Ethnography and the Role of Intersectionality and Complex Methodologies

• In Event: Ethnography and Public Scholarship: Ethical Obligations, Tensions, and Opportunities

Abstract

Objectives

Using my experiences as an associate editor for a scholarly journal and a professor at a research university, I will discuss the ways critical race theory can be used as methodology (in the form of counterstories and counternarratives for use in critical race ethnographies, for example) and as a theory in and of itself that can analytically and conceptually frame an ethnography.

Perspective

Through what McCall (2005) and Nash (2008) call the complexity of intersectionality, the paper examines some of the newer trends in critical race theory (CRT) research in education. These trends speak not only to the centrality of race and racism in CRT, but how social science research of dynamic and interconnected categories such as gender, disability, class, and many more require intersectional and complex methodologies.

Methodology and Data Sources

The paper incorporates scholarship related to CRT and intersectionality. Methodological complexity involves three approaches: anticategorical, intracategorical, and intercategorical. Anticategorical complexity is based on scholarship that calls attention to the social processes of categorization and the workings of exclusion and hierarchy, processes that draw and maintain boundaries of gender, race, etc. Intracategorical complexity describes research that problematizes the exclusionary implications of categorization and then presents narratives that represent the multiplicity of persons and who they are and how they represent themselves. Such descriptions demonstrate the inadequacy of the categories such as race and gender. Finally, intercategorical complexity presents a methodological approach that is grounded in the premise that there are relationships of oppression among already legally and socially defined groups, and they are imperfect and ever changing. These relationships are at the center of the analysis.

Findings

Intercategorical complexity can be strategically useful in critical race qualitative research studies that both call the categories themselves into question and, at the same time, display the linkages among categories like race, gender, and inequality. These approaches also remind us of the importance of racial reflexivity as something more than just simple “member checking.” The technique requires researchers to deeply question assumptions of why research is being done and for what purposes, including their own (Pillow, 2003).

Significance

The paper explores some of ways in which CRT seeks to examine and uncover critical social issues such as “deep whiteness” (Bonilla Silva, 2015), the racialization of immigrants, intermediate racial categories, and the globalization of race theory. I will conclude with a discussion of racial authenticity versus racial sincerity (Jackson, 2005) as a way to examine how I as an editor push authors’ submissions to explore the methodological tensions involved when researchers misconstruct racial authenticity as racial sincerity. Both are at opposite yet intersecting ends which attempt to answer the question as to what, why, and how do we do ethnographic research on race, racism, and the call for post-race theory in research (Leonardo, 2013).

Author

• Laurence Parker, University of Utah