Thinking Critically About "Social Justice Methods"

• In Event: 25.027 - Multimethod Approaches to Research for Social Justice and Equity in Education

Abstract

This paper offers a few reflections on my thinking related to socially-just research methods as well as a few examples of maneuvers in qualitative methodology that are oriented toward social justice, but are project specific, crystallizing in the space, time of that moment of inquiry. As part of a larger collection of papers that recount journeys of becoming justice-oriented researchers—a project that is always in process, never complete—and exploring what socially-just methods might look like, I describe some of my shifts in thinking over the years that emerge from my feminist training during the rise of poststructuralist approaches in educational research in the 1990s (e.g., Lather, 1993; Richardson, 1997; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000; see Bailey & Fonow, 2012) through more than a decade of teaching qualitative methodology courses in a mid-western state. In the spirit of Lather, I find myself always working within/against contemporary discourses and institutional practices toward the horizons of the not-yet. I begin here from a basic and important premise in my thinking about research thought and practice: that inquiries with justice-oriented aims, and that conceptualize, conduct, and represent research aligned with justice-oriented aims however defined, must work against conceptualizing and freezing any given method, tool, approach or representation at the outset of a study as inherently just. In fact, as many researchers have noted, the terms and practices such as “social justice,” “emancipatory” and “decolonizing” that have surfaced in the methodological literature for decades are at times so heavily used and ambiguous that their critical meaning and power is lost.

In our era of productive “methodological proliferation”, a range of processes have become commonplace for researchers to use for emancipatory ends—as Lather terms it, working with rather than on participants. Such tools and stances include careful attention to power dynamics in conducting, analyzing and representing research, including researcher reflexivity, peer-dialogue, peer-analysis, and member checks among others. They might include involving participants at every stage of the research, from conceptualizing the questions to collaborating through the process of data analysis and representation. Others have championed the use of particular participatory or creative methodologies, such as photovoice, arts-based, or autoethnographic practices, for displacing the researcher as primary instrument and meaning-maker and producing different kinds of knowledge (St. Pierre, 2000). Yet all researchers are vulnerable to shifting forms of normalization, to discourses that champion hegemonic standards, or even “new” and “better” methods, including those oriented toward “social justice.” The danger of such disciplining practices in contemporary neoliberal circumstances, Canella (2001) reminds us, is that researchers become disciplined as good subjects in ways that shape our very embodied sense of satisfaction, knowledge, security, and identity as researchers. All norms have power to fix thinking, to occlude and foreclose conceptual possibilities, and to reproduce hegemonic power relations. In this paper, I discuss some of these critical complexities through specific projects, including historical work.

Author

• Lucy E. Bailey, Oklahoma State University