Working Through Self-Reflexivity in the Contexts of Critical Literacy Research

• In Event: 49.064 - Revisiting Longitudinal Language Ethnographies: The Case of Bourdieu and Reflexivity

Abstract

Objective
Feminist scholars (e.g., Alcoff, 1993; Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1993) have challenged the dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity, suggesting that situated epistemologies and rigorous self-reflexivity may lead to both deeper inquiry as well as more accurate interpretations in the human and social sciences. In this paper, drawing on feminist standpoint theory, reflexive sociology (Bourdieu, 1990), and key concepts adapted from the work of intellectual historian LaCapra (2004), we provide examples from several of our longitudinal research projects to work through dimensions of our self-reflexivity as researchers and practitioners in school-, university-, and community-based critical literacy studies.

1. Theoretical frameworks

Besides Bourdieu, we employ the intellectual historian LaCapra, who draws on psychoanalytic concepts such as transference, working through, and acting out, in order to understand researchers’ relationships vis-à-vis individuals and objects of study in academic inquiry.

LaCapra describes two poles in the research process: one entails a clinical, hyper-objectification of objects of study, which disavows the researcher’s relational and affective investment in the research process; the other involves an over-identification with research subjects, which elides important differences between self and other, and perhaps can even transferentially reproduce the problems that the researcher is studying. In LaCapra’s provision, to be self-reflexive as a researcher involves acknowledging difference, as well as identifying and situating knowledge claims. How can researchers be reflexive in relation to participants while mediating between these opposing tendencies?

2. Methodology

The studies we explore in this paper involve ethnographic emersion, participant observation, and practitioner research.

3. Data Sources

We revisit data from our empirical research with immigrant, migrant, and minoritized students, educators across a professional lifespan, and community members in a range of contexts. These include self-reflexivity in work with immigrant communities, including work as a classroom teacher, and more recent work in a faith-based immigrant community; also, reflexive positionality as a teacher educator working with youth and teachers in communities of inquiry, including examining the role of the Holocaust in family history in a recent collaborative arts project.

Data include interviews, transcriptions of class discussions, field notes, reflective memos, artwork, and document analysis.

4. Findings

Longitudinal scholarship is not merely about following participants over time. It also involves adopting an intergenerational ethos toward our own legacies as researchers. A rigorous self-reflexivity entails a process through which researchers historize their own identities. This might involve surfacing ideologies and conceptual frameworks that have been naturalized or are rooted in histories, which may or may not be conscious, with the goal of situating our perspectives and interests within a more intergenerational framework.

5. Scholarly significance

For scholars invested in post-positivist or feminist research, self-reflexivity has sometimes been reduced to coming clean about one’s identity, in relation to race, class, or gender. What might it mean for researchers to take on a self-reflexive stance on their own self-reflexivity? We argue that this may involve attention to how reflexivity manifests itself in every stage of the research process, including the moment of representation in writing, research reports, and even presentations such as this one.

Authors

• Rob Simon, University of Toronto

• Gerald Campano, University of Pennsylvania