Facts and Ethics in an Era of Antifactualism: Dreamers on an Entangled Road to Social Justice

• In Event: 47.098 - Sheraton Roundtable Session Eight - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 47.098-4 - New Possibilities, Traditional Methodologies

Abstract

Drawing on a participatory critical ethnographic study with Dreamers, this paper reports on the possibilities of qualitative research to articulate the intra-sectional (Dennis 2017) space of facts and ethics in the service of social justice. The ethnography was conducted over a period of 3 years in a local school district drawing on richly across interactions with elementary, middle and high schools that were serving an increasing number of “newcomer” students. In an era with anti-factual debates and propaganda against immigrants, the counter stories (Fine 2018) are not merely separate but equal perspectives. These different stories produce a communicatively and materially structured entanglement (Barad 2008) of facts and ethics in our efforts toward social justice (Freire 1970, Kuntz, 2016, Dennis 2018).

Author

• Barbara Dennis, Indiana University