Epistemology, Activism, and Scholarship: Reflections on Research, Roles, and Representation

• In Event: Activism, Research, and Social Movements: A Dialogue Among Emerging Activist-Scholars

Abstract

This paper is based on the research that I conducted for my dissertation, Public Education in the United States: The Production of a Normative Cultural Logic of Inequality Through Choice, a historically informed ethnography that examines how choice emerged in the post-Brown v. Board of Education era as a key principle of reform and management in public education and became central to how rights, freedom, and citizenship were structured, constrained, and imagined. To be sure, the questions that my work examines are at once old and new; and one of the attempted contributions of my work: to historically situate the contemporary inequalities confronted in education with hope that by better understanding the terrain, the course of struggle might shift. My research is based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in New York City's Community School District (CSD) 3, one of the most racially and economically diverse districts in the nation's largest school system. CSD 3 is also one of the most segregated districts in New York City and one of the districts that provide the most choice-based programs and policies. In my ethnography, I examine the ways that low-income and middle-income parents—particularly mothers---navigate and negotiate selecting a public non-charter elementary school for their child. I trace how situated claims to universal rights as choices facilitate the continuance of a tiered citizenship and the production of what I term a “normative cultural logic of inequality.” My methods included historical research, extensive participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups. Based on this research, this paper tells three stories related to activist scholarship. First, I examine the ways that my research spanned much more than eighteen months of formal field work and grew out of my work, for over a decade, as a community organizer in the community that I “studied” and specifically enters into dialogue with what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has termed syncretism. Second, this paper offers reflections on research methods as strategy in activist scholarship, and draws from João H. Costa Vargas’ term observant participation to mark the ways in which my research is informed by my participation in collective efforts to dismantle the realities of school segregation that I was studying. Finally, my work is strongly informed by Robin Kelley’s observations on the limits of social science research to capture (rather than classify) the complexity of human life. As such, this paper also offers reflections on strategies of representation and storytelling within ethnography as well as my own experiences of emotional messiness, or what Renato Rosaldo has termed emotional force and what Michelle Fine has demonstrated as a reflexive stance in her own ethnographic work. As this paper explores, the latter had to do with carefully watching the sharply palpable slow yet steady violence that permeates public schools in New York City, one that despite the care, dreams, and hopes of parents, continues to structure a differential value to the human lives of very small children.

Author

• Ujju Aggarwal