Useless Narratives and an Interrogation of Practices of (Un)Masking in the Rural Rust Belt

• In Event: 61.022 - (Un)Masking Ruralities: By Whom and for What?

Abstract

Resistance to simple or incomplete narratives in education research comes from the stance that they render findings useless for the political work of understanding contexts of education as they exist today (Anders & Lester, in press). Postcritical ethnographic perspectives on representation offer challenges to notions of simplicity by framing research as political, moral, and responsible to multiple communities (Noblit, Flores, & Murillo, 2004). As researcher, I seek to work beyond damage (Tuck, 2009) inflicted on rural and rustbelt spaces through a framing based in stagnant and backwards perspectives typical in academic literature and popular media (Biddle & Azano, 2016). I also work to resist rosy and idyllic versions of a ‘real’ America located in nostalgia and pride also typical of writing about the rural US (Massey, 1995). In this paper I consider the collision of media and academic research as connected to particularities of rural rustbelt places and the “social advantage that accompanie[s] [whiteness]” (Harris, 1995) to interrogate the understanding of rural space and researcher complicities in the process and product of education research.

The post-industrial rural towns of the Midwestern United States have been the subject of surging media interest from late 2016 into 2018. Across these representations there is an explicit focus on giving voice to and complicating these places. Yet, also across these media representations is an emphasis on narratives that frame white majority, high poverty rural and rustbelt spaces in binaries: culpable, or not; complex, or not; erased, or not; powerful, or not. Stewartsville, the pseudonym for the location of my own four-year publicly-engaged ethnography, is located in just such a place (Author, 2016; Author 2017; Author 2018). I found, in reading media with teacher-participants, that they read both with and against these binaries by distancing and affiliating themselves with the towns in which they live and work, implicating current media portrayals in how teachers orient to their work in schools (Author, 2018).

As such, I foreground the intersecting complexities of geography, class, and race by examining what happened when, as a researcher, I was confronted with national media attention about Stewartsville in the midst of a post-truth and increasingly politically-divisive present that is characterized by racial and geographic difference in the US (Pew Research Center, 2018). Thus, I question my practice of “masking” (Jerolmack & Murphy, 2017) when working at the intersection of media attention and schooling in Stewartsville. I draw on whiteness studies that acknowledge the mobile privilege that exists and is produced by white racial experience, including my own, and that acknowledge such privilege can be experienced unequally, often due to geography or economic access (Harris, 1995; Wray, 2006). I consider how and if attempting to maintain anonymization holds the possibility of erasing particularities to the extent of limiting possibilities to share politically meaningful findings with the research community about the work of public education in rural contexts. I argue education research must look to what the practice of masking mobilizes in terms of race, geography, and class when working in a media-saturated time.

Author

• Alexandra Panos, University of South Florida