Crazy White Girls and Wiggers: Autobiography and the Conundrum of Ethically Representing the School Subject in Research

• 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

Currently, there is an urgency to address the perceived failure of contemporary public schools in the United States to educate diverse populations. Dictated by government policies, schools are working to overcome inequities impacting underperforming learners. Energizing this climate of urgency are discourses of crisis (Noguera, 1997), epidemic (McCoy, 2000) and rescue (Sleeter 1997; Popkewitz 2000, Taubman 2009) as they circulate through schools and research communities, brushing against, intermingling, and colliding with each other in complex, contradictory, and complementary ways. Productive of these dominant discourses, low income students, English language learners, and students of color are categorically positioned in schools as they are “organized through a populational reasoning that … functions as a social practice that historically classifies, differentiates, and divides” (Popkewitz, 2000, p. 49). Concurrently, the persistent failure of these populations, and their teachers, is often attributed to a “cultural and demographic mismatch” (Grant and Gibson, 2011, p. 25). But are there more ethical ways to represent teachers and students in schools, and by extension, in educational research, than categorical identity?
In this context, grappling with the ethical conundrum of how to represent diverse selves and others as school subjects in educational research, this paper will explore the ways a White woman teacher might engage in autobiographical life writing around her engagement in an enduring relationship with five, young, Black men. Working to challenge categorical identities upheld by what Miller calls “rigid and monolithic ‘identity constituting’ discourses of education” (Miller, 2005 p. 220), this engagement with autobiographical inquiry is an effort to explore how both feminist poststuctural discourses and materialities might intra-act to constitute school subjects. Because these embodied subjects abstracted through category and bound by linguistic representation are always, also, material, the theoretical framework employed will juxtapose Butler’s notions of discursive performativity and relational ethics via the citation alongside a methodological engagement that embraces a materialist critique of representation that challenges “common sense analysis” as well as “what will count as ‘data’ and [of] our relation to that data” (MacLure, 2013, p. 660). In this critique, “researchers are no longer autonomous agents, choosing and disposing. Rather, we are obliged to acknowledge that data have their ways of making themselves intelligible to us. This can be seen, or rather felt, on occasions when one becomes especially ‘interested’ in a piece of data” (p. 660). From this perspective, picking up the discursive citations of “crazy White girl” and “wigger” as ‘interesting data’ in my own relational, autobiographical self-making, I shall seek in the textual residues of memory and experience, the places where my life writing “glows,” noting, like MacLure, that this glowing occurs most frequently “at the boundaries of language and the body” (pp. 662-663). By exploring the spaces where discourses, citational chains and materiality collide, the life writer might gesture toward an ethics that ruptures the surety of categorical identity and complicates purely discursive representations.

Author

• Mary Joyce Newbery, Teachers College, Columbia University