How Bad Can a Good Girl Be?

• In Event: 63.070 - Bad Girl Theory and Practice: Qualitative Research in Post-Truth Times

Abstract

Purpose: This paper tracks recent developments in feminist methodology and qualitative inquiry, with a late breaking foray into rethinking the quantitative, including some “notes” on assessment.
Theory framework: The paper is located on the edge of several discourse/practices: education research, including its qualitative variant; critical theory; and the various postie movements in theory as interrupted by feminist commitments to praxis.
Methods/Data: The method used is autobiographical self-reflection on a body of work long interested in interdisciplinarity and cultural hybridity. Particularly influenced by “mixed genre” writing that combines historical, philosophical, popular culture, literary, sociological and ethnographic perspectives, the paper explores what difference various shifts in cultural theory—from structuralism to poststructuralism, postcolonialism, queer theory and, of late, post-humanism—might mean in addressing the question of how knowledge remains possible given the end of the value free notion of the construction of “truth.”
The data consists of “narratives of methodology” from empirical studies that address theoretical issues, from introductory women’s studies classrooms to women’s stories of their experiences of living with HIV/AIDS, to “research on research” where various studies are mined for methodological insights in doing (post)critical policy research in a time of governmental incursion into education research methods. Here, regardless of topic, the interest is in using empirical work, particularly ethnographic fieldwork, to address how we live out the weight of history in our lives and the capacity of the world to surprise us and exceed the “too easy to tell” story.
Results: Shuttling between forms and genres of academic writing, the result is a hybrid of intellectual autobiography, academic memoir and an archival collection of various documents. Here a history is woven of academic life, with backstory and a little gossip too.
Significance: Working on the edges of feminist methodology in terms of narrative theory, ethnographic fieldwork and post-structural theories of writing, the paper presents an history of working in the field of education research from a time when critical theory was the cutting edge to contemporary times when “truth” claims are recognized as political football. As such, it offers both a reflection on where we have been and a movement into possible futures where quantitative/qualitative distinctions are newly rethought and philosophy is brought to such practical fields as assessment. It is a time of post-qualitative methods and intersectionality feminism, an era where inclusivity is the word of the moment. While “post-race” clashed with the historical reality of increasing inequality, something has gotten unleashed whereby “critical” has become almost the dominant and feminist “intersectional” has become a popular movement, announced from the stage of the 2018 Academy Awards by Ashley Judd, schooled, I presume, by Tarana Burke, who founded MeToo, as well as the women who founded Black Lives Matter.
Given the “borderline postmodernism” that underlies the truth games of present headlines, a “full Orwell” time of not knowing what to believe or what evidence to trust, this paper wrestles with the question of how science can be made to mean in present times.

Author

• Patti A. Lather, The Ohio State University