Situating the Knowledges of Quantification: Understanding How Bodies Count in Postsecondary Education

• In Event: 14.045 - Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: 14.045-23 - Queering Positionality

Abstract

On May 13, 2016, the U.S. Department of Education’s (DoE) Office for Civil Rights, alongside the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, issued the first Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students. The letter signaled a national watershed moment in the visibility for trans* students, providing resources with clarifying terminology, “examples of policies and emerging practices to support transgender students.” (p. 1) For researchers at the National Center for Education Statistics (a subdivision of the Institute of Education Sciences), however, the issuance of this letter created an opening to interrogate its current survey components, particularly with regards to questionnaires which currently solely provide respondents with binary options for gender-related items. Anticipating further changes, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), one of the primary databases hosted by NCES, has already announced a Technical Review Panel (TRP) broadly focused on gender for October 2016.
As other researchers have noted, surveys like IPEDS (Renn & Lunceford, 2004) and the U.S. Census (Mora, 2014) have been subjected to intense scrutiny in their changes to survey items focused on demographic data, like race and ethnicity. This body of work calls attention to the importance of situating these surveys as artifacts that illuminate specific social and historical junctures within educational research.
Yet, absent from these accounts, are the roles of the data scientists charged with constructing these instruments. In turn, this presentation discusses how federal and institutional data scientists narrate the changes to demographic information collected through IPEDS. Specifically, it draws from a subset of oral histories with over twelve current and past government officials and an additional twelve current and past members of institutional research offices that use IPEDS data in their everyday operations. How do these data scientists’ racial and gender ideologies frame their understanding of data collection strategies, particularly with respect to changes in IPEDS’ racial/ethnic and gender survey items? In producing these oral histories, I invited data scientists to narrate their own points of entry into their professional fields, as well as their interest in quantitative approaches to understanding social differences. By collecting their own narratives of self alongside their perspectives on the utility and objectivity of surveys like IPEDS, I sought to capture moments of consonance and dissonance in participants’ racial and gender ideologies.
I frame my textual analyses of these data scientists’ narratives through Donna Haraway’s notion of situated knowledges, a stance that “argues for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims.” (1988, p. 589). In doing so, I tease the ironies between claims for universality asserted by population-based survey technologies (Spade, 2015) and the situated embodiments of those producing these artifacts. Thus, I offer a queer critique of quantitative research by calling attention to the bodies of the producers of data that have heretofore been rendered invisible through their own epistemic investments in the presumed objectivity afforded by their line of work.

Author

• Andrés Castro Samayoa, Boston College