Meditations on Experience and Subjectivity: An Epistemological Journey in Ethnographic Research in Education

• 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

I’m so lost! I’m not sure if this study makes sense, if even worth to be done… I came all the way down here to see how these girls did citizenship, challenged the discourses available and… I don’t see anything. At the end, is it true that they’re not that “political” after all? Also, it’s so problematic what I see in this school! I was coming to study “good practices” and all I can do now is to write about how bad things are… great! Now I’ll reinforce what everybody already believes about this school, its teachers, and students. Good job! (Fieldnotes, 10/25/2013)

A sentiment of anxiety and despair is noticeable in the above quote from my ethnographic study on the subjectivization of citizenship among immigrant girls. What is it about contradictions and tensions in ethnographic research that make us want to evade them? What does this tell us about the epistemological foundations that ground our ways to engage with messiness in research practices?
Feminism has traditionally relied on experience as a reliable source of authoritative evidence in educational research. However, post-structural and post-colonial feminists have drawn our attention on the limitations of the too often “easy-to-tell story of salvation” of this research (Britzman, 1997; Lather, 2009; Spivak, 2000). In this paper, I contribute to Patti Lather’s provocative call “against empathy, voice, and authenticity” in feminist and educational research. This project refuses a mode of thought and practice that secures itself with the “consolidations of foundationalism and nostalgia for presence, the lost object of correct knowledge, and the security of understanding” (2009, p. 18). The purpose of this presentation, then, is to engage with the feminist project of “not knowing” and “getting lost” (Lather, 2008) as an ethical and political practice in educational research. “Getting lost” becomes a disorientation where openness and unknowingness are part of the process, research practice that relishes conflicting interpretations―a permanent unsettlement of the research practice.
The tensions and contradictions that emerged during my ethnographic research on the process of subjectivization of citizenship among immigrant girls serves as a fertile ground in the quest for alternative research practices to realist-educational research. To accomplish this, I place the notion of experience under scrutiny and engage with the political implications of the benevolent, questions we tend to ask in realist-ethnographic research when trying to capture the voice of the “voiceless”. “Getting lost” with experience, as a category of uncontestable evidence and an originary point of explanation, serves as a fertile site in the epistemological analysis of the limitations of realist-educational research to engage with the (im)possibility of methods in educational research. The feminism to which I am committed proposes how putting one’s categories in crisis can help us see how such categories work across time and what they exclude. I narrate how I troubled the category of experience on my research by historicizing it (Popkewitz, 2013; Scott, 1992). This historicizing of experience allowed me to understand how individuals are constituted by experience and to propose a political intervention.

Author

• Belén Hernando-Lloréns, University of Iowa