How Am "I" Ethical When I Succeed as "They" Fail?

• In Event: 35.082 - Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: 35.082-12 - Autobiography as Postfoundational Curriculum Research: Toward an Ethics of (Im)Possible Representation

Abstract

In my research, I seek to contextualize and explore epistemological discourses and discursive practices that simultaneously produce and foreclose learning experiences, and through which Black and Latino youth become constituted in particular ways. However, recently, in response to an informal question of how the school from which he was expelled might have served him more justly (or even justly) a nephew remarked, “Well, the first thing is, don’t make us feel like us it’s versus you...We can’t feel like you guys are uh…or they, you know…are out to get us.” Within and through the utterance (and corrective utterance) of “us,” “you guys,” and “they,” I considered my relation to institutional structures that had allowed me to enter doctoral study in a prestigious program, while almost foreclosing entirely his educational experience. How could I consider my success to be ethical when the same structure had produced his failure? I felt implicated, and yet, I grappled with a narrative in which a determinate causality could be made (Butler, 2008). Undertaking an endeavor, as a researcher, to examine my world and selves seems difficult indeed (Popkewitz, 1998).
At Butler’s (2008) prompting for an ‘account of oneself’ via Foucault’s (2007) self-critique, this autobiographical work is an attempt to “call into question the truth of oneself and, indeed, to question one’s ability to tell the truth about oneself” (Butler, 2008, p. 30). Situated within a study of ethics, this accounting occurs across social relationalities propelling me to consider norms constituting independent forms of an “I” and an “other.” In other words, how have I come to understand “in my world” my selves in relation to social norms interpellating me as successful (“doctoral candidate,” “researcher,” and “educator”) and my familial relations as failures (“problem student,” “dropout”)? Butler (2004) argues for a political community in which my fate and theirs are neither “originally or finally separable,” but together, we are “traversed by a relationality that we cannot easily argue against” (p. 22). Additionally, these norms require investigation in that they are often ‘invisible’ (Popkewitz, 1998) and a “domain of unfreedom and substitutability on the basis of which our ‘singular’ stories are told” (Butler, 2008, p. 29).
Further, Foucault calls to “delimit of that part of the self that will form the subject of...moral practice” (1985, p. 28 cited in Butler, 2008, p. 26).
In this ‘accounting,’ I begin with a description of my subjectivities as researcher, educator, and family member within/through institutionalized discourses. Next, in questioning “Am I an ethical subject?,” I engage in a “deliberation” (Butler, 2008) on social relationalities and “self-crafting” (Foucault, 2007). In the course of this writing, I hope to open a space in which to rethink the making of my “selves” in relation to essentialized norms marking me as successful and others as failures. Throughout, I consider an interrogation of what it might mean to be ethical.

Author

• Lillian Sharon Leathers, Teachers College, Columbia University