Breaking the Glass: Tensions in Research "With and For" Education Justice Movements

• In Event: 66.015 - "With and For" Not "On" or "About": Engaging the Limits of Education Research for Movement-Building

Abstract

In June 2016, Yale University food service worker Corey Menafee was cleaning a dining room in the university’s Calhoun College, named after one of the U.S.’s most infamous pro-slavery politicians. Frustrated by a stained-glass window depicting enslaved Africans carrying bales of cotton, he stood on top of a table and used the end of his broomstick to break the window. “Menafee said the image is racist and degrading and he had become sick of seeing it everyday” (Democracy Now, 2016). As education scholars, our academic research is often disciplined into the production and relatively narrow circulation of research and writing “on” or “about” teacher candidates, students, families, and/or communities. Pervasive methodological norms value researchers’ disassociation with their researched and award institutional credibility to certain “knowledge” based on particular forms of evidence (Fine, 2011). Other forms are illegible or always deemed insufficient. Approaches to research and representation that seek to subvert these practices of disassociation and disrupt the reproduction of institutional life are never completely successful, given the structural and institutional conditions under which this research is produced and circulated. Thus, how do we understand the work of research in relation to the kinds of “knowledge to action” that are always already happening in both large and small ways within the movements in which we participate (i.e., Menafee’s act of resistance)? And, how can we destigmatize and learn from particularly difficult moments in this work?

This paper considers these questions from the context of a two-year activist research study embedded within an urban social justice education movement in Minnesota. I highlight and make sense of two moments that arose during the course of engaging and writing up the study that illuminate the kinds of tensions that arise when forms of “knowledge to action” that occur within movements are translated into academic/institutional research and writing, even as this research and writing is fueled by liberationist commitments: First, I describe a moment within the context of research with and for an urban social justice education union, which I was an active participant in. In my attempts to avoid burdening members with my research analysis, I later discovered that I had misinterpreted and misrepresented the role of race and whiteness during an important turning point in the organization. Next, I recount my experience engaging in collective memory work analysis and writing with a pre-service teacher candidate and fellow activist, Audra, and the different and hierarchized ways in which our collaborative work was received and valued by the education system. Analysis of both moments raises questions about the difficulties in enacting one’s ethical-political commitments to co-authorship and movement-embedded study within the context of satisfying one’s requirements for remaining within the university. After considering some of my own challenges, I conclude by raising questions and provocations to further think through the relationship between movement-embedded research and “breaking the glass” of the structurally and historically white supremacist institutions many of us work for.

Author

• Erin Lee Dyke, Oklahoma State University