Promiscuous Feminist Policy Ethnography: Disrupting Methodological Practices in Qualitative Research

• In Event: Disrupting Qualitative Inquiry: Possibilities and Tensions of Educational Research

Abstract

This papers focuses on how feminist policy analysis and policy ethnography in and through post-structural and critical race theories disrupt the methodological boundaries of traditional policy analysis. The author explains how she conducted and analyzed data from an 18-month ethnographic case study of a high-achieving, high-poverty high school in Ohio. The goal of the project was to understand how this school negotiated educational policy “as practice” to subvert the constraining effects of NCLB and promote success. While initially the methodological approach aimed to disrupt traditional policy analysis, it also became apparent that a mixed methodological approach was needed to get at the complications and disruptions of what success meant at this school. This notion of disrupting policy analysis is not new (See Marshall, 1997; Scheurich, 1994; Pillow, 2004). What is potentially different about what Childers does as a policy researcher is confront the unavoidable tensions of placing methodologies up against each other. Offering a reflexive cross -methodological critique enables the researcher to wrestle with the disruptions rather than exclude them in favor of a more coherent analysis.

Author

• Sara M. Childers, Independent Scholar