Critical Theory and Qualitative Data Analysis in Education

Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, Jamila Lee-Johnson, Ashley N. Gaskew, Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, Jamila Lee-Johnson, Ashley N. Gaskew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351657846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Critical Theory and Qualitative Data Analysis in Education offers a path-breaking explanation of how critical theories can be used within the analysis of qualitative data to inform research processes, such as data collection, analysis, and interpretation. This contributed volume offers examples of qualitative data analysis techniques and exemplars of empirical studies that employ critical theory concepts in data analysis. By creating a clear and accessible bridge between data analysis and critical social theories, this book helps scholars and researchers effectively translate their research designs and findings to multiple audiences for more equitable outcomes and disruption of historical and contemporary inequality.

Section II
Critical Theory and Analysis with Marginalized Populations

Introduction

Keon M. McGuire

The relationship between research(ers) and the “researched” – particularly when the latter constitutes those whom we may rightfully refer to as marginalized – is one that too often exists as a form of exploitation and violence (Tuck & Yang, 2014). Though the academy is at times hailed as a beacon of E/enlightenment, rational thinking, and liberal-democratic possibilities, academically trained researchers frequently operate as constitutive components of the nation-state’s surveillance apparatus. Motivated by a seemingly insatiable quest for knowledge accumulation in order to know, manipulate, and dominate the social-material universe, academic research originating from the global north on a grand scale has advanced and operated within the leitmotif of Manifest Destiny (that settlers were destined to colonize and settle). Writing from/within/on the southwest border, I do not use such language lightly. That is to say, legitimized research as an organized, sustained commitment of human activity aimed at make sensing of the worlds we inherit, make and are made by, has progressed in a manner that has deputized (purposefully used here) imperial agents to engage, interpret, and (re)present the lives of all people, places, and things as reality/ies and T/truth/s.

While it has been well documented through the collective analyses of ethnic studies, feminist, postcolonial, decolonial and indigenous scholarship, it is worth indexing a few illustrative examples here. Consider how the heteropatriarchal construction of great men historical narratives celebrates the medical advancements of James Marion Sims, crowning him the father of modern gynecology, yet erasing the brutal experimentations he performed on enslaved Black women without anesthesia that led to such ‘advancements’ (Roberts, 1997). Too, we may recall the grossly unethical Tuskegee experiment in which roughly 400 Black men who tested positive for syphilis were purposefully untreated over the span of four decades (Washington, 2006). Even the history of the development of the birth control pill belies how Puerto Rican, Haitian, and Mexican women were treated as a beta-testing playground as the pill served as technology of population control for neo-colonized women, while later being marketed to middleclass American women as purchasable means of sexual freedom (López, 2008).

These histories are ever present with any of us who seek to work with marginalized populations – both in ways that we are aware of and unconscious to. That is, our institutions, modes of writing, thinking, studying, interpreting, critiquing and creating representations of life are implicated within colonial projects and white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal relations (hooks, 1990). With this realization, many scholars continue to advocate for a way of research that aspires to, at the least, interrogate and problematize these taken-for-granted modes of academic inquiry. Such scholars from a broad array of disciplines are committed to deconstructing hierarchical relations between the researchers and the researched, explicitly pursue social justice agendas, make visible positionalities, and engage in more humanizing methodologies that prioritize ethical considerations and do not attempt to speak for any subject (Paris & Winn, 2014; Smith, 1999/2013). As a placeholder, and to remain responsive to the focus of the section, we may collectively refer to such positions as “critical.”

Critical qualitative research signifies a diverse set of, and at times divergent, projects that arguably are unified in a “commitment to expose and critique the forms of inequality and discrimination that operate in daily life” (Denzin, 2017, p. 9). Particularly when engaging with marginalized communities, this is a commitment to study such individuals as fully human beings – or in DuBoisan terms, studying sociological problems that humans experience and not humans as problems unto themselves. This intellectual legacy was threaded throughout Du Bois’ body of work and is evident, for instance, in his opening to Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 where he states, “In fine, I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience” (Du Bois, 1935/1998). As Gordon (1999) argued, Du Bois was prompting a critical self-reflexive praxis that would interrogate the prejudicial assumptions brought to bear on the analysis of Black people. As Du Bois proclaimed, “we must study even dehumanized human subjects in a humanistic way in order to recognize the dehumanizing practices that besiege them” (Gordon, 1999, p. 24).

As the chapters in this section demonstrate, a central component of critical qualitative inquiry involves the relationship between critical theory and data analysis. Reavis’ chapter, Illuminating Systematic Inequality in Education: Using Bourdieu in Critical Qualitative Data Analysis, proffers Bourdieu’s social reproduction theory as a way to understand systemic and systematic educational inequality within American schooling. Employing in tandem Bourdieu’s four theoretical concepts – cultural capital, social capital, habitus, and field – Reavis makes sense of select data from a “longitudinal multi-site qualitative case study” that focused on “how families and schools influence students’ college aspirations and college choice over a four-year period” (p. 85). Outlining detailed strategies for incorporating and engaging theoretical concepts at the stage of reflective memos, Reavis offers a possibility for thinking through inequality as an outcome of certain forms of capital and habitus being legitimized and valued, while others fail to provide necessary currency. In this way, Reavis encourages a form of criticality that moves beyond rational-choice frameworks – typically grounded in notions of abstract liberalism, meritocracy, and individualism – in order to consider the ways certain individuals work to purposefully accumulate additional resources.

In the next chapter, Answering the Methodological “Call” to Position Complex Blackness in Conversation with Hermeneutic Phenomenology, Mobley brings attention to a critical approach that rejects positivism not science and refuses empiricism, but not empirical evidence. In articulating his own intellectual–methodological lineage through/with philosophers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Lewis Gordon, Fanon, and Husserl, Mobley demonstrates the incredible importance of conducting “research with and not on his people . . . with both care and humility” (p. 93). As someone who himself embodied the very complicated Blackness he explores in his work – the lived experiences of Black students attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) at the intersections of race and class – Mobley positions hermeneutic phenomenology as a necessary foil to other traditions of phenomenology that privilege distance over closeness and, in this way, Mobley advocates a form of criticality (through which we understand the ways theories are built into methods) that both answers and raises questions; pays attentions to the margins of the margins; stretches the boundaries of what constitutes context and data; and runs towards reflexivity as an inevitable set of opportunities with which we should unapologetically grapple.

Blockett continues our conversation of critical closeness through his contribution, Thinking with Queer of Color Critique: A Multidimensional Approach to Analyzing and Interpreting Data in which he models a way of employing Black queer/quare theory to “unearth the practices that [Black queer men in college] engage as they labor to establish kinship networks at a [predominantly white institution]” (p. 110). In his work, Blockett promotes a mode of critical ethnography that is participatory in a way that refuses colonizing dispositions that fetishize dispassionate relations. Moreover, drawing on queer of color scholars, quare theory, and Queer Crit, Blockett highlights the importance of troubling racialized heteronormativity, challenging status-quo ideologies, and advancing an intersectional analysis concerned with the discursive and material. Similar to Mobley’s discussion, Blockett sees positionality as a strategic resource in critical qualitative inquiry when working with marginalized populations – not something that needs to be quarantined or restrained. In this regard, Blockett raises three very important considerations for any scholar working with marginalized populations: (1) the politics of entering the field; (2) the necessity of using a theoretical framework throughout the entire study; and (3) what it might require to be competent as a researcher.

Offering more explicit attention to spatial-material realities, in the chapter Globalization, Higher Education, and Crisis: A Model for Applying Critical Geography toward Data Analysis, Blackburn Cohen uses critical geography to understand the various ways higher education institutions positioned themselves in pre- and post-World War II eras. Blackburn Cohen argues that the central tenets of critical geography are “an acute attention to material practices of power and power dynamics . . . a social justice orientation . . . and a focus toward emancipation, consciousness and change” (p. 125). More specifically related to globalization, Blackburn Cohen carries out an analysis that pays particular attention to three themes – imagination, manifestation, and contradiction. Through document analysis of several contemporary text excerpts, Blackburn Cohen brings these themes to bear on the two aforementioned globalization eras and makes clear the ways aspirational rhetoric and material realties collide, the various structures and processes that find neoliberal rhetoric wanting, and thinks through these realities within the prisms of space (physical) and place (abstract).

In the final chapter of this section, Context and Materiality: Inclusive Appropriations of New Materialism for Qualitative Analysis, Dennis offers an extension on the ways we may think about what constitutes the critical. Drawing on a “cluster of concepts” found in the writing of Karen Barad, Dennis uses her first day of teaching/entering the classroom and a picture of her exchanging money with a school director as a patron for a Ugandan school as data points and grounds for analysis. Employing concepts emerging from new materialism, Dennis refuses the binary between subject–object and human–nonhuman and attempts to enliven our thinking of what constitutes context – particularly material contexts. In this way, Dennis asks how we might think of material contexts as not simply objects of human manipulation, but active co-constructors of social phenomenon. In this way, Dennis’ work is reminiscent of Fanon’s principle of sociogeny and Sylvia Wynter’s important philosophical work, which serves, in part, as an opportunity to bridge the hard and social sciences. In what could be read as a somewhat divergent approach to the other chapters in this section, like other new materialist scholars (Maclure, 2015), Dennis raises the issue of critique itself. That is, should the purpose of critical scholarship exclusively focus on unmasking ideological forces through processes of interpretation? Especially in her analysis of the photo, Dennis imagines what might be possible if we engage in a form of analysis that refuses certain assumptions about power, privilege, and global positioning.

While not always aligned, through mapping out specific traces of their processes of data analysis and purposeful selection of and engagement with critical theoretical frameworks, our authors proffer exciting possibilities for critical qualitative analysis. Moreover, they provide potential roadmaps for those hoping to advance an ethical, responsible and critical approach to working with marginalized populations in ways that are humanizing.

References

Denzin, N. K. (2017). Critical qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 23 (1), 8–16.

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1935/1998). Black reconstruction in America: 1860–1880. New York: The Free Press. Gordon, L. (Spring 1999). A short history of the ‘critical’ in critical race theory. The APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience, 98 (2), 23–26.

hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston, MA: South End Press.

López, I. O. (2008). Matters of choice: Puerto Rican women’s struggle for reproductive freedom. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Maclure, M. (2015). The ‘new materialisms’: a thorn in the flesh of critical qualitative inquiry? In G. Cannella, M. S. Perez, & P. Pasque (Eds.), Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Foundations and Futures. California: Left Coast Press.

Paris, D., & Winn, M. T. (Eds.). (2014). Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Roberts, D. (1997). Killing the Black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. New York: Pantheon Books.

Smith, L. T. (1999/2013). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books.

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). R-Words: Refusing Research. In D. Par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Reflections on Research that is Humanizing
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• SECTION I The Need for Partnering Critical Theory and Data Analysis in Education
• SECTION II Critical Theory and Analysis with Marginalized Populations
• SECTION III Critical Theories and Data Analysis in Institutions and Policies
• Afterword
• List of Contributors
• Index