In linear research, these two simultaneously occurring phenomena are studied separately. They take place in different nations (Uganda and United States),

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and they deal with different subjects (epidemiological modeling versus social impact of disease). Yet, postformal research can illuminate how the intersections between these phenomena speak volumes about how anti-Black racism operates as a global institution of oppression resulting in epistemological and material consequences for Black people across multiple domains of social life. If the goal of research is to gain a rich, panoramic understanding of the world, the possibility for knowledge generation is truncated when research is bound by linearity and restricted to a backward gaze and forward movement toward Eurocentric notions of “progress”. In this chapter, we demonstrate postformal method as alternative to so-called “progress-oriented” empirical research by recognizing the artificiality of uni-directional timelines and Western progress narratives that bind the parameters of what is knowable and doable in education, research, and the social world.

From postformal theory to postformal method In a 1993 Harvard Educational Review article, Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg described a critical cognitive theory for education called “post-formalism”. Postformalism problematizes linear, mechanistic ways of thinking about knowledge and learning, and therefore, learners and their development. Specifically, it challenges theories of learning that are informed by the philosophies of (1) Jean Piaget who, based on research about White middle-class boys, posited that all children develop psychologically in approximately the same way through a series of stages that are at first rudimentary and become more complex as they grow older, (2) Enlightenment philosopher Rene Descartes who presumed that knowledge in one’s mind is separate from and superior to experiences of the body, and (3) Sir Isaac Newton who asserted that all of the world is organized by universal truths that can be discovered by empirically documenting, measuring, and predicting future outcomes using mathematics. Postformalism rejects the notion that the world is mechanical and organized by some underlying universal truth. Instead, postformalism expands awareness and raises questions about how the presupposition of universal truth is representative of one particular Eurocentric truth that is not shared by all humanity. Furthermore, that one belief is fundamentally flawed because it is narrow in scope and often used as a means for justifying the oppression of marginalized social groups who do not fit into the pre-established norms defined by the experiences of one particular group of people. By drawing inspiration from postmodernism, justice-oriented aspects of modernism, critical theories, feminist theories, liberation theology, African American and indigenous ways of knowing, postformalism challenges narrow conceptions of what counts as knowledge and, therefore, standardization and testing movements in education that presuppose knowledge is quantifiable. As explained by Kincheloe (1999), postformalism emerged as a response to the contradictions students experienced between the deadening effects of technorationalism (i.e., the assumption that life is systematic, uniform, and

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mechanical) that was permeating both schools and workplaces in 20th-century U.S. society. In contrast with the uninspiring, systematic “learning” of technorationalism in schools, in the real world students experience hyperreality that is technologically rich, inundated by rapid information flows, yet few means of critically analyzing information. For Kincheloe, classic psychological frameworks like behaviorism and developmentalism, both of which dominate education in the United States, are insufficient for making sense of intelligence and learning in hyperreality. Moreover, he posited that young people can see through the artificiality of the so-called learning they experience, which results in resistance, boredom, shutting down, and acting out. Postformal cognitive psychology takes into account the totality of people’s lived experiences in a complex and wholly unknowable world by rejecting the notion that people learn and grow in stages, that learning is divorced from experience, and that learning takes place strictly in one’s mind. The technorationalist worldview presumes students come into schools as blank slates, and all of them should be learning the same things in the same ways at the same time. It discounts how students’ social and cultural knowledge from home may be different, which may impact student performance in classrooms and on standardized exams. For instance, White middle-class children may appear to be stronger academically when in fact they are drawing from their home knowledge that aligns with the expectations of schools. Test scores may indicate an “achievement gap” when it seems lower income students and students of color are not performing at the same norm as their White middleclass peers. In contrast, postformalism moves beyond the limits of formal logic and reconnects multiple ways of knowing to better understand what children know that is not measured or valued by the test and the education system in question. Postformalism asks questions about the child’s experiences in schools and how technorationalist structures and practices may get in the way of teachers recognizing, valuing, and leveraging children’s unique knowledges and talents. Postformalism encourages school adults to problematize what they think they know by tapping into their sensory experiences, autobiographical histories, and deeper structures of knowledge through analogy, metaphor, art, and emotion to identify when schools’ structures are liberating or oppressive so that they can act upon them and change them (Kincheloe & Thomas, 2006). When put to work for critical educational research, postformalism utilizes rogue methods that might not be recognized as “empirical” or “valid” by formal research traditions. The postformal researcher is a rule-breaker who disrupts assimilated knowledge and provokes cognitive dissonance through new lines of inquiry and learning that intentionally engage with difference. Consider the ideas that might emerge when juxtaposing a student’s grades and test scores with an artistic rendering of that student’s self-image as a learner and again with an artistic rendering of students like them in popular culture. Unlike empiricists who limit their research within the confines of what constitutes “valid” research, the postformal researcher’s rogueness stems from their attempt to break free from those exact confines. While Piagetian formalism tends to

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cast learning as assimilation of knowledge into pre-existing worldviews, postformalism privileges critical accommodation, “the continuous criticism and reconstruction of what one thinks she knows” (Kincheloe, 1999, p. 14). The goal of this mode of thinking is for researchers to come to new awareness of how tacit knowledge gleaned from one’s own upbringing and enculturation in society insidiously informs one’s practice and may make them complicit in maintaining systemic oppressions. Postformal researchers dive beneath takenfor-granted understandings of the world to access deeper knowledge for examining unique problems and detecting structural patterns. By having a more critical understanding of one’s own assumptions and how they uphold or challenge dominant power arrangements, one can turn upon oppressive habits and catalyze change. To operationalize a postformal research method, researchers approach their work with four constructs at the forefront: (1) etymology, (2) pattern, (3) process, and (4) contextualization. This is not, however, a step-by-step endeavor. Researchers move through these constructs as they pursue answers to their questions, and new questions and movements will emerge as a result of their explorations. Each construct involves its own particular dispositions and activities designed to lead the researcher to delve under the surface of daily life to generate abstract understandings of concrete reality, which is then deconstructed and recontextualized to raise awareness of how (1) hegemony operates in people’s lives, and (2) embedded systemic oppressions can be ferreted out and changed (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1999). 1

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Etymology – postformal researchers question the origins of knowledge, how they know what they think they know, and how their location in the web of reality informs their worldviews. They engage in meta-cognition (thinking about thinking) to seek out conflicts and contradictions, giving rise to unique questions they may choose to investigate (e.g., why is Whiteness not represented as a culture in a multicultural curriculum?) Pattern – postformal researchers approach the social world as layered and interconnected, seeking out underlying patterns that tie different people and events to each other through discourse, power, ideology, and materiality. They use metaphors as organizational and analytical tools for identifying and exploring underlying interconnections and relationships between disparate ideas and events. Process – postformal researchers read the world as text; they deconstruct, read between the lines, and expose unnoticed contradictions. They look for what is and isn’t said, pointing out areas of blindness and their implications, but also recognizing uncertainty of meaning – there are no closed texts and no final truth. They reconnect cognition and emotion, recognizing the significance of emotional intensity as an indicator of embodied knowledge that can be explored and investigated for insight. They challenge Cartesian-Newtonian cause-effect linearity, which assumes that every action has an equal and opposite reaction predetermined by laws of

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physics. In education, this might translate into an equation that goes something like this: Student + Standardized Content = Amount of Knowledge in relation to the Norm. Therefore, student < normal, student = normal, or student > normal. These equations tell a story that assumes all students should be achieving at or above a predetermined norm. This is how we can understand the student’s supposed “aptitude” (+, -, or = to norm). But a postformal method might focus instead on how the effect of the test score outcome can define a cause. It is the normed score at the end of the equation that defines which students are normal or not. The individual learner and what they know beyond the confines of the exam is irrelevant. A postformal researcher might flip the equation, deconstructing the norm itself by investigating its origins and effects on students. Hence, the final product of a series of events or circumstances gives definition to the meaning of the cause-effect. The cause-effect process does not necessarily or neatly lead to an inevitable outcome. Furthermore, the meaning of a single part of a process can never be separated from the whole of the meaning of the product. Contextualization – postformal researchers pay attention to the context of knowledge, which is what gives knowledge its meaning and form. They recognize the interactions between the particular and the general, and they use place as a way of connecting them, since place grounds abstract ideas through particular ways of knowing the world. Place and context link knowledge with emotion through the visceral insights of experience. Through context and experience, postformal researchers can trace the way power shapes lives through policies, traditions, institutions, norms, discourse, and practices.

Finally, we posit a fifth construct: postformal researchers enter their work with a sense of humility. They are self-conscious, recognizing that a postformal method is just one way of many for investigating the world, and that it is a journey toward transformation not a destination in itself. Hence, postformal method resembles what Kincheloe (2005) describes as bricolage. Postformal researchers traverse disciplinary boundaries and social fields, journeying through different lenses to bring a multiperspectival analysis to bear on the issue at hand. Rather than using predetermined lenses, postformal researchers have a tool kit where they mix and match pieces to compose a mosaic of the object of their analysis. They may have to do additional research to explain phenomena that their tool kits and prior knowledge cannot readily articulate. Or, they may need to cross social fields, use popular culture, science, art, literature, and/or the natural world to shed light on their explorations. Emergent knowledge from postformal theoretical research takes form multiply like many colored glass beads turning in a kaleidoscope (Kress, Lake, Buechner, & Cox-Vineyard, 2019). For example, Tricia has used optical physics, specifically light diffraction to understand how neoliberal consumerism as a form of pedagogy co-opts and contains youth indignation and resistance (Kress, 2017). She used the metaphor

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of a prism to illustrate how socially progressive music is filtered through the neoliberal music industry and then commodified and sold back to fans as t-shirts and coffee mugs. Fans can feel good about their anti-capitalist values expressed by their choice in music while also upholding the same structures they denounce. In another publication, Tricia and Robert explored the connections between bee colony collapse disorder and standardization in U.S. schools to shed light on the deadening effects of neoliberalism in the living worlds of both schools and the biosphere (Kress & Lake, 2016). Using a rhizomatic approach we traced interconnected roots of both phenomena to illuminate how deep epistemological structures of neoliberalism, modernism, and positivism disregard the interdependent nature of life which results in destruction of living things. This example illustrates the usefulness of postformal method because if we were to take a formal, linear approach to investigating student engagement we might consider psychological and/or environmental factors with the goal of identifying which factors ought to be changed to alter the behavior of the learner or teacher. By unearthing deep structures using a postformal method we were able to challenge the very epistemological assumptions that were positioning learners as objects isolated in a static context, which gave rise to new ways of thinking about learners and learning environments as dynamic and interconnected.

Modeling a postformal method: examining chronos, kairos, and the fabric of time In this section we use the previously mentioned tenets to model a postformal method as we explore the Western construct of “time” and articulate how it has shaped the Western worldview and informed discursive and institutional structures. We juxtapose “time” with the educational policy mandate of Adequate Yearly Progress, illuminating how AYP “time” is bound up with multiple other space-times and therefore experienced differently by different people. To provide a roadmap, here we articulate some questions that would guide this inquiry. In the interest of transparency, we do not always articulate actual questions to get started. Sometimes, postformal inquiry begins with a gut feeling, musing, or strange connection. We often experience a sensation of “something is not right” or “something is happening”, which leads us to identify multiple different phenomena where we see “not right” or “happening” manifesting. That leads us to examine and articulate our connections by seeking out different lenses for meaning making. For ease of understanding, the following list approximates our musings and feelings in question form to illuminate how the process works, though in actuality it is not as tidy as this. •

What are the features of “time” in dominant Western worldviews? • •

How does Western “time” regulate what and how we know? How does Western “time” regulate research as both process and product?

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Where/when do we see the features of Western “time” at work? How might we describe them as an abstract pattern? How are the features of Western “time” operationalized in society and to what effects? • •

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How is Western “time” experienced differently by different people and across different domains? What contradictions emerge from disparate experiences of time?

How do the contradictions of experiencing Western “time” illuminate Western “time” as discourse and ideology? •

What other ways might we think about time to provide new understandings of the natural and social worlds? What opportunities are there to deconstruct and reconstruct “time” in order to change material conditions that result in differential experiences of “time” across different domains?

The framing questions roughly map to the constructs we delineated earlier. But again, the process is not linear; we may move up and down the list of questions sometimes even changing the central focus of our examination because what we uncover is diferent from the ideas we had when entering the research. The following sections answer these questions by examining “time” through the postformal constructs of etymology, pattern, process, and contextualization. Etymology: unearthing the epistemological roots of “time” To demonstrate a postformal method, we begin with an etymological unearthing of the epistemological roots of “time” by using “chronos” and “kairos”, two different kinds of time recognized by the Ancient Greeks. Smith (1969) explains, Western time has never simply been limited to linear progress narratives, despite the fact that progress is what dominates contemporary Western conceptualizations of time. The Western progress narrative is closely tied to chronos, the quantifiable notion of time that informs Newtonian physics. Chronos allows one to measure time in length, speed, and duration. It also links time and place, creating an understanding of distance between time periods, events, or geographical locations, and it affords a means of organizing time via clocks and calendars. As a basic metric, chronological time (i.e., chronos) allows for documenting progress through measurement, particularly expansion or contraction as objects under investigation increase or decrease in quality or quantity over time. In contrast, kairos is about the qualitative nature of time and the ordinal positioning of events in history. It allows one to describe what a time is like when a certain event happens, while chronos allows one to describe what happened at a particular moment. Kairos allows for thinking about not just metrics or progress but rather how events are linked to constellations of other events in historical timelines across different geographical

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locations. While chronos has a linear trajectory of forward movement, a singular track by which history moves forward, kairos is multi-directional and multidimensional, more like a spider web that has interconnected lines and spirals at different scales that are all connected through the links that bind them to each other. The linearity of chronos mirrors formalist research’s singular path toward discovering universal truths, while kairos mirrors the spiraling, multidirectional, multi-dimensional postformal method. As a comparison, public schools are evaluated under the metric of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). This progress-based metric is dependent upon chronological time (i.e., chronos), specifically 365 days which is a measurable length of time called “one year”. A school must make sufficient progress toward a predetermined marker of academic achievement for their student body. Whether or not that goal is attainable in one particular place during that particular time is irrelevant. In chronos time, if the goal is attained in that length of time, progress is made. If the goal is not attained, progress is not made. Yet, kairos allows us to draw a link between AYP and Darwin’s theory of natural selection. These are two very different things, but underlying both is a worldview that assumes progressive change happens to all entities, organizations and organisms alike, and that adaptations will result in improvements to the entities (i.e., species) or else they will cease to exist (i.e., they will phase out or die out). While chronos can be thought of as a ruler or tape measure, kairos can be thought of as a piece of fabric. In kairos time, AYP could be understood for its implications for the school community in question. Postformal method would consider many different events and sources of activity that go into preparing to meet AYP: the school adopts a curriculum which provides knowledge to students taking an exam which was adopted by the state; teachers receive professional development to help them deliver the curriculum and prepare students for the exam; students read books, watch videos, complete activities in school and at home, have discussions with peers or family members, take practice tests, and then take the actual test; the state evaluates the numerical data of whether or not AYP has been met. Some of those events may happen simultaneously or at different times, and each of them can also be thought of as its own event, linked to other events. For instance, teacher professional development (PD) could be linked to other kinds of teacher professional development across past or present space-time, which would give different meaning to the AYP professional development in relation to other kinds of PD. Yet, the character of the event of AYP evaluation is determined by the outcome: If the school fails to meet AYP all sorts of negative consequences could be triggered (e.g., sanctions, school reforms, administrative turnover, loss of funding). If the school passes, the event is a victory that triggers neutral or positive effects. Postformal method would shed light on the relationships between the micro-level activities of the school community, macro social and historical patterns of classifying schools and students as “failing”, and meso-level school and community responses to “failure” or fear of “failure”.

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Pattern: tracing “time” and its manifestations To begin identifying patterns related to AYP, we return here to Western “time” to identify the pattern of “progress” as an organizing feature recognizable in various aspects of Western cultures, including the organization of life, work, and education. For instance, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution traces the developmental path from simple to more complex organisms. Developmental psychology delineates stages that people advance through from infancy to adulthood. Abraham Maslow (1954) delineated a hierarchical order of human needs that a person must acquire before one can reach their full potential (i.e., self-actualization). In 1956, Benjamin Bloom put forth A Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, which created stages of learning from knowledge acquisition to application. And both Taylorism and Fordism were predicated on the belief that efficiency and industrialization led to more advanced forms of labor, production, and social organization. Indeed, Western history is often presented holistically as a tale of linear development, as European societies moved out of the Dark Ages, through the Enlightenment, and into expansion and industrialization. The history of the United States is also presented in a similar way from colonial “discovery” to frontier expansion and the birth of cities and industries. The Western preoccupation with stage-based progression is apparent throughout U.S. society, which prioritizes expediency and efficiency to drive consumerism. In some ways, the progress narrative can be positive as it encourages innovation, ingenuity, problem solving, and change. It provides a hopeful outlook, encouraging people, industries, and societies to continually improve their performance. However, this narrative also feeds into problematic ideologies like incrementalism which assumes social change happens slowly like evolution of species, and each moment is potentially an improvement upon conditions of the previous moment and a step in the direction of progress. This grand narrative of progress-based time regulates how people are allowed to understand how social change happens and why there is persistently entrenched injustice over time. Incrementalism distinguishes between times that were more unjust than the contemporary moment, which justifies contemporary injustice by quantifying its quality. An incrementalist rebuttal to White privilege and institutionalized racism would sound something like, “But look at the progress that has been made. {Insert oppressed group here} have greater rights and freedoms than they did {insert quantity} years ago”. The assumption here is that injustice is measurable and that some injustice is “lesser” in quantity and therefore more acceptable than less evolved/more severe past injustice. This perspective misses the systemic nature of injustice and the significance of social struggle by assuming, (1) society is working through its developmental stages, and (2) injustice would go away over time if society were left to its natural course of development. In contrast, by tracing patterns across space-times, a postformal method would illuminate injustice embedded in society, manifesting itself in new forms over time.

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A postformal researcher focused on AYP would problematize the very notion that AYP represents “progress”. A postformal researcher might instead seek out the roots of what the discourse of “progress” means in the context of school reforms, and how progress might be understood differently across diverse space-times. The effects of “progress-based” reforms for diverse students of color may yield insights about “progress” as a grand narrative. For instance, for Native American students during the Carlisle school era, settler educators measured “progress” if Native children assimilated into White settler culture. Comparatively, African American students in apartheid schools in urban areas in the 21st century exhibit “progress” when they perform on par with White students on standardized exams. These cases are different; yet, “progress” brings them together and reveals how Whiteness and Eurocentrism is at the center of both “progress” narratives. The school reforms for Native American and African American students were designed to “evolve” students to become like the “more advanced” White norm. Postformal method illuminates AYP and “progress” as institutional structures that maintain institutional racism and White supremacy. Process: working the fabric of knowledge across space-times Postformal method recognizes the insufficiency of chronos, unspooling like a ribbon, pushing people and events further away from each other. Kairosattuned postformal researchers draw from multiple data sources across diverse space-times to work with knowledge that is folding and twisting, bringing the relationships between different people and events on opposite ends of the fabric into closer proximity with each other. Events are then linked by their quality, meaning, or significance. Such links may be located in and across empirical data, popular culture, news and media reports, social commentary, history, nature, personal reflection, and the arts. For the postformal researcher, everything is data that holds potential for analysis beyond the strict measurement techniques of positivist science. Furthermore, weighty events simultaneously impact people at various social and geographical locations in different ways. Postformal method illustrates how what happens in one location on the fabric may have a small or large ripple effect in another location. This is akin to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity which hypothesized that in the cosmos gravity is a relationship between space and bodies; when there is a disturbance in one area of the universe, effects are experienced elsewhere. As explained by Kincheloe, Steinberg, and Tippins (1999), he demonstrated this phenomenon by asking people to imagine a large rubber sheet and the effect that dropping a BB (small metal sphere) in the middle of the sheet would have. Since the mass of the BB is small, there might be a slight ripple in the sheet, but it would likely not disturb the sheet much. If a bowling ball were dropped in the middle of a sheet, the sheet would stretch and elongate, having a significant effect on all areas of the sheet. If there were BBs spread about on the sheet, when the bowling ball was dropped, the BBs would all roll toward

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the center. Now imagine the bowling ball spinning like a planet on its axis: the sheet would twist, and the BBs would begin to rotate around the bowling ball. If we look again at AYP, a postformal method could consider the policy itself as the bowling ball dropped in the middle of the sheet and rotating, allowing the researcher to visualize U.S. public schools and their stakeholders being pulled closer together by the gravity of the policy. However, depending on their location on the sheet, not all school communities are equally impacted. Some schools are pulled into the orbit immediately and rapidly, perhaps colliding with the policy, while other schools further away from the impact of the policy may feel barely any effects at all; yet, they are still connected. One could even assume that if the weight of the bowling ball continues to stretch, those on the outer edge of the sheet would eventually be pulled in toward the center as well. Indeed, if we slightly shift our focus to the effect of the national Common Core State Standards in combination with AYP and testing, you can see this effect as schools in more affluent areas that traditionally had stronger AYP performance were suddenly falling behind. The weight of this event brought those advantaged and disadvantaged by years of AYP closer together, enraging privileged communities alongside historically disadvantaged communities and sparking the Opt Out movement (Kornhaber, 2015). An example like this demonstrates how relationships across space-time are more obvious under extreme circumstances, but with a postformal method it doesn’t take an exceptional event to make these connections. Even mundane day-to-day activities have the opportunity to spark new awareness if the researcher keeps their eyes and ears open for resonance between different events. Contextualization: postformal method as research for the “right time” Just as Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity upended the dominance of Newtonian physics and changed modern science to open the door for quantum physics, postformal method opens up possibilities for new ways of thinking about educational research for social change. The final step necessary for generating new theory via a postformal method is contextualization. Here, we are inspired by Deloria’s (2003) words, In a world in which communications are nearly instantaneous and simultaneous experiences are possible, it must be spaces and places that distinguish us from one another, not time or history. (p. 64) If we recognize all of humanity, the world, and time as part of a whole piece of cloth, we can begin to see patterns that traverse time and place. How people come to understand the significance of events may look and feel diferent based upon their proximity to the event and to each other. Through postformal theorizing, we can twist space-time to bring events, people, and places closer to each other in order to better identify commonalities and diferences and

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generate ways to bring about change, even if that change is fairly localized in one’s own classroom or community. For example, earlier we identified how AYP illuminates “progress” reforms in education as mechanisms for maintaining institutional racism and White supremacy. This new awareness of “progress” as White supremacy can be applied to different contexts by raising questions about practice, such as: How as a leader am I complicit in perpetuating White supremacy/“progress” through school policies? How as a teacher am I perpetuating White supremacy/“progress” through my course content and pedagogy? How as a researcher am I upholding White supremacy/“progress” in the epistemology driving my research designs and analyses? These questions dovetail with our fifth construct of humility. No one has all the answers; no one is immune to perpetuating injustice. Postformal researchers realize that they too can be complicit in a White supremacist agenda without being conscious of their complicity. By asking questions about the manifestation of injustice through practice in various contexts, postformal researchers are compelled to act, make changes to what they do and educate others because inaction equates to being complicit in upholding White supremacy.

Conclusion Postformal method moves researchers away from narratives like AYP that force separate paths of “progress” and maintain White supremacy. It reframes “progress” as the pushing and pulling of people’s lives and histories as they struggle to maintain or disrupt power, and it connects an ostensibly neutral metric like AYP to the struggle for Black Lives. Postformal method moves away from “time of ” or “time that” toward “the time for” by compelling the researcher to act upon their new awareness and root out injustice across contexts. We wrote this piece in “the time of COVID”. Schools were thrust into remote learning and the manifestations of White supremacy in schooling became ever more stark. Students already disadvantaged were further disadvantaged in lockdown. Debates about whether to suspend testing began to simmer to the surface. Black and Brown students, especially those living in poverty, would feel the deleterious effects of the being out of school much more acutely than White affluent peers. COVID time was also “the time that” anti-racist protests erupted all over the world. We watched the news and social media and wondered, “how during a pandemic do police still have ‘time for’ killing Black people?” We heard White people opine about the protests, “COVID time is not the time for that”. Yet, from the perspective of anti-racists COVID time was precisely “the time for” that. It was “the time that” the death of an unarmed Black man at the hands of police should not have happened because there is never a “right time” for that at all. COVID was the time that “essential” Black and Brown bodies worked low-wage jobs and continued to serve the affluent White population. It was the time that Black and Brown children in urban schools might not have had access to school breakfast and lunch or technology for learning. COVID was the time that a virus disproportionately killed Black people because of disparities in access to health care. Lethal White supremacy knows no lockdown. In postformal

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method time twists together, illuminating the fight against injustice as always “the right time” because humanity knows no progress as long as injustice exists.

References Bloom, B. S., Engelhart, M. D., Furst, E. J., Hill, W. H., & Krathwohl, D. R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. New York, NY: Longman. Bury, J. (1980). The idea of progress: An inquiry into its origin and growth. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Chow, D. (2020). Africa has held off the worst of the coronavirus. Researchers are working to figure out how. NBC News. Retrieved from www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/ africa-has-held-worst-coronavirus-researchers-are-working-figure-out-n1241026s Deloria, V. (2003). God is red: A native view of religion (30th anniversary ed.). New York, NY: Putnam. Kincheloe, J. L. (1999). Trouble ahead, trouble behind: Grounding the postformal critique of educational psychology. In J. L. Kincheloe & S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), The postformal reader: Cognition and education (pp. 4–54). New York, NY: Falmer Press. Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. R. (1999). A tentative description of post-formal thinking: The critical confrontation with cognitive theory. The post-formal reader: Cognition and education, 63, 55–90. Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. R. (1999). The postformal reader: Cognition and education. New York, NY: Falmer Press. Kincheloe, J. L. (2005). On the next level: Continuing the conceptualization of the bricolage. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(3), 232–350. Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. R. (1993). A tentative description of post-formal thinking: A critical confrontation with cognitive theory. Harvard Educational Review, 63(3), 296–320. Kincheloe, J. L., Steinberg, S. R., & Tippins, D. J. (1999). The stigma of genius: Einstein, consciousness, and education. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L., & Thomas, P. L. (2006). Reading, writing, and thinking: The postformal basics. Rotterdam: Sense. Kornhaber, M. L. (2015). Students are opting out of testing. How did we get here? The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/students-are-opting-out-oftesting-how-did-we-get-here-40364 Kress, T. M. (2017). The dark side of the prism: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and the pedagogy of neoliberal capitalism. In J. Austin (Ed.), Spinning popular culture as public pedagogy: A critical exploration of album cover artwork. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Kress, T. M., & Lake, R. (2016). Wild honey: Toward a curriculum of be(e)comings. In W. Reynolds (Ed.), Expanding curriculum theory: Dis/positions and lines of flight (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Kress, T. M., Lake, R., Buechner, K., & Cox-Vineyard, M. (2019). Critical kaleidoscopic pedagogy. In M. A. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of teacher education. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Maslow, A. H. (1954). Motivation and personality. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers. Millet, G. A., Jones, A. T., Benkeser, D., Baral, S., Mercer, L., Beyrer, C., . . . & Sullivan, P. S. (2020). Assessing differential impacts of COVID-19 on black communities. Annals of Epidemiology, 47, 37–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annepidem.2020.05.003 Patel, L. (2015). Decolonizing educational research. New York, NY: Routledge. Smith, J. E. (1969). Time, times, and the “right time”: “Chronos” and “Kairos”. The Monist, 53(1), 1–13.

17 Black lives mattering in and out of schools Anti-Black racism, racial violence, and a hope for Black imagination in educational research Courtney Mauldin and Lamar L. Johnson Introduction Black haunting is ever present in the United States. It permeates with ongoing police brutality, the endemic nature of anti-Black racism, and the ceaseless racially violent curricula, pedagogies, and teachers found in K-12 schools predominant with Black children. From the Gullah Sea Islands of South Carolina (e.g., Walter Scott, Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons, Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson) to the concrete jungles of New York City (e.g., Eleanor Bumpurs and Eric Garner) to the windy city of Chicago (e.g., Rekia Boyd, Laquan McDonald, and Paul O’Neal) and to the hills and Bay Area of California (e.g., Tyisha Miller and Oscar Grant), the murders of Black people are constant reminders of the dangers of anti-Black racism and racial violence – otherwise Black haunting – which we, as educators, must teach and empower against. These violent Black hauntings not only run rampant outside of schools, sadly they also run rampant inside the proclaimed “safety” within schools, particularly through the literary canon, English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms, and literacy educational research. Traditional research practices, the literary canon, and state-sanctioned curriculum police confine and haunt the lives of Black children, youth, and adults in ways that do not murder their beings (like those aforementioned) but nonetheless spirit murder (Love, 2019) their souls. To illustrate, as a former secondary English teacher, the genesis of who I (Lamar) am as a language and literacy scholar transpires from my experiences from working with and learning from Black youth. During my first year of K-12 teaching, George Zimmerman, a white male neighborhood watchman, killed Trayvon Martin, a Black male youth, in Sanford, Florida. The murder became a national phenomenon when Zimmerman successfully used Black male racial stereotypes to justify his actions in court. Here, Zimmerman engaged the white imagination (Morrison, 1992; Steinberg, 2020) which is often scripted and utilized as ideological thoughts and actions that are shaped around white logic, whiteness, patriarchy, and violence (i.e., physical, symbolic, linguistic, and curricular and pedagogical violence) that does harm to

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Black youth and Black people. Steinberg (2020) writes that “The white imagination is a powerful tool, it is the manifestation of white supremacy within white and no-white minds everywhere.” Embodying the white imagination is the reason why Trayvon Martin was racially profiled and shot senselessly by George Zimmerman and then not given justice by a predominantly white jury for the murder. That Monday following Trayvon’s death, I witnessed 14- and 15-year-old Black youth wrestle with the misperceptions, stereotypes, and racial violence that are inflicted upon Black lives. I witnessed Black youth problematize the relationship between how Black lives are positioned in and out of school, prompting me to meditate on how language and literacy studies and English education are implicated in the racial violence that unfolds within-school spaces and outside-of-school contexts. It is no surprise that anti-Black racism is embedded within the English language. Namely, that Zimmerman can use the English language that he learned in schools to justify his murder of a Black teenager outside of schools is exactly the gravity of my position. To be clear, ELA classrooms are saturated with white supremacist and racist undertones. In the case of Trayvon Martin, Zimmerman used terms and phrases like “suspicious,” “Black,” “wearing a hoodie” to frame Trayvon as a threat to the dispatch officer. He continues with language that frames Black men as dangerous, violent, and disposable in the same ways they are so often portrayed in canonical text used in ELA classrooms like Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact, as a Black male myself, I too experience anti-Black racism and violence which has informed my teaching. Indeed as a Black male English Language Arts (ELA) teacher I operationally choose to reconceptualize how anti-Black racism and violence seep into the classroom and educational research in ways that do not make race invisible. Instead, I developed a racial justice framework to be applied to ELA and classroom teaching; otherwise, Critical Race English Education (CREE). This chapter delves into what is CREE and how it can be used as a method to thwart the Black haunting and its anti-Black violence.

Presenting Critical Race English Education (CREE) CREE as pedagogy and theory To counteract the racial violence that ensues within K-12 English and ELA classrooms and within educational research writ large, we, the authors, encourage teachers to build upon perspectives that specifically shed light on the stories, history, and knowledge of Black people. Thus, CREE is not just a theory to center Blackness in the literary canon, but in doing so, it is also a method for how to center Blackness in theoretical education research. In doing so, CREE addresses the complex intersections of anti-Black racism, Blackness, whiteness, language, and literacy, which ultimately aims to deconstruct the white literary canon (Morrison, 1992). For example, unlike the traditional canon that focuses

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on white heroism, CREE stems from an epistemological framework that heralds Black accomplishments. Additionally, CREE influences how language and literacy scholars conduct research, drives what theories and frameworks are utilized, and informs teachers’ pedagogical ideologies and practices. For example, white literary texts such as The Old Man and the Sea, Lord of the Flies, Romeo and Juliet, and To Kill A Mockingbird center American exceptionalism, white innocence, and anti-Black racism and violence. By not adhering to these canonical literary texts, educators informed by CREE can present new texts grounded in Blackness. Contrary to resistant discourse, this can be done in PK-12 classrooms. For me, (Courtney) it was imperative that as an elementary school teacher I challenged my students to question the curriculum placed in front of them as well as the literary texts made available by our school. So often, if my students did see Blackness reflected in our school library or their guided readers, the characters were portrayed as tricksters, in need of saving, or impoverished. It was not only my responsibility to teach them the tools to critique these texts but also to present them with books where they saw themselves as thriving, happy and whole people. CREE as methods The application of theoretical methods that are grounded in positivist paradigms often depersonalizes Black communities, propels a racially stratified society, perpetuates objectivity white rationality, and silences the lived realities and voices of LGBTQAI+ communities (Johnson, 2018). This is done because oftentimes empirical researchers arrive at their research with dominant ideologies like that of whiteness. However, unlike these methods, CREE as a method draws from Blackness because it’s dynamic and exists along multiple dimensions. Considering this, Blackness moves beyond race and encompasses other interlocking identities such as ability, religion, citizenship, and gender and sexuality. To that end, using CREE as a method better humanizes the Black experience. For example, Gordon (2011) wrestles with haunting alongside concepts like dispossession, exploitation, and racial capitalism, all of which entangle with Blackness. Noting that haunting is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed (p. 2), she explains that haunting, however, is usually produced by these experiences. As such, the reckoning that haunting emerges from these instances helps us to confront what must be done when encountering antiBlack racism, whiteness, and the white imagination in classrooms, society, and research. This process is also a part of engaging in CREE methods. Through CREE, we are better equipped to develop future educational researchers and to ground them in the authentic understandings of Black history, memory, and knowledge. If Black lives are to matter in theoretical educational research, then researchers must embrace new theories and methods that prioritize Blackness and depart from traditional qualitative measures that inherently embed whiteness, and anti-Black racism. Milner (2007) corroborates this, reminding us that “Some education researchers have given privileged status to

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dominant, white voices, beliefs, ideologies, and view over the voices of people of color” (p. 389). Avoiding this, the CREE method centers Blackness, a necessary step to stop anti-Black racism in educational research.

Ideological parameters to CREE White imagination Circling back to the white imagination, the white imagination exists within what Morrison (1992) calls the white literary imagination. The white literary imagination specifically speaks to literary studies and literacy educational researchers; more specifically, Morrison (1992) explicates that white literature, authors, research practices, writing theories and methods, and language are all deeply entrenched in white ideologies and white supremacist patriarchy. Focusing on the white literary canon and literacy research practices protect whiteness and white ways of living and being in the world while policing and controlling what can and cannot be researched, read, critiqued, and challenged. It is of no surprise then that the white literary canon and white literacy research benefit white people and dehumanize Black people because whiteness continues to go unnamed and unchecked (Baker-Bell, Butler, & Johnson, 2017) in schools and society. The white literary imagination is the reason why many Black youth disengage with commonly used white literary texts that focus on white characters, stories, authors, and language. It also sustains traditional research and positivistic paradigms which are continuously applied in literacy education research by continuing to portray Black students as subjects to be studied rather than humanized and empowered if they take center stage at all. However, there are extensive amounts of scholarship that challenge these traditional and positivistic approaches to qualitative research (Johnson, 2018). Johnson (2018), for example, argues that Black feminist epistemologies (see Baker-Bell, 2017; Butler, 2017), CRT (see Bell, 1992; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), LatCrit (Hernandez-Truyol, 1997), and critical Indigenous methodologies (Tuck & Yang, 2014) – just to name a few – take a stance against discriminatory and dehumanizing research methods and methodologies. (p. 111) However, to disentangle with the white imagination in research methods, researchers must take an active step to center Blackness, an underlying condition of applying CREE as method. Black radical imagination As stated earlier, the white imagination and the white literary imagination lead to anti-Black racism and violence because they view Blackness as

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anti-intellectual, sinister, and non-human. The humanity, brilliance, and beauty of Black people and culture do not exist within the white imagination or the white literary imagination. On the contrary, historically and contemporarily, Black folks have pushed back against all forms of oppression, marginalization, and violence, as a way to knock down and eradicate our current conditions while creating and building the world we deserve and demand. Through the Black gaze and experience, the Black radical imagination centers Blackness, Black lives, Black humanity, and Black futurity. Historically, our ancestors who encountered enslavement demonstrated what it means to revolt and overturn an endemic system that polices, surveils, and oppresses Black life. Our ancestors and elders practiced and embodied what Kelley (2002) calls freedom dreaming. He contends, without new visions, we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics but a process that can and must transform us. (p. xii) In like manner, Love (2019) argues that freedom dreaming and the Black radical imagination are powerful tools that help Black folks to fight against injustice. In harmony with scholars such as Kelley, (2002), Love (2019), and Stovall (2017, 2018), operating from the Black radical imagination requires the exploration of how our past, present, and future intersects and are constantly in complicated conversations with one another. Our past and current condition of anti-Black violence, misogynoir, xenophobia, and anti-immigration continue to haunt Black people; therefore, understanding our past and current conditions enable us to read, study, and analyze social life (Gordon, 1997). Embodying the Black radical imagination provides us with the tools to understand the structure of feeling a reality we have come to experience. The Black radical imagination and haunting go hand-in-hand. To be clear, as Black folks navigating multiple spaces such as the academy, the classroom, and the overall institution, we understand how our racial hauntings are deeply etched within our lives, and we carry them into our research, teaching, service, and outreach. As such, we lean on and build upon the Black radical imagination because, ideologically, it can not only lead us to a critical understanding of our past, present, and future but also provide us with an opportunity and space to move towards the liberation of these hauntings. Because haunting functions as an ideological framing that allows us to capture how the past shapes the present and how the past and present structure the possibilities of the future, we name that haunting creates space for the Black radical imagination to take form. Within the Black radical imagination, Black people are holders and producers of knowledge, and knowledge is not presented through a westernized lens that reflects white standards and onto-epistemologies which are often neutral, objective, non-emotional, and non-personal (Baszile, 2006).

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Since CREE method draws from this ideological stance it then becomes a formidable method to stop the haunting of Black people and, in this case, for Black students.

Black lives mattering in PK-12 ELA classrooms Despite centuries of anti-Black racism, there is something about today’s intense anti-Black racism and police brutality that cuts Black youth so deeply today. The resemblance of past and present trauma and violence are noteworthy; however, even more noteworthy is how Black youth are responding to these racial traumas. These Black hauntings evoke emotionality and trigger traumas due in part because racism and white supremacy continue to manifest, especially with respect to today’s return to blatant anti-Black racism and violence. Because Matias and Newlove (2017) argue that the Trump presidency led to a return to emboldened whiteness, the enactments of anti-Black racism and racial violence are not only virally displayed in social media, sadly some whites enjoy mocking it (see #georgefloydchallenge). As such, Black youth are severely triggered and emotionally traumatized in ways unknown before. This new emotional condition is brought into the classroom because it unearths Black youth’s racial reality. Thus, when exposed to eurocentric1 literature Black students cannot withstand any more racial assaults that ignore their humanity – sadly whiteness in the literary canon is just that. As such, educational researchers have to understand that our research, theory, and pedagogy intersect with racial reality and cannot be divorced from that racial reality. CREE researchers must bear in mind the racial text of Black students, recognizing that they bring in a racial reality wrought with trauma, haunting, and emotional depression. This text for Black youth must be read and not ignored.

CREE in English education: an application As such, educators and researchers have to grapple with how anti-Black violence and white supremacy are omnipresent in research, in classrooms, and in the curricula. The anti-Black violence and racism that erupt in educational research and school classrooms are rooted in and build from the white imagination. This is an imagination that we can no longer afford to expose Black youth and communities to. In the wake of Black Lives Matter movements across the nation, CREE researchers and educators must name Black haunting for what it is and what it evokes. With CREE, we are able to move towards a Black future and in doing so, we (researchers and educators) must operate with a Black gaze, one where Blackness is made center and not only in opposition to whiteness. When CREE researchers make Blackness center, they move away from coded or safe terms that don’t fully capture the realities of Black life; they name the hauntings for what they are. However, CREE researchers don’t simply name Black life as a life that is haunted by oppression, they also give texture and fullness to the lives of Black folks and adequately frame and humanize them. In

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our respective research, this has been second nature when working alongside our co-researchers. Our commitments are to an inward gaze when engaging research in our own communities as well as asking the essential question – is this school, organization, or classroom any better because I was here? CREE researchers do not prioritize their gains in the academy over the lives of Black communities. Instead, we challenge ourselves to pour back what has been given and ask ourselves what we’ve left behind. Researchers who do not use CREE as a method are susceptible to being motivated by means and prioritizing gains in the academy more than the participants of their study. In fact, they may see themselves as entirely removed from the research, with participants regarded as mere objects of study. Since CREE is about centering Blackness, applying it as a method then makes room for oral traditions like racial storytelling, counternarrative, creative and performative art forms. While research design often determines a researcher’s interview approach, we feel that CREE researchers must consider the sociopolitical context, background, preferred pronouns, first language, ability and other occupied identities of their participants when creating interview protocols. Frankly what a CREE researcher asks is already, by design, for the people and by the people. CREE researchers must also make way for healing as praxis. This means that as a CREE researcher, we acknowledge that fostering a space is a small attempt at disrupting the historical school harm that K-12 institutions often perpetuate. Thus, these considerations shape our engagement and research process while also establishing relational trust needed before any true data is “collected.” In my (Courtney) research with Black youth and youth of color, I created a communal space where healing and restoration are at the core of how we share space together. Utilizing the arts, the youth and I were able to reimagine the world they desire where CREE is at the heart of this undertaking. Oftentimes, traditional researchers approach space as something one comes into, investigates within, and leaves upon completion. Unlike this approach, CREE researchers already understand the space is controlled by whiteness and thus it is essential to create a space where researcher and participants coexist and heal together. While CREE can support traditional approaches to data collection, it also invites researchers to operate within a new schema that requires rigorous engagement with theory and knowledge as well as history and memory as data themselves. Meaning, what constitutes data is not always something that must be collected, per se. Instead, data is also living, experiencing, and understanding the shared history of a people. In traditional research, researchers can interview participants who may or may not be cognizant of how the white gaze and imagination have influenced their experiences in life. If the participant does not bring it up they may wrongfully presume that such history does not impact their life. For a CREE researcher, however, whether cognizant of how antiBlack violence operates hegemonically and, at times, like death by a thousand backstabbing cuts, they will realize a participant’s realization of history, or lack thereof, is emblematic of the trauma.

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Historically, U.S. schools have served as institutions that forwarded the largely assimilationist and often violent white imperial project, with students and families being asked to lose or deny their languages, literacies, cultures, and histories in order to achieve in schools (Paris & Alim, 2014). When schools deny the literacy experiences and practices of Black people, it is an example of anti-Black violence against Black humanity. The anti-Black violence that happens in the streets and in schools is undergirded by this dominant fear of Black lives which affects teaching and learning. As aforementioned, this same fear and deployment of the white imagination is what gave Zimmerman the brazen indignation to go on a manhunt after Trayvon Martin. Similarly, teachers, many of whom are white, feel entitled to surveil and target Black youth in classrooms (Love, 2016). Teachers are spending too much of their time on surveillance and punishment rather than understanding how this ominous fear is interconnected with a racial past that dangles in our present. Therefore, CREE is a method that not only rejects the white imagination but does away with its properties and instead invites a framing of Black futures and placing Black humanity at the forefront. In research with CREE, there is no damage centered framing (Tuck, 2009), there is only radical love and the Black radical imagination. This in turn means that there is no surveillance, policing, or persistent harm done to Black youth and communities in our classrooms nor our research. Therefore, researchers who employ CREE engage in critical selfreflection or reflexivity by first interrogating how their positionalities shape the research and communities they engage. Further, they apply a critical eye to the ways they frame the communities they work alongside in both their engagement and written research. For researchers, we are also challenged to bring together theory in ways that offer new understandings about what it means to humanize Blackness. Using CREE as method should produce findings that trace implications of a historical past and how it shapes our current moment. Yet, these types of findings should also move us towards Black futures and away from binaries or oppression as our single story. In fact, to not think about the betterment of Black futurity is a type of anti-Black violence. Therefore, when literacy researchers uphold positivistic paradigms and research practices that dehumanize and marginalize Black communities by focusing on the ills or deficits rather than the richness and hopes, they too are violent. Paris and Winn (2014) writes that, it is important to consider the ways in which people, and more specifically youth, are often “dehumanized” or – to borrow Blackburn’s words – “made less human by having their individuality, creativity, and humanity taken away, as when one is treated like a number or an object.” (as cited in Paris and Alim, 2014, p. 1) In the same manner, Haddix (2015) contends that educational researchers often perpetuate research practices that are wrapped in westernized and eurocentric ideologies that encourage Black and Brown communities to assimilate into

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white culture and norms in order to fit into society. When researchers apply CREE as a method they focus on radical Black uplifting more so than whitecentric degradations.

Applying CREE in various contexts Teaching and learning for justice and humanization are ongoing projects that require a critical reflexivity. That is, as Paris and Alim define (2014), an inward gaze. In adopting this reflexivity, we must ask ourselves where we might be responsible for reproducing practices in our teaching and research that perpetuate ableist, racist, transphobic, homophobic, and xenophobic ideas and enactments. Here, we are calling for CREE to not only invite educators and researchers to engage in critical reflexivity but also to apply this inward gaze to the actionoriented components of CREE. For educators and researchers that currently operate with criticality and humanization, it is already understood that the application of CREE alone is unable to accomplish the task of solving racism and white supremacy in schools and research. However, CREE does demand action from educators and researchers particularly in the areas of addressing race and racism in classrooms, dismantling dominant texts used in classrooms, and building on the Black literacies of Black youth (Johnson, 2017, 2018). In educational spaces, this may take on the form of critical race writing circles where educators facilitate guided reflection on race, racism, whiteness, white supremacy, and power within school and out-of-school spaces. Further, these circles can create an intimate space of healing for persons of color to engage in healing as praxis where white dominant norms and gazes cannot contract emotionality nor how youth of color/persons of color display their confrontations of haunting and racism. As we look towards the application of CREE as both theory and method in educational research, we acknowledge that in literacy education research, there is room to disrupt how language and literacy upholds dehumanization by its definitions of what are considered canonical texts, whose histories and literacies are reflected in literacy research as well as valuing methodologies that disrupt traditional notions of literacy instruction and literacy research (Sailors, Martinez, Davis, Goatley, & Willis, 2017). As such, CREE poses an opportunity to redefine canonical texts, ensuring that People of Color, especially Black people, are made center in this uptake. Equally, the histories and literacies reflected in literacy research cannot continue to see youth of color as “objects of study” rather than human beings complete with experiences that have historically engaged and defined literacy for themselves. This is why we name the need for critical reflexivity alongside CREE. Without it, the ways we intend for CREE to be applied become reduced to touch and go practices that further dehumanize the educational futures of Black youth and youth of color. While literacy research does maintain its scholarly conventions, we seek for CREE to undergird new critical methodologies like racial storytelling (Johnson, 2017), Black Feminist Womanist Storytelling (Baker-Bell, 2017), Black Girl Cartography (Butler,

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2018), and other critical modalities that embrace the stories and humanity of historically oppressed groups. In writing this piece, we have been reticent to reduce CREE down to a series of steps that magically create an anti-racist world. Instead, we believe that by unsettling the bounds of which we have historically taught in classrooms or conducted research, we begin to move towards an engagement of anti-Black violence frameworks, methods, and methodologies thoughtfully. In doing so, we are better able to actuate justice in literacy classrooms as well as in literacy research.

Conclusion: towards Black futurity It is important for us to name that applying CREE is not a step-by-step process that will lead Black youth or Black persons to sudden liberation. In fact, CREE is an unconventional theoretical framework and method that does not fit nicely and neatly in a box. Echoing Johnson (2018), this section is not intended to be a “how-to-guide” or a “cookie-cutter” demonstration of how to do CREE. Oftentimes, when it comes to equitybased pedagogies such as culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2000), and culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012), many educators want step-by-step instructions. (p. 120) CREE is soul work – and, it compels and challenges researchers to dig deep down inside to understand ourselves in relation to racial justice. In short, it is not just about research. CREE pushes researchers to come full frontal with ourselves and the research we engage. Meaning, it demands that we investigate our own epistemological and ideological stance before even engaging in said research. Essentially, is the researcher’s mind free from the white imagination that hurts Black people? If so, how does one know? In what ways does the research move us towards a Black future? Teaching and learning for justice and humanization are ongoing projects that require a critical reflexivity that moves us closer to Black futures that operationalize the radical Black imagination. This requires what Paris and Alim define as an inward gaze (2014). In adopting this reflexivity and gaze, we must ask ourselves where we might be responsible for reproducing practices in our teaching and research that perpetuate ableist, racist, transphobic, homophobic, and xenophobic ideas and enactments. For researchers and educators who operate in the status quo realm of research, they are susceptible to replicating many of the harms we have detailed throughout this chapter to Black students and communities. Our current sociopolitical climate reminds us that the white imagination is ever present and must not simply be interrogated but dismantled and exposed at its roots. We argue that educators and researchers must take on this charge. Bearing witness to this pervasive harm is not an option for those who position themselves as researchers or educators who do work in urban contexts

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and communities of color. With using a CREE method, researchers are better able to assess their intentions, humanize their research practices, and traverse new imaginations. For educators and researchers that forefront criticality and humanization, we know that the application of CREE as method alone is unable to accomplish the task of solving racism and white supremacy in schools and research. Furthermore, using a CREE method demands action from educators and researchers, particularly in the areas of addressing race and racism in classrooms, dismantling dominant texts used in classrooms, and building on the Black literacies of Black youth (Johnson, 2017, 2018). To fashion research and practice that does this well, Black lives must be affirmed in the classroom by using methods that directly interrogate whiteness and the white imagination that harms Black students.

Note 1 Purposely lowercased to thwart the centering of whiteness.

References Baker-Bell, A. (2017). For Loretta: A Black woman literacy scholar’s journey to prioritizing self-preservation and Black feminist-womanist storytelling. Journal of Literacy Research, 49(4), 1–18. Baker-Bell, A., Butler, T., & Johnson, L. L. (2017). The pain and the wounds: A call for critical race English education in the wake of racial violence. English Education, 49, 116–129. Baker-Bell, A., Stanbrough, J. R., & Everett, S. (2017). The stories they tell: Mainstream media, pedagogies of healing, and critical media literacy. English Education, 49, 130–152. Baszile, D. T. (2006). Rage in the interest of Black self: Curriculum theorizing as dangerous knowledge. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 22, 89–98. Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well. New York, NY: Basic Books. Butler, T. T. (2017). # Say [ing] HerName as critical demand: English education in the age of erasure. English Education, 49(2), 153. Butler, T. T. (2018). Black girl cartography: Black girlhood and placemaking in education research. Review of Research in Education, 42, 28–45. Cruz, G. (2015). To kill a mockingbird top 10 books you were forced to read in school | TIME.com. Retrieved November 29, 2015 from http://entertainment.time.com/2010/ 07/09/top-10-books-you-were-forced-to-read-in-school/ Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching theory, research, and practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Gordon, A. (1997). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gordon, A. (2011). Some thoughts on haunting and futurity. Borderlands, 10(2), 1–21. Haddix, M. (2015). Cultivating racial and linguistic diversity in literacy teacher education: Teachers like me. New York and Urbana, IL: Routledge and National Council of Teachers of English. Hernandez-Truyol, B. E. (1997). Indivisible identities: Culture clashes, confused constructs, and reality checks. Harvard Latino Law Review, 2, 199–230.

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Johnson, L. L. (2017). The racial hauntings of one Black male professor and the disturbance of the self(ves): Self-actualization and racial storytelling as pedagogical practices. Journal of Literacy Research, 49(4), 1–27. Johnson, L. L. (2018). Where do we go from here?: Toward a critical race English education. Research in the Teaching of English, 53(2), 102–124. Kelley, R. D. G. (2002). Freedom dreams: The Black radical imagination. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–68. Love, B. L. (2016). Anti-Black state violence, classroom edition: The spirit murdering of Black children. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 13(1), 22–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 15505170.2016.1138258 Love, B. L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Matias, C. E., & Newlove, P. M. (2017). Better the devil you see, than the one you don’t: Bearing witness to emboldened en-whitening epistemology in the Trump era. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(10), 920–928. Milner, H. R. (2007). Race, culture, and researcher positionality: Working through dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen. Educational Researcher, 36, 388–400. Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97. Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (Eds.). (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Paris, D., & Alim, S. (2014). What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy? A loving critique forward. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 85–100. Paris, D., & Winn, M. T. (Eds.). (February, 2014). Trust, feeling, and change: What we learn, what we share, what we do. In D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.), Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry for youth and communities (pp. 223–248). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sailors, M., Martinez, M., Davis, D., Goatley, V., & Willis, A. (2017). Interrupting and disrupting literacy research. Journal of Literacy Research, 49(1), 6–10. Steinberg, A. (June, 2020). The white imagination must be bound. The Humanist. Retrieved from https://thehumanist.com/magazine/july-august-2020/up-front/thewhite-imagination-must-be-bound Stovall, D. (2017). Freedom as aspirational and fugitive: A humble response. Equity & Excellence in Education, 50(3), 331–332. Stovall, D. (2018). Are we ready for “school” abolition?: Thoughts and practices of radical imaginary in education. Taboo: Journal of Culture and Education, 17(1). https://doi. org/10.31390/taboo.17.1.06 Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409–428. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15 Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). R-words: Refusing research. In D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.), Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry for youth and communities (pp. 223–248). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

18 Beyond the individual Deploying the sociological imagination as a research method in the neoliberal university Jacob Kelley, Andrea Arce-Trigatti, and Ada Haynes Introduction Empiricism often limits what does and does not constitute valid research based upon methods alone. This form of gatekeeping forces scholars to push past these methodological limitations by widening and exploring new realms in critical theoretical research precisely because as described in this book, empiricists strictly adopt traditional, classical approaches to methods that expect educational researchers to rely squarely on positivist, postpositivist, or naturalistic paradigms (Dennis, 2017; Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba, 2011; Rist, 1977). Such an approach presumes that formalized mechanics and structure in methods by way of processes, rigor, and application are necessary to organize an unapologetically messy world (Lincoln et al., 2011; Strunk & Locke, 2019). In this sense, empiricist work – not to be equated with empirical work – focuses its attention on the intricacies of process-based applications that do not allow for much interrogation of the researcher themself. And, by deflecting the research’s attention away from the researcher and onto the mere methods, they inadvertently defend the actions of the researcher’s objective or subjective logic in efforts to establish what Lincoln and colleagues refer to as “intellectual legitimacy” (p. 97). This emphasis, however, steers the conversation of research methods toward the processes of these methods rather than the impetus for the research. In order to critically (re)frame how we approach educational research, researchers must reflect on the societal context in which education occurs, not just fine tuning the empirical methods they apply. This context includes racism, sexism, classism, ableism, patriarchy, and heteronormative sexuality that is replicated and reinforced. As such, strictly narrowing in on methods diverts attention from the context of how replication of these -isms inculcate in the educational system (Giroux, 2001, 2015; Grosland & Roberts, 2021). This critical (re)framing of the educational context, however, is not without resistance from those who fight to maintain a status quo characterized by a narrow conception of educational research (Ball, 1995; Morse, 2015). This reified view of conducting research holds strong consequences in terms of the value and need to conduct research in an evermore complex world (Stevick & Levinson, 2007). Not uncommonly, student-researchers adopt ideas of research methods

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as static or frigid, often considering them “set, natural, and unquestionable,” mirroring a possible adoption of the reality in which they also conduct research (Anderson, 2010; Strunk & Locke, 2019, p. xix). This strict delineation of what constitutes educational research via methods smothers the realization that theory indeed offers transformative applications for inquiry. Denzin (2009) points out that “governments are attempting to regulate scientific inquiry by defining what good science is. . . . These regulatory activities raise fundamental philosophical, epistemological, political, and pedagogical issues for scholarship and freedom of speech in the academy” (p. 13). While Denzin is referring more broadly to qualitative research, we argue that theory as method falls under this assertion. One such theory as a method under assault is C. Wright Mills’s (1959) sociological imagination. The purpose of this chapter is to join the voices of scholars, both past and present, who argue for the advancement of theory as method by offering an explanation and application of the sociological imagination as a method, particularly to develop student-researchers for socially just projects. Per Freire’s (1972) assertion that critical pedagogy is both theory and praxis, we too argue that the sociological imagination is also an act of praxis that blurs the lines between knowing and doing in research.

The sociological imagination as theory C. Wright Mills (1959), a contemporary sociologist from the United States, conceptualized the sociological imagination as “the vivid awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society” (p. 6). The sociological imagination is a theory that problematizes individual realities by forcing researchers to also consider the social realities that shape daily life. That is, beyond individual realities, there is something more to understanding those realities when acknowledging how society socializes people into their experienced realities. For example, a Black man may have an individual reality of his lived experience, yet the social reality of racism, white supremacy, and anti-Black violence also contributes to how he experiences his individual reality. Further, Mills (1959) argued that our personal troubles only have meaning when considered within proximity to public issues. He noted, The first fruit of this imagination – and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it – is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. (Mills, 1959, p. 5) The sociological imagination, as such, places the individual in the context of their society and the public issues within that society. To illustrate, Myles Horton’s conceptualization of the Highlander Research and Education

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Center leveraged education to interrogate and alleviate the struggles inherent in people’s lives within rural Appalachia (Brian & Elbert, 2005). This community-based institute was founded in 1932 and empowered activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, to fight structural inequalities. In doing so, this critical consciousness helped to advance initiatives (including social class and land, literacy, environmental activism, and food insecurity, inter alia) within the Civil Rights Movement and the Appalachian Social Justice Movement (Brian & Elbert, 2005). Clearly, the research and activism become one because the individual injustices are married to larger public injustices. They cannot be divorced. And, in their forever entanglement, research methods become more robust and meaningful to both the individual and the public. The sociological imagination, then, serves as a theory and, haphazardly, also a method for situating the daily lives of individuals in a larger social context. Aligning with Mills (1959), individual reality is not in and of itself informed by just that one individual, especially when the period of time and other individuals within the circumstance influence the ways one person views reality. Needless to say, reality is co-constructed between the individual and those around them and cannot be detached from other lived experiences (Crowley, 2019). As such, the sociological imagination is a theory that expands our understanding of an individual as part and parcel of a larger collective. When applied as a method, the sociological imagination realizes the story captured by one participant in empirical research may not be adequate enough to best capture the reality of a more holistic lived experience. Playing a fundamental role in sociology, the sociological imagination is oftentimes one of the first ideas discussed alongside social theory (Garoutte, 2018). For sociologists, social theory centers on understanding four major components: socio-cultural contexts within which institutions/human behavior exists; the connection between those contexts and institutions/human behavior; the social worlds created by these contexts; and the experiences of individuals or groups within these contexts (Anderson, 2010). However, the sociological imagination takes these objectives one step further by acknowledging the role of the individual in these investigations and necessitates a critical examination of the roles individuals played within the socio-cultural contexts that then affect the researcher (Garoutte, 2018). Through this, the sociological imagination equips researchers to reveal and critique structures in society that may help to reproduce and maintain inequities (Doob, 2019; Hurst, Fitz Gibbon, & Nurse, 2020; Kozol, 1991). Going back to the Highlander example, this is illustrated through the philosophy that was adopted as part of the training for collective action: To empower people, Horton had to begin where they were; help them develop the ability to define their own problems and find solutions for themselves. As Horton and Highlander focused on assisting the poor and oppressed, it became apparent that a first step in empowerment and

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facilitating change would be to honor people for what and who they are: unique individuals possessing a wealth of knowledge. (Brian & Elbert, 2005, pp. 2–3) By starting with community leaders’ experiences, this training taught individuals to critique inequalities in society and become aware of structural inequalities (e.g., racism, sexism, classism, etc.). Though used widely in sociology the sociological imagination has not been fully integrated into the field of critical theoretical research in education. The sociological imagination impacts a researcher in that applying the sociological imagination as method not only investigates the role of the individual researcher but also their role within a larger context of race, gender, class, etc. Meaning, the sociological imagination as method accounts for the role of researchers and the social identities of that researcher. If the researcher is white, for example, and does studies in Black communities, how then do larger social contexts of race influence their role? Or, more precisely, shall the identities of the researcher as white, cisgender, male, monolingual, and non-disabled within a social context of white supremacy, gender binaries, patriarchy, hegemony of English, and ability privilege also be considered? In this manner, researchers can no longer waltz into communities of study without acknowledging how their social identities might be extensions of larger social systems of power and privilege. Why the sociological imagination? The significance of this chapter derives from the argument that critical theory is inherently a form of research. Thus, we examine the contending arguments in educational research to better understand why and how the sociological imagination fits into the ever-expanding definition of what constitutes research methods. Within these paradigmatic wars, theory has typically been placed as an add-on to these “more rigorous” methods – an assistance to help explain or add action to discoveries made within these paradigms but rarely a stand-alone process by which to evaluate the same, messy world. However, on its own, theoretical work offers what more traditional methods do not. Theory offers a way to unpack the existing and explore a multiplicity of perspectives, lenses, or possibilities for change; a look into the ideal or the unknown based on flexible parameters and intertwined realities (Anderson, 2010; Strunk & Locke, 2019). As Lather (1986) would note, leveraging theory, particularly frameworks aligned with critical theory, offers an opportunity of negotiation, reciprocity, and empowerment that elevates it to research as praxis. The question is how. How do we prepare researchers to do as Lather suggests, elevate their research to praxis? For us, the sociological imagination, long used in sociology courses as a foundational theory which undergirds other sociological theories, is that bridging theory. For example, sociology courses at universities are oftentimes populated with sociology majors and non-sociology majors.

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This brings various perspectives to issues of social problems. However, it was not until student-researchers were exposed to the theory of the sociological imagination that they begin to rethink social problems in new ways. Instead of thinking of a social problem as one they experience in isolation, upon learning the sociological imagination, they begin to realize that social problems are but mere results of larger social contexts. Needless to say, learning the sociological imagination helps student-researchers, both sociology majors and nonmajors, expand their understanding of social problems and contexts. As such, curricula in sociology courses that begin with foundational understanding of the sociological imagination is vital to begin the preparation of student-researchers. In this chapter, we offer an example of how the sociological imagination, though initially conceptualized as theory, was implemented as a research method within an undergraduate sociology course in a neoliberal university. This context is defined by the encroaching reliance on empiricism to guide teaching and learning; in accordance, the use of this theory as a research method guided students’ culminating projects within this course to intentionally integrate their experiences with their learning and socio-cultural contexts (Giroux, 2015). Suffice it to say that though we are researchers ourselves, the focus of this chapter is not about our research. Instead, this chapter focuses on how to better prepare student-researchers with both theory and method of the sociological imagination. As their professors, we speak pedagogically. But for the purposes of this chapter, we focus in on the revelations and actions of our student-researchers.

Implications of sociological imagination in education Although derived from sociology, the sociological imagination as a theory has relevance for research in education. By leveraging this framework, through which “the awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society” comes to the forefront, researchers recognize education as a social institution in which members of a society are taught skills and values that are seen as important for the survival of the society (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Mills, 1959). Fine (2017) uses the sociological imagination as a formidable theory for education and a way to promote social justice in the classroom. She expands on creating solidarity among marginalized groups, democratizing the knowledge production process, and critiquing structures to promote social change. While her book focuses on the method of critical participatory action, our approach builds on this perspective and helps students engage in the sociological imagination as a method through establishing agency needed to foster social change. This theory as method approach is particularly important because, as educational institutions replicate unjust power structures found in society, there must be alternate ways in education that create agency within student-researchers who then feel empowered to create social change. Before agency, however, a thorough understanding of how education is an institution with inherent power dynamics that are historically oppressive must

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be had. Bowles and Gintis (1976), for instance, explain how the primary function of education in the United States is to reproduce social class. Educational institutions use a dominant socio-cultural structure that privileges the norms of one social group and silences the norms considered “other.” We see the reproduction of injustices from the larger society, including racism, sexism, and classism (Giroux, 2015). Within the United States, for example, this type of privilege has favored white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, male, heterosexual, nondisabled norms and systemically silenced, policed, and oppressed those that do not fit into this mold (Weber, 1930). By using the sociological imagination, students can better examine how issues of white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, heteronormativity, and Christiancentricity are all embedded in educational institutions. To this point, that type of activism can be described as follows in terms of the reproduction of systemic oppression in educational institutions: On this point, a politico-pedagogical problem, for Giroux, is not whether students, or academics, are right or left, but whether they are responsible or unreflective and acritical – about themselves, the conditions in which they learn and work, and the broader world – and, thus, whether or not they make it difficult to extend the conversation and perturb the basic conditions of arrogance and myopia that underpin dead-end polemics and a politics of annihilation. (Giroux & Robbins, 2015, p. xv) This type of politics of annihilation is reflective of the work of other scholars who have highlighted how education in the United States is permeated with multiple forms of racism, sexism, and classism (to name a few) through learned oppression and policing practices (Giroux & Robbins, 2015; Kohli, Pizarro, & Nevárez, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2005). The sociological imagination as method, in turn, demands that researchers reimagine education as a just and joyful context and investigate, through a critical lens, how education acts as a reproducer of socio-cultural injustices (Giroux, 1997; hooks, 1994). hook (1994) indicates that this type of (re)framing becomes a challenge to those that may benefit from the actual structure that is being reproduced through education. In (re)framing and shaping the way that education is understood, from institutionalized oppression to liberation, she expounds on the fact that such freedom challenges the inherent sociocultural authority established in schooling (hook, 1994). Thus, in many ways, the sociological imagination serves as a call to action to challenge the status quo by deploying a method that connects biography and history for a better society.

Understanding sociological imagination as method As a research method in education, the sociological imagination is comparable to other frameworks within the critical lens tradition in that it leverages

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research to enact change in the social world in which we live (Lincoln et al., 2011). Intertwined with the notions of empowerment and praxis, the sociological imagination is not meant to be a static mechanism by which to explore the social world, but rather a fluid dynamic that meshes the micro and macro lenses to dismantle and understand what is there and what can be envisioned. In forming critical sociological thinkers, researchers become catalysts of change through an intentional understanding of data via the sociological imagination and the lenses selected for the analysis (Mills, 1959). To this degree, understanding other critical analyses offers a mechanism by which to make the case and better consider the mechanics of the sociological imagination as a research method. One particular parallelism that can be used is Critical Narrative Analysis (CNA) as offered by Souto-Manning (2007) in her defense of the method as a valid research process. As a new research method, Souto-Manning (2007) argues that CNA marries the lenses of the micro and macro analysts through intentional discourse analysis (micro) and institutional analysis (macro) to help understand and uncover the dynamics that affect both. In her words, CNA transcends the artificial dichotomies of micro-macro in discourse analysis and of personal and institutional discourses. It uses a mostly microanalytic perspective (Critical discourse analysis or CDA) to inform a predominantly microanalytic perspective (analysis of personal/conversational narratives), and vice versa. (p. 131) In doing so, using a method like CNA allows for researchers to explore the “link between macro-level power inequities and micro-level interactional positioning” which positions people in the entanglement of both (Rymes, 2003, p. 122 as cited in Souto-Manning, 2007, p. 131). Using CNA as a template, similar arguments can be made for the sociological imagination as a valid research method. Similar to CNA, the sociological imagination requires scholars to transcend the bounds between the micro and macro levels that influence larger social patterns and establishments (Mills, 1959). However, instead of focusing on just discourse, the sociological imagination requires a more holistic use of social theory (via meta-analysis of structures) to investigate social patterns/trends from different perspectives including historical, economic, and political (Anderson, 2010; Jones, 2011). In a CNA study, for example, the focus would be on dismantling the conversational narratives that result from contextual markers that underscore what was said, the language used, and the social elements that give that language power and meaning (Souto-Manning, 2007). Souto-Manning (2007) illustrates this through a study conducted in Brazil wherein the conversational habits of low socio-economic status residents revealed larger political themes of governmental oppression and gender-based

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discrimination. In contrast, the sociological imagination is more observational than discourse-based, holistic methods, and attempts to transcend power inequities stemming from both macro- and micro-level positioning. Taking the same context as the CNA study, the sociological imagination would task researchers to evaluate their position within the Brazilian neighborhood being studied, interrogate the frameworks being presented in terms of socio-economic status and gender of the participants, and charge researchers with evaluating the historical and social elements that not only influence these narratives and behavioral patterns, but also search for possible solutions to address these challenges (Anderson, 2010). Effectively, the sociological imagination leverages three main elements – (1) reflection and reflexivity, (2) a critical framework, and (3) critical metaawareness – to contend with the structuralist traditions that initially gave way to social theory as analysis. Specifically, the sociological imagination asks people to remove themselves from their individual vantage points (reflection and reflexivity) in order to reveal and challenge a social panorama (critical framework) where institutions and structures can be understood, challenged, dismantled, and transformed (critical meta-awareness). We discuss them next. Reflection and reflexivity Beginning with reflection and reflexivity, the sociological imagination adopts a form of introspection that requires the researcher to understand their place in inquiry. According to Akenson (2018), while distinctively different – reflexivity necessitates the development of full awareness of positionality wherein reflection allows for this awareness to remain at a distance – both shape the processes inherent for critical reflexivity. In this sense, the Freirean (1972) understanding can be adopted, wherein it is understood that no social experience takes place in a vacuum; all experiences including historical, economic, and political are influenced by the very lens that the sociological imagination requires be flexed as part of the process (Souto-Manning, 2007). As a method, the sociological imagination requires the integration of reflection and reflexivity as part of the analytic structure. In the example provided in this chapter, reflection and reflexivity represents a better understanding of our unique position within various socio-cultural contexts and how this perspective influences the way the world is analyzed. From the student-researchers’ perspective in the said course, they were tasked with engaging in both reflection and reflexivity as a means to understand their own positionality within the social patterns and issues they were investigating. Reflection and reflexivity are thus necessary in terms of understanding researcher and social agent positionality requiring a deep comprehension of the social elements that influence identity development, social actions, and subsequent consequences of those actions (Strunk & Locke, 2019).

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Critical framework The second element centers on the notion of a critical framework, which necessitates action. Of scholars working within this framework, Anderson (2010) describes the following: We are more rebellious in desiring rapid social change. Theorists from this position examine institutions for their faults, often with the political intent of changing institutions. We reject the notion that it is dangerous to alter social beliefs. We do so because we view the current system as being designed to promote the power and wealth of a few, at the expenses of the many. (p. 11) The sociological imagination is innately a critical framework demanding that researchers engage in reflection and reflexivity for societal transformation. In other words, the sociological imagination equips researchers with a lens that enables them to reveal and critique structures that marginalize those in our society with the least power. This is parallel to how Giroux and Robbins (2015) understood activism in challenging the oppressive structures of educational institutions. The researcher, then, is called to action when they deploy their sociological imagination to critique racism, sexism, classism, etc. in the larger society and to work toward a more just society. The culminating projects created by the student-researchers in the example of this chapter illustrate the very notion of a critical framework. Whether alleviating poverty, eliminating human trafficking, or improving accessibility on college campuses, the student-researchers of this course leveraged the sociological imagination to challenge common social woes and, through this process, challenge themselves to imagine a different world. From the professors’ perspective, the critical framework helped us to dismantle the common structure of an undergraduate sociology course and help redesign the course with a purpose geared more toward student development as scholar-activists. The purpose of the sociological imagination as a method tasks the researcher with deconstructing social structures, patterns, and processes through the critical analysis and integration of other perspectives, notions, and understanding (Souto-Manning, 2007; Strunk & Locke, 2019). Thus, the purpose of the sociological imagination is to challenge the status quo, regardless of the positionality of the researcher, to affect change in society. Critical meta-awareness The third element refers to the development of critical meta-awareness as part of the research method. The pairing of the micro to macro lenses that the sociological imagination uses to examine social structures provides a holistic lens by which to investigate ingrained social patterns and practices. This type of holistic lens, the intertwining of the personal with the institutional or structural, builds on what

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Souto-Manning (2007) refers to as the development of critical meta-awareness (or conscientization) – a step that goes further than reflection or reflexivity. For Souto-Manning (2007), the development of this critical meta-awareness allows “common people to engage in social action to solve problems and address issues they identify in their own narratives” (p. 134). The student-researchers, then, did just that throughout the course and within their culminating projects. For the student-researchers in the example of this chapter, this critical metaawareness was reflected in the steps they needed to take to evaluate the social problems, investigate factors associated with their positionality, and then propose solutions to the problem. The student-researchers followed guidelines by which to engage with the critical meta-awareness processes using the sociological imagination to develop solutions cognizant of different perspectives, understandings, and realities. Thus, critical meta-awareness was developed not only in the process of designing the culminating project, but also in the process of understanding their place in what worked and what did not work in order to enact positive change to better the solutions posed in the final project. Together, these three theoretically derived elements play a role in facilitating the use of the sociological imagination as a research method that is not empirically derived but rather sociologically driven and individually centered.

Situating the sociological imagination as method: an application Deep learning of the sociological imagination applied to novel situations outside of the classroom is needed if student-researchers are to apply this method to their lives beyond the classrooms (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2004). Thus, in this context, the sociological imagination was used as a research method for studentresearchers’ culminating projects as well as to help co-design their experiences in the course. Learning the theory of the sociological imagination empowered student-researchers to develop and deploy their own sociological imagination to recognize social problems and advocate for social change, both within and outside of class. For example, after completing the course (and developing a research project around food insecurity) one student-researcher group used their sociological imaginations to create a Food Swipe Program on campus where students would be able to donate their unused meals in their meal plan to other students who are food insecure. Student-researchers were, thus, required to use the sociological imagination as a research method, including the notion that a sociological imagination comes with social responsibility to work toward social change (Haddad & Lieberman, 2002; Hironimus-Wendt & Wallace, 2009). C. Wright Mills (1959) offers a set of tips for developing a sociological imagination that can guide researchers and student-researchers through this process. He suggested the following tips: 1 2

Avoid existing sets of procedures, Be clear and concise,

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3 4 5 6 7 8

Observe the macro and micro, Observe social structure as well as milieu, Avoid arbitrary specialization, Always consider humanity and history, Understand humanity as historical and social actors, Consider individuals in connection with social issues – public is personal, personal is public. (Brink, 2019, para. 21)

To help develop the sociological imagination as a research method, we center on student-researchers’ culminating projects as evidence of this process. These projects integrated a student-centered pedagogy that placed each student’s sociological imagination (i.e., reflection and reflexivity, critical framework, and critical meta-analysis) at the forefront. The learning outcomes, instructional activities, and assessments linked to this culminating project all played a crucial role in empowering student-researchers to step out of their individual realities in order to see the social realities. In many ways, the sociological imagination functioned as a theoretical perspective, a research method, and a desired sociological outcome for the course. The sociological imagination was implemented in this undergraduate sociology course as part of student-researchers’ iterative experiences with their culminating projects. For this project, student-researchers used the sociological imagination to publicly engage in sociology by creating a media project that either educated people about a social problem or offered a solution to a social problem. Regardless, the culminating project included the elements of reflection and reflexivity, critical framework, and critical meta-analysis. This process encompassed various activities throughout the semester that were further integrated as a multi-layer research process for student-researchers to investigate a social inquiry of their interest. How this process was implemented by studentresearchers in terms of reflection and reflexivity, critical reflexivity, and critical meta-analysis in this course is detailed in the following sections. Reflection and reflexivity The culminating project began with student-researchers selecting a real-world social problem that was of interest to them. One challenge related to reflection and reflexivity is how to engage student-researchers in the sociological imagination while not promoting a post-modern response from student-researchers that “it is all just opinion” (Haddad & Lieberman, 2002). Teaching studentresearchers to use the sociological imagination as a research method can often lead to resistance, especially when student-researchers are confronted with their own privilege as part of the reflection and reflexivity process (Eckstein, Schoenike, & Delaney, 1995; Haddad & Lieberman, 2002). For example, when student-researchers do not use their sociological imaginations, they tend to “blame the victim” of social problems for the social problems they experience

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(Ryan, 1976). This means that an individual is seen as contributing to their own oppression instead of living in a society that is built on oppressive structures like hegemony, patriarchy, and neoliberalism. This is particularly true when discussing social inequality (Goldsmith, 2006; Haddad & Lieberman, 2002). Student-researchers tend to do this often for multiple reasons: (1) they have not been exposed to the sociological perspective, (2) to reduce criticism of society and/or inequality, and (3) to avoid responsibility for the social problem (Goldsmith, 2006). Another obstacle is when student-researchers explain social problems as a form of “naturalization” where they view the status quo as the natural way for things to occur and therefore it cannot or should not be challenged or changed (Goldsmith, 2006). However, the sociological imagination asks people to remove themselves from their individual vantage points in order to reveal a social panorama where institutions and structures can be critiqued. The sociological imagination is an act of praxis through which reflection and reflexivity can emerge (Freire, 1972), blurring the lines between knowing and doing in research. Evidence of this type of reflection and reflexivity include that as the course progressed, student-researchers increasingly were able to shift from an individualist approach rooted in blaming the victim to examining the social structures and institutions behind social problems in their culminating project. Student-researchers also commented in class discussions about how they had shifted from blaming individuals for the problems they faced to seeing these as part of broader social problems. This reflection and reflexivity process helped student-researchers narrow down topics that would become the focus of their culminating projects. The sociology classroom as an “arena of activism” is the public venue of choice where personal experience can be afforded critical sociological depth. Here, personal “troubles” can be linked to “issues of public matter”: “matters that transcend . . . local environments of the individual and the range of his inner life” (Mills, 1959, p. 8). The cognitive and affective recognition of the fundamental connectedness exists and persists beyond the immediacy of our private orbits. This ability to see our lives as part of something much larger, this quality of mind (and heart) that prepares the way away from apathy and “privatized notions of citizenship” (Giroux, 2001, p. 4), ultimately empowers student-researchers to understand these issues as related to matters of social justice (Muller, 2012). As the semester progressed, the papers and discussions related to the culminating projects increasingly shifted toward how to work for social change through civic engagement, linking this process to the second element of theory as research, the critical framework. For example, in exploring the problem of food insecurity, the student-researchers discovered that this larger social issue was closer to home than anticipated; some students were going hungry while other students had meal plans that were going unused. In response, the student-researchers designed a Food Swipe Program on campus that offered a potential solution to this social problem. This shift is illustrative of how student-researchers’ reflection and reflexivity grew through a deeper

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understanding of their topics via the sociological imagination, consistent with how Giroux (2015) describes activism in education. Critical framework Building on the reflection and reflexivity aspects of their research, studentresearchers continued examining their own positions with respect to their social inquiry and exploring possible strategies towards solving this problem. Taking the food insecurity example again, student-researchers examined their own positions as college students along with the intersectionality of their class, gender, and race and their respective access to food, researching different approaches to food insecurity that had been implemented on other campuses with respect to their own experiences with food accessibility. Although hard to disentangle the reflection and reflexivity phase from student-researchers’ engagement with critical frameworks, asking them to better define their identified goals via possible solutions also required them to look externally and integrate multiple perspectives in this phase. In the food insecurity example, initially student-researchers wanted to be able to donate all of their unused meals. After realizing the social constraint of corporate and neoliberal control over food distribution on college campuses, they learned that this was not a realistic goal. In order to achieve any realistic chance at success, they had to modify their goals and compromise their strategy to integrate elements of national success stories. This new goal was to maximize the number of meals that they could donate each semester. This led to in-depth discussions about capitalist structures of food distribution on college campuses as well as discussions about the contradictions of neoliberal conceptualization of property and how that did not apply to the meals that they had purchased when in opposition to a major corporation. After brainstorming and revising topic selection throughout the early part of the course based upon using their sociological imaginations, student-researchers developed a written component based on peer-reviewed sources to serve as the basis for this part of their culminating project. Having peer-reviewed sources involved viewing social problems from more than one perspective, working through solutions by anticipating outcomes, and supporting why one strategy would be more effective. This type of peer-reviewed source integration allowed student-researchers to better define power dynamics in terms of capitalism and neoliberalism as they are studied within the field of sociology. In doing so, the student-researchers adopted the sociological imagination as method by incorporating a critique of capitalism and neoliberal market distributions that many student-researchers may have resisted without this type of approach. This critical examination differed from typical literature review assignments as using their sociological imaginations further allowed student-researchers to evaluate and understand why certain strategies would benefit parts of the student population on campus, while still not making an impact on others. Through this process, student-researchers realized that there were vested

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powers in the operation of the university that went beyond the goals of education and the needs of students. Although this realization set parameters to their initial strategy in response to food insecurity on campus, they also realized that through their activism they could engage as a counter to these entities to create social change and to provide a more equitable learning environment. Student-researchers who do not deploy their sociological imaginations might assume that students experiencing food insecurity poorly managed their food and money. Critical meta-analysis In the final phases of the culminating project, student-researchers were asked to engage in critical meta-analysis as part of anticipating the outcome of the proposed strategies and recommending a strategy. Although initially linked to the critical framework, asking student-researchers to determine the quality or value of a proposed strategy also requires a component of understanding one’s role in the effectiveness of this strategy (i.e., critical meta-analysis). To address this phase, the course was designed to provide student-researchers multiple opportunities to practice and receive feedback on skills related to developing critical meta-analysis (Bidwell, 1995; Bransford et al., 2004; Malcolm, 2006). For example, on the final project student-researchers were given feedback from other student-researchers, the teaching assistant, and the professor. For the food insecurity topic, this type of feedback cycle was intended to be an iterative approach that offered student-researchers the possibility of moving through the logic and frameworks of their project development, while at the same time learning about the parameters of the project both socially and logistically on campus. In the last step of their culminating project, student-researchers were charged with integrating critical thinking skills as part of the sociological imagination into their recommended solution to the social inquiry initially identified. As part of this step, student-researchers engaged in critical meta-analysis by creating a novel solution to a social problem or by using their creativity to promote other people’s solutions to a social problem. This required a deep understanding of the social inquiry initially identified (reflection), their position within the socio-cultural context of that inquiry (reflexivity), their understanding of the power dynamics within that inquiry (critical framework), and their individual abilities to engage civically in changing the outcome (critical metaanalysis). In engaging with these research elements, student-researchers needed to leverage critical thinking skills to better understand the appropriateness of their selected solutions with respect to the socio-cultural context in which the social inquiry manifested. In relation to the food insecurity on college campuses, the critical meta-analysis aspect culminated in student-researchers’ different approach to activism on campus. While awareness of the issue on campus was a popular strategy to engage the student population directly with the issue, student-researchers also worked with a student government representative who

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agreed to write a bill to implement a Food Swipe Program on our campus. This tactic of engaging the student body government representation was based upon examining the power dynamics inherent on campus and leveraging the most effective strategy in line with other campuses’ success stories and campus resources. Reflective of this step, student-researchers’ culminating projects needed to be as equally engaging to their audience. In accordance, student-researchers used Adobe Spark to create a 3- to 5-minute video reflective of the sociological imagination as method to develop either a solution to or an awareness campaign about their identified social problem. Student-researchers received feedback to make sure they were using the sociological imagination as method and incorporating a social justice framework on their culminating projects from their peers, addressed revisions, and presented them to the Office of Research. The representative of the Office of Research selected three of the student projects (i.e., domestic violence, food insecurity, and mental health issues) to highlight in the campus wide Research and Creative Inquiry Day. Not only did the Office of Research create a special category and presentation format for the culminating project, they featured the project in a campus-wide email and a campus-wide newsletter. In effect, when using the sociological imagination as a method, researchers account beyond themselves and connect to socio-cultural elements that may be overlooked in more traditional empirical methods. This leads to the creation of research questions that interrogate socio-cultural norms and the behavior of those that are negatively impacted by these institutional structures, differing from traditional research questions that may stop at determining an effect. Through this method, student-researchers realized that as they completed their culminating projects that additional theoretical perspectives were needed, including those related to critical theory and feminist theory. This was evident, for example, in the food insecurity project where student-researchers centered on socio-economic status as a backdrop to investigating the power dynamics of hunger on campus which led to further examinations of how to address this issue navigating and challenging these institutional structures. Focusing on socio-economic status, student-researchers explored how the varying positions of privilege related to social class influenced access to food, educational opportunities, support structures, power, and comfort. As described, throughout the semester, and through extensive reflection, reflexivity, and critical framework development, student-researchers could scrutinize the social and economic factors that impacted college students’ success in terms of food security and general stability. In accordance, after completing this investigation of food insecurity on campus and seeking to develop a Food Swipe Program to donate their unused meal plans to those who are food insecure, student-researchers developed theories to explain the institutional roadblocks to being able to donate meals that they had already purchased. In using their sociological imaginations to develop their culminating projects, the student-researchers began to critique the social institutions that contextualized

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their projects, ultimately critiquing social institutions that represented a reproduction of oppressive systems.

Conclusion The purpose of this chapter was to present the sociological imagination as a method for which to conduct critical theoretical research in education. Effectively, the contents of this chapter propose the sociological imagination not only as a theory that helps to better understand the social structures that govern the actions and patterns of everyday life, but also as a method that can be applied to better provide a critical lens to dismantle the hegemonic nature of social structures and decolonize what is considered common knowledge. Introducing the sociological imagination as a critical theoretical method for educational research stems from a long history of critical scholars who have argued that the function of levering theory to perform critical work is, in itself, a rigorous method by which to conduct research (Rist, 1977; Stevick & Levinson, 2007; Strunk & Locke, 2019). As a method, the sociological imagination holds its own weight as a contender within the paradigmatic contests in educational research. Originally, the sociological imagination was intended by its creator C. Wright Mills (1959) to provide scholars with the ability to analyze larger social structures in which they were situated as a way to offer critique. Perhaps more eloquently stated, Jones (2011) suggests that methodologically applying the sociological imagination offers the following: the capacity of individuals to recognize the influence of larger structural forces on their everyday lives and concerns; understanding that their personal troubles were often public issues. This ability to link the micro-level minutiae of behavior to broad macro-structural factors such as gender and ethnicity is one of the principal attractions of sociology to such leading theorists as Loic Wacquant (2005). (p. 6) Rooted in sociology, then, the purposes of the sociological imagination as a mechanism to analyze reality is aligned with the larger notions of uncovering social patterns, realities, and structural factors that govern the actions of people (Jones, 2011). However, the sociological imagination goes one step further in offering ways in which to question, and therefore disentangle the structure, to empower those individuals who are often entangled within these very realities. In contrast with the objective and subjective logic that guides traditional notions of educational research, the sociological imagination joins the critical frameworks in asking researchers to examine all social patterns with a critical eye. This entails “questioning metanarratives, myths, stereotypes, and hegemonic processes of social matters” against what may be thought of as dominant or hegemonic beliefs,

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as well as those ideologies that are deeply embedded within the researchers’ own social construct, as demonstrated in the food insecurity project (Anderson, 2010, p. 10). In this way, the sociological imagination is meant to build researchers’ skills in critical sociological thinking (Grauerholz & BoumaHoltrop, 2003), encouraging the problematization of the world in which they exist (Souto-Manning, 2007). The sociological imagination as method, thus, provides a way of knowing and being to help researchers critically view their social world and move toward a more just society.

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19 Unapologetic Black Inquiry Centering Blackness in education research Jelisa S. Clark and Derrick R. Brooms

Introduction Numbers lie. Numbers tell incomplete stories. Numbers manipulate. Despite the racist history of social statistics (Zuberi, 2001), quantitative analyses predominate educational research and conversations about who Black students are, how they experience schooling, and what they need. Through the years quantitative research has told us that “there are more African American men incarcerated than enrolled in higher education” (Schiraldi & Ziedenberg, 2002). However, these findings were based on incomplete data and make a fallacious comparison between college enrollment and incarceration (Desmond-Harris, 2015; Toldson, 2019). Additionally, this statistic is inherently anti-Black as it finds fault with Black men, rather than the social, political, and economic conditions that oppress Black men. Further, statistical analyses also have told us that “Black women are now the most educated group in the United States” (Helm, 2016). Yet, much of the discourse about Black women’s educational success is fueled by statistical comparisons of Black women to Black men and neglects the oppressions impacting Black women (Patton & Croom, 2017). Empirically driven conversations about the state of Black education often reinforce crisis and deficit narratives. Black critical theories have laid the groundwork for shifting the conversation away from Black dysfunctionality. For instance, Critical Race Theory (Bell, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) and BlackCrit Theory (Dumas & ross, 2016) argued racism and anti-Blackness are central research concerns. Black feminist theorizing (Collins, 2000, 2004; Combahee River Collective, 1983; Crenshaw, 1989; Dillard, 2000; hooks, 1984) established Black women’s knowledge as epistemologically valid. In order to continue efforts to center Black humanity and work towards Black liberation, we propose engagement with Unapologetic Black Inquiry (UBI). Allen and Miles (2020) define Unapologetic Blackness as “the centering of Black identity and culture in places and spaces where race is neutralized and racial politics are silenced or ignored” (p. 3). UBI then is a theoretical-methodological approach that centers Black humanity and liberation through Black defiance and dissident knowledge and by examining the intersections of anti-Blackness in institutions. Later we will apply UBI to a

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study on Black girls’ schooling experiences to demonstrate how such a theory can also be applied as method for the development of racially just, critical theoretical research.

A brief history of Black educational challenges A cursory glance at the history of Black education within the United States reveals several troubling and damning trends as it relates to educational access, support, and success. Most prominently is historian Carter G. Woodson’s thesis regarding Blacks’ miseducation. Woodson (2000) maintained that Black education had developed through a series of handicaps, including state-sanctioned actions that undermined and blocked attempts for Black educational progress. In speaking about shortcomings of Black education, and the ways in which Blacks suffered in U.S. schools, Woodson stated, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. It kills one’s aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime. (2000, p. 3) Similarly, in his critiques levied against Black education, Du Bois (2002) articulated a range of challenges that Blacks face in the U.S. educational context, not least of which is that, “Negro children will be instructed in the public schools and taught under unpleasant if not discouraging circumstances. . . . [T]hey will fall out of school, cease to enter high school, and fewer and fewer will go to college” (p. 151). As these scholars and others note, particularly related to the educational challenges that Blacks have endured, the school system perpetually miseducates, neglects, and fails Black people (Anderson, 1988; Du Bois, 2002; Epps, 1973; King, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Woodson, 2000), especially when educational institutions are bastions for white supremacy, racism, and whiteness. How does one imagine Black educational success if Black students are set within schools that are designed to see them fail (Noguera, 2008)? In reflecting on education for Black Americans, education scholar Edgar Epps (1973) noted that educational goals and strategies must be considered within the framework of U.S.-based race relations. Overwhelmingly, as other scholars have discussed regarding the miseducation of Blacks (Du Bois, 2002; King, 2005; Woodson, 2000), all too often schools “fail to educate large numbers of blacks to even the minimal level expected of American adults is one consequence of being black in America” (Epps, 1973, p. 316). This educational neglect includes the ongoing ways that Blacks are denied access to educational opportunities, facilities, and programs. Historically, the denial of educational opportunities for Blacks has been based on white supremacist ideology and a white racial (il)logic. White supremacy and white racial (il) logic are racist and anti-Black ideologies that wrongly presume that Blacks are uneducable. Such racist ideologies then limit the education of Blacks to simple

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trainings of subservience to whites or forcing contentment of occupying the lower echelons of economic and occupational systems across the U.S. Without doubt, these modes of thinking and the practices they produce are not only problematic for many reasons (e.g., educational neglect) but they also are predicated on anti-Blackness. As a consequence, much of the schooling processes that include subversion of Black intellect, thought, and life (re)produces Black suffering (Comeaux & Jayakumar, 2007; Dumas, 2014; Love, 2016; Goff, Jackson, Di Leone, Culotta, & DiTomasso, 2014; Tillis, 2018). This suffering and educational neglect reveal themselves through school practices and policies that include hampering educational access, fostering hostile schooling environments, and delimiting educational outcomes. Across various studies of Black students’ schooling experiences, researchers find that they continuously suffer from low and lowered expectations, routinely are overpoliced and hypersurveilled, are overrepresented in exclusionary disciplinary practices, and often are repositioned away from educational success (Blake, Butler, Lewis, & Darensbourg, 2011; Brooms, 2020; Carter Andrews, Brown, Castro, & Id-Deen, 2019; Clark, 2020; Dumas, 2014; Duncan, 2002; Evans-Winters, 2011; Ferguson, 2001; Fordham, 1993; Morris, 2015; Rogers & Brooms, 2020). For instance, in a critical race ethnography of the schooling of adolescent Black boys, Duncan (2002) found that these youth were an estranged population as they were neglected within the school. More specifically, various school practices rejected the experiences and stories of Black students (e.g., Black language was framed as in opposition to school values), created an ethos that marginalized and excluded Black male students from the school’s caring networks and academic program (e.g., students indicated they were regularly ignored by peers, felt overpoliced by staff members, and experienced teachers routinely mistreating them), and, were subjected to low expectations (e.g., teachers often failed to provide these students with appropriate or honest feedback about their work). Similarly, Matias (2016) demonstrated that whiteness embedded in teachers (many of whom are white) created the conditions for Black and Brown students to learn to hate themselves. In each of these ways, and others, Black students in schools “suffer a condition characteristic of a population that is beyond love,” a condition that ultimately relies on their marginalization and oppression and also excludes them from society’s economy and networks of care (Duncan, 2002, p. 140; also see, Dumas & Nelson, 2016; Ferguson, 2001, Rogers & Brooms, 2020). Relatedly, studies show that disciplinary infractions and sanctions are imposed on Black girls at alarming rates as well (e.g., see Blake et al., 2011; Clark, 2020; Morris, 2015). In examining Black female students’ experiences in an urban school district, Blake et al. (2011) found inequitable discipline where Black girls were “overrepresented for exclusionary discipline sanctions and were twice as likely to receive in-school and out-of-school suspensions than all female students” (p. 99). And within higher education contexts, Black students routinely endure anti-Black violence and race-related stressors, particularly at predominantly white institutions (Brooms, 2017; Griffith, Hurd, &

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Hussain, 2019; Mustaffa, 2017). As findings from research discussed earlier indicate, as well as other related studies, not only are Black students continuously burdened by denigrating and deficit-laden ideologies, overly punitive school policies and practices, and what Duncan (2002) articulates as “beyond love,” they also are relegated as “faces at the bottom of the well” (Bell, 1992). Clearly, as even recent experiences and scholarship demonstrate, the miseducation of Black folks is rife within U.S. society.

Theorizing Black humanity and liberation Throughout U.S. history, unapologetic Blackness has existed in the actions and behaviors of Black people from all walks of life. Black girls continue to “talk back” and stand up for themselves in the face of oppression despite being stereotyped as “loudies” (Fordham, 1993; Morris, 2007). Unapologetic Black Inquiry (UBI) is situated in a tradition of Black defiance to white supremacy and is rooted in critical theory aimed at understanding Black thought, Black lives, and Black experiences in the U.S. context and globally. UBI is particularly indebted to the pioneering research and activism of scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Carter G. Woodson and, in the latter half of the 20th century and more recently, scholars such as James Baldwin, James H. Cone, Joyce King, and Gloria Ladson-Billings. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (2005[1903]) and Wells’s Southern Horrors (1892) stand as exemplars of using an unapologetic Black research approach to effectuate change for Black communities. Du Bois (2005) articulated how racism impacted Black life (e.g., problem of the color line) and helped create the intellectual argument for the Black freedom struggle throughout the 20th century. In engaging the Black freedom struggle, Wells (1892) demonstrated the possibilities of interrogating white-dominant narratives and crafting counternarratives, simultaneously. Wells’s aim was to expose the lies that were used to support majoritarian stories that defiled Black life and provide greater context and insight, which ultimately honored Black humanity. Similar to Wells’s approach, UBI understands that calling out white lies is necessary for honoring and affirming Black life. White lies, such as ones propagated within the field of education about Black student success, or lack thereof, function to dehumanize Black students. Fordham and Ogbu (1986) argued that Black students’ success in education was diminished by the burden of “acting white” – the idea that Black cultural aesthetics are incongruent with educational success, which is considered as a white cultural norm. Even as this narrative grew in popularity, little credence was given to the inferior social and economic opportunities that Black students confront and, even further, social scientists produced little empirical evidence to substantiate such claims (Tyson, Darity, & Castellino, 2005). Problematizing Black students is the legacy of knowledge production in the academy which employs white methods and white logic. White logic is infused with a sense of superiority that assigns objectivity to elite whites and subjectivity to People of Color. White methods are tools that manufacture empirical data and analyses to support racial

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stratification – as well as the maldistribution of resources and opportunities (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008). Given that empirical methods were developed within the context of colonization, slavery, and Black subjugation, all too often they are deployed to mask white supremacy and justify Black oppression. These methods are easily weaponized to consign fault with Black students and their families. Therefore, it is not surprising that the findings of Fordham and Ogbu’s (1986) work, which reaffirmed existing beliefs about Black dysfunctionality, blamed Black students and their communities for lagging educational outcomes, and defined Blackness as anti-school, remain influential in current and ongoing education discussions. As Fanon (1967) theorized, the “fact of Blackness” is both that Blacks are perpetually subjugated to a white gaze (see Yancy, 2008) and too often crushed under the weight of racist stereotypes (along with ongoing irrational and insidious justifications for these stereotypes and other forms of anti-Blackness). Thus, it is precisely because of the fact of Blackness that “the specificity of the Black” (Wynter, 1989) is critical to UBI. Relying on and appreciating Black experiential knowledge then necessarily pushes back against white insistence that we must justify Black experiences – or, even worse, must juxtapose Black experiences against white experiences. Insistence on objectivity as the standard for research is white-centric, problematic, and a lie. Black experiential knowledge exists outside the confines of an objective/subjective dichotomy and in our theorization is its own entity. That is, Black lived experience is in itself real, important, and valuable in its own regard. As an example, there is little need to explain the recent collective response to the unarmed murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. These killings exist within a long history of devaluing Black life and within a system that allows (and perhaps even encourages) white violence against Black bodies, spirits, and minds. As a result, the anti-Black racism and violence, miseducation, and suffering that Blacks experience within educational contexts must be documented and they must be used to reject white hegemonic schooling and other policies and practices that inform whitecentric education. Black people and communities who have these experiences and live to tell their stories should be valued. UBI honors this valuation and can be used to document, appreciate, and learn from these realities to affirm Black humanity and create the conditions for liberation. Conducting research without confronting white lies misses an opportunity to appreciate Black humanity and can contribute to Black subjugation. UBI understands Black dissident knowledge is valuable and necessary for Black liberation. More specifically, Black knowledge produced through counter storytelling and Black feminist epistemology are critical tools for Black liberation and humanity. From slave narratives and stories of survival to achieving in spite of as opposed to because of schools, Black Americans have a long history of oral traditions and harbor great knowledge through their own experiences that help inform and teach each other ways to navigate and negotiate various educational environments and, in some ways, move from surviving to thriving. Black critical theories have utilized Black voices to challenge white lies.

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All knowledge is constructed based on location, history, culture, and interests, therefore there are multiple versions of the truth (Collins, 2000). Similar to Critical Race Theory’s use of counter storytelling, or storytelling that aims to cast doubt on the validity of accepted premises or “myths” as a research method (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001), UBI sees narratives and stories as powerful tools to center Black life and Black humanity. UBI interrogates the narratives, storylines, myths, and stereotypes told of Black people using a cultural, racial, historical, and political lens. This research focus can help us relocate deficits away from Black youth (Baldridge, 2014), understand institutional racism and the ways that it undermines Black schooling experiences (Evans-Winters & Esposito, 2010; Graham & Robinson, 2004; Massey, Vaughn, & Dornbusch, 1975), appreciate institutional betrayals of Black students (Brooms, 2020; Delpit, 2006; Lofton & Davis, 2015), and see with better clarity the ongoing spirit murdering of Black students (Love, 2016; Tillis, 2018). Such an interrogation problematizes the ways that Blackness is (re)constructed as a problem, as it too often is littered by anti-Black oppression and violence within and across various schooling contexts. Finally, UBI seeks to be both specific and inclusive. Anti-Blackness is endemic in the U.S. and central for understanding Black experiences (Du Bois, 2005; Dumas & ross, 2016). Further, the lived experiences of Black people across social identities is inextricably linked. Black feminist theorizing has consistently recognized that within the U.S. context African Americans share a common experience of racism; however, the form that racism takes varies by race, gender, social class, and sexuality (Collins, 2000, 2004; Combahee River Collective, 1983; Crenshaw, 1989). Therefore, anti-Blackness is gender specific. In observing the similarities and divergences across Black experiences, Black feminist scholars introduced and applied concepts such as intersectionality and the matrix of domination (Collins, 2000, 2004; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). Crenshaw (1991) coined the term intersectionality to explore how structures make certain identities at risk for discrimination. Relatedly, the matrix of domination explores how systems of oppression are organized through structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains (Collins, 2000). These concepts allow us to understand how Black experiences converge and diverge. UBI extends this theorizing by asking: How do we make sense of a multiplicity of Black experiences?

Framing Unapologetic Black inquiry In order to employ UBI as method, we identify three themes to define Unapologetic Black Inquiry and demonstrate its application: Black Subjectivity, Affirming Black Humanity, and Black Specificity and Multiplicity. Black subjectivity Unapologetic Black Inquiry rejects positivists’ insistence that research is and should be objective. A researcher’s prior knowledge, experiences, and perspectives

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are influential in the research process (Strauss & Corbin, 1998; Tillman, 2002). Therefore claims of objectivity are delusional. Borrowing from Black feminist epistemology (Collins, 2000), which asserts that all knowledge is constructed based on location, history, culture, and interests, UBI acknowledges that the subjectivities researchers bring to research frame the types of questions asked, how understandings and knowledge are positioned and appreciated, and how interpretations are drawn. The history of social statistics reveals that white supremacists’ notions about racial superiority and inferiority guided its development (Zuberi, 2001). UBI requires Black subjectivity to thwart those embedded racist ideologies. UBI understands both Black students and Black researchers1 as outsiderswithin. Outsiders-within are able to identify contradictions and double standards within educational spaces (Collins, 2000). Black students, due to their marginalization in schools and educational spaces, are uniquely positioned to identify contradictions. Similarly, Black researchers are endowed with “cultural intuition,” or the multiple sources of knowledge they may bring to research (Huber, 2008; Malagón, Huber, & Velez, 2009). While Black researchers may have personal, academic, professional, and research experiences that may come to bare in the research they may also be disconnected from the realities of Black students; therefore, the primary subject when using UBI should be the students themselves. The voices, concerns, and ideas of Black students should be a central focus throughout the research process. The requirement of Black subjectivity does not preclude researchers who do not identify as Black from using UBI. Just as we note the importance of Black subjectivity, engaging UBI requires that researchers, regardless of racial identity, engage in reflexivity, are transparent about positionality and subjectivities, and link these to the how and why of their research. Affirming Black humanity Unapologetic Black Inquiry also seeks to enrich the tenet of Critical Race Theory regarding the centrality of race and racism by focusing more specifically on anti-Blackness. Focusing on anti-Blackness elicits a shift in language, analysis, and interpretation. This shift means moving discussions and analyses away from standpoints that suggest racism affects all people in the same general ways and instead recognizes racist policies, practices, and customs as well as violence and harm predicated precisely upon “the fact of Blackness” (Fanon, 1967; also see Bell, 1992; DeGruy, 2005; Du Bois, 2005; Muhammad, 2011; Roberts, 1999; Wells, 1892). Shifting language and developing questions We reject the notion and application of race as a problem and as a causal variable. Race is not the problem; Blackness is not the problem. Rather anti-Black racism is the problem because it poses barriers in education to Black people and

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Black communities. According to Bonilla-Silva (2017), contemporary racial inequality is (re)produced through seemingly non-racial mechanisms. Language that statisticians use such as “the effect of race” obscures the structural foundations of racial inequalities (Zuberi, 2001, p. 96). Instead of asking, “why aren’t Black students succeeding?” UBI would ask questions such as: “How do Black students experience and negotiate white supremacist curricula?” or “How do we create more enriching educational experiences for Black students?” Answering these types of questions involves analyzing Black students’ experiences within a wider social-historical and political perspective (i.e., how do messages about Black boyhood and girlhood outside of educational spaces shape curricula?) that calls out anti-Black racism without fear. This approach stands in direct opposition to Eurocentric paradigms, which are limited in understanding the experiences of People of Color and dishonest about the history of anti-Black racism in the U.S. (Huber, 2008; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). Additionally, calling out anti-Black racism accommodates the counter-stories of Black people (Dumas & ross, 2016) and thus allows us to better appreciate Black students’ humanity and reduce their suffering. Intellectual resistance and self-definition Unapologetic Black Inquiry is an undertaking of intellectual resistance and activism, with specific aims of Black liberation. Some may view CRT’s claim that racism is a permanent part of U.S. society as pessimistic – or, even further, “un-American” as we’ve seen in recent national talking points. However, as Bell (1992) explained, many subjects of racial domination find courage and hope in resistance and defiance. Black scholars are often forced to suppress their rage and justify Black-focused research agendas to navigate the academy. UBI provides an opportunity for Black scholars to recognize their work as an act of resistance and proclaim the legitimacy of their work. Understanding UBI as an act of resistance also allows us to identify everyday acts of resistance and interrogate how teachers/instructors and students challenge or reinforce stereotypes of Black students as intellectually inferior and incapable of learning. According to Collins (2000), self-definition commences with finding fault with the dominate white point of view, and subsequently developing one’s own point of view, and acting on it. UBI creates space for engaging Black students’ self-definition, self-valuation, and self-reliance. UBI might question how students resist controlling images and how they define Blackness on their own terms (Collins, 2000). Facilitating Black students’ self-definitions challenges the notion that Black students are anti-intellectual and serves to empower students and create space for Black liberatory fantasy. Black specificity and multiplicity As mentioned, anti-Blackness is gender specific; therefore, Unapologetic Black Inquiry attends to the intersections of anti-Blackness. Gender and sexuality

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have been important factors in explaining the experiences of Black women, and are equally important to the experiences of Black men (Collins, 2004; Davis, 2003; hooks, 2004). Within the past ten years there has been a propagation of single-sex schools marketed toward the families of Black and Brown boys. This development warrants specific attention to the educational experiences of Black boys. When applying UBI the researcher should also consider how other members of the Black community are impacted. In justifying the need for single-sex schools stakeholders often rely on rhetoric that Black boys do not have appropriate role models at home. This argument draws on controlling images of Black men as missing fathers and Black women as incapable Black mothers (e.g., “they can’t teach Black boys how to be men”) and is frequently deployed in education discourse (Clark, 2017). It is also important to ask who is missing from the view of our analysis? Most notably, this line of rationale sidelines the lives of Black girls as well as Black gay, queer, and gender-nonconforming youth. For instance, Black girls have many parallel experiences as Black boys related to school discipline, such as being disproportionately suspended and expelled, yet they are ignored as a result of the hyper focus on Black boys’ educational experiences and needs. Additionally, Black girls are repositioned as an impediment to Black boys’ academic engagement. Similarly, little thought is given to how Black gay, queer, and gender-nonconforming students may benefit or be harmed by a single-sex schooling environment.

Applying UBI to Black girls’ schooling experiences Black subjectivity In applying Unapologetic Black Inquiry we begin with Black subjectivity. In this view, we are sensitive to the subjectivities that we bring to our work as researchers as they inform our questions, understanding, and analyses. Both authors identify as unapologetically Black in their research agendas and work and are committed to Black education and liberation. Our experiences and our positions in the academy have established us as outsiders-within and endow us with cultural intuition that we bring with us to our research and praxis. The first author is Black woman educator who specializes in Black education and Black feminism. Her praxis includes advising Black Feminist Scholars, a student organization aimed at raising consciousness of issues impacting Black women and mentoring Black undergraduates interested in research. The second author is a Black man who is an educator and youth worker who engages a philosophy of Black education. He has taught in both secondary and postsecondary institutions, developed programs for and courses focused on the lives and experiences of Black boys and men, and has worked with Black youth in a number of capacities. We have both routinely observed and experienced the ways that schools marginalize Black students and their families, both unwittingly and intentionally. The legacy of anti-Blackness in the United States shapes our

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understanding of educational neglect that Blacks experience across the educational system. We see the U.S. school system as a site of suffering whose motives should be questioned, interrogated, and analyzed. We contend that UBI can be used by researchers from various racial backgrounds but, of course, with several notes of caution. Given UBI’s intentional focus on affirming Black humanity and working toward liberation, researchers who do not engage in such intentional approaches will find little utility in UBI. Additionally, given the ways in which whiteness dominates research as well as distorts and disfigures Blackness, UBI is not useful for researchers whose work peddles in anti-Blackness or even reaffirms or centers whiteness – regardless of the researchers’ racial identities. For these reasons, there are some inherent tensions in its use. That is, a researcher’s subjectivity as well as the racial ideologies that inform their work will matter in the utility of UBI. Researchers need to grapple with their racial identities and ideologies and discern how these situate them in Unapologetic Black Inquiry research. Still, we acknowledge that UBI is not for everybody. There are many reconciliations. UBI is well-suited for both individual and collaborative research and can provide opportunities for researchers to interrogate their proximity to whiteness, how their racial identities inform their research, and how identities and ideologies matter in collaborative work. Black humanity After our positioning, UBI then demands a critical, more humanizing engagement with the literature already published. Here, we focus on the experiences of Black girls in schools through the lens of affirming Black humanity. In particular, we pay attention to how focusing on Black girls’ experiences can allow us to shift language and develop new(er) questions. Increasingly, scholars are bringing attention to the ways in which Black girls are harmed within schools. At the most foundational level, this harm is revealed by the ways in which white supremacy demands a right to and control of the Black female body (e.g., see McGuire, 2010; Roberts, 1999; Sharpley-Whiting, 1999). Within schooling contexts, Black girls are accosted by policies and practices that dictate and surveil their hair, clothing, attire, and behaviors (Fordham, 1993; Morris, 2015). However, school discipline is often framed as a male issue. Black boys and men face routine and continuous scrutiny in school settings that contribute to their educational outcomes, with some being framed and constructed as “bad boys” (Ferguson, 2001). UBI, by engaging specificity and multiplicity is able to identify the ways all Black students are implicated by and suffer collectively under the weight of inequities in school disciplinary policies and practices. Black girls experience inequitable school discipline precisely because of antiBlack racism. Race, gender, and class for Black girls combine to inform policies enacted on the embodiment of their Black femaleness. That is, because they can be repositioned as “loud” in their talk and speech, which inherently draws on stereotypical images of Black femininity and centers Black girls and young

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women as targets for school discipline (e.g., their “loudness” is construed as gender-inappropriate behavior and a lack of self-control; see Neal-Jackson, 2018), they can be labeled as unruly and receive negative sanctions in school, which has personal, academic, and social significance and consequences. School discipline policies, especially those that police students’ attire, hair styles, and speech volumes, often couched under the umbrella of zero tolerance and no excuses are problematic because they all constitute various forms of racialized surveillance. Thus, there is a need to shift language and develop new and different questions. For instance, asking questions that center Black girls as a/the problem (e.g., “Why do Black girls misbehave in school?”) reproduces their suffering in school and positions them away from schooling success. Alternatively, a UBI approach honors Black girls’ humanity and instead interrogates how their Blackness can be constructed as delinquent and deficient (e.g., “Why do schools establish and enact policies that problematize Black girls’ ways of being?”). This shift in language and questions not only provides opportunities to learn more about Black girls’ schooling experiences, through the examples we identify here, it also allows us to be more informed about the harmful impacts of school discipline policies and practices – even those that claim to be race neutral or colorblind and, even more importantly, helps instill humanization for Black students in school settings. Black specificity and multiplicity Finally, by engaging Black specificity and multiplicity, a UBI approach helps expand discussions of students’ schooling experiences, such as the school-toprison pipeline. To do so a UBI approach recognizes, calls out, and resists white lies; even further, it also unpacks the harmful impact of racist stereotypes, assumptions, and storylines that are weaponized against Black youth – regardless of gender, class, and other social identities. Given the way that dominant narratives about school discipline are male-centric, and in some ways considered as an issue that seemingly solely challenges boys’ schooling experiences, focusing on Black girls’ experiences as well those of Black gay, queer, or/and gendernonconforming youth are important. These foci can help education stakeholders and researchers better understand and appreciate similarities and differences in Black students’ experiences so that the remedies and solutions offered can be more specific and intentional. As we draw attention to the specific experiences of Black girls we situate our discussion in the multiplicity of Black experiences. In examining national news discourse on the school-to-prison pipeline, Clark (2020) contended that the popular argument that more Black men in schools as teachers and administration will reduce rates of suspension and expulsion of Black students, particularly Black boys, is harmful and neglectful for a number of reasons. First, this proposed solution does not account for a multiplicity of Black experiences. Arguing for more Black men in schools is based on a Black boy-centric framing of the school-to-prison pipeline. Black girls are also victims of the school-to-prison

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pipeline; yet, there is little consideration given to how more Black men in schools might impact them, nor Black gay and gender-nonconforming students. Furthermore, when Black men enter educational spaces there is a push for them to take on disciplinary roles which does little to lessen the harm that Black students experience in schools, especially since the institutional culture remains intact (Brockenbrough, 2015; Ferguson, 2001). Proposing more Black men as a solution to the school-to-prison pipeline ignores the contributions of Black women teachers and offers no analysis of the structural impediments that contribute to, produce, and are predicated on Black suffering in schools. Black student success is not as simple as a race alignment with a teacher. Clearly, there must be specificity and multiplicity in researching. Overwhelmingly, the school-to-prison pipeline as well as punitive schooling practices create specific challenges for Black students and families, regardless of and because of intersecting identities particularly given the “condemnation of Blackness” (Muhammad, 2011) across various social institutions. Constructing Black male youth as “bad boys” as well as through other pathologizing images and tropes continuously repositions them as threats and dangers to themselves and others (e.g., Black girls), are attacks on their humanity, and diminishes their intellect and educational possibilities. Relatedly, Black girls are situated within a discourse that insists upon patriarchy and their behaviors are defined as threats to that patriarchy. It is unsurprising then that teachers interpret their ways of being as defiant and inappropriate. Ultimately, the policing of Black girls in educational spaces and across wider society is a racial project intended to constrain and justify the oppression of Black communities. Educational institutions too often work to suppress Black girls’ voices and their epistemologies. In doing so schools silence the opportunities necessary to support their development as well as their health and well-being.

Implications and conclusion Unapologetic Black Inquiry seeks to challenge dominant narratives and traditional research models which increasingly opt for colorblindness rather than the specificity that Black experiences call for. Black specificity is a central component of Black inquiry. Black people are routinely subsumed under racist ideologies which imagine them through controlling images, such as hypersexual, violent, and anti-intellectual. This imagining ignores the complexity of Black experiences and interactions of race, class, gender, and other social identities. While engaging specificity, UBI also recognizes the interconnectedness of Black experiences across identities and accounts for Black suffering and violence experienced in educational contexts and within/across communities. A central aim of UBI is to create more just educational experiences for Black students. Unveiling anti-Blackness, which functions in subtle ways and allows us actively resist anti-Blackness in curriculum development, discipline policies, and classroom interactions, can make school a more humane and fulfilling space for Black students. Additionally, Unapologetic Black Inquiry has

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the ability to highlight and value Black students’ resistance – especially to dysfunctional and abusive educational settings. By centering subjectivity, research can more readily see and appreciate Black students’ resistance to anti-Blackness and the multiple ways that they fight for and reclaim their humanity. Such an approach helps reveal pathways for how we all get free.

Note 1 While we center students in our discussion throughout the chapter, we also recognize and suggest that Blacks who are positioned in other roles (e.g., faculty, staff, administrators) are included in our conceptualizing as well.

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318 Jelisa S. Clark and Derrick R. Brooms Neal-Jackson, A. (2018). A meta-ethnographic review of the experiences of African American girls and young women in K-12 education. Review of Educational Research, 8(4), 508–546. Noguera, P. A. (2008). The trouble with Black boys: . . . And other reflections on race, equity, and the future of public education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Patton, L. D., & Croom, N. N. (2017). Critical perspectives on undergraduate Black women. In L. D. Patton & N. N. Croom (Eds.), Critical perspectives on Black women and college success (pp. 1–14). New York, NY: Routledge. Roberts, D. E. (1999). Killing the Black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Rogers, L. O., & Brooms, D. R. (2020). Ideology and identity among white male teachers in an all-black, all-male high school. American Educational Research Journal, 57(1), 440– 470. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831219853224 Sharpley-Whiting, T. D. (1999). Black Venus: Sexualized savages, primal fears, and primitive narratives in French. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schiraldi, V., & Ziedenberg, J. (2002). Cellblocks or classrooms?: The funding of higher education and corrections and its impact on African American men. Justice Policy Institute. http://www. justicepolicy.org/research/2046 Solórzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2002). Critical race methodology: Counter-storytelling as an analytical framework for education research. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 23–44. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tillis, G. E. (2018). Antiblackness, Black suffering, and the future of first-year seminars at historically Black colleges and universities. The Journal of Negro Education, 87(3), 311–325. Tillman, L. C. (2002). Culturally sensitive research approaches: An African American perspective. Educational Researcher, 31(9), 3–12. Toldson, I. A. (2019). No BS (bad stats): Black people need people who believe in Black people enough not to believe every bad thing they hear about Black people. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers. Tyson, K., Darity Jr, W., & Castellino, D. R. (2005). It’s not “a Black thing”: Understanding the burden of acting white and other dilemmas of high achievement. American Sociological Review, 70(4), 582–605. Wells, I. B. (1892). Southern horrors: Lynch law in all its phases. New York, NY: New York Age Print. Woodson, C. G. (2000). The miseducation of the Negro. Chicago, IL: African American Images (Original work published 1933). Wynter, S. (1989). Beyond the word of man: Glissant and the new discourse of the Antilles. World Literature Today, 63(4), 637–648. Yancy, G. (2008). Black bodies, White Gazes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Zuberi, T. (2001). Thicker than blood: An essay on how racial statistics lie. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Zuberi, T., & Bonilla-Silva, E. (2008). White logic, white methods: Racism and methodology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

20 Paying emotional tolls Politics, poststructural narrative theory, and research on race and racism subjects for emotional well-being Tanetha Grosland and LaSonja Roberts Introduction Emotions impact everything and education is not exempt. Thus, the need for a critical theoretical method to theorize these emotions in education. One such theory, poststructural narrative theory, is a viable critical theoretical method that provides unique levels of theoretical nuance about the role of emotions and the implications for well-being. Although many educational researchers have addressed the concerns over emotional burnout in educational leadership writ large (Beatty, 2007; Dantley, 2010; Friedman, 2002; Ittner, Hagenauer, & Hascher, 2019; Mills & Niesche, 2014), they nonetheless do not offer a more nuanced theorization on aspects of emotions like emotional well-being in racial justice. Therefore, a more pinpointed application that addresses emotional well-being in racial justice work in educational leadership must be had. Regarding the significance of emotional well-being, Boler and Davis (2018) address the social conditions of the “post-truth” era, asking, “What roles do emotions and affect play in the extreme partisan polarization around race, feminism, ‘political correctness,’ and other issues, in North America and beyond?” (p. 76). The answer is that these issues have a direct impact and play an enormous role on leadership psyche. Racial justice, particularly as a matter of wellbeing, is not only an issue in educational leadership. Central in the preamble of the World Health Organization (WHO) (2019) constitution, complete health is described as a robust state of well-being and a right regardless of, for example, race, political belief, or social conditions. In education, this well-being is evident in scholarship related to particular leadership roles (Bas & Yildirim, 2012; Somech & Miassy-Maljak, 2003; Mehdinezhad & Nouri, 2016) and in leadership as it concerns racial justice (Grosland, 2019; Grosland & Matias, 2017; Jansen, 2006, 2009; Radd & Grosland, 2019). As such, in this chapter we, the authors, propose that poststructural narrative theory (PSNT) is a formidable theory that advances theorizations of well-being among racial justice educators and leaders, a much-needed praxis if expectation of prolong racial justice is to be met. The ultimate aim is to explore the ways in which research using critical theoretical methods produces more critical theoretical scholarship about emotions, particularly in its relation to race and educational leadership, than

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empirical methods alone can do. This is not to say that empirical methods are useless. Indeed, they bring forth findings in specific ways. However, we do argue that they alone cannot substantiate the kinds of critical scholarship needed to combat the emotional deprivation faced, for example, among scholars of color committed to racial justice and their allies engaging racial justice practices.

Exploring existing condition of race, education, and emotions Emotional well-being and educational leadership Engaging theoretical methods in theoretical race research foregrounds the complexities of leadership practices, particularly among educational policy and politics. One reason for this is that a considerable amount of educational leadership practices involve politicking policy. As political theorists who engage leadership as a core function of enacting/resisting policy, we turn to Young and Diem (2017) in how they state that there is a tendency within the policy community to think about the theoretical part of policy analysis as separate from the more practical part, the empirical and methodological details, as if theory is something that is applied only after data has been collected. However, theory and method should not be treated as two separate issues or stages in a process. It is our contention that theory and method should be considered simultaneously. Policy analysis is, by its very nature, theoretical; that is, it requires theorizing about the objects of study. (p. 2) Theorizing objects of study is a crux of theoretical research. It is key to use theories and methods in concert when focusing on emotions because emotions can be easily muddled in research on race subjects. This confusion occurs because extreme partisan polarization plays out emotionally in the context of politicized subjects like race policy. When educators are enacting race subjects in policy or otherwise, how they feel about race will impact their policy practices. If leaders care about racial justice, then they will engage, empower racial justice educators, and express emotions related to race as a policy subject, as a discussion subject, and amongst other subjects where race and racism become a focus. Instead of viewing emotions as periphery, we operationally employ poststructural narrative theory to center emotions in leadership studies, particularly emotionally charged topics like racial justice education in leadership. Leader burnout Using the WHO (2019) definition for well-being, in the context of U.S.-based racism, sexism, and xenophobia, how are we, as educational advocates, even to

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expect mental or emotional well-being if the societal conditions are not just? The social contexts of leadership well-being are imperative, especially when applied to race, and there is definitely an emotional toll to leadership. In our conceptualization, we consider all aspects of affect, emotion, feeling, and other types of constructions that relate to states of feeling (e.g., Cvetkovich, 2012; Grosland & Matias, 2017; Grosland, 2019; Zembylas, 2014). Meaning, we focus on how emotions are conceptualized in poststructural narrative theory as critical theoretical research which includes deconstructing “negative” feelings not as something unwell, but instead as possible resources for political action (Cvetkovich, 2012). Although we connote leadership as a stance, including assigned career roles (e.g., principal, superintendent, department, chair, dean), we also define leadership as a way of life. Basically, leadership is a process of both being and becoming. Both noun and active verb, so to speak. And, in becoming leaders the emotional context of leadership is then expressed in schools precisely because these are the very educators who are often active in their communities within and outside of schools (Crawford, 2007). Though not positioned as “superintendents,” their leadership is nonetheless evident in their influence and advocation for causes they care about (e.g., by protesting, speaking at school board meetings, serving as cultural liaisons). All of which oftentimes comes at an emotional cost “to pay,” leading to burnout. The concern with contextual burnout is acute among educational leadership in urban, “turnaround,” or reform situations (Beatty, 2007; Dantley, 2010; Ittner et al., 2019; Mills & Niesche, 2014), as these leaders are on the “front lines” of “accountability” measures. Yet and still, the emotions of, and advocating for, social and racial justice reform in educational leadership classrooms (Rusch & Horsford, 2008; Zembylas, 2010) and “leading against the grain” in school buildings is telling of the demands these particular educators face (Jansen, 2006, 2009). Nonetheless, there are political forces and cultural hierarchies of emotions in educational leadership practices (Zorn & Boler, 2007). Clearly, well-being in education leadership is certainly not new; what is novel is the clear need to use poststructural narrative theory as a method to research emotions focused on the implications of burnout in the field of leadership. Race and racism While related concepts such as whiteness, racial formation theory, and the like deconstruct and challenge racial domination, for consistency in this chapter, and because the texts under analysis use race as a subject, we primarily engage the term race or racism. Although race is based on arbitrary body differences, it is yet used to create a hierarchy and ideology of white supremacy (LadsonBillings, 2013). Classic sociological theory reminds us that race and racism symbolize conflict among human bodies that transcends individual identities (Omi & Winant, 1994). Rather, beyond individualities race and racism interpellate between individual and society in severely conflicting and emotional

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ways. Racism is therefore an emotional condition. As emotional conditions, race and racism reproduce emotional dynamics that impact the psyche and can present in the body (tears, trembling, gut feelings, etc.). These emotions come in the form of loss for idealized objects among teacher educators who use critical race dialogues (Shim, 2018). Such emotions are also hidden among the many undetected stressors of “grit” that accompany the suffering that many Black and other racialized students endure as part of life in racialized schools and society (McGee & Stovall, 2015). Known are the ways that politicized raced emotions manifest in notions of “tolerance” post-9/11. For example, a self-serving version of “tolerance” toward Asian Americans post-9/11 was legitimized as long as it took the form of dominant interpretations of patriotism centering white self-interest (Subedi, 2013). In schools, this played out as a “tolerance” of religion. Although Asian American educators protested acts of white resentment, the racialization of religion in schools post-9/11 created climates of fear and skepticism of students seen as “outsiders” (Subedi, 2013). In these hostile climates, racism has a psychic impact and so the need for therapeutic and cathartic responses, such as those found with the use of Critical Race Theory counterstories (Ladson-Billings, 2013). Needless to say, these racialized hegemonic systems are detrimental to the well-being of racialized groups, and ultimately to humanity. As a word of caution, harmful racialized emotions have stark research implications for the use of narrative theory, seen in the proliferated methodological use of Critical Race Theory’s (CRT) counternarrative. But, for critical theorists producing theoretical research, and as Ladson-Billings (2013) specifically warned CRT scholars, we “cannot rail against the failure of positivist research to be objective or neutral when our own scholarship is so specific to our personal concerns that it fails to help us grasp important principles of racial justice” (p. 44). Meaning, we, as educational researchers, cannot decry the lack of objectivity in empirical research when sometimes we too are not objective in our quest for racially just educational research. These words of caution exemplify how power must remain central, including that of the researcher, when using critical theoretical research methods to do theoretical research. Arguably, this is even more so for those theoretically researching “difficult” subjects (like race) in leadership and policy studies, due to the large platform leaders have to advocate racial justice principles. Poststructural narrative theory as a critical theoretical research method powerfully deconstructs power and promotes racial justice, even those uncomfortable injustices from within the researchers themselves, as we demonstrate here.

Narrative theory Narrative theory, or narrative inquiry in education, is nothing new. However, what is new is applying poststructural narrative theory as methods particularly when investigating race subjects. To do this we first investigate the underlying ideological parameters that undergird poststructural narrative theory apart

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(meaning, poststructuralism separate to narrative) before we define its ideological dimensions together. In short, narrative inquiry (or narrative research) is best described as interpretive research and, although important in critical theory, as we explain, it has limitations for doing critical theoretical research methods. Regardless of its limitations, it is still a major tenet of poststructural narrative theory. The tenets, not the definition, are most enduring in narrative research thus we begin there. There are a few overarching major tenets and characteristics of narrative in education that easily transcend context. For one, the roots of narrative research sprout from the humanities and narratology (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006). Meaning, since narrative is a way of understanding experience, things, people, and events (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), its corollary, narrative research, is then rooted in understanding those complexities in human lives. As such, because people’s stories are complex knowledge sources of social reality, narrative research (with roots in feminism) becomes politicized when drawing from that knowledge source (Clandinin & Raymond, 2006; Elbaz-Luwisch, 1997). Clearly, narratives and applications of narrative theory are deeply political. Case in point, testing narratives in the United States, and elsewhere, are very politicized and racialized. It is through testing policies and practices that Black children are positioned as “underachievers” and thus scorn a “badge of inferiority” that reinforces the myth of Black inferiority (Horsford & Grosland, 2013). As such, the racist narrative that Black children and families are intellectually inferior is reproduced throughout education achievement discourse (Horsford & Grosland, 2013). This is how the “political” aspect of sustained grand narratives are interwoven with issues of power, authority, and legitimacy (Elbaz-Luwisch, 1997). Examinations of power are key to critical theoretical research methods, and so, too, when conducting theoretical research on the emotional landscape of race subjects in education. Without examinations of power dynamics when researching race, and since emotional well-being is a key element of burnout among racial justice education, emotional dynamics in the plight of racial justice can become blurred. These concerns, therefore, relate to who has power in what is considered a “narrative” or narrative “worthy,” the existence of “subject and object,” who gets to make the distinction between them because these decisions all have emotional roots concerning worthiness. Hence, issues of equality and supremacy occur in politically structured narratives (Elbaz-Luwisch, 1997). Considering Elbaz-Luwisch’s (1997) early work on political issues and implications, expression in narrative research is thus given political value. This strand of narrative analysis challenges prevailing logic that “underlies the technical rationality of most educational research . . . in the background of narrative work [that] is a critique of top-down” education practice and research (Elbaz-Luwisch, 1997, p. 77). The act of critique has elements of emotions that are often overlooked, and therefore critique itself has a potentially important element when producing theoretical research on emotions in racial justice leadership.

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Although limited because examinations of power are lacking in traditional narrative inquiry, the major aspects of narrative inquiry in education is nonetheless a baseline for postmodern narrative theory including place (context and location), temporality (relationship and dispositions of the researcher and participants), and sociality (how people transition) (Clandinin & Raymond, 2006; Connelly & Clandinin, 2006). Temporality attends to the ways that experiences are rooted in the present and has implications for the future – everything under study is in transition and is described with a past, present, and future (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). Then sociality addresses the simultaneous concern with both personal and social conditions of an individual’s experience and context that is under study (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). Narrative theory in education provides a backdrop to research methods that form a foundation for methods in poststructural narrative theory. However, in its simplest form, narrative inquiry alone has limitations for the poststructural narrative and critical theoretical researcher because of the under-examination of power and oppression. In this, we focus on what emotions do and how they are the data in theoretical research, and in the context of racial oppression, racialization and racism is driven by emotions. Advancing fair or just racial policy and leadership, therefore, is nullified when emotions are taken for granted or seen as nothing more than “ground noise.” Since emotions are fluid and grounded in issues of power, poststructuralism is needed. Of utmost importance within this is keeping stories central to the theoretical research method while still allowing for awareness of emotional discourses that are often overlooked in many other forms of critical research.

Poststructural in a “narrative turn” Poststructural narrative theory for theoretical research on the emotional dynamics of race subjects in leadership is a promising approach, whereas emotions would be otherwise peripheral. Under the auspices of “narrative turn,” narrative education research increasingly took up Marxist/critical and poststructuralism theories (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). This turn is particularly important because it mitigates the limitations of narrative alone in terms of the role of power in producing theoretical research. Thus, when researching issues of emotions, emotions are not only relegated to the individual, but instead, as Ahmed (2004) reminds us, they become matters of cultural politics related to race subjects, be it racial resistance, empowerment, or something else. Meaning, emotions are structured by power. Poststructural narrative research methods involve other ways of knowing and being because it critiques objectivity as proclaimed in “objective” research, hence problematizing post-positivism’s stronghold on research methods (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). Distinguished from positivist/post-positivist research, poststructural narrative theory as a critical theoretical research method foregrounds the role of power in the functioning of stories. Consequently, it is precisely these stories that help critical theoretical researchers best understand

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how structural power shapes how one’s stories, which are then used to understand the broader social factors that shape the experience behind the stories (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007), like white supremacy and patriarchy. Poststructuralists are concerned about hegemonic structural power of large-scale social factors like those aforementioned, and how this power influences individual stories so ubiquitously that they are blinded by their own participation in social oppression (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). This blindness is a detrimental condition for educators committed to advancing critical and racial justice practices, for how can they engage in racial justice if they, too, are blind to the larger hegemonic structure of whiteness and white supremacy that structures not only the experiences that frame their stories but the very emotions that arise from those experiences? Although Clandinin and Rosiek (2007) use the term “poststructural narrative inquiry borderland” to describe the theoretical borderland of both narrative theory and poststructuralist theory, we operationalized it as “poststructural narrative theory” because of our attraction to both the doing and being of racial justice and activism in leadership, for example. Using this theory as a method of theoretical research, one operationalizes discourses that address both their inner and outer world and how these perpetuate (in)justices in education. Discourses in this sense are (Radd & Grosland, 2019): ways of knowing, acting, judging, and thinking, [discourses] function to direct how power and resources are distributed. In addition to serving as the tools of social construction and, thus, the undergirdment of social systems, [discourses] inhabit the minds, emotions, and bodies of individuals within those systems. (p. 5) Abiding by this definition of discourse helps us understand that these ways of knowing and emoting, coupled with the working of power, are key for using poststructural narrative theory as a critical theoretical research method. Discourses about leadership become then both the being and doing of leadership. That is, leadership is not just auditory talk, but also how one “shows up” and embodies a leadership stance. One of our following examples discusses this in relation to cyberspace. Since space becomes fluid when conducting critical theoretical research in educational leadership, especially during a tide of the COVID pandemic where the leadership and expressed emotions go online, one must ask “profoundly multicultural questions” that at times can be seen as difficult (Nieto, 2003). The difficulty of these questions is deeply emotional. Yet, it is precisely these difficult emotions that disrupt the problematic discourses that permeate leadership because these are the exact emotions needed to undergird racial justice. Needless to say, the poststructural turn in narrative theory grew out of the limitations of narrative theory’s overdependence on interpretivism and critical theory’s overdependence on structural power (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007).

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Other infused theories have also sprouted from these one-theory limitations. For example Pillow (2015) used a fused theory of temporality and postfeminist queer praxis to explore the relationship of time and its implications for the marked bodies of teen mothers in schools. Just as Pillow was able to more deeply explore time and teen mothers using a fused theory, so too do we attempt to explore more deeply emotion states in the temporality context of race subjects in educational leadership. Doing so gets at both the structural and the individual.

Presenting a fusion: poststructuralist narrative theory The foundations of narrative theory and narrative in the poststructural turn are rooted in stories. Although both theories are strong separately, their separation still poses limitations because they do not readily address the flexibility needed to challenge power in racialized landscapes and discourses that themselves are fluid and constantly changing (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). For this reason, we offer a fusion application of narrative and poststructuralism as poststructural narrative theory. Next we discuss the limitations before the definitions. One limitation of narrative theory is how it treats lived experience as the beginning and endpoint – essentially the narrative stands on its own (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). Yet, with respect to poststructural theory, narratives do not stand on their own because they are not created in a vacuum. Conversely, according to Clandinin and Rosiek (2007), a limitation of poststructuralism is how lived experiences are not treated at face value and as immediate sources of knowledge but instead are filtered through social processes. Since research is not an exactness and stories are messy, traversing is necessary. Traversing borderland, per Clandinin and Rosiek (2007), is an opportunity to “play” with ideas and methods. Borderlands are “spaces that exist around borders . . . where one lives within the possibility of multiple plotlines” (p. 59). In acknowledging this, we can traverse the borders of both narrative and poststructuralist theories. Since traversing is a core aspect of poststructural narrative theory methods, its applicability as a method allows researchers to swiftly navigate the unique aspects of theoretical nuance that happens when researching emotions in the context of race subjects. Poststructural narrative theory is a theoretical fuse that offers “epistemic and methodological diversity in the social sciences” (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 52). It is a theoretical hybrid used to critically examine experiences (Clandinin & Raymond, 2006). In doing so, it challenges majoritarian stories of privilege while considering issues of power and the limitations of the human experience. These fusions allow us to ask: “Whose stories? Whose and which stories are privileged or disadvantaged? How is this story operating in the context of power and the limitations of being human?” Although the primary purpose of narrative research is to create understanding, by-products include change or solutions to problems (Elbaz-Luwisch, 1997), but fusing it as poststructural narrative theory offers solutions that include challenging race and

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racism discourses. That is, regardless of how they are presented, the discourse with all its considerations of how contemporary race language is used, examines how emotion is presented in relationship to the race language or discourse. Informed by Clandinin and Rosiek (2007), when engaging poststructural narrative theory, the purpose of crafting stories is rooted in the political value of stories and the ability of stories to foster emotional and moral responses to topics such as racism and other forms of oppression. This is true because, as mentioned earlier, this borderland is negotiated in conversation with critical theory, in that the critical researcher examines the role of power in a way that they listen through a participant’s story in order to hear the operation of broader social discourses shaping experience (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). However, unlike other forms of research, in poststructural narrative theory the researcher simultaneously considers both challenging power and, rather than listening through the story, honors story as a valid source of knowledge (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). Poststructural narrative theory, again deriving from narrative theory nuances keeps central place, temporality, and (3) sociality. Again, place is the actual location of where the research is occurring; temporality is a description of how you as the researcher interact with the field; and sociality is how people transition over a certain amount time – this is an examination of how people take on different actions over time (e.g., an engineering class building a bridge). Forthcoming are examples of how these are applied in theoretical research.

Maneuvering methods: poststructural narrative theory amid race subjects Although there are many cases we could have chosen, we focus on these two primary texts for application of poststructural narrative theory as a method. As an author and a researcher in these examples (Grosland), this insider status allows for an additional exploratory level of emotional psychological observation nuance. Example 1 The first text is based on a study of a U.S.-based graduate classroom (doctoral and master’s class) where race and racism in higher education and educational leadership are topics of study (Grosland, 2019). Grosland utilizes poststructural narrative theory to research emotional discourses via race and racism in the classroom where she was participant observer/observer participant (temporality – relationship of the researcher to the participant). In her classroom research in an urban city (place – context and location), she is guided by post and critical theories on antiracism/Critical Race Theory, emotion, and anti-oppression. In her theoretical methods, although addressing problematic discourses, she treats narrative instances as one’s own story, reality, and perception of “truth.” A common example of this is when classrooms predominated by white students claim

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they are “overwhelmed” by discussions of racism. In traditional methods, overwhelmed would not be analyzed as data to develop theoretical research. This under-analysis is evident throughout the scholarly literature. So, if applying poststructural narrative theory as a method, white students’ “overwhelmed” feelings then become a matter of racial theory and drive the data collection. As for the researcher, her digital recorder becomes her microscope, and audio recordings of students’ feelings of “overwhelmed” become a point of theoretical data. In order to deconstruct this, first the researcher needs to notice the emotional pattern, document it, and how it is racialized. Then once the researcher notices these theoretical patterns in real time, it is important these moments are noted as sociality (how people transition over time). Here, emotions as data become a theoretical point of exploration, not in a psychological manner to clinically “diagnose.” To be clear, emotions drive a theoretical study that promotes racial justice. Seen in this way, emotions are data and thus a researcher employing a poststructural narrative method must determine emotional patterns in the field. Although Grosland’s explorations forefront racist discursive instances, she uses these instances of racism as emotional interplays and as such strengthens her claims about the need for theoretical research on emotions. She deconstructs these emotions and racist instances by, most importantly, first addressing her own racist and racialized emotions as a racialized researcher. For example, in this study, a white female student name Diane cried after watching the film The Color of Fear (Wah, 1994). Focusing on poststructural narrative theory, one becomes aware of how their own emotions become theoretical data points. These data points are not simply two dimensions as oftentimes depicted in traditional research. Instead the emotional outbursts become multi-dimensional because they can happen in a multitude of ways. Hence, in doing so, she finds that although she is from a racialized community, she is not excluded from perpetuating racism in her pursuit to deconstruct racism and whiteness. Her theoretical goals here are to address the multiplicity and situatedness of oppression, deconstruct self/other dichotomies, and show the serious limitations of education for the Other, of the Other, and education that is critical of privileging and Othering (Kumashiro, 2000), particularly the racial Other. Using a poststructural narrative theory as method clearly shows more than an emotional outburst to a film but structures the emotional outburst within a larger social and racial context. If poststructural research narrative were not the guiding method, especially since Grosland typically used to have a slight abhorrence for emotions in herself and others, then it is reasonable that the role of emotions would have been overlooked or seen as distraction from the goal of racial justice. Deconstructing her own emotions are types of emotional dynamics that take place in everyday racial justice research but that are often omitted by researchers. However, in using poststructural narrative theory as method it then forces researchers to address those emotions head on. If emotions are not included as points of data in the poststructural, then advancing knowledge on well-being in leadership and policy research on race subjects is arguably inadequate.

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In studying race and racism subjects for the purpose of racial justice and wellbeing, Grosland makes the connection between self/other emotional dynamics in several ways. One, per Connelly and Clandinin (2006), she brackets herself into the narrative theory in the act of theoretical research. She constantly writes in order to become more conscious of which systems of oppression inform her methods. These reflective practices were/are sometimes troubling for her because they reveal unexplored theoretical assumptions and aspects of herself (e.g., fear and racist assumptions in antiracist/racial justice theorizing) that she never intentionally addressed nor shared in writing (Grosland, 2010). Although she found it emotionally difficult in ways that made her physically ill due to the stress of self-exploration, these practices made for a more robust theoretical analysis and helped her grow personally in ways that always keep central the fluidity of power across “differences” (race, gender identity, socioeconomic status, language, geographic status/north-south/east-west). That is, the burden of meaning is not placed solely on the narrative of others but also on the theoretical researcher herself. Results from exploration indicate the significance of poststructural narrative theory as both theory and method because it brings to the forefront the realities of dynamic emotional states on researchers when conducting leadership research on race and racism subjects. Example 2 The other precedent of poststructural narrative theory was when two researchers, Grosland and Matias conducted a traditional qualitative study on an online graduate class where race is discussed. In their empirical data collected from the course they noticed an emotionally charged discussion (also digital text) between two students from different racial backgrounds in a graduate teacher leadership course (Grosland & Matias, 2017). Since the main feature of poststructural narrative theory as method is to discover how emotions operate as pity and emotional negativity toward racially minoritized people, this became instead a data site for investigation. However, there was something more happening that became an key moment that informs theoretical research. The researchers became emotionally interested with the participant (graduate student) through their participation in the analysis of the student’s digital text. And, since poststructural narrative theory as method focuses on emotions as stories, researchers cannot ignore the emotional dynamic happening for the participant (graduate student) in the traditional empirical qualitative study nor could the researcher ignore the emotional dynamic happening between them and the digital text they were analyzing. To account for these under-investigated emotions, Grosland and Matias collaboratively used poststructural narrative theory as method to explore racial justice in a professional practice course by abridging their emotional reactions to the empirical data to make better sense of the data theoretically. This emotional dialogic exploration between Grosland and Matias occurred while the

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more traditional qualitative study of examining student work in a graduate course was taking place. To be clear, the empirical portion of data collection was already done and is not the focus of this application of poststructural narrative method. The poststructural narrative theory as method began because as Grosland felt remiss about some of her analysis from the student work in her traditional study, she found greater understanding when applying poststructural narrative theory as a method to collaboratively explore her own emotional landscape with Matias. This investigation happened during a fall course and students were all practicing professionals in K-12 settings engaged in an educational leadership program. Emotions arose in the course when observing forms of digital writings (see the following). For example, and as detailed next, “Teachers shared stories about how the district had ignored their pleas for help” (Grosland & Matias, 2017, p. 77) In thinking through the analysis of students’ emotional writing, Grosland and Matias include an example concerning how Black identity is discursively linked to “fighting” and “pleas for help (Grosland & Matias, 2017, p. 77), student fights, suspensions from school, and numbers of absences and tardies. Teachers shared stories about how the district had ignored their pleas for help and had, in fact, made decisions that actually set the school up to fail. I simply couldn’t imagine how all of this could possibly be completely true. Another example is (Grosland & Matias, 2017, p. 77), Just as teachers are susceptible to learned helplessness and a defensive rather than offensive use of educational practice, educational leaders must resist the temptation to fall victim to external pressures and leadership fatigue. In seeing this link come up in the traditional empirical research there was something missing for understanding how it is emotionally processed by researchers. Grosland and Matias started dialoging about the ways in which they were emotionally responding to the empirical data which they realized in and of itself became a new study with immense theoretical implications. “Why is this getting to me,” one researcher asked aloud. The other asked, “I’m getting angry just reading this student’s journey. I don’t even know her.” That the importance of a researcher’s emotional connection to the studied is not contested. What is contested is that what method then do researchers use to investigate their own emotions to better understand what they research empirically. Another example was when Grosland and Matias delve into a story of one of their teacher leader participants who, as a self-identified Black, told Grosland about a conversation she had with a white colleague. That student shared to Grosland in their class that her white colleague used negatively emotionally laden words to explain what happened to them when they overheard their students using race language about Black children in their classroom. The Black teacher, in taking about her white colleague, said (Grosland & Matias, 2017, p. 78),

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At the end of the day on Wednesday, the [white] teacher came to me and told me that the students were yelling, “You black boy/girl,” at each other. She did not understand why they were doing this because all of the students are African American but knew that they were being hurtful to one another because of the tone of voice they were using. I explained that the students were most likely referring to each other’s skin complexion. We decided we should have a discussion with the students regarding their race. These emotional experiences prompted the graduate student to attempt to educate her white colleague about race, language, and emotion. In this situation, temporality of poststructural narrative theory as method came into play. Because although this story was told to Grosland during the fall course, it was not until it was relayed to Matias a year later during the traditional analysis of the digital texts that it led to greater meaning. Using temporality which includes notions of space and time, Grosland and Matias realized they were not only emotionally reacting to the digital texts and the stories being told as they analyzed such texts, they were becoming emotionally embedded to the study. Using poststructural narrative theory as method then allowed the researchers to shift from strictly focusing on the analysis of the traditionally collected empirical data to the temporal space between empirical data to emotional data experienced by the researchers in their process of analyzing. No longer were there strict boundaries, instead there are borderlands. The data no longer was just what was written on the online course but what was becoming of the researchers themselves. By using poststructural narrative theory research methods, they were able to seamlessly embed aspects of their own experiential knowledge teaching graduate courses for this theoretical essay. In particular, they engaged aspects of narrative theory based on work by Chase (2005), in that Grosland and Matias are narrators who also acknowledge their own theoretical conceptions of emotions, thoughts, interpretations, and events. This reflexivity on theoretical assumptions was made possible by making those assumptions public through a systematic approach. Although they live more than 2,700 miles apart – Grosland in the South on the Atlantic Coast and Matias on the Pacific Coast – they were able to conduct regular scholarly briefings via calls and texts and were able to collaborate in real time using shared syncing documents. Their dialogic process included conversations that intentionally noted how their own stories and emotions influenced their research method decisions for the essay. This use of poststructuralist narrative theory as method ultimately improved their practices related to addressing race subjects, for if it were not for their ongoing reflexivity, they would have been blinded to how their own emotions were impacting their emotional analysis. The ability to notice emotions in self and others in theoretical research influences theoretical research on emotional well-being in leadership when race is the topic of study. Our textual analysis of the two research precedents, where emotion is explored when race is the subject on the ground and in cyberspace, draws attention to when poststructural narrative theory is used to create theoretical research, particularly how it makes emotion apparent in ways not clear in other

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research methods. Although these studies take place in different environments, the power of using poststructural narrative theory as method is that it grounds the critical researcher so they can traverse theory for the purpose of theoretical research even when researching something as fluid as race subjects and emotion.

Race and other political subjects: implications Clearly, poststructural narrative theory as method expands existing critical theoretical research methods about the intersection of emotions and race and racism subjects. Promising practices lead to an interpretation that unabashedly and explicitly centers the messiness of politics, challenges oppressive power discourse, and honors the multiple layers of lived experiences for both the researcher and their participants. Humans are complicated, thus dichotomous emotions are just par for the course, hence emotions can guide emotional healing in the sometimes conflicted emotional world of race subjects. Advancement of well-being for both the participants and the researcher is the pathway to health that the WHO emphasizes is needed worldwide. The sociality of emotions and liberatory politics (Boler & Davis, 2018) makes for a cogent connection for poststructural narrative theory, emotion states of being, and political life as lived. In sync with Boler and Davis (2018), more research is needed on the relationship between emotion and politics, but this research is particularly necessary for critical theoretical methods in education. For if one is unable to notice emotions in themselves, how are they able to “see” emotions in theoretical research? The answer is simple: they cannot. Reflexivity of one’s own emotions toward race subjects in poststructural narrative theory research methods is a crucial aspect to theoretical research. Auspiciously we provided two research scenarios where poststructural narrative theory as method became necessary for the production of critical theoretical research methods in leadership studies on race subjects and how these methods can mitigate the harm to emotional well-being among leadership committed to racial justice. With these examples, poststructural narrative theory as a method provides a richer and more robust body in leadership studies than simple interviews, focus groups, and/or observations could ever provide. Pillow (2017), for example, argues that there are “theoretical absences and blind spots” that discount theories from Women of Color. She then asserts that theory and praxis need to be engaged differently if we are to be more equitable in race and gender. Therefore, to advance theoretical methods in research, two things need to be operationalized: first, theoretical reflexivity and praxis must be paramount in critical theoretical research methods in education. Reflexivity through in-depth and frank journaling on the social and political climate assists in deconstructing binaries. Hence, developing inquiry reflexivity in critical theoretical research methods in education involves asking deep questions of oneself rooted in critical non-binaries that challenge majoritarian narratives. This binary challenge includes scholarship related to stopping otherizing (e.g., trans-women, racialized bodies, dis/abled, deaf/hearing). Research promise is

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endless when scholars move beyond discourses that marginalize the being and doing of critical theoretical research.

Conclusion In research on educational leadership burnout, when poststructural narrative theory is not the grounding method, it is reasonable that the emotional occurrences are taken for granted and assumed, resulting in under-analysis or the complete absence of analysis of emotional data objects. Of course, other forms of theory would suffice, like narrative because it foregrounds lived experiences or critical because it examines experiences. However, as a result of the dichotomizing perspectives of story in those theories – narrative theory diminishes the structural oppression that occurs in narratives, and critical theory overlooks the power of individual stories as they are – serious limitations abound in a world of conflictive emotions. As, in 1970 education was said to be “suffering from a narration sickness” (Freire, 2008, p. 52) and, in spite of more than 50 years of scholarship since, this is still where the problem lies. Critical researchers, in general, and racial justice researchers particularly, who produce theoretical research to examine the fluidity of power in the context of race subjects, need a theoretical method that is fluid in order to advance education research. Education, as a function of society, is suffering from an emotional crisis and the demands for theoretical methods to address the complexities of this ongoing crisis. Poststructural narrative theory offers unique and creative pathways to address the evolving problems that surface from burnout in educational leadership for racial justice in the context of race and racism subjects. Due to social issues that upend society, like wars, genocide, and pandemics, and the resulting pending emotions, oppression is amplified; therefore, racism and subjects become more important. So, the importance of theoretical methods that address well-being is utterly fundamental to humanity, if not for the well-being of our educators and students, especially those committed to racial justice or racially minoritized, then for everyone in our communities. Simply stated: emotional well-being is the miner’s canary.

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21 Meditations on experience The politics and ethics of “not-knowing” in educational research Belén Hernando-Lloréns

Introduction This chapter is the story of my ontological and epistemological journey as a researcher in a study on convivencia – the ideal of living together in harmony in diverse societies – as a technology of modern governmentality in the making of the other in contemporary education in Spain (Hernando-Llorens, 2019a, 2019b). It is the story of learning to do what I was told “good” research was about: letting your data “speak” to theory (Denzin, 2009). This chapter is situated in the “empirical turn” in the postfoundational methodologies in education, without lapsing into empiricism and within the postfoundational and feminist tradition in educational research (Britzman, 1997; Koro-Ljungberg, 2015; Lather, 2009; St Pierre & Pillow, 2000). My research answers the call of Elizabeth St. Pierre and Wanda S. Pillow’s (2000) to “work the ruins” after the postmodern and postfoundational shift in educational research in the 1980s and 1990s. I do so by depicting how I got my hands dirty, so to speak, with archival and ethnographic data (interviews, participant observation, focus groups, and so on), a task that was placed in the postmodernism’s empirical turn, “where theoretical concerns increasingly have become expressed in investigations of an empirical kind” (Seidman & Alexander, 2020, p. 23). This chapter contributes to conversations surrounding the “politics and ethics of evidence” and the value of qualitative work in addressing matters of equity and social justice (Lather, 2006, p. 789). This contribution subscribes to a postfoundational and postcolonial tradition that interrogates the complicity between, on the one hand, faith in theory, truth, and evidence and, on the other, the fact that the racialized other has been described as incapable of truth telling, of giving evidence (Spivak, 1998, p. 214). Not-knowing as a method builds on the extensive work that postcritical and postfoundational feminists have done around the metaphor of not knowing and getting lost in research (Baker, 1999; Britzman, 2012; Davis, 2002; Lather, 2007, 2008a, 2009, 2012). By epitomizing the call for “epistemological awareness” in qualitative research, in the current climate, in which many “question the design choices, purposes, and trustworthiness of qualitative studies and other alternative research approaches” (Koro-Ljungberg, Yendol-Hoppey, Smith, & Hayes, 2009, p. 687), this is a story about learning to not know.

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In this chapter, I examine the effects of my inquiry as a social practice, the ethical work of the kinds of research methods we use and the questions they allow us to ask – its ontological and epistemological effects on the object/ subjects of study. In losing oneself and the presence of the research subject by engaging in a historical analysis, I’m less concerned with the melancholia of the loss in the presence of the subject, but with the epistemological and ontological implications of that loss. What happens when we decenter the presence of subjects of our research? What enablement can we imagine from loss? Does not-knowing as a way of knowing respond to the demands of academic work in making a difference in struggles for social justice? What is left of the political in anti-empiricist methodologies? While there is a considerable amount of storytelling in this chapter, this is not a story with a happy ending in which I magically discover a “right” method at the end; it is not even a story with an end. I engage with the journey of not-knowing as a method of what John Law and John Urry (2004) call “political ontology” – methods not only discover reality but create it. I engage with my journey with not-knowing as a political practice of making worlds. But the most significant contribution is my proposal that not-knowing as a method can help us disentangle the civilizing agenda embedded in educational research methods and help create worlds that contribute to a more just society. I start by situating not-knowing as a theory and method within three crises that dismantle the modern edifice of social educational research: (1) the crisis of voice, experience, and authenticity, (2) the crisis of identity and agency, and (3) the crisis of methods. Then I continue with an elaboration of the key tenets that ground not-knowing as a theory and method. And finally, I conclude with a metacognitive narrative of my own journey working with not-knowing as a method.

Working the ruins of educational research In their edited volume, Working the Ruins: Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education, Elizabeth A. St. Pierre and Wanda S. Pillow engage in the intellectual task of working the ruins of educational research to address the crisis of representation and explore the foundations in which humanism grounded its raison d’être and which also served as the core of its colonial enterprise – knowledge, objectivity, truth, reality, reason, science, progress, the subject, and so forth. After having dismantled the certainties that sustained the edifice of social sciences, they wonder: Is there any ethical practice toward justice and equity left in educational research? I examine how the task of working the ruins of educational research can be tackled by engaging with three “crises” – the crisis of voice, experience, and authenticity, the crisis of identity and agency, and the crisis of representation and its methods. This section is written less to review existing literature on how postcritical theories have tackled issues of methods in educational research than to draw on a range of scholarship about the tensions that erupted around how we construct objects/subjects

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of educational research and knowledge about them. It is meant to intellectually orient the reader to how I discuss not-knowing as a method in subsequent sections. The crisis of voice, experience, and authenticity Feminism has traditionally relied on voice and experience as a reliable source of authoritative evidence in educational research. However, postfoundational and postcolonial feminists have drawn our attention to the limitations of the toooften “easy-to-tell story of salvation” of this research (Britzman, 1997; Lather, 2008a; Spivak, 2010; Wynter, 2003). Concerns with uncomplicated notions of voice call for caution and highlight the need to more carefully examine “what we are to do with what we are told in terms of listing for the sense people make of their lives without reverting to ‘too easy’ ideas about voice” (Lather, 2007, p. 147). Some scholars have challenged the factual approach to voice and focus on the limits of voice and how voice functions to communicate in qualitative research – what is not told, its silences, and what is lost and/or avoided in communication. The meaning of voice and the study of experience as a liberating and empowering strategy in educational research have been questioned. While the study of voice and experience in education has traditionally focused on how to include all voices and experiences, specifically those that have been historically marginalized (of Black and Brown students, undocumented students, etc.), scholars have pushed the boundaries of this kind of research. They invite us to rethink what voice and what experience are. During the 20th century, voice, identity, and representation became synonymous, and experience became the site to study these conflated concepts. During this time, voice and experience were portrayed as either unproblematic and empowering expressions of unitary group identity (e.g., teacher voices, girl experiences) or essentialist notions of voice and experience that assume subgroups’ stable identities (see Beltrán, 2010). In her work “What Is Voice?” Baker invites us to consider how we know who is speaking in the first place, rather than only ask how we can include everybody’s voice (1999, p. 16). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s (1998) “What Is an Author?,” Baker suggests an examination of the historical terms that make possible the articulation of certain ideas, rather than reducing our reading of people’s voices and experiences to intentions and traits of the individual. By problematizing the “who?” – in other words, the speaker – Foucault invites us to shift the questions around voice from “who is speaking?” to “what are people able to say?” This shift requires examination of various discourses and regimes of truth and their effects on power structures that historically and culturally ground what people are able to say. This said, Baker challenges us to think, “if we speak discourses that we are born into and/ or socialized to speak, then who is it that’s speaking?” (Baker, 1999, p. 380). In a similar vein, Gayatri C. Spivak has questioned what we consider we hear when the subaltern speaks. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak (2010) argues that the processes of imperialism have so contoured what can be said through

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the substitution of the language of the colonizer for the colonized, that, when the colonized speaks back, what is being spoken is the colonizer’s worldview. Similarly, with how voice has been challenged, experience as a trustworthy account of a personal event has also been probed. Joan W. Scott (1991) critiques what she calls the trap of the “evidence of experience.” For Scott, the trap lies in the appeal to experience as a category of indubitable evidence and its categorization as an original point to explain reality. By taking experience as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject becomes the corroboration upon which scientific explanation is built. Under this perspective, knowledge is gained through vision while questions about the constructed nature of experience – about how subjects come to experience issues in certain ways and not others, how they are constituted as different in the first place, and how one’s vision is structured – are left aside. Experience, Scott (1992) concludes, is not the origin of our explanation, but what we want to explain. These challenges to studies of voice and experience are fundamental in working the ruins of educational research and in not-knowing as a method. Mainly because, after the crisis of representation, it “allows” us to work with individuals and their accounts of reality. However, these accounts are not the response to our research questions, but the beginning of our inquiry, what we want to explain. The crisis of identity and agency One of the main issues around how voice and experience have been created as a symbol of inclusion of different identities is that it purportedly offers a simple solution to inclusion while producing injustices and inequalities that it then aims to solve by talking about “different” voices and experiences. The foundational idea is that individuals have voices, not that those voices can be heard equally. The problem with this way of approaching the study of difference in which the inequities of voice and experience come into view, Baker argues (1999) is that the categories that make possible those histories of difference are left unchallenged and the conditions of existence that make possible those categories in the first place are left underexamined. The emergence of identities and concepts – like voice or experience – as historical events is in need of explanation. As Stuart Hall (1996) reminds us, “Black is an identity which had to be learned and could only be learned in a certain moment, in Jamaica that moment is the 1970s.” Identities, voice, or experiences, postfoundational scholars argue, have not always been there waiting to be expressed or told, but are the result of a certain historical moment and the emergence of that new voice, identity, or experience as a discursive event that should be the focus of our investigation. Critical scholars of voice and experience in education have critiqued this approach as apolitical. However, what postfoundational scholars argue is that the study of the subject as a discursive event is not a way to introduce a form of linguistic determinism that deprives individuals of agency – their capacity for

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action. It is actually a call to situate the discursive event of experience within the limits of the discursive contrition of the individual and not outside. Individuals have agency, but they are not autonomous individuals exercising free will but rather “subjects whose agency is created through situations and statuses conferred to them” (Scott, 1992, p. 34). Being an individual, then, means being subject to the definite conditions of existence and conditions of action. The study of these conditions of possibility ought to be the focus of the inquiry. Questions of identity, voice, and experiences become the site to study and access the “real” in ethnographic studies. However, postfoundational scholars working the ruins of educational researchers invite us to tackle a different venue in our research. As Deborah Britzman proposes, it may be time to be wounded by thought as an ethical move. Incited by the “demand for voice and situatedness” (1997, p. 31), she asks how we come to think of things this way and what would be made possible if we were to think about research in another way, as a space surprised by difference into the performance of practices of notknowing. What if our methods to “collect” data rather than discover truth and reality serve as some sort of savior narrative of scientific progress that in fact comes to produce the reality? What if there are not better or worse methods, but better ways in which our research gives accounts of the venues through which reality has been constructed? It is at the intersection of accounts of the real and difference where the method of not-knowing is situated. In working the ruins of educational research, postfoundational feminist scholars who have challenged essentialist approaches to the study of identity and voice of minority groups have started working the ruins of voice by examining the interstices of voice, its silence. The division between voice and silence – what one does and does not say – and voice as liberation and silence as oppression has been forcefully challenged. There are many types of silences, as Foucault reminds us, and they are an “integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourse” (Foucault, 1990, p. 27). Silence entails many kinds of silences: the things that one declines to say, as well as what is forbidden to say or the discretion that may be required between different groups. This multifaceted conceptualization of silence makes it less the limit of discourse than the element that makes it possible for a discourse to exist. For example, as Foucault (1990) describes in The History of Sexuality, silences on sexuality were critical in forming the discourse of sexuality during the Victorian era. The taboos about sexual practices or sexual illness were as important in the working of the discourse as sexuality itself. There are many silences, and they are key in how discourses work – and also in governmentality. The crisis of representation and its methods The crisis of methods and representation in educational research cannot be dissociated from the two previous crises. One issue defines this crisis of representation and its methods and it involves the assumption that the modern edifice of social sciences is structured by a logic that separates research/writer,

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text, and the subject. Under this assumption, the researcher presumes a world out there (the real) that can be captured by a “knowing” researcher through the careful transcription (analysis) of field materials (interviews, notes, etc.) and conveyed in a research text that depicts that reality in a scientific, precise way. The researcher/writer becomes the mirror of the reality and this reality represents the subject’s experiences through the researcher/writer’s accounts and observations. Several questions follow from this assumption. To what extent can we ensure that our methods of “data collection” don’t come to reproduce and reiterate the same inequalities that have sustained the humanist modernist building of sciences and social sciences? What is the role of our methods in reproducing the legacies of coloniality, which have historically othered those who are located outside the grand narratives of belonging and the nation? In what ways do our methods replicate the extractivist economic model of the colony? From psychoanalysts and deconstructivist scholars who question even the possibility of representation of the subject, to postcolonial scholars who challenge the role of the social sciences in perpetuating visions of members of minority or marginalized communities as violent, to feminists who challenge quantitative methods as limiting to the accounts of women’s experiences – all of these actors have contributed to the crisis of methods. However, postfoundational scholars challenge the traditional ethnographic and sociological notions of methods as being able to gather and extract reality and truth from fieldwork, and their critiques revise these methods as “ontological politics” (Law, 2004; Mol, 1999). “Ontological politics” designates a form of performativity in which any practice of knowing is seen as a contingent enactment of a specific version of the real, not the real in itself. John Law and John Urry (Law & Urry, 2004) caution us that this is neither a relativist nor realist claim, but actually an ontological one. They argue that reality is a relational effect – it is produced within relations. Reality is produced in the enactment of methods, and different methods make up different worlds. The question is what different realities are strengthened by different methods, and whether any methods are able to deal with the complexity of the material world we inhabit. New methods are needed to engage with the world and capture these complexities. One of these methods is simply not-knowing.

“Not-knowing” as a method Inspired by feminist and postfoundational scholars of education working the ruins of educational research, this chapter assumes the practice of “notknowing” as a valuable ethical and political practice in educational research. The expression “not-knowing” in this sense implies a disorientation where openness and the state of not-knowing are part of the process, a research practice that relishes conflicting interpretations – a permanent unsettlement of the research practice. It is risky for a junior and feminist scholar to draw a line between these two understandings of not-knowing: not-knowing as the lack

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of knowledge in the apprenticeship as researcher and not-knowing as what-isnot-known as the point of certainty of the investigation. I develop in this chapter the second definition of not-knowing, or, as Lather puts it, not-knowing as a notion where “the necessary exclusion is the very organizer of whatever insight might be made” (2007, p. vii). Patty Lather’s (2009) metaphor and theory of getting lost serves as fertile theoretical/methodological ground to depict not-knowing as a theory and method. Despite its disorienting connotation, the metaphor of getting lost is less about not knowing what to do and more about deconstructing the categories that we know, are certain about, or familiar with. Here I put myself in the awkward position of telling a story, not so much about losing myself in knowledge, but about “knowledge that loses itself in the necessary blind spots of understanding” (2007, p. vii). Drawing on Lather’s invitation to getting lost, I probe “not-knowing” as a subversive method of certainty, evidence, and truth, in which not-knowing raises issues of “ontological methodology” (Law, 2004, p. 154) – it reflects my own concerns with the ontological and epistemological categories of experience in educational research and the methods we use to study these experiences. As Lather puts it, getting lost “is a science based less on knowledge than on an awareness of epistemic limits where ethics begins with an embrace of such limits as constitutive of ethical knowing: de-colonizing, post-imperial” (2008b, p. 60). I propose that not-knowing as a method is a necessary tool to disentangle the colonial legacies embedded in educational research methods. I tackle this task through the analysis of four tenets of notknowing as a method: (1) interweaving the subject/object of research as the research event; (2) working the interstices of voice and discourse by focusing on their silences; (3) embracing uncertainty in the process of engagement with the world by paying attention to aporias; and (4) disturbing the categories of study as an ethical practice. Interweaving the subject/object of research as the research event The point here is that in not-knowing as a method, the researcher and research methods are as much an object of study as what/who is being researched. The reality under investigation is not simply out there to be discovered by the researcher, either in society or in individuals. If methods are performative and make up reality, then in doing research we enact multiple worlds produced in diverse and contested social and material relations. This idea that there are multiple realities is fundamental in not-knowing as a method for multiple reasons. Firstly, if we are working with methods that emerged as part of the humanist and colonialist project of the 19th-century social sciences, how are these methods going to let us approach worlds alternative to the ones that have been made and that are patriarchal, racist, and colonial? We need alternative tools to enact different, more justice-oriented realities than the traditional ones social sciences have enacted. Secondly, if methods produce reality, then whatever we as researchers do or tell, we are involved in the creation of the real. This practice

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is not innocent, but political – methods enact difference and rank realities. As long as we conceal our “world-making” from what we as researchers do and tell, we’re presuming and performing an innocence that we don’t have. Thirdly, if social sciences have traditionally used methods that look for and assume the stability of the world and individuals, these same methods enact those stabilities, ostracizing realties that enact instabilities. Not-knowing as a method acknowledges the role of the research process, its tools, and the researcher in the inquiry of research. The researcher’s task is not going into the “field” to “collect data” from its participants, to apprehend the reality. Actually, the researcher will be creating reality in the process of “collecting data.” The researcher then co-constructs reality with the study’s so-called participants. Not-knowing as a method, then, invites us to embark on a more uncertain journey of engaging with data, in which the end point is not to find the truth. On the contrary, it’s a more sinuous journey where the researchers (“researcher” and “participant”) attend to the inconsistencies, silences, or gaps in the accounts of reality. In this attentive process they decide what social reality will be made more real and to what ends. In their experimental ethnography of women diagnosed with HIV, Troubling the Angles: Women Living with HIV/AIDS, Patti Lather and Chris Smithies (1997) tell the stories of these women living with AIDS. But in this study, as important it is the study of these women’s stories and the researchers’ examination of their epistemological and ontological journey in representing those stories and women. As the authors depict, “[o]ur task is not so much to unpack some real as to enact the ruins of any effort to monumentalize lived experience” (Lather, 2007, p. 40). In a way, both these women and the researchers themselves become a source of “data collection” and analytic inquiry. Working the silences of voice and discourse Discourses are inconsistent and incoherent, and the stiches that keep them together as logical narratives, as well as the silences they contain, are the matter of interest for not-knowing as a method. The focus of this method is less on what people say than on what they are actually able to say. For example, the conditions that make possible for Latina girls in my study to give an initial account of their experiences with citizenship in school in the terms of equality and rights, rather than in the terms of experiences of sexual harassment, point to a key dimension of examination. It is not that they are more correct or more liberated if they give one account or the other, but how is it possible for them to give one account or the other. What makes the experiences with sexual harassment, which became articulated only after several focus groups with the girls, remain in the silences of the unconscious, while discourses of equality of rights come to the forefront in the very first conversations? How is it possible for these girls to respond to the instances of sexual harassment by silencing and under-sexualizing their bodies, instead of attending to more institutional channels of bringing the matter to the students’ assembly or to the school

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administration? Once again, the silences that are palpable in girls’ responses to sexual harassment are not placed in the moral dichotomy of good/bad, more/ less liberating, but on the questioning of how it is possible for these girls to respond in these bodily terms on silencing and under-sexualizing their bodies. What has been learned about and embodied in what citizenship is about is entangled with the individual’s capacity to say what each of them wants to say. These issues of silences and voice are crucial as well in the analysis of institutional and policy discourses. What is (not) said? What is it that can (not) be said? Foucault (1990) told us about the importance of silences in discourses of sexuality during the Victorian period and of what is left outside of the gaze. Similarly, the silences in discourses of convivencia – the ideal of living together in harmony in diverse societies – in Spain were critical in the study of modern forms of governmentality. Specifically, the silences around convivencia policy in education in the 2000s that made it possible – in the name of conviviality – to allow the police to patrol schools or to suspend from school a Muslim girl for wearing the hijab. The disjointed edifice of conviviality that makes it possible to keep together a project for coexistence among different cultural groups and for those groups to then be the target of exclusionary practices is also sustained in its silences. Those silences are as important as the inconsistencies. In my study, “Participation, Technologies of the Body, and Agency: The Limits of Discourses of Responsible Citizenship,” I examine the way a group of Latina girls responded to instances of sexual harassment in a public high school in Madrid (Spain) (Hernando-Lloréns, 2020). While in my initial stages in the study, I was expecting to give account to institutional participatory ways in which these girls responded to these instances, my ultimate focus ended up being their silent responses – silencing and under-sexualizing their bodies. I elaborate how they remained quiet after these incidents to avoid retaliation and under-sexualized their bodies to avoid these incidents. Rather than limiting my study to an account of these practices, I draw on ethnographic and genealogical modes of inquiry to examine the assemblages of these subjective capacities (technologies of the body) that were being developed by these girls in the attempt to respond to instances of sexual harassment. Ultimately, this study concludes that these silent girls’ bodily response to instances of sexual harassment in school cannot be dissociated from the historical production of the “regime of conviviality” that grounds educational reform, where dissent is displaced from democratic culture in favor of consensus. Embracing uncertainty in the process of engagement with the world by paying attention to aporias Here the focus is on placing incertitude at the center of the ethical work that entails working the ruins for educational research. By placing uncertainty at the core of the research process instead of validity, truth, or finding solutions to the issues we are investigating, we are putting front and center the vulnerability of

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the researchers when confronted with the fragmented knowledge that sustains grand narratives and the instability of the knowledge constructed during the research journey. By embracing incertitude, we’re making visible the political work that makes possible the modern edifice of scientific, political, and judicial knowledge and that sustains the unequal grounds on which it is built. But how do we actually embrace incertitude as a tool of inquiry? By attending to aporias. In her study with prostitutes, Turid Markussen describes aporias as “certain kinds of gaps and deletions in bodies of knowledge or understanding” (2006, p. 792). These deletions, she continues, “cannot be acknowledged without the generalizations that hold together established knowledge falling apart” (ibid.). The aporias I propose to confront can be multiple. For example, Markussen focuses on “the method of the two researchers and in notions of sexuality playing out in [prostitutes’] work” (ibid.). Lather (2006) proposes five aporias to learn against technical thought and method: aporias of objectivity, complicity, difference, interpretation, and legitimation. In my own work, as I depict next, I’ve focused on the aporias of good intentions and of notions of citizenship playing out in youth civic performances. But aporias are not expressed in obvious ways and, like in my own work, they are not obvious or explicit. Not-knowing as a method of intervention in world-making processes entails an intervention in reality that can turn those realities into objects of ontological politics. Attending to the affective, or feelings of the engagement, in the construction of reality is a key tool in working with aporias.1 But attending to the affective doesn’t simply mean attending to emotions, but attending “in embodied ways, interact[ing] perceptively with that which is beyond us” (Markussen, 2006, p. 293). The method of the researchers is involved in the affective work of not just listening to what the girls had to say but attending to a variety of scattered traces of their experiences, realities with citizenship discourses. The aim in this kind of work, I propose, is to approach and analyze some of those traces, as they appeared to me through some instances of the affectivity of the research. This works as a method for “gathering” data but simultaneously serves to enact citizenship in ways that helped me to disentangle the civilizing agenda of this logic. Disturbing the categories of study as an ethical practice Disturbing the categories of study within our research requires approaching them not as taken-for-granted excerpts of reality with ontological entity (either the identities – the Black boy; the words of schooling – citizenship, agency, or learning; or the experiences) but as historical assemblages of reality. As such, not-knowing as a method invites the researchers to approach these categories as historical events; as such, they can be traced as originated in a specific moment and reassembled at different historical junctures. Exploring how those categories came into being in the first place and how we came to think of specific phenomenon in certain ways – either as a problem, a solution,

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or a collectivity that needs to be saved or fixed – is essential in the ethical work that entails working the ruins of educational research. I propose tackling this practice of disturbing and unsettling the categories of our research by historicizing them. The historicizing of the subjects and categories of schooling is, as Judith Butler (1993) argues, to challenge what is uncritically taken as natural in regulating and producing subjects. Disturbing the categories of our research by historicizing them entails “understanding change through exploring how the objects of thought and action assembled, connected and disconnected over time/space” (Popkewitz, 2011, p. 18). Within not-knowing as a method, the instability of knowledge concerns both the phenomenon studied and the process of gaining insight into it. The historical trajectories of the categories we maneuver today were not formed through a singular origin, nor did they emerge from an evolutionary progression.

Application: the journey Path 1: historicizing experience When I began this research (Citizenship, Diversity, and the Limits of Inclusion in Education in Spain: Disquieting Convivencia), I was interested in the experiences of immigrant girls with citizenship in schools in Spain, and gender justice was my main point of entry. I wanted to access and document how school discourses of citizenship transformed into young women’s identity and political agency. I also wanted to explore alternative understandings of citizenship and civic engagement that challenged liberal views of young women’s activism. I spent almost two months looking for a culturally diverse public high school that could serve as an example of “good teaching practices.” As a former high school teacher, I was deeply committed to avoiding teacher bashing and to focusing on this school’s good practices in relation to democratic and citizenship education. However, as my research unfolded, what progressive and democratic education in Spain is and what it means was increasingly put under scrutiny. After two months of ethnographic research and the first round of interviews with the girls, I realized that they were embracing a form of liberal feminism in which values of independence, freedom, and equality grounded their own political positioning as women. While these liberal forms of feminism have characterized feminist theorization and activism, in the last decades transformations in the movement and the field have facilitated a paradigmatic shift bringing into the field voices and perspectives from the margins. Influenced by postcolonial feminists and the work of feminist anthropologists working with gender justice, I was sensitive to forms of girls’ activism that may challenge some of the liberal forms of feminist activism and known demands. Furthermore, these girls were not participating in political events, not even at a politically turbulent time in which the Students’ Union of the school was

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organizing in school assembly meetings, strikes, and demonstrations. Beyond what the girls were doing, at this early stage of my research I perceived their disengagement from the representative and deliberative spaces for democratic participation in school as some sort of “political apathy.” They did not seem to take advantage, I thought, of the possibility of having their voices heard. Were these girls, in the end, as disengaged from democratic life in school as the academic literature would suggest? At that time and now, I recognize how troubling my thinking about these girls was and how it aligned with much of the concerns that have been tied to ethnographic work since its early years (Behar, 2003a, 2003b). After several months with a feeling of uncertainty, I wrote in my field notes: I’m so lost! I’m not sure if this study makes sense, if it’s even worth being done. . . . I came all the way down here to see how these girls did citizenship, challenged the discourses available and . . . I do not see anything. In the end, is it true that they’re not that “political” after all? Also, it’s so problematic what I see in this school! I was coming to study “good practices” and all I can do now is write about how bad things are . . . great! Now I’ll reinforce what everybody already believes about this school, its teachers, and students. – Field notes, 10/25/2013 I wonder if I could get out of a moral analysis of how I look at the school and its students (good/bad, political, apolitical) to start looking at them in a less judgmental way . . . why am I lost? What is that telling me? That life is complex? Aren’t my tools not complex enough for that task. . . . What am I asking in my questions? In the end, that’s what I’m doing, answering my questions. – Field notes, 11/3/2013 These quotes capture how my thinking started to shift when I embraced notknowing as a legitimate path in my inquiry. I started to review the nature of my research questions and to wonder whether the epistemological and ontological groundings of my research were pushing me into the trap of what Scott (1991) calls the “evidence of experience.” For Scott, the trap lies in the appeal to experience as a category of indubitable evidence and as a point of origin to explain reality. By taking experience as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject becomes the corroboration upon which scientific explanation is built. From this perspective, knowledge is gained through vision, while questions about the constructed nature of experience – about how subjects come to experience issues in certain ways and not others, how they are constituted as diferent in the first place, and how one’s vision is structured – are left aside. In this way, according to Scott, experiential vision is conceived as a direct, unmediated apprehension of the world and seeing as the origin of knowing (Haraway, 2013; Scott, 1992). Scott suggests that making visible the experience of a

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group that has been perceived as vulnerable exposes the existence of repressive mechanisms, not their inner workings or processes that make them possible. To her, by attending to the historical processes that position subjects and produce their subjectivities we are able to engage with the constructed nature of experience. This historicizing, therefore, implies the critical scrutiny of the category of “experience.” Evading the trap of the “evidence of experience” allowed me to shift the epistemological and ontological groundings of my study and, with it, the kinds of questions I was asking. My questions shifted from an examination of the ways in which girls engaged in citizenship to an interest in the historical conditions that made it possible for these girls to talk about responsible citizenship in terms of rights and responsibilities and not in other ways. This shift in the nature of my questions also changed the tools that I was using to engage with discourses and to start focusing on the aporias of citizenship, both in girls’ accounts of their experiences with citizenship and in my analysis of institutional discourses. Engaging with the aporias, silences, and inconsistences of discursive accounts, instead of with what was known by the analysis, opened up fruitful ways to give a richer account of girls’ experiences with citizenship. One of the first aporias of citizenship that I explored in girls’ accounts of their experiences with it was that while they embraced a liberal feminism in which values of independence, freedom, and equality grounded their own analysis of their experiences as women (by saying, for example, how they live in a more equal society compared to their grandmothers in the countries where they were born), the girls, at the same time, shared experiences with sexual harassment in school and they responded to these experiences by silencing and undersexualizing their bodies.2 The celebratory liberal account of how women have accomplished so much in terms of equality and rights is in tension with the girls’ experiences with and responses to sexual harassment in school. The girls did not respond in accordance with expectations of liberal feminism, for instance, by bringing this issue to the students’ union or students’ assembly or the school’s administration – they did not go through any institutional channels of contestation. A realist analysis of these contradictions would have made me to get rid of one of them in order to give a coherent account of these girls’ stories. However, embracing not-knowing as a method and responding to the affective dimension of the discomfort that this tension generated in me allowed me to accept this aporia as the focus of the analysis. Why is it that these girls were responding to instances of sexual harassment by silencing and under-sexualizing their bodies instead of engaging in more liberal modes of civic contestation? The historical journey of examining discourses of participation and citizenship in education since the beginning of the democratic period in 1978 led me to conclude that these girls’ responses to sexual harassment were entangled with a regime of conviviality where dissent was displaced from democratic culture (Hernando-Lloréns, 2020). This journey, in addition, allowed me to challenge a well-established tradition in educational research of notions of agency as synonymous with resistance to domination and to open up to other notions of agency that apprehend feminists’ accounts of resistance situated within the

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historical conditions that make them available. Specifically, girls’ silencing and under-sexualizing their bodies as a response to sexual harassment needed to be understood within the conditions of possibility available within the limits of the regimes of convivencia. These responses, then, didn’t make girls more or less political, but situated their responses historically. Path 2: haunting the subjects and bodies of the problems of convivencia Studying experiences of citizenship in education in Spain, I soon realized that convivencia was the cultural thesis through which citizenship was articulated and legislated in education. The visions of national reconciliation after a traumatic civil war infiltrated in the 1980s the sphere of education through the policy of conviviality that came to legislate the rights and responsibilities of students in schools (Hernando-Lloréns, 2019b). There were two important events in the 2000s, a period of racial and cultural diversification of Spanish society, that focused my analysis on convivencia as a problem. First, the legislation of educational policy3 allowed the police to patrol schools and surveil students in order to “eradicate any violence in schools” in the name of convivencia (Ministerio del Interior y Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, 2007). And second, a Muslim girl, Nawja, was suspended from school, in the name of convivencia, for wearing the hijab. The historical examination of convivencia in education helped me trace how problems of convivencia had shifted to make possible the production of the Latino Brown boy or the Muslim girl as a threat to public safety in school and society. I examined how problems of conviviality shifted from a concern with how to raise the responsible citizen after a dictatorship (during the 1980s and 1990s) into a problem of diversity, in the 2000s. This historical analysis proved how convivencia has functioned as a moving target in forming the ideal citizen and has embedded a division that differentiates human bodies by gendering and racializing their attributes through a civilizing agenda. However, this necessity to historicize the problems of convivencia also brought with it other methodological and theoretical questions and issues. One of them was that, in the historicizing of the problems of convivencia, the embodiment and materiality of its subjects seemed to evaporate. What allowed me to engage with not-knowing as a method was examining the gray documents of the policy archive with an eye for its silences. In the case of convivencia policy, the silences were around the issue of the problem of convivencia in education and society. This subject was a ghostly presence in policy. For example, the preamble to the 2006 Organic Law of Education (Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, 2006) acknowledged that “[w]ith new groups of students in schools, the conditions under which schools develop their tasks have become more complex.” Little was said about who those “new” students were and why they generated conditions in school that were complex, but those “new groups of students” required a solution. The preamble continued, “[i]t is necessary, then, to respond to diversity among students and to equitably contribute to the new challenges and difficulties that this diversity generates [in education].” It is clear, that there was a group

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of students that were a matter of concern and were generating enough problems to demand an educational reform. Little is said about how new this new group of students was and if the problems that this diversity generated were different from the experience with the Roma community in school. They were a disembodied presence in policy: (maybe) everyone knew who they were, so it wasn’t necessary to name or in the naming there was something obscene, probably something that was done in the past but not now. Those ghosts became the new aporia that require succinct scrutiny and investigation and alternative sites of inquiry than educational policy of schools. Something in the effect of the encounter with those ghosts brought them alive in my mind into the body of the Brown Latino boy in the hood, the chica de barrio, the Moroccan young men, or the veiled Muslim girl. However, these ghosts were roaming, disembodied, like any ghost, indexing the remittance to an embodied being, but one inhabiting a disembodied existence in policy. For those of us who work not only in multiple sites of production of reality, but with gender and race as socially and historically constructed categories, this can be a big issue. How could I historicize these experiences and their subjectivities without tracing their bodies? The work of Susan Grosz (1994) on materiality and the research of Maria Tamboukou (2003a, 2003b) with genealogical ethnography allowed me to get lost by decentering the subject in my analysis of governmentality and to draw on the body as an ontological site of analysis. It allowed me to materialize the specters of subjectivity that haunted educational policy where discourse analysis and genealogy did not let me trace them. Bringing together the strands of analysis outlined earlier vis-à-vis citizenship and subjectivization produced a key idea that shifted my study: that the process of governing and citizenship is a process that takes place in the body. Tamboukou’s ethnographic-genealogical work helped me to articulate this idea and to corroborate the limitations of my discursive tools of inquiry in examining who the subject of the problems of convivencia actually was. Specifically, my study draws on Tamboukou’s conception of the body “as a critical spatial site of interaction of materials and symbolic forces, a battlefield of power relations and antagonistic discourses” (2003a, p. 198). One example of this logic can be seen in how the media produced the bodies of Latino boys as the subjects of the convivencia problem and threats to public safety. Another example is the way the judicial ruling in Najwa’s case – a young Muslim girl who was suspended from school for wearing the hijab – produced her body as toxic and in need of being tamed in order to prevent a problem of public safety. A final example of this logic is the case of Latina girls who altered their bodies in response to instances of sexual harassment in order to achieve a sense of fulfillment in regard to equal rights. In these cases, bodies became fruitful sites for examining how modern governmentality functions through the mobilization of discourses of citizenship and convivencia. But what is of more significance in these theoretical detours is that historicizing was limiting for approaching a more complex reality and, specifically, how gender and race came to intertwine in the study of the subject of the problems of convivencia. Paying attention to the aporias of silences made

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it possible to envision the need for ethnographic practices to materialize the ethical subjects of historization and “make them look and sound ‘real’” (Tamboukou, 2003a, p. 210). I found in printed media a site for the analysis of ethnographic accounts of the problems of convivencia in the 2000s. This new methodological shift entailed, once again, “getting lost” and pushing the traditional boundaries of what ethnographic data is and the issues of validity and authenticity. Like Lissa H. Malkki’s (1997) ethnographic study of political conflict in Rwanda and Burundi, I too found myself relying on the media to get information about the events around convivencia during the first decade of the 2000s. Not-knowing as a method provided me just enough latitude to trouble the notion of the “site” of my research and to occupy symbolic sites of culture production, like media. In this quest, I was less interested in the truth telling of a journalist about a so-called Latino gang member than in the account of “reality” created by the media around the “problem” of convivencia in a venue of mass media production like national newspapers. Once the sacred texts of anthropological research were desacralized, media accounts of social phenomena became crucial sites in the study of culture and sources of secondary ethnographic accounts. To approach less traditional sites of educational examination, like the media, allowed me to examine not only the subject of the “new” problems of convivencia in the 2000s, but how those subjects were gendered and racialized. The demarcation of the other was drawn around race and gender: the Latino Brown and Black boy portrayed in the media as violent and as a threat or the Muslim girl presented as a problem of public safety. Not-knowing as a method allowed me to disentangle how discourses of convivencia in educational policy in the present are interlaced with a civilizing agenda of othering those who don’t fit into the grand narrative of belonging and the state. Specifically, this method to produce reality took place by examining the interstices of voice and discourse to focus on their silences (the ghosts in the problem of convivencia in educational policy), by embracing incertitude in the process of engagement with the world, by paying attention to aporias (aporias of citizenship and ghosts), and by disturbing the categories of study as an ethical practice (examination of convivencia). Postfoundational, feminist, and historiographical theories allowed to disorient, to not-know, the cultural thesis of conviviality as the ideal of living together in harmony in diverse societies that circulated in education to disentangle its civilizing agenda by othering those that distanced from normative notions of responsibility and citizenship.

Conclusions The ideas ventured here about not-knowing as a theory and method are provisional and exploratory in spirit. By looking at how feminist and postfoundational scholars have worked the ruins of educational research I contribute to the theoretical rethinking of educational methods as a practice of world making, rather than of discovery.

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I hope that the approach I lay out in this chapter will help us envision alternative methods to disentangle the colonial legacies in educational research. I have shown that these legacies remain embedded in the objects of educational research, either the voice, identity, experience, or the construction Latino Brown boy as a threat, as well as its methods. I have described how methods don’t “collect” data from the world, but actually create a world. Nineteenth-century social science methods are limiting for capturing the complexity of the world I wanted to talk about in my research on convivencia as a technology of modern governmentality in the making of the other. Not-knowing as a method allowed me to focus on the silences, the interstices, and the aporias of the modern edifice of citizenship to explain how convivencia actually serves to exclude in the name of inclusion by gendering and racializing the attributes of those who don’t fit into the grand narrative of nation belonging. Not-knowing as a method proposes to interweave the subject/object of research as a research event, working the interstices of voice and discourse by paying attention to their silences, embracing uncertainty in the engagement with the world by paying attention to aporias, and disturbing the objects of study as an ethical practice.

Notes 1 For more on affective theory, see Ahmed (2004), Dreyfus (1996), Merleau-Ponty (2004). 2 For details of this study, see Hernando-Lloréns (2020). 3 The Master Plan for the Improvement of Convivencia and School Safety legislated in 2017.

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Dreyfus, H. L. (1996). The current relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4(4), 1–16. Foucault, M. (1990). History of sexuality volume 1: An introduction. New York, NY: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1998). What is an author? In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Aesthetics, methods, and epistemology (pp. 205–222). New York: The New Press. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hall, S. (1996). Minimal selves. In H. A. Baker, Jr., M. Diawara, R. A. Lindeborg, & R. H. Lindeborg (Eds.), Black British cultural studies: A reader (pp. 114–120). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Haraway, D. (2013). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York, NY: Routledge. Hernando-Llorens, B. (2019a). Citizenship, diversity, and the limits of inclusion in education in Spain: Disquieting convivencia (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation). University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI. Hernando-Lloréns, B. (2019b). Differentiating citizenship, criminalizing diversity: Problematizing convivencia in education in Spain. Curriculum Inquiry, 48(5), 521–539. https:// doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1546541 Hernando-Lloréns, B. (2020). Participation, technologies of the body, and agency: The limits of discourses of responsible citizenship. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 654–672. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2020.1779351 Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2015). Reconceptualizing qualitative research: Methodologies without methodology. Thousands Oak, CA: Sage. Koro-Ljungberg, M., Yendol-Hoppey, D., Smith, J. J., & Hayes, S. B. (2009). (E)pistemological awareness, instantiation of methods, and uninformed methodological ambiguity in qualitative research projects. Educational Researcher, 38(9), 687–699. Lather, P. (2006). Foucauldian scientificity: Rethinking the nexus of qualitative research and educational policy analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19(6), 783–791. Lather, P. (2007). Getting lost: Feminist efforts toward a double(d) science. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lather, P. (2008a). Against empathy, voice and authenticity. In Voice in qualitative inquiry (pp. 29–38). New York, NY: Routledge. Lather, P. (2008b). (Post) feminist methodology. International Review of Qualitative Research, 1(1), 55–64. Lather, P. (2009). Getting lost: Social science and/as philosophy. Educational Studies, 45(4), 342–357. Lather, P. (2012). Getting lost: Feminist efforts toward a double (d) science. New York, NY: Suny Press. Lather, P. A., & Smithies, C. S. (1997). Troubling the angels: Women living with HIV/AIDS. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. New York, NY: Routledge. Law, J., & Urry, J. (2004). Enacting the social. Economy and Society, 33(3), 390–410. Malkki, L. (1997). News and culture: Transitory phenomena and the fieldwork tradition. In A. Gupta & J. Ferguson (Eds.), Anthropological locations: Boundaries and grounds of a field science (pp. 86–101). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Markussen, T. (2006). Moving worlds: The performativity of affective engagement. Feminist Theory, 7(3), 291–308. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2004). The world of perception. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Ministerio de Educación y Cultura. (2006). Ley Orgánica de Educación. Retrieved from www. boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2006-7899

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Ministerio del Interior y Ministerio de Educación y Cultura. (2007). Plan Director para la Convivencia y Mejora de la Seguridad en los Centros Educativos y sus Entornos. Retrieved from www.interior.gob.es/web/servicios-al-ciudadano/planes-de-prevencion/plan-directorpara-la-convivencia-y-mejora-escolar Mol, A. (1999). Ontological politics. A word and some questions. The Sociological Review, 47(1_suppl), 74–89. Popkewitz, T. S. (2011). Curriculum history, schooling and the history of the present. History of Education, 40(1), 1–19. Scott, J. W. (1991). The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry, 17(4), 773–797. Scott, J. W. (1992). Experience. In J. Butler & J. W. Scott (Eds.), Feminists theorize the political (pp. 22–40). London and New York, NY: Routledge. Seidman, S., & Alexander, J. C. (2020). The new social theory reader. New York, NY: Routledge. Spivak, G. C. (1998). Race before racism: The disappearance of the American. Boundary 2, 25(2), 35–53. Spivak, G. C. (2010). “Can the subaltern speak?” Revised edition, from the “History” chapter of critique of postcolonial reason. In R. Morris (Ed.), Can the subaltern speak? Reflections on the history of an idea (pp. 21–80). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. St Pierre, E., & Pillow, W. (2000). Working the ruins: Feminist poststructural theory and methods in education. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Tamboukou, M. (2003a). Genealogy/ethnography: Finding the rhythm. In M. Tamboukou & S. J. Ball (Eds.), Dangerous encounters: Genealogy and ethnography (pp. 195–216). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Tamboukou, M. (2003b). Women, education and the self: A Foucauldian perspective. New York, NY: Springer. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/41949874

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures; page numbers in bold indicate tables. ableism 133, 134, 138, 284, 289 activist education research 182; see also transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH) Adichie, Chimamanda 4 Aesop’s fable 40 African Americans: apartheid schools in urban areas 268; communities 53, 56, 57–60, 61; doctoral students 50–51, 55, 57; education 53, 60; education for 49–50; impact of pandemic on 259; incarceration of 303; postformalism and 260; racism experience 308; researchers 52; scholars 52–53, 60–61; students 53, 57, 60, 268, 331 Agamben, Giorgio: Homo Sacer trilogy 67–68; Remnants of Auschwitz 69; theory of biopower 64–65, 73–74, 76; theory of camp and bare life 67–70, 74 agential cuts 161, 174–175 agential realism 10, 161; Barad’s theory of 10, 161, 163; diffraction 162, 165–166; double-slit experiment 163–164; ethico-onto-epistemology 175–176; implications for critical theoretical research 173–176; intra-action 162, 164–165; ontological flexibility 174–175; overview of 161–166; teaching and learning mathematics for social justice (TLMSJ) 166–172; see also teaching and learning mathematics for social justice (TLMSJ) age of algorithmic cultures 32 Ahmed, Sara 96 Airbnb 42–43 Alamo University 83–90

Alcoff, Linda 96, 101 Algebra Project 167 Al-Saji, Alia 96, 101, 108 Alvarado-Nichols, Ingrid 52 American Educational Research Association (AERA) 4, 9, 18–19, 149 annotated bibliography 142; metasynthesis 143, 155 anti-dialogical action 19 antiracism 7, 97, 167, 327 antiracist education 7, 97–99, 106 Anzaldúa, Gloria 129–130, 152, 156 Appalachian Social Justice Movement 286 Apuleius and Petronius (Greek romance) 245 Aristotle 68, 199 Artificial Intelligence systems 31–33, 37; digital tools 43; individual intelligence and 42 assemblage 212–214; as complicating educational settings 214–216; honing in on 215; June Jordan’s Poetry for the People 219–222; ninth grade Ethnic Studies class 216–219; re-reading youth poetry and literacies as 219–222; re-reading YPAR (youth participatory action research) and schooling 216–219; research 215–216; research in youth studies 222–223; territorializing and deterritorializing 212–214; see also youth participatory action research (YPAR) authoritative recognition, of capital 200 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 11; concepts related to dialogism 221–222; dialogic imagination 253–254; The Dialogic Imagination 219; essays 244; explorations

356

Index

of theories of 244–245; notion of chronotope 243, 245, 247, 250, 255; Rabelais and His World 221; theory of dialogism 11, 245 Baldwin, James 306 Barad, Karen: agential cut in world 174; agential realism 170, 176; agential realism theory 10, 161, 163; diffraction 165–166; ethico-onto-epistemology 175; exclusion 175 Barbrook, Richard 41 Beira, Eduardo 39 Bell, Derrick 20, 23–24, 82, 229, 310 Berry, Robert 172 Besley, Tina 37 big data 31, 38 biopower: Agamben’s theory of 64–65; political vulnerability and theory of 73–76; term 67 BlackCrit Theory 303 Black education, history of challenges 304–306 Black English Vernacular 105 Black futurity 276, 279, 281–282 Black haunting 272–273; Black radical imagination and 275–277 Black Lives Matter movement 196, 277 Blackness: Fanon on “fact of Blackness” 307, 309 Black radical imagination, critical race English Education (CREE) 275–277 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 101 blockchain technology 42–43 Bloom, Benjamin 267 bodily hexis 206 Bohr, Niels 163, 164, 166, 174 border crossings 129–130 borderlands 150–152, 153 border pedagogy 152 border pedagogy for teacher preparation (BPTP) 143, 147, 150, 152–157; emerging conceptualization of 153 Bourdieu, Pierre 11; Masculine Domination 206; overview of habitus 201–203; State Nobility 207; theory of habitus 199–201, 204, 206–207 Boyd, Rekia 272 Britzman, Deborah 64, 340; notion of difficult knowledge 65–67 Brown v Board of Education (1954) 226, 229 Bumpurs, Eleanor 272 Butler, Judith 10, 64–65, 346; bare life and vulnerability 75–76; concepts of grief and loss 74; Frames of War 72; political

vulnerability and biopower theory 73–74, 76; Precarious Life 70; theory of performativity 166; work on political vulnerability 70–73 capital, authoritative recognition of 200 capitalism 25, 112, 175; bioinformational 36; colonialism and 187; communism vs 41; consumerism and 247, 249; digital 38, 41; global 112–115, 121, 123; knowledge 36; neoliberalism and 296; racial 274 Césaire, Aimé 56 Champaign school district: background of 232–233; Carrie Busey school and family proximity 240; controlled choice and 232; elementary school racial demographic 235; geographic racial privilege 238–240; Racial Dot Map 233, 234, 235, 238; racial mapmaking 233, 234, 235, 236, 239; racism embedded in spatiality 235–238; referendums for elementary school construction 237; segregated demographic history 233–235 Chaudhry, Lubna 128, 129 Chow, Rey 128 chronotope, Bakhtin’s 11, 221, 243, 244, 245, 247, 250, 255 Civil Rights Movement 167, 168, 226, 286 classism 133, 134, 284, 287, 289, 292 Cobb, Charles 167 cognitive mapping 114, 115, 117 Cold War 20 Coleman-Singleton, Sharonda 272 collective action 101, 194–195; expression of 188; Penal Code in Honduras 190; student activists 191, 196; theory 182; training for 286, 286–287 collective challenge, fox and stork 40–42 collective intelligence, definition of 42 coloniality of being 185, 187, 188 coloniality of gender 185 coloniality of knowledge 185, 187, 188 coloniality of power 184–185, 187, 188 Colonizer and Colonized, The (Memmi) 25 colorism 23, 27, 132–133 Color of Fear, The (film) 328 Common Core State Standards 269 communism 21, 41 Cone, James H. 306 conscientização, Freire’s concept of 168 controlled choice: application of critical racial spatial method (CRSM) 228, 231–232; background of Champaign

Index school district 232–233; Carrie Busy school and racial proximity 240; elementary school racial demographic 235; geographic racial privilege 238–240; location of elementary schools in Champaign 236; policy and practice 227–228; Racial Dot Map 233, 234, 235, 238; racial mapmaking 233–234, 234, 235, 236, 238, 239; referendums for elementary school construction 237; segregated demographic history 233–235, 235; see also critical race spatial method (CRSM) convivencia 11, 336, 344, 349–352 Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) 191 counterstorytelling: arrival to Texas 82–83; critical race theory 81–82; early into the semester 83–87; los tres 87–90; method for exposing internalized whiteness 82–90, 92 COVID-19 7, 11, 32, 45, 196, 243, 251; instruction 31, 33 Crawford, Kate 37 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 185, 229, 247, 308 critical chronotopic analysis (CCA) 243, 245, 255; amalgamation of Bakhtin’s chronotope and criticality 247; challenging status quo of neo-plantation ideology 252–253; employing repressed stories and counterstories as data 250–252; examples of whitewashed temporalspatial contextuality in K-12 ELLS education 249; examples of whitewashed temporal-spatial contextuality in TESOL teacher education 250; generating theories to disrupt whitewashedness 253–254; identifying whitewashed temporal-spatial contextualities 248–249, 250; limitations of 254–255; teacher researchers using 254; transnational spatial adjustments 246–247; transnational temporal adjustments 245–246 critical discourse analysis (CDA) 290 critical narrative analysis (CNA) 290–291 critical objectivity 22 Critical Race English Education (CREE) 11, 273; Black radical imagination 275–277, 279; contexts for application 280–281; in English Education 277–280; ideological parameters to 275–277; method demands 281–282; as methods

357

274–275; as pedagogy and theory 273–274; towards Black futurity 281–282; White imagination 275, 279 critical race hermeneutics (CRH) 16, 18, 21; conflict theory 20; critical objectivity 22; human experience 19; obstacles facing 26–28; whiteness and critical pedagogy 23–26; white supremacy ideology 22–23 critical race spatial method (CRSM) 227, 240–241; application of 231–232; critical race theory (CRT) 229; critical spatial perspective 230; data in 230–231; modeling, on school of choice policies 232–240; theoretical constructs of 228–230; see also controlled choice critical race theory (CRT) 6, 18, 19, 27, 90; core tenets of 229, 235; counternarrative 322; counterstorytelling as theoretical construct 81–82; counterstorytelling method 80, 92, 308; critical spatial perspective (CSP) and 228; foundations 33–34; ideology 21–23; racism 310; whiteness and critical pedagogy 23–26; whiteness and white supremacy 79–80 critical regionalism 121 critical spatial perspective (CSP) 227, 228, 230, 233 cultural logic 113; of period 116–117; of postmodernism 114, 119, 120 Darwin, Charles 266, 267 Davis, Angels 190 decolonial theory, Latin American 182–183 Decolonizing Methodologies (Smith) 128 Delgado, Richard 229 Descartes, Rene 260 design principle 41 Dewey, John 3, 5, 8 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno) 33 Dialogic Imagination, The (Bakhtin) 219 dialogism, Bakhtin’s 6, 11, 212, 221, 222, 244, 245, 251, 253; notion of 219 dialogue 19 Diary of Anne Frank 65 difficult knowledge 64; Britzman’s notion of 65–67; political vulnerability and biopower theory 73–76; socially just teacher education 74–76 diffraction 161; concept of 162, 165–166

358

Index

digital technologies, contemporary education 34–36 double-slit experiment, Bohr 163–164 Du Bois, W.E.B. 2, 49–50, 52, 96, 97, 100, 304, 306 Duvall, Chuck 84 education: background of hermeneutics and 16–18; critical theoretical research methods in 10–12; emotional crisis of 333; narrative theory in 322–324; postdigital challenge 34–36 educational research: applications of Par/ Desi framework 135–137; assemblage complicating educational settings 214–216; confronting time in 259–260; crisis of identity and agency 339–340; crisis of representation and its methods 340–341; crisis of voice, experience, and authenticity 338–339; curriculum of empiricism in 2–5; disturbing categories of study 345–346; embracing uncertainty in process of engagement 344–345; empiricism 126–131; Greimassian square for 122–124; historicizing experience of immigrant girls 346–349; implications of sociological imagination 288–289; interweaving subject/object of research 342–343; not-knowing as a method 341–346; Par/Desi framework 131–135; postformal method 260–264; problems of convivencia 349–351; qualitative inquiry in 137–138; qualitative research 126–131; reframing approach to 284–285; researching 1–2; silences of voice and discourse 343–344; sociological imagination as method 289–293; sociological imagination as theory 285–288; working on 337–341; see also metasynthesis Educational Researcher (journal) 149 Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity 268, 269 Eisenman, Peter 120 emotion(s) 52, 261, 345; COVID pandemic and 325; Critical Race Theory (CRT) 23; in education 10, 319–320, 323; education patterns 8; leader burnout 320–321; postformalism 262–263; poststructural narrative theory 329–332; power and 324–325; psycho-emotional counselling 246; of race subjects 326; racism and 321–322,

324, 327–329, 332; teachers’ reactions 75–76; time and space 221; traumatic events and 66; well-being 319, 320, 321, 323, 331, 332, 333; work demands 205 emotionalities: Black haunting and 277, 280; faculty and students 24; whiteness 8 empirical research 2, 5, 27, 90–91, 147, 195, 216, 251–252, 260, 286, 322, 330 empirical researchers 3, 40, 259, 274 empiricism 12, 284; agential realism 176; critical theories and 41, 44; curriculum of 2–5; educational research 147, 173, 336; fetish of 131, 134, 137; hedgehog and fox 36–40; ideological birth of 2; introduction of theoretical methods 5–10; philosophy of 126, 128–130; research ideology of 34–35; teaching and learning 288 English education, critical race English Education (CREE) 277–280 English Language Arts (ELA): Black lives mattering in PK-12 ELA classrooms 277; education 272–273 English Language Learners of Color (ELLC) 241; challenging status quo of neo-plantation ideology in teacher education 252–253; criticality in critical chronotopic analysis (CCA) 247; employing repressed stories and counterstories as data in 250–252; limitations 254; transnational spatial adjustments 246–247; transnational temporal adjustments 245–246; whitewashedness in TESOL teacher education 244; whitewashed temporalspatial contextualities in K-12 248–250, 249; see also critical chronotopic analysis (CCA) Enlightenment 33, 129, 260, 267 epistemic challenge in empiricism, hedgehog and fox 36–40 Epps, Edgar 304 Erickson, Fred 3 essential emancipatory question (EEQ) 55 ethico-onto-epistemology, agential realism 175–176 Ethnic studies class, 9th grade 216–219 exo-pedagogy 122, 124 extraction-assimilation system 187 face validity 143 Fairhall, Uenuku 172

Index Fanon, Frantz 7, 54, 56, 96; Black Skin, White Masks 101; fact of Blackness 307, 309; sociogeny 50; Wretched of the Earth 25 Feenberg, Andrew 32, 34, 36, 39–40, 42 feminism 130, 311, 319, 323, 338, 346, 348 feminist(s) 326, 336; Black epistemology 275, 307, 309; Black Feminist Womanist Storytelling 280; Black theorizing 303, 308; postfoundational and postcolonial 338, 340, 341, 346, 351; theory 161, 260, 298; transnational 127; women of color 81, 90, 129 Feynman, Richard 163 Floridi, Luciano 32 Floyd, George 277, 307 Food Swipe Program 293, 295, 298 Foucault, Michel 67, 164, 338, 340, 344 fox and stork, collective challenge 40–42 Frames of War (Butler) 72 Frankenstein, Mary 167 Frankfurt School of Social Science 33, 112 Freire, Paulo 3, 8, 19, 49, 253, 285; concept of conscientização 168; critical pedagogy 285; Pedagogy of the Oppressed 25, 26, 253 Fresh Off the Boat (Huang) 252 Fuchs, Christian 39 Gallagher, Shaun 16 Garner, Eric 272 Gholson, Maisie 172 Gillborn, David 23 Giroux, Henry 3 globalization 114, 128, 183–185, 189 Global North 133, 186, 187 Global South 128, 187 Google Maps 171 Google Scholar 148 Gordon, Lewis 96 Gotanda, Neil 229 Gould, Dana 136 Grant, Oscar 272 Graves, Michael 120, 121 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 115 Greimassian square 115–122; application in education research 122–124; critical regionalism 119, 120, 121; deconstructionism 119, 120, 121; dirty realism 119, 120, 121; high modernism 119, 120, 121; Jameson’s visualization 124–125; pedagogical function 117 Grewal, Inderpal 128 Grosz, Susan 350

359

Guajardo, Alice 85 Guardian, The (newspaper) 200 Guevara, Ernesto 191 Gutiérrez, Kris 3 Gutiérrez, Rochelle 172 Gutstein, Rico 167 Habermas, Jürgen 19, 21 habitus: collective and classed nature 206–208; concept of 202; as conceptual linchpin 203, 209; corporeality and the hexis 206; idealised 205; institutional ideal as structuring 205; overview of 201–203; practical sense 202; realised 205; as research tool 204–205; scholarly 206; Singapore 207; student 201; study of learner identities and 203–204; as theory 202–203; transformative 209; using to theorize learner identities 204–208; working-class 207–208 Hall, Stuart 23, 339 Haraway, Donna 32, 35, 165, 193 Harding, Victor 52, 60 Harford, Tim 37 Harris, Cheryl 23 Harvard Educational Review ( journal) 260 healing for liberation, African American communities 57–59 Heidegger, Martin 34, 52 Heisenberg, Werner 163 hermeneutic 52 hermeneutics: background of education and 16–18; critical 53; politics of 16–17 Hermeneutics and Education (Gallagher) 16 heteroglossia: Bakhtin’s 219, 221, 244, 245, 248, 252, 253 heteronormativity 185, 289 Highlander Research and Education Center 285–286 Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) 79–80, 82–83, 86, 89, 92, 151 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault) 340 HIV, qualitative research on women with 145 HIV/AIDS 343 Holocaust education 65, 69 homophobia 75, 133, 134, 138 Homo Sacer (Agamben) 67–68 hooks, bell 253, 254, 289 Horton, Myles 285 Houston, Whitney 9 Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 273

360

Index

Hurd, Cynthia Marie Graham 272 Husserl, Edmund 51, 52, 199 idiographic validity 144 innovation 119, 120, 121 intercorporeality, concept of 101–102 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (journal) 137 intra-action 162, 164–165; concept of 161 Islamophobia 133, 134, 138 Jackson, Susie 272 James, William 194 Jameson, Fredric 10; contradictions vs antinomies 114; critical regionalism 121; Greimassian square 115–121; mapping strategy 114–115; project 112–115; visualization strategy 124–125 June Jordan’s Poetry for the People 219–222 justice: educational research 1–2, 5–7, 10; emotions and racial 319–320, 328–329, 332–333; racial 20–21; racial, in housing 230; racial, in leadership 325; racial, in teaching 7, 10, 249, 273; racial, reform in education 321–323; social 66, 166–172, 222, 230, 288, 295, 298, 336–337; see also teaching and learning mathematics for social justice (TLMSJ) K-12 education 17; African American stakeholders 55, 57; Black haunting 272; Black lives mattering in PK-12 ELA classrooms 277; critical chronotopic analysis (CCA) 248, 255; Critical Race English Education (CREE) 273–274, 278; ELLC in 246–247, 249, 250–254; leadership program 330; nationwide walkouts 92n2; neo-plantation ideology in 252–253; public school 83; teacher education focus 6–7; Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) 243, 245; U.S. Constitution and 136; use of TLMSJ 167; whitewashed 244 Kaplan, Carey 128 Kincheloe, Joe 11, 261; post-formalism 260, 263 King, Joyce 149–150, 306 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 190, 286 King, Rodney 171 Kitchin, Rob 38 Koolhass, Rem 120 Ladson-Billings, Gloria 306 laissez faire attitude 39

Lance, Ethel Lee 272 Lather, Patricia 11, 342, 343 Latino Critical Theory (LatCrit) 80, 90, 275 Law, John 337, 341 Lévy, Pierre 42 learner identities 205; collective and classed nature 206–208; concept of 199–201; corporeality and the hexis 206; habitus and study of 203–204; institutional ideal as structuring 205; use of habitus for theorizing 204–208 Learning Management Systems 31–32 Le Corbusier 120 Lee, Emily 96, 101 Levinson, Paul 36 LGBTQIA+ communities 274 life-long learning 122, 123 Lincoln, Yvonna 59, 182, 193, 284 Loomba, Ania 128 Lord of the Flies (Golding) 274 Los Angeles Unified School District 7 Lynch, Kevin 114 McDonald, Laquan 272 machine learning 37 McIntosh, Peggy 5 McKittrick, Katherine 50 Malkki, Lissa H. 351 Mandela, Nelson 191 Marcuse, Herbert 33–34 Margonis, Frank 96 Markussen, Turid 345 Martin, Danny 172 Martin, Trayvon 272–273, 279 Marxism 114 Marxism and Form (Jameson) 112 Marxist 25, 116, 174, 192; literature 23; theories 112, 324 Masculine Domination (Bourdieu) 206 Maslow, Abraham 267 Massive Open Online Courses 43 mathematics see teaching and learning mathematics for social justice (TLMSJ) mathematx 172 Matias, Cheryl 23, 81, 224, 255, 277, 305, 329–331 Matsuda, Mari 229 Meaney, Tamsin 172 Meeting the University Halfway (Barad) 161 Memmi, Albert 25 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 96, 101, 199 meta-cognition, concept of 199 metasynthesis: annotated bibliography 143; Black cultural traditions 149–150;

Index border pedagogy 151, 152–154, 153; data procedures 146; expanded, for educational research 146–154; idiographic validity 144; implications of 154–156; literature review 143; metaanalysis 144; popularity of quantitative meta-analysis 156–157; published research 150; qualitative 142–143; Sandelowski and Barroso’s qualitative 144–146; steps of methodology 147–149; theoretical synthesis 152–154 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) 87, 92n3 Microsoft Research 37 Middleton-Doctor, Depayne 272 Miles, Steven 32 Miller, Tyisha 272 Milliken v Bradley (1974) 226 Mills, C. Wright 11, 23, 299; The Sociological Imagination 26; sociological imagination as theory 285–288; tips for developing sociological imagination 293–294 Minhaj, Hasan 136 Minh-ha, Trinh 128, 165 Mohanty, Chandra 128 Montez, Citlali 86 Moses, Robert 167 motherscholars 3 narcissism, empiricist ideology and 5 narrative theory: education 322–324; place, temporality and sociality 324, 327; postmodern 324; poststructuralist 326–327 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) 244 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics 167 National Research Council 128 Nazism 18 Negroponte, Nicholas 35 Negro Problem 52 networked learning (NL) 34 Newton, Sir Isaac 260, 262, 265, 269 New York Department of Education 7 not-knowing: crises of 337; crisis of identity and agency 339–340; crisis of methods 340–341; crisis of voice, experience, and authenticity 338–339; as education research method 341–346 Old Man and the Sea, The (Hemingway) 274 O’Neal, Paul 272

361

ontological politics 341, 345 Opt Out movement 269 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 183 Organic Law of Education (2006) 349 Oxford University 42 Par/Desi framework: application of 135–137; communal healing 134, 136; South Asian diaspora 131–135; tenets of 133–134 Parks, Rosa 190, 286 part/element 119, 120, 121 patriarchy 3, 5, 12, 83, 129, 134, 272, 275, 284, 287, 289, 295, 314, 325 pedagogic actions (PA) 200 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire) 25, 26, 253 People of Color 1, 3; Brazilians as 26; counterstories 3, 23, 91, 310; counterstorytelling 80–82; CREE as theory and method 280; critical race theory (CRT) 229; narratives of racial strife 27–28; substandard education 92n2; white logic 306; white supremacy and racism 90; whitewashedness 244 personal anarcho-aesthetics principle 41 Peters, Michael 32, 37, 41 Peterson, Bob 167 phenomenology of racial embodiment (PRE) 96–97; as intercorporeality 101–102; case example of racialized voice 102–103; crafting 104–105; detailing 100–102; voice and white humanity 105–106; white humanity 96, 99–100; whiteness studies in education 106–108 Piaget, Jean 260, 261 Pillow, Wanda S. 326, 332, 336, 337 Pinckney, Clementa C. 272 pluritopic hermeneutics 186, 195 political ontology 186, 337 political vulnerability: Butler’s work on 70–73; theory of biopower and 73–74 postcolonial: discourse 127–128; feminism 130; feminists 338, 346; scholars 341; theory 161, 192; tradition 336 postcolonialism 127, 130 postdigital challenge: applications of method 42–44; elephant in room 34–36 Postdigital Science and Education ( journal) 33, 35 postformalism 11; contextualization 263, 269–270; COVID time and 270–271; etymology 262, 265–266; humility of researchers 263; knowledge across

362

Index

space-times 268–269; modeling method 264–270; pattern 262, 267–268; process 262–263, 268–269; theory to method 260–264; tracing time 267–268 postmodernism 114–115, 127, 336; constraints of 119–120; crisis of 119; critical regionalism 121; cultural logic of 114, 119, 120; drawing inspiration from 260; of Graves 121 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson) 112 poststructuralism 11, 127, 323–324, 326 poststructural narrative theory (PSNT) 319, 333; fusion of narrative and poststructuralism 326–327; maneuvering methods 327–332; in narrative turn 324–326 potentialism 122, 124 power 1, 9, 11–12, 80, 149, 192, 270; administrative 5, 249; agency and 199, 217, 288; biopower and political vulnerability 10, 64–65, 67–69, 73–76; coloniality of 184–185, 187–188, 191, 193, 196; domination and 19; dynamics 296–298, 323; examinations of 323–324; language of 105; racial 16; relationships 44, 61, 91, 183, 186; repositioning of 54–55; role of 324, 327; structural 20–21, 35, 72, 324–325; structure 252–253; usurping 1, 4; of whiteness 4, 79 practice, concept of 199 Precarious Life (Butler) 70 Presumed Incompetent (Gutiérrez et al) 88 Problem with Apu, The (documentary) 136 progress, time in educational research 259–260 protocoling 122–124 qualitative inquiry 135, 137 qualitative meta-synthesis 142, 144–146; educational research 146–154; see also meta-synthesis qualitative research 126–130, 131–132, 134, 137, 142–144 quantitative literature 149, 152 quantitative meta-analysis 142, 144, 145–146, 154–157 quantitative methods 6, 43, 151 quantitative research 128, 143, 145, 147, 150, 151, 152, 155–156, 193, 227, 303 quantitative researchers 27 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin) 221 race: counterstorytelling as study of 81–82; Critical Race English Education

(CREE) 273–282; critical race theory 229; education and emotions 320–322; existential variables of 95–96; gender and 185–186, 247, 308, 312; Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualization 101; poststructural narrative theory 327–332, 332–333; white humanity 99–100; whiteness and 4, 4–5, 8, 79–80, 99, 328; see also critical race hermeneutics (CRH); critical race spatial method (CRSM); Critical Race Theory (CRT) Racial Dot Map 233, 234, 235, 238 racial justice 20–21; emotions and 319–320, 328–329, 332–333; in education 321–323; in housing 230; in leadership 325; in teaching 7, 10, 249, 273 racism 81, 138, 187, 289, 303; African Americans 56, 58, 308; anti-Black 260, 272–275, 277, 307, 309–310, 312; in critical race spatial method (CRSM) 228, 231–232; in critical race theory 227, 228–229; in education 6–7, 245; English Language Learners of Color (ELLC) 253; in housing 233; institutional 267–268, 270; institutionalized in schools 174, 243, 304, 308; morality and 149; narratives about 81, 83, 88, 90, 216; race and 321–322, 324, 327–329, 332–333; research on antiracism 97–100; scholarship of 4; sexism and 4–5, 247; in spatiality 235; structural 243, 253; systemic 54; whiteness and 4–5, 79–80; white supremacy and 2, 21, 90–91, 268, 270, 273, 277, 280, 282, 285, 304 Ray, Satyajit 136 relativism, rejection of 40 Remnants of Auschwitz (Agamben) 69 replication 119, 120, 121 rhizoanalysis 127 rhizome 127; characteristics of 213–214; notion of 215–217 rhizovocality 127 Ritzer, George 32 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 274 Said, Edward 128 St. Pierre, Elizabeth 336, 337 Sanchez, James 85 Sanders, Tywanza 272 schooling: controlled choice in 227–228; segregation in 226–227; see also critical race spatial method (CRSM) school of choice see controlled choice Scott, Joan W. 339, 347

Index Scott, Walter 272 self-concept 199 self-regulation 199 sexism 4–5, 81, 133, 247, 284, 287, 289, 292, 320 Signature of All Things, The (Agamben) 69 Simmons, Daniel L. 272 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake 187 Simpsons, The (television series) 136 Singapore habitus 207 slavery abolition, Jim Crow 20 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 128–129, 131 Smithies, Chris 343 social justice see teaching and learning mathematics for social justice (TLMSJ) social totality: of modern/colonial capitalist world-system 187, 188, 189–190; transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH) 183–184 sociogenic phenomenological method (SPM) 51; in educational leadership 60–61; phenomenological research 51–52; trustworthiness through 59–60 sociogenic phenomenology (SP) 10, 53–54; application for educational leadership 54; contextualization 53; culturally affirming co-design 54–56; emancipatory tenets of 54–60; healing for liberation 57–59; historical orientation 53; researcher identity, contextuality and voice 60; sociogenic investigation 56–57; sociogeny and sociogenic principle 50–51; theoretical lineage of 50–54 sociogeny: Fanon’s 50; sociogenic principle and 50–51 sociological imagination: critical framework of 292, 296–297; critical meta-analysis 297–299; critical meta-awareness 292–293; elements of 291; implications in education 288–289; reflection and reflexivity 291, 294–296; rethinking social problems 287–288; situating as method 293–299; as theory 285–288; understanding as method 289–293 Sociological Imagination, The (Mills) 26 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) 306 South Asian diaspora, Par/Desi framework 131–135 South Central Los Angeles, Rodney King riots 171 Southern Horrors (Wells) 306 Spillers, Hortense 103 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 128, 131–132, 338

363

Standard American English (SAE) 105 standardization 121, 122; academic 183, 219, 260; bee colony collapse disorder and 264 State Nobility (Bourdieu) 207 Steinberg, Shirley 11; post-formalism 260; white imagination 273 STEM 27, 227, 233 Stiegler, Bernard 34 student activism 182; collective action 196; transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH) 188–192 Sullivan, Shannon 106 Tamboukou, Maria 350 Tamez, Esperanza 82, 83, 85 Tamez, Malaquías 82–84 Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, A (Bloom) 267 Taylor, Breonna 307 teacher(s) 7–10, 16, 33, 106–108, 226; administration and 313; affective dissonance and loss 66; African American K-12, 55; border pedagogy 156; Brown 91; conceptions of education 95–99; emotional reactions 75–76; English Language Learners (ELL) 251; experiences 59; in-service 155; K-12 public 244, 251, 272; mathematics 167, 170–171, 176; neoliberal academia 43; political vulnerability 73; postformalism and 261, 266; pre-service 152, 153, 155, 244; professional practices of 153; voice of 103 teacher education 153, 155, 157n3, 250; English Language Learner (ELL) 249; ideas about 150; neo-plantation ideology in 252–253; programs 24, 244; research 6, 7, 9; socially just 74–76; TESOL 243, 245, 250, 253, 254, 255; TLMSJ and 167; whiteness in 4, 7, 8–9; whitewashedness in TESOL 244 teacher preparation 143, 150–152, 152, 153, 157n3, 243, 255 teaching 98; assemblage 215–217; computers for 31; COVID-19 and 33; English Language Arts (ELA) 273; English Language Learners of Color (ELLC) 247, 249, 251–253, 255; graduate students 18; Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) 79, 86; K-12 6–7, 272; learning and 64, 67, 74, 99–100, 153, 161, 166–171, 248, 249, 279, 280, 281, 288; research 7; whiteness in 8–10

364

Index

teaching and learning mathematics for social justice (TLMSJ) 161; applying agential realism to 169–172; epistemological dimensions of 167–168; liquor store distributions 170–172, 175; ontological dimensions of 168–169, 169; overview of 167 Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) 11; examples of whitewashed temporal-spatial contextuality in TESOL teacher education 250; history of field 243; seminar for English Language Learners (ELLs) 251; whitewashedness in teacher education 244, 245, 255; see also critical chronotopic analysis (CCA) technology enhanced learning (TEL) 34 territorializing and deterritorializing: assemblage 212–214, 216; bodies 223; classroom 217; entanglement of wasp and orchid 213; nomadic travels of 127 TESOL see Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Thompson, Myra 272 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari) 214 time: Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) 266, 268; chronos and kairos 265–266; confronting, in educational research 259–260; epistemological roots of 265–266; Western worldviews of 264–265 TLMSJ see teaching and learning mathematics for social justice (TLMSJ) To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee) 273, 274 totality 119, 120, 121 transcendental, term 52 transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH) 11, 182–187; activism education research 195–196; coloniality of being 185; coloniality of gender 185; coloniality of knowledge 185; coloniality of power 184–185; coloniality of power, knowledge and being 184–186; decolonial tenet 183–184; methodological and ethicopolitical tenets 186–187; methodological implications 193–195; reading and interpreting the neoliberal university 187–188; theoretical method of 192–193; university student activism through 188–192 transnationalism 128–130, 152 transphobia 134, 138 Trinick, Tony 172

Troubling the Angles (Lather and Smithies) 343 Trump administration 243, 277 Tuskegee Syphilis Study 59, 88, 92n4 Uber 42–43 Unapologetic Black Inquiry (UBI) 11, 303; affirming Black humanity 309–310; aim of 314–315; applying to Black girls’ schooling experiences 311–314; Black humanity 312–313; Black specificity and multiplicity 310–311, 313–314; Black students and researchers as outsiderswithin 309, 311; Black subjectivity 311–312; definition of 303; framing 308–311; implications of 314–315; theorizing Black humanity and liberation 306–308 Unapologetic Blackness 303, 306 uncertainty principle, Heisenberg’s 163 University of Georgia 126 University of Virginia 233 university student activism, transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH) 188–192 Urry, John 337, 341 U.S. Constitution 17 U.S. Supreme Court: Brown v Board of Education 226, 229; Milliken v Bradley 226 Vagle, Mark 104 Visweswaran, Kamala 128, 129 voice: crisis of 337, 338–339; racialization of 106–107; teacher/student interaction 103; white humanity and 105–106 Wacquant, Loic 299 Wark, McKenzie 39 Web Science 41; concept of 38–39 Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 306 white humanity 96; phenomenology of racial embodiment 99–100; voice and 105–106 white imagination, critical race English Education (CREE) 275 whiteness 52, 131–132, 241, 312; aspirational 135–136; in classroom 104–106, 108; concept of 321, 325; counterstory as method for exposing 82–90; critical pedagogy and 23–26; Critical Race English Education (CREE) 273–275, 277–278, 280; critical race theory (CRT) 229; critical study of 6–10, 19, 21; educational research 137–138; Eurocentrism and 268;

Index ideology of 17, 27, 79–81; internalized 91–92; Racial Dot Map and 238; racism and 4–5, 5, 79–80, 328; research on 97–100, 102; scholarship of 4; study of 96; teacher education 244, 247, 255, 304–305; in teacher education 7, 8–9 Whiteness as Territoriality (Allen) 24 white supremacy 12, 16, 52, 58, 60, 87, 103, 226, 232, 253, 289; Black defiance to 306–307; Black female body and 312; Black students negotiating 309–310; critical race theory and counterstories 79–81; disease of 82; geographic realities 232; ideology of 321; as object 22; patriarchy and 3, 5, 12, 325; racism and 2, 21, 90–91, 268, 270, 273, 277, 280, 282, 285, 304; shaping unconscious 22–23; social system 20–21; structural 16–19, 21–22, 24–27, 97; systemic 16, 97, 98, 104, 229; theories of 95–96; understanding presence of 21–22; white imagination 275; whiteness and 91, 99 whitewashedness, definition 244 Wiener, Norbert 37 Williams, Raymond 113 Williamson, Ben 39 Women of Color 4, 81, 88, 90, 253, 332 women with HIV, qualitative research on 145, 150

365

Woodson, Carter G. 50, 304, 306 Woolf University 42–44 WordPress journals 191 Working the Ruins (St. Pierre and Pillow) 337 World Health Organization (WHO) 319, 320, 332 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon) 25 Wynter, Sylvia 49, 52, 56, 96, 99–100; coloniality of being 185; conception of “ethnoclass Man” 53; sociogenic principle 50 xenophobia 129, 138, 153, 276, 280–281, 320 Yamada, Mitsuye 128 Yancy, George 96, 101, 108 Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional (Kelley) 2 youth participatory action research (YPAR) 212; assemblage in 222–223; ninth-grade Ethnic Studies class 216–219; schooling assemblages 216–219; see also assemblage youth poetry and literacies, assemblage 219–222 YPAR see youth participatory action research (YPAR) Zimmerman, George 272–273, 279 Zoom 32, 34