(Post)Critical Methodologies: The Science Possible After the Critiques

The Selected Works of Patti Lather

Patti Lather

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317214229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands and see how their work contributes to the development of the field.

(Post)Critical Methodologies forms a chronology through the texts and concepts that span Patti Lather's career. Examining (post)critical, feminist and poststructural theories, Lather's work is organized into thematic sections that span her 35 years of study in this field. These sections include original contributions formed from Lather's feminism and critical theory background. They contain her most cited works on feminist research and pedagogy, and form a collection of both early and recent writings on the post and post-post, with a focus on critical policy studies and the future of post-qualitative work.

With a focus on the implications for qualitative inquiry given the call for scientifically based research in education, this compelling overview moves through Lather's progressive thoughts on bridging the gap between quantitative and qualitative research in education and provides a unique commentary on some of the most important issues in higher education over the last 30 years. This compilation of Lather's contribution to educational thinking will prove compelling reading to all those engaged in student learning in higher education worldwide.

p.9

PART I

FOREWORDS

The validity papers: validity has been very very good to me

The first set of papers is organized around the theme of validity that might seem like a strange obsession for a budding feminist methodologist in the early 1980s. But as one of Egon Guba’s qualitative research students at Indiana University, I came by it honestly. He had just returned from a sabbatical where he pursued his own paradigm conversion from the quantitative work in which he had excelled to a qualitative world via the parallels between investigative journalism and what he termed, at that time, naturalistic inquiry.

On my own parallel track at the time via a Women’s Studies minor that introduced me to one of Karl Popper’s students, Noretta Koertge, who taught me philosophy of science, I had a growing sense that Guba’s take on this new world did not go far enough. Still insisting on objectivity, he clashed with my sense of feminist methodology as political to the core. What emerged out of this clash was my first experience of original thought.

This resulted in the first article in this section, “Research as Praxis,” which began as the methodology chapter for my dissertation on feminist curricular change efforts in teacher education (Lather, 1983). There, alongside the uses of Antonio Gramsci for articulating a critical method, was an effort to extract/abstract methodological practices of validity from three movements: feminist methodology, neo-marxist critical ethnography, and Freirian empowering or participatory research. This grew up into my first major publication in 1986.

I have often tried to figure out why this article hit like it did. I remember presenting an early version of it at Bergamo and people responding in a sort of pale-faced way. I remember being at AERA after it came out and literally hearing my name bandied about in the streets in a “you have to read it” kind of way. I remember Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren calling me at home in Minnesota to congratulate me. What was going on? Discussion with various people has led me to believe that many critically minded researchers were thinking and feeling along similar lines and that my rendition hit the nail on the head in a way that had a sort of shock value to it.

This was of immense heartening to me for reasons that have less to do with fame and even the usefulness of one’s work than of a “divine” feminist moment of calling the patriarchy to account. The subtext of “research as praxis” was that it was addressed to and motivated by the tendencies of the “neo-marxist boys” to do their critical ethnographies in a way that demonized teachers. The whole “social reproduction” genre of field-based inquiry consisted of largely male researchers being granted entry into the classrooms of largely female teachers to document how teachers were unwitting “soft cops” of capitalism. And most shocking to me, these “findings” were never shared with teachers.

p.10

This contrasted greatly with the ethos of the nascent feminist methodology of the time that was dedicated to working “with” women as participants. Hence I saw it as my mission to bring this huge contradiction between what “critical” “empowering” “emancipatory” researchers saw themselves as doing and how it went down on the ground in terms of practices of power and hierarchy.

As but one example of this, I taught at the University of Utah the summer I was doing the extensive revisions for the Harvard Educational Review article. Some of the critically oriented folks there were studying classroom teachers around such issues and I quoted from them to document this dynamic. As we had had some good times on a Friday afternoon or three while I was there, they asked me if I would eliminate this quote. But I would not given that the article was intended exactly to hold this genre of work to accountability. As I remember, the Friday afternoons continued to some collegial effect. On a larger stage, it is the most cited of all my work, to this day, and continues to have a life although I myself have some reservations. These reservations came early in 1988 and are included in the first selection in the next part on feminist methodology where I delineate the challenges of postmodernism to feminist empirical work.

The second article in this section, “Fertile Obsession: Validity After Poststructuralism,” is an excerpt from my 1993 effort to think validity under conditions of the post. By now I have established a pattern of “narrating methodology” where I ground my efforts to articulate new practices out of empirical work that I found generative, in this case moving from epistemological criteria of validity to counter-practices that take into account the crisis of representation. Here I make an argument for why “validity” should remain a term of choice and why “a critical social science” should remain the umbrella under which we do our work. I have made my Foucauldian turn by now and, of course, Nietzsche is in there as well with the focus on “masks of methodology.”

This article is among my most cited, particularly across many disciplines including more than you might think in the humanities. I remember having a great deal of fun as I came up with the four framings of validity: ironic, paralogical, rhizomatic, and voluptuous. I didn’t have to look too far for exemplars either, given what was coming across my desk in terms of dissertations, the postmodern re-reading of classics like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the work of my colleague, Laurel Richardson (1997), in my feminist reading group, Postmodern Studies (PMS), and my own work on women living with HIV/AIDS. I used all of these to flesh out the intelligibility of validity after poststructuralism and the fun involved is clear in the “Transgressive Validity Check-List” (included in the following article) that I carefully subtitled “A Simulacrum” as a disincentive for any operationalizing. I did hear by the way that such still happened in an occasional defense, but given my newly developing interest in “somewhat less stupid assessment,”¹ I might have to re-launch this check-list as it both is and is more than a joke. The “Fertile Obsession” article provides the basis for what follows it, an elaboration of the work on women and HIV/AIDS as exemplar.

“The Validity of Angels” article was first presented at the 1994 Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction Annual Symposium that Laurel Richardson took me to. It was here that I met Adele Clarke who was instrumental in getting me an invitation to a 1995 University of California residency program on feminist methodology that was one of the highlights of my career. She also deepened my appreciation of the feminist science studies from which I have drawn so much.

p.11

The article introduces the Troubling the Angels text and then uses the “Transgressive Validity Check-List” to think through my practices in this book that combines interview data and researchers’ reflexive ponderings in a split-text format. Here Walter Benjamin is put to much use as I turn to matters of confessional writing, textual strategy and my deliberately ephemeral categories of validity after poststructuralism. I end with a quote from holocaust researchers Shoshona Felman and Dori Laub (1992) on “a singing from within the burning of a knowledge” that well captures the tumult of the work on women and HIV/AIDS that will be expanded upon in Part II of this book.

My 2007 contribution to The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, “Validity, Qualitative,” pulls together much of my early work on the topic with a survey of varied discourse practices across the social sciences. Focusing particularly on education, I track Lincoln and Guba’s delineations across the years as a case study of shifts toward post-epistemic practices. It is useful for teaching in offering an encyclopedic concision. But even more concise and, I think, more useful, is the 300-word rendition in The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology (2011). In my teaching, I read this aloud, slowly, stopping for much discussion and questioning, as a kind of “test” to see what students had absorbed from the class thus far. It often helped them “nail” the major themes of the introductory course. It also serves as a lesson in editing as they see the longer piece cut down to 300 words and begin to appreciate the difficulties involved. What they never see (nor is it included here) is the much longer version that was the original template for both these encyclopedia entries. Published in the Handbook of Research on Teaching as “Validity as an Incitement to Discourse: Qualitative Research and the Crisis of Legitimation” (Lather, 2001), this much longer piece situates the conversation within the many “turns” in the social sciences and includes several exemplars to demonstrate new practices as well as charts and a concluding section, “Do We Have to Read Derrida?”

The second edition of the Encyclopedia (projected for November 2017) provided one of my proudest moments. Invited to do a new entry for it, I declined and asked if the early piece could just be updated a bit to which they replied that they wanted new pieces only. Unbeknownst to me, the editor then commissioned a review to see if the early piece could be republished without changes and, perhaps, to everyone’s surprise and my pleasure, the review came back with one minor “quibble.”² Otherwise, “the reviewer felt the entry was still very much up-to-date and therefore we will publish the original entry again as part of the new edition” (quoting from the project manager email, March 18, 2015). This made me inordinately happy as it seemed a testimonial to the worth of the work over so much time and changes in theories of this and that. I then labored much over two changes I wanted to make: (1) the inclusion of a new criterion of “relevance” and (2) a sentence or two that would gesture toward the future of validity under conditions of the post-post or new materialism. Gutierrez and Penual (2014) provided me with a handy way into the former via their “Relevance to Practice as a Criterion for Rigor” in Educational Researcher and Karen Barad helped me craft a new paragraph over the course of a week. Remember, this paragraph took me a week to write:

p.12

Gesturing toward the future, the “ontological turn” shifts validity from discourse practices to materialities of enfolding, enacting and tracing rhizomatic multiplicities. The science that is about-to-be becomes thinkable with its entanglements, distributed agencies and intra-relationalities (Barad, 2007). Here “matter matters” in evoking a “post-post validity” that is immanent and response-able in moving from canonical to situated practices where science hardly recognizes itself in its affect, force and movement. This is the validity to be developed in the next generation, inexact and yet rigorous, incalculable, flowing along the lines of Deleuzean “transcendental empiricism.”

(Lather, in press)

I cannot tell you how happy I am with this paragraph for its concise rendering of the longer piece I would have had to write had I accepted the insistence on new work. I am equally happy for the space it makes for whomever is going to pick up from where I left off in trying to move social science in directions away from positivism and toward the succession of whatever is coming down the road of theory and practice.

This section concludes, fittingly, with the tribute I wrote on the occasion of the death of Egon Guba in 2008. I say fittingly because it is to him I owe this “fertile obsession” with validity that launched and has so structured my career. It is to this obsession that I owe the job at Ohio State teaching qualitative research that has been my great good fortune. He set me up to address a pressing need: how to establish the legitimacy of alternative paradigm work in a way both within intelligible discourse practices of the social sciences and beyond them in taking account of the “openly ideological” research of critical paradigms. This “within/beyond” move is the foundation of my intellectual work.

Notes

1 This phrase comes from Harry Torrance who found my first title of “smart assessment” to be premature.

2 The “quibble” was actually substantive in wanting a change from “what is actually true” to “what participants believe to be true” in discussing internal validity. And good for the reviewer for catching this!

References

Agee, James and Walker Evans (1988) Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the University Halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Felman, Shoshona and Dori Laub (1992) Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge.

Gutierrez, Kris and William Penual (2014) Relevance to Practice as a Criterion for Rigor. Educational Researcher, 43(1), 19–23.

Lather, Patti (1983) Feminist Curricular Change Efforts in Teacher Education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University.

Lather, Patti (2001) Validity as an Incitement to Discourse: Qualitative Research and the Crisis of Legitimation. In Handbook of Research on Teaching, fourth Edition, Virginia Richardson, ed. Washington, DC: AERA, 241–250.

Lather, Patti (2011) Validity, Qualitative. In The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology. George Ritzer and J. Michael Ryan, eds. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Used with permission. DOI: 10.1002/9781444392654.ch22, 674.

Lather, Patti (in press) Validity, Qualitative. In Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd edition, George Ritzer, ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Richardson, Laurel (1997) Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. New Brunswick, N...