Meditations on Experience: The Politics and Ethics of "Not Knowing" in Educational Research

• In Event: Responsibility...Even in Our Methods: Critical Theories as Methods for Social Justice Research

Abstract

Objectives
This presentation is the story of an ontological and epistemological journey as a researcher (Author, 2019; 2020). It contributes to conversations surrounding the “politics and ethics of evidence” and the value of qualitative work in addressing matters of equity and social justice (Lather, 2006). It subscribes to a postfoundational and a decolonial tradition that interrogates the complicity between, on the one hand, the faith in theory, truth, and evidence and, on the other, the fact that the racial Other has been described as incapable of truth telling, of giving—precisely—evidence (Spivak, 1998, p. 214). Specifically, it interrogates the category of experience in a study with a group of immigrant Latina girls in a high school in Madrid, Spain. It excavates the paradox generated by two axioms in educational research: 1) the importance of reclaiming the place of providing evidence (of telling truths), even the importance of truth; and 2) upholding the “vanguardism of truth-evidence-theory” that can generate oppression in its name (p. 38).

Theoretical framework, Method, and Data Sources
By bringing up front the epistemological and ontological journey that became the foundation of this study, I expose how I worked out the tensions and contradictions in the early stages of this study as an object of epistemological and ontological analysis. Patty Lather’s (2009) metaphor of getting lost serves as a theoretical/methodological foundation of this research. Despite its disorienting connotation, the metaphor of getting lost is less about not knowing what to do and more about deconstructing the categories that we know, are certain about, or familiar with. Drawing on Lather’s call for getting lost, I probe a subversive methodology of certainty, evidence, and truth, in which I start with disassembling the essentialist subject of experience in order to reassemble it later. Getting lost in experience raises issues of “ontological methodology” (Law, 2004, p. 154)—it reflects my own concerns with the ontological categories of experience in educational research and the methods and methodologies we use to study these experiences. As Patty Lather puts it, getting lost “is a science based less on knowledge than on an awareness of epistemic limits where ethics begins with an embrace of such limits as constitutive of ethical knowing: de-colonizing, post-imperial” (2008b, p. 60).

Significance and conclusions
The tensions and contradictions that emerged during my research serve as a starting point in the quest for alternative research practices to realist and empiricist educational research. By placing the notion of experience under scrutiny, I engage with the political implications of the benevolent questions in educational research when trying to capture the voice of the “voiceless”. The critical and decolonial feminism to which I am committed proposes that putting one’s categories under a critical lens can help us see how these categories work across time and what they exclude. Getting lost in experience allows us to understand how individuals are constituted by experience through different material technologies and to propose a political intervention.

 

Author

• Belén Hernando-Lloréns, University of Iowa