Sabotaging "Significance": A Call for Less Research and More Organizing

• In Event: "Disruption, Interruption, Change...It's Not Enough. What We Need Is Sabotage": Critical Participatory Inquiry as Sabotage in/of the Academy

Abstract

Objectives and Perspectives: This paper is an auto-ethnographic journey of critical reflexivity and ultimate rejection of the status quo within academia and is written from the position of a white, non-tenured university faculty member. Over the course of seven years I have shifted professional positions from doctoral student to university faculty member, and have recently shifted my research trajectory from what I consider to be edgy and anti-racist, but still within the bounds of being deemed acceptable, to one that gives the middle finger to academia, my university, and my future tenure committee. This paper follows that journey, offering vignettes to illustrate the need to completely alter the way academia understands and applies the intertwined, white supremacist concepts of rigor, validity, trustworthiness, and significance. These, I argue, are applied as tools of domination and control, as is much that calls itself “research”. What we need, in this moment, is less research and more organizing (Tuck, 2015). I wonder, how would we measure the “significance” of such a move?

Modes of Inquiry: Through five reflexive vignettes I map out my own personal discovery of research as domination. I move narratively from my first attempt at critical participatory inquiry (CPI) during my doctoral program when I conducted a project on racism with undocumented Latinx youth in rural Idaho (see Author, 2015). I then move through four other examples of CPI work, detailing how I have understood the significance of each project compared to how they have been received by peers and those in positions to judge the value of my scholarship. I aim for transparency as I detail how I have maneuvered within academia to find the right metrics, the right words, the right reviewers to bolster my own “significance”. I conclude with a personal moment of awakening to and naming of my own disgust with the ways in which academia reinforces white supremacy and colonialism through a narrow but intentional definition of significance, a definition that engages subtle and overt tactics of domination and dispossession.

Conclusions and Significance: This paper concludes with a discussion of how the concept or measure of significance is used to dominate and dispossess within academia. I return to anti-racist (Bernal & Villalpando, 2002) and decolonial literature (Castleden, Sylvestre, Martin, & McNally, 2015) to argue for an upending and, indeed, all-out rejection of normative notions of significance, validity, rigor, or quality, which serve to further neoliberal, neocolonial agendas to use research as tools of domination and control. Instead, I suggest that to engage in inquiry-informed organizing and activism is a necessary act of sabotage and should become the new yardstick, the new norm – the “so what?” that we often hear around dissertation defense tables.

Author

• Meagan Call-Cummings, George Mason University