66.012 - "Critical Bifocality" in a "Post-Truth" Era: The Increasing Necessity of Exploring Structure and Agency Through Multimodal Methodologies to Address the Role of Education in Deepening Inequalities

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

Weis and Fine developed critical bifocality to reflect a dedicated theoretical and methodological commitment that documents at once the historic and contemporary linkages and capillaries of structural arrangements and the discursive practices by which those on the ground in schools and communities make sense of their circumstances. Critical bifocality offers a way to think about epistemology, design, and the politics of educational research in light of new forms of macro-level structural dynamics associated with the refractive implications of globalization and neo-liberalism, in this case, in the U.S., a nation that is arguably, in terms of income inequality, the most unequal society in the world. Critical bifocality enables us to consider how researchers might account empirically for global, national and local transformations as produced, insinuated, embodied, and resisted by youth and adults trying to make sense of current educational and economic possibilities in massively shifting context.
In the tradition of DuBois and feminist Sandra Harding critical bifocality insists that practical questions be unpacked historically and epistemologically – where does this come from and how do we know? - so that scholars may conceptualize and actualize this form of research while continuing to acknowledge that any move towards dogmatization of thought runs the risk of concretizing what must be continually challenged and unpacked in the current “post truth” context.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• Lois Weis, University at Buffalo - SUNY

Participants

• Michelle Fine, City College of New York - CUNY

• James D. Anderson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Adam Gamoran, William T. Grant Foundation

• Joyce E. King, Georgia State University

• Rubén G. Rumbaut, University of California - Irvine

• Terrenda Corisa White, University of Colorado-Boulder