Stories of Public, Stories of Good: Scaled Approaches to Educational Research in the Rural Rust Belt

• In Event: For What Public and Whose Good? Critical Reflections on Research Practices for Advancing "Public Good"

Abstract

Resistance to simple 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, responsible to multiple publics (Noblit, Flores, & Murillo, 2004). As researcher, I seek to work beyond damage (Tuck, 2009) inflicted on rural/rustbelt spaces through a framing based in stagnant, backwards perspectives typical in academic literature/popular media (Biddle & Azano, 2016). I also work to resist rosy/idyllic versions of a ‘real’ America located in nostalgia/pride also typical of writing about rural US (Massey, 1995). Here, I consider the collision of stories told about the rural rustbelt as connected to particularities of public(s) and difficult to pin down ‘good’ given the “social advantage that accompanie[s] [whiteness]” (Harris, 1995) in order to interrogate understanding rural-rustbelt space and researcher complicities in the process/product of education research.

The post-industrial rural towns of the Midwestern United States have been subject of surging media interest since 2016. Across representations there is an explicit focus on giving voice to and complicating these places as publics. 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. I found, in working to inform research and ‘public’ audiences about substantive findings from this study that stories I selected to share were fraught with implicit understandings of whose interest was served (which public) and towards what ends (what good) (Author, 2018; Author, 2019).

As such, I foreground intersecting complexities of geography, class, and race by examining what happened when 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/geographic difference in the US (Pew Research Center, 2018). Thus, I question my practice of “masking” (Jerolmack & Murphy, 2017) and how I located the responsibilities (Noblit, et al, 2004) I have to notions of ethics/justice when working in Stewartsville, Midwest. I draw on whiteness studies that acknowledge the mobile privilege that exists and is produced by white racial experience, including my own, and acknowledge such privilege can be experienced unequally, often due to geographic or economic access (Harris, 1995; Wray, 2006). I consider how/when/whether to scale the public my research serves and when to make claims about (specific) good. Thus, I interrogate whether my research erased particularities to the extent of limiting possibilities to share politically meaningful findings with the research community and public(s) about public education in rural contexts. I argue researchers must interrogate what we mobilize in terms of race, geography, and class when attaching ourselves to responsibilities to public(s) and to good.

Author

• Alexandra Panos, University of South Florida