Ungrounding Discourse: Critical Ethnography, Method, and the Political

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: The (Im)possibility of Methods in Curriculum Study and Teacher Education, and Its “Alternative” Investigation

Abstract

A primary condition of truth in ethnographic research is “grounding” (see Denzin, 1997). A grounded ethnography recognizes the challenge posed by methods “getting it right,” but at the same moment presumes that a researcher’s sufficient attention to context might yet reveal the “world out there.” This faith in methods as a conduit to unadulterated truth is at loggerheads with posthumanist critiques that challenge the possibility of disentangling “self” and “Other” (Rabinow, P., 2008; St.Pierre & Pillow, 2000). This paper explores what it would mean for critical ethnography to historicize the very “grounds” upon which notions of the human and science are asserted as facts rather than as the provisional, provincial, and political.
In Critical Development Studies generally, and in critical approaches to education research specifically, grounded methods seek to represent the voice and agency of the marginalized in order to “counter” hegemonic discourses of transnational schooling reforms, policy, and research (see Bajaj, 2009; Baily, 2011). While these critical approaches are important to liberal theories of equality and representation, they also embody important limits in how difference is seen and acted upon. They do not attend to how the very practices that make up “kinds” of peoples with distinct needs, desires, and aspirations are deeply entangled as the commitments of transnational education policy and school reforms that are often the focus of critique. In seeking to represent the marginalized voice of the Other, the grounded ethnographer risks reinscribing the categories that differentiate and divide kinds of people.
Herein lies this paper’s intervention: By historicizing the methodological practices that generate self and Other, it becomes possible to contest social science expertise that derives its authority upon “being there”—of talking to people and studying their meanings through categories and classifications in order to generate the “data” of who “they” are. Methods generate conditions for what is admissible as “true” discourse and entails a hierarchy of who may speak and what is permissible to say that Rancière (2004) describes as the “policing” of identities and the social world.
An alternative to the methodological double bind is “un-grounding” critical ethnographies by historicizing the present. Un-grounding means refusing to participate in the inscription of the identities of Others in ways that would police who one is or should be, instead suspends and analyzes the practices in education that speak with scientific authority about how differences are generated and understood. Historicizing draws upon techniques familiar to both historians (i.e., archival research) and ethnographers (i.e., interviews), and yet, is distinct from both in that it questions the authority of the researcher to represent and speak for others.
A frank discussion of the challenges embedded in critical ethnographic approaches is necessary if the hope of research interventions is to avoid falling into the very historical presuppositions about people that it would ostensibly challenge. Rather than assuming the researcher as a prophet, historicizing is a mode for practicing dissensus by opening up the taken for granted about people and making these qualities available for scrutiny, contestation, and transformation.

Author

• Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, The University of Kansas