Researcher’s Consciousness: Young People’s Struggles With Racialization in the Context of Racially Sorting School Choice in Vancouver

• In Event: The Power and Limitations of Critical Research as Praxis: Youth, Race, and Schooling in Western Canada

Abstract

My presentation examines the ways in which qualitative research can be deployed as a practice of critical consciousness for both research participants and researchers, and in fact, I argue, probably more for the latter. For this purpose, I join Paulo Freire with Michel Foucault to think dynamically about the importance of research as critical engagement of the researcher with the ‘public(s)’. In making this point, I draw from my study of the impact of the secondary school market on the racialization of local schools and the reconstitution of young people’s racial identities in the radically changing cosmopolitan city of Vancouver.
My study is guided by modern critical theories with a post-structural sensitivity, in the effort to strengthen an analysis of complex racial issues that emerge in the operation of education policy (Ball, 1994). Goldberg’s (2009) critical racial theory is drawn to highlight the role of the state in exacerbating race-based inequality. Mawani’s (2009) post-colonial and post-structural work is drawn to pinpoint the historically-shaped uneven processes of crossracial anxiety. This study was conducted as an eight month ethnography consisting of a detailed study of two public secondary schools; over sixty one-on-one interviews with students; and a critical analysis of policy and popular media texts which have presented competing discourses of school choice.
My overall argument is that the market is not only a passive mechanism through which current racial orders are reproduced, but also it acts as a technology through which racial ordering is unevenly created across the city. I pinpoint historically-entrenched crossracial anxieties and further suggest that the racialization of particular groups often surfaces in the events of moral panic surrounding minority groups in ‘Canadian’ society and schools. Both absent and available choices are analyzed in linkage to the imperial past and contemporary processes of racial empowerment and marginalization. My study thus offers a new insight into the function of the market, filling an important gap in the current field of school choice studies.
Furthermore, I argue that the qualitative research process offers a powerful opportunity to deepen participants’ understanding of how their everyday life is linked to larger issues and structural processes, critical to changing their particular situations, as many critical researchers, notably Lather (1991) and Freire (1998/1972), have argued, however, I want to pinpoint that research as praxis, more importantly, expands researcher’s understanding of lived struggles, and therefore it is critical to building the researcher’s political participation and organic intellectual work (Foucault, 1980). My study with youths not only illuminated my subsequent conversations with local policy-makers but also elevated my political consciousness to take part in the process of policy-making.

Author

• Ee-Seul Yoon, The University of British Columbia