Participant Misdirection, Epistemic Aphasia, and the Ethnographic Interview

• In Event: Speaking Back to Methodological Aphasia: Challenging the Foundations of Race and Coloniality in Critical Educational Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives: I respond to the conference theme of “The Dreams, Possibilities, and Necessity of Public Education.” I ask, “do we have the tools to inquire about the dreams and possibilities of youth of color and excluded youth?” In order explore this question I interrogate the question of participant truthfulness within social science research methodology utilizing a lenses of anthropology of the West (Asad, 1993), surveillance studies (Browne, 2015; Weheliye, 2014) and colonial aphasia (Stoler, 2011).

Specifically, I explore the notion of self-censorship in the construction of interview methods, protocol, and analysis. In light of the hyper-surveillance of Muslim youth in the U.S. (Aaronson, 2014), research with this community often addresses to topic of self-censorship in classroom and community spaces (Author, 2016). Yet, the question of how surveillance (in its various forms) structures participant truthfulness has not been interrogated within social science research methodology. As scholars have began exploring silences (San Pedro, 2015a; San Pedro, 2015b), I consider participant misdirection, or “re-formations of truth.” Social scientific research built itself upon post-positivist dichotomous logics of trustworthy/un-trustworthiness (Denzin, 2010). Considering Stoler’s notion of colonial aphasia (2011), I ask how we might consider a Hegelian dialectic of thesis/anthesis/synthesis a more productive epistemological foundation for social research, and most specifically the interview method.


Perspectives. This study posits that Muslim youth are actively responding to the surveillance context which targets Muslim bodies, questions Muslim civility, and violates Muslim civil liberties in the U.S. (Ali, 2016). These responses include how they engage social researchers for their own political and social purposes. Drawing upon research in surveillance studies (Browne, 2015) and colonial aphasia (Stoler, 2011) this paper interrogates what the researcher has the ability to “see” empirically as mediated by the political context in which s/he works.

Methods and Data Sources. Over a six-year period I conducted three ethnographic studies with Muslim youth in Southern California and New York City. I have examined these data to ask what I heard and saw through the words and actions of young Muslims. In reanalyzing my data, I re-read my interview transcripts (within the broader context of field notes) to ask what the interviewee’s words reveal about the political and social anxieties of surveillance and the suspicion citizenship written upon Muslim bodies. I ask how the context of surveillance mediates a participants responses to a social researcher as well as mediates both’s vision, politically, socially (Weheliye, 2014), and epistemically (Asad, 1993). Finally, I ask how social scientific research can take into account the ways in which participates “play” with truthfulness to serve their purposes in an interview.


Significance. I ask how educational researchers construct, record, and ask question of data that responds to, appropriates, engages and reflects the epistemic anxieties of the contemporary moment of neoliberal multiculturalism (Melamed, 2011). This paper further develops a conversation about contemporary educational research, state surveillance and the data collection in order to further posit how engaged researchers can be responsive, and reflective of the communities in which they engage.

Author

• Arshad Imtiaz Ali, George Washington University