Examining and Mirroring Spatial Lived Realities of People of Color Through Critical Feminist Ethnomethodology

• In Event: Conceptualizing Spatial Justice in Education: Creating, Navigating, and Surviving Racialized Space through Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objective
Ethnomethodology (e.g. Goodwin, 2000) offers powerful analytic tools to understand how spatial realities of people of color are co-constructed, maintained, and transformed through everyday social activities. However, a narrow focus on micro-interactional processes erases the central role of race, racism, and white supremacy in the purposeful and dynamic construction of place, as well as holistic understanding of the agency of people of color. Through collaborative inquiry between researcher and participant, we investigate how our critical feminist approach to ethnomethodology strengthened the methodological choices of studying the spatial lived realities of a Black teacher in an urban high school.

Theoretical Framework
Acknowledging that U.S. contemporary racism often operates through systemic processes that are seemingly “colorblind” and “normal and natural” (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Ladson-Billings, 1998), we argue that a place-based examination of everyday activities experienced by People of Color is crucial to understanding how race relations are constructed, maintained, transformed, and experienced in social space (Delaney, 2002). Drawing on an intersecting lens of Asian American Pacific Islander (Yee, 2009) and endarkened feminist epistemology (Dillard, 2000), we introduce critical feminist ethnomethodology as a research paradigm that considers how our shared yet distinctive ways of knowing, being, feeling, and doing as Vietnamese and Congolese Black American women influenced how we approached research with love and in community (hooks, 2003), with an understanding that macro- and micro-level productions of race, space, and place are mutually constitutive processes.

Methods
Focusing on language, the body, and the material environment, we investigated the everyday social and curricular activities in a Black teacher’s AP Language course for a predominantly Black and Latina/o/x student population in South Central Los Angeles, CA. Drawing from videorecordings, interviews, written and informal reflections, and field notes, we examined how critical feminist ethnomethodology shaped the research design, study context, and analysis.

Findings
Shared reflections throughout the course of the study amplified the historical, ancestral, spiritual, embodied, and structural dimensions of interacting in social space. These emergent perspectives expanded multimodal data collection for examining spatial lived realities of women of color, which were not observable or realized through interviews and ethnography alone. The racialized identity of the researcher uniquely positioned her to notice invisibilized ways Black female educators transform classroom spaces for students of color. In turn, the embodied presence of Southeast Asian American woman served as reflective tool for the participant, re-affirming how she experienced race in body and being as a Black woman within and beyond the classroom. The dual processes of participating in and reflecting on the study had critical healing and restorative effects on her own practices, leading to the creation of racial affinity space, through the advocacy for and teaching of an Afro AP Language class designed for Black students.

Scholarly Significance
Inspired by hooks (2003) and contributing to humanizing methodologies (Paris & Winn, 2014), we argue that critical feminist ethnomethodology offers paradigmatic shift that centers the material and individual creators whose work we study, and comprehensive analytic tool for examining spatial realities of people of color.

Authors

• Josephine Pham, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Kiese Vita, Alain LeRoy Locke College Preparatory Academy