Employing Critical Qualitative Inquiry to Mount Nonviolent Resistance

Yvonna S. Lincoln, Gaile S. Cannella, Gaile S. Cannella

• Publisher: Myers Education Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781975500443, 9781975500436
• eBook ISBN: 9781975500467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This volume engages researchers with the notion of critical qualitative inquiry (CQI) as a direct practice of resistance. As female educators and researchers who have (through our politically activist sister) been referred to as "Nasty Women" in the US presidential debates, we believe that it is our responsibility to respond through our inquiry to the violent reinscription of intersecting forms of injustice and marginalization. The purposes of this volume are therefore (1) to demonstrate personal actions taken by researchers to deal with thoughts/feelings of despair as well as how to move toward survival, and (2) to explore historical, new, and rethought research and activist methodologies (frameworks) as counter measures broadly and for public education specifically. Examples of CQI as resistance in response to the particular neoliberal patriarchal, whitelash presidential election event are provided by featured authors. Additionally, resources related to activist scholarship are provided. These frameworks, resources, and perspectives are also useful for future research in reaction to neoliberalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

Perfect for courses such as: Qualitative Research, Curriculum Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Race and Ethnic Studies, Sociology of Education, Social Justice and Education, Democracy and Civics, Community Engagement, Policy Studies, Critical Race Theory, Intersectional Studies, Posthuman Inquiry, and Activism and Performance Inquiry.

CHAPTER ONE

Research and Struggles in the Contemporary Political World

Gaile S. Cannella
Yvonna S. Lincoln

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him. (King, 2003, p. 453)

SO MANY OF us (in the United States, but potentially around the globe) were disappointed and distressed by the conduct of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The results dashed our hopes that misogyny, racism, capitalist patriarchy, even speciesism and capitalist destruction of the earth, as well as so many other forms of disqualification, violence, and erasure had been, at least, acknowledged as injustices in the public imaginary (even if not always addressed). Feminist, poststructural, postcolonial, and other forms of critical research, as well as all manner of diverse voices and ways of being, have demonstrated that democratic society in general, and educational practices specifically, are dependent on respect for the complexities, becomings-with, and multiplicities of all manner of earth critters (“becoming-with” and “critters” used by Donna Haraway, 2015), whether human or more-than-human. More importantly, justice for all requires safety, support, being valued, equity, fairness, and opportunity in equal measure. However, even as so many critical scholars from diverse fields and perspectives have spent their lives supporting multiple knowledges and challenging injustice, the power of patriarchal capitalism has remained a major force for marginalization, inequity, the perpetuation of intersectional oppressions, and even violence.

Appropriately labeled by bell hooks (2001) as “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” in the current condition, we ask ourselves as human beings, educators, and researchers: What do we do next? How do we deal with our feelings? our despair? After years of work toward justice and equity, are there ways we can counter this patriarchal, capitalist whitelash in our daily lives? Before organizing this volume, and in our despair related to the 2016 election, we as panel members and additional participant scholars came together at two conferences to demonstrate personal actions taken by researchers to deal with thoughts/feelings that we hoped would help us move toward survival. We wanted to generate rethought, and even new, research methodologies (frameworks) as counter measures. Early on, some scholars turned down our invitations to participate, saying involvement would be even more upsetting. However, we continued and presented papers, conducted protest performances with our audiences, and completed coalition-building activities. We believe that our ethical responsibilities are to continue to research, to go public, and to take action.

The 2016 election in the United States reminded us that intersecting oppressions and injustices are alive and well in societies broadly, whether locally or globally. Critical scholars and public activists in a range of fields and from diverse ethnic, gender, and racial locations have inquired into and challenged these power plays and hegemonic assemblages for years (Bordo, 2017a)—as examples, from the actions of Sojourner Truth to Kimberle Crenshaw on intersectionality (1989). There exist multiple literatures and forms of public and community activisms and resistance historically confronting patriarchy, racism, misogyny, and the destruction imposed through various forms of injustice and oppression. We believe that we should acknowledge and engage with this resistance history and presence.

However, we would also recognize that this research and multiple performances of public activism have not always been followed by transformations toward a more just world (Cannella & Lincoln, 2009). Further, critical researchers face accusations of academic elitism (Latour, 2004) and activists are often accused of playing identity politics (Lilla, 2016), just to name a few examples of the oversimplified forms of disqualification used to discredit and silence. Further, current theoretical perspectives offer opportunities for recognizing the privileged role of “human beings” in the literal construction of injustice, damage, and destruction (e.g., the Anthropocene); yet, blaming all “human beings” for privilege “over” other humans (e.g., women; People of Color; those labeled as poor, persons with disabilities, non-English speaking people) or other living beings (e.g., other animals, plants, the Earth) is problematic. This imposition of a universal human culpability denies the ultimate and continued intersecting, rhyzomatic, and intertwined roles of patriarchy (von Werlhof, 2007; Lerner, 1986) and capitalism (the Capitalocene, Moore, 2016, 2015), along with specific groups of human beings, in the origins, continuation, and reinscriptions of sexism, racism, and yes, even speciesism, environmental destruction, and all manner of injustice.

As we have all become aware, power inequities are played out in all aspects of society. One major example is public education, with impositions of injustice and inequity ranging from privatization that limits access, to curriculum that would control, to beliefs in evaluation that would judge, label, and limit—and on and on. To support public education that provides equal access and opportunity for all, education researchers and other scholars must engage themselves with these issues broadly, as they are also played out in other aspects of society. Patriarchal and capitalist impositions and damage are infused throughout areas like health care, living conditions, and equal access broadly defined, in environmental damage, and in the lack of environmental justice, just to name a few. As has been explained from a range of perspectives, neoliberalism (Foucault, 2008), or so-called capitalist patriarchy (von Werlhof, 2007), has become rhizomatically attached to, and envelops, all aspects of our existence. Whether labeled human animals or nonhuman animals, environment or place, value is now imposed through capitalism, an all-invasive capitalism that is always and already marked by misogyny, sexism, and racism.

We could continue with multiple daily examples under the Trump administration in the United States. Again to illustrate briefly, as we began writing this chapter, the Trump administration (in existence for 16–18 months at the time of these actions) had separated children from their parents as they attempted to cross the southern border of the United States to escape rape, torture, gang violence, and murder in their homelands. Based on the little information that could be gathered—as reporters and even members of Congress were barred from most forms of access—the separation was achieved by placing adults and children into large, seven- to eight-foot-high cages in different locations. Many in the United States (and around the globe) were and are extremely concerned about what was happening to these children as they were ripped away from their parents and the ways this will forever negatively affect their lives. Obviously, injustice is being perpetrated overall on this group of families, adults, and children of color. Marches have occurred; civil rights lawyers and other advocates have traveled to the southern border and other locations as they have determined where children were taken. A judge has ordered that the separated families be reunited. Yet within this administratively constructed disaster, many wonder if some of the children will ever be reunited with their parents. These are such difficult times that it has never been more important to stand for justice, and this is just one more horrific example. In these times, we as scholars must literally take a stance for justice in the research that we choose to conduct.

To illustrate a stance that would employ research as nonviolent resistance, in this volume five different authors demonstrate differing forms of critical qualitative inquiry employed as counteractivity in reaction to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the continued daily incompetence and horrific actions exhibited by the administration since its inauguration in January 2017. In their chapters, the researchers demonstrate how current methods like autoethnography, historical analysis, and juxtaposition can be used for critical inquiry, survival, and public action during difficult times. Further, some scholars insist that reconceptualized problems and methods are needed, as well as perspectives and intersectional forms of inquiry that address justice, equity, and privilege more inclusively. Finally, more public dissemination methods, like performance and arts-based work, are demonstrated as researchers are encouraged to share, collaborate, and act with/and in communities. Since higher education is conceptualized as a learning environment, scholars do tend to have more freedom than most workers. For this reason, and because justice and equity have never been more important than they are in today’s backward-leaning environment, critical scholars must become even more political and action oriented in their research.

Positioning Critical Qualitative Researchers

As the editors and lead authors of the volume, we want to begin by positioning ourselves as critical qualitative scholars and teachers who continue to struggle with the notion of research broadly as always and already a power construct and an often elitist, colonialist practice. Yet, we also continue to believe that since so-called (by the dominant North and West) human beings have historically chosen to act and continue to perpetuate the research construct, whether well intended or not, we must become more responsible for those actions and our research conceptualizations, as well as less centered on our privileged, White selves. As we choose to act through inquiry, publications, pedagogy, and community work, there are worries within which we (and some others) continue to struggle. This list of worries is not complete, but we hope that it is at least thought provoking for the reader who would hope to conduct critical qualitative research in difficult political times.

•Research as construct is problematic from any perspective. Many of us have critiqued the Enlightenment/modernist creation for most of our professional lives, asking questions like: How can anyone have the right to speak for, interpret, or represent “others”? How does one deal with the power hierarchy that is intrinsic to a construct like research, because the construct will likely not be eliminated in the science-oriented, deterministic world in which we must survive? As “trained” researchers, what are our ethical responsibilities within this context?

•We live in a time that would deny our interconnected histories, treating everyone as entrepreneurs of their own thoughts, as “new” knowledge creators. Yet, there is likely no author (Barthes, 2002; Derrida, 1978; Foucault, 1977), no researcher, writer, or scholar who is independent of the many academic, community, or cultural ancestors who have gone before. How do we always and already make these historical acknowledgements while at the same time challenging dominant academic, western pressures to “know all the literature” or “be the expert”?

•Language and thinking almost always oversimplify. Whatever we think, act, or become is usually reified at the performance, the interpretation, or even throughout the becoming. As teachers and scholars, how do we think, perform, engage, and interact with complex, contradictory ideas and relations while making informed introductions of those ideas to new scholars and other students and readers? How do I/we respectfully engage the scholarship and actions of critical justice ancestors without perpetuating positivist, colonialist privileging? As Lorde (2007) reminds us regarding the master’s tools: If a researcher has been conventionally placed in the margin (e.g., through race, gender, even academic background), how much of the dominant must be considered, while in the end eliminated, in order to transform and decenter?

•Critical work has not always been successful. Currently, some scholars invoke Latour (2004), as he has labeled critical scholarship as not transformative, as elitist, as “running out of steam.” We disagree and feel that both academia and society more broadly exhibit a range of critical transformations that have been facilitated through critical qualitative inquiry. Further, we feel that a simplistic critique of past critical work, as currently accepted and used by some, itself perpetuates dualisms (e.g., in the use of affirmation or negation), Enlightenment linear views of academic and social progress, oversimplifications, denial of diverse cultural conceptualizations, and human privilege that, in our understandings, the “critique of critique” would have hoped to counter (Ray & Selinger, 2008; Noys, 2011; Folkers, 2016). While attempting to always question and critique ourselves, we think of critical work in a Foucauldian genealogical sense, which means going beyond the more structuralist perspective related to how facts become matters of concern (as examined in Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge, 1972), to question if certain matters should be of concern. Further, we remind ourselves that critical investigations can be considered events that themselves actually become ways to limit the power of dominant forms of reason (Foucault, 1997; Folkers, 2016). So, how do we continue to construct inquiry that challenges, limits, and transforms domination?

•Research has tended to be for and about those who have labeled themselves “human.” Yet, to be critical, inquiry should also question the notion that human privilege is always more important than justice for other living creatures and/or the environment. Further, will we ever attain justice—socially or otherwise—for all “humans” if human beings are always considered most important? We have tended to speak of justice and equity in human social terms, while at the same time many of us who are labeled “human” have not been treated fairly. These unjustly treated human beings have been labeled animal, savage, and childlike (thereby also creating the categories of nonhumans, People of Color, and those who are younger, who are “less than” particular groups of “human beings”). We have never achieved social justice or socioeconomic equity for all human beings and should continue to place social fairness and equity at the forefront. However, as critical scholars we do struggle with this continued human privilege. We are beginning to ask: What does justice mean for the more-than-human, for living beings who have not had the privileged human voice? What does justice mean for the Earth? Can justice and equity, social and otherwise, ever be attained as long as those who have labeled themselves human (and controlled the label) construct the definitions and circumstances in which all others, human or otherwise, must survive?

•We (and maybe all of us) continue to struggle with our own understandings, beliefs, and experiences. These internal confusions surround our interpretations of the thoughts, work, and actions of others, whether so-called human or more-than-human others. So we ask the very personal questions: Am I humble enough to listen and listen again, to read as much as I should read, to humbly attempt to engage with past and present ideas and scholarship, to work hard to understand and construct possibilities, to turn my world upside-down? Can I take risks regarding my own interpretations while always challenging those interpretations? How do I continue to perpetuate a critical justice research agenda without claiming new power for myself?

Obviously, we are concerned about justice and equity in all forms, but we do not have profound insights for addressing these concerns. Rather, we hope that we (and other critical researchers) embody a continued critical awareness. From within this standpoint, we want to introduce our interpretations of critical research, an understanding embedded within qualitative research/inquiry, diverse histories, and a multiplicity of philosophies. First, we briefly summarize our understandings specifically related to beliefs about reality and knowledge as research constructs. Then, critical qualitative research is overviewed more fully. Finally, we provide an overview of each chapter.

Exploring Research Ontologies, Histories, and Entanglements

As researchers, we have come to a point in which we understand research as multiple, historical, fluid, complex, constructed, and always necessarily interrogated and multiple (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016), often prescriptively undefinable. To have a feel for this multiplicity, researchers must explore the notion of inquiry as a construct and practice not only historically and philosophically, but most importantly, ontologically. Much has been written on the history of research or inquiry and associated concepts like theory, research questions, design, data, analysis, results, and paradigm. Historically, the Enlightenment/modernist embeddedness of research has been accepted in one form or another, whether as (a) scientific inquiry that would, at least partially, uncover reality (most often labeled postpositivist, critical realist, or the scientific method) or, as (b) postmodern emergent, empirical contingencies always/already generated through researcher interactive constructions and intersections with participants, institutions, material relations, or life worlds, often with an underlying concern for power, equity, and justice. Research that is concerned with power and equity has been labeled everything from critical to poststructural to endarkened feminist to postqualitative to posthuma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Research and Struggles in the Contemporary Political World
• 2. Difficult Love: Preparations of a Warrior
• 3. “Unbought and Unbossed”: On Being Black, Woman, and Transgressive in the Fight for Justice
• 4. Sanity on the Chopping Block, or How to Save Yourself in an Insane World
• 5. Shuffling the Deck: The “Woman Card,” Misogyny, and Material-Discursive Complexities of “Identities”
• 6. Resisting Patriarchy: Explorations Using a Collaborative Protest Play
• 7. Resources for Becomingswith Activism, Research, and Contemporary Politics
• Editors
• Contributors