Participation, Design, and Leadership: Denying Disabled Girls of Color Access to Educational Research

• In Event: Addressing Intersecting Oppressions in Institutional Review Board Processes: Constraints, Strategies, and Future Directions

Abstract

Purpose
Resonating with this year’s call for proposals to acknowledge “the roles we play in sustaining an array of social and educational inequities” (Harper et al., 2020, p. 1), this paper focuses on one junior scholar’s experiences navigating institutional IRB processes, within university and school district level activity systems during her dissertation year at an R1 institution and within university level activity systems during her first year as tenure-track faculty at a state teaching college.

Theoretical Framework
In this autoethnography, I draw on Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit; Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013) and cultural historical activity theory (CHAT; Cole & Engeström, 1993) to uncover how exclusionary mechanisms (systems and processes) were generated through IRB processes. The examined scholarship were two critical and participatory (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015) empirical projects with historically multiply-marginalized disabled girls of color in middle and high school. However, the barriers across activity systems were multifaceted and interacted to afford or constrain opportunities for disabled girls of color, some who use varied modes of expression and communicative mediums (e.g., facial expressions, eye contact, sign language; Author et al., under review), to participate in generative research. I use DisCrit and CHAT to examine how particular ideologies and mechanisms at macrosociopolitical (e.g., racism, ableism, linguicism) and microinteractional (e.g., classroom interactions, access to curriculum) levels (Erevelles & Minear, 2010) work in tandem across university and school district activity systems.

Methods
Through an autoethnographic narrative (Jones et al., 2013), I weave in my personal stories as they connect to mechanisms and normative discourses (Bhattacharya, 2017) within IRB processes, while also reflecting on my own complicity as an emerging scholar and first-year faculty member who identifies as a white woman with hidden disabilities.

Data Sources
Data collection sources and methods included: personal journaling and transcribed audio and video-recorded reflections. Once all data is transcribed, I will engage in multiple cycles of unitizing, categorizing, and labeling, first identifying the smallest pieces of information or chunks that can examined independently (Rodwell, 1998). Subsequent cycles will consist of reviewing and examining as I look for emerging relationships amongst categories through inductive analysis. Finally, I will engage in deductive analysis guided by my blended theoretical framework.

Findings
The findings from this study will support the existing literature showing how ableism and other intersecting oppressions (e.g., linguicism, racism, sexism) exist in IRB processes (e.g., Kersten-Parrish; Nusbaum & Sitter, 2016), mindful not to center whiteness.

Scholarly Significance
This study expands current understandings of how IRB processes (re)produce the underrepresentation of disabled girls of color in education research (García & Ortiz, 2013; Sinclair et al., 2018). Moreover, it interrogates the researcher’s role (or complicity) in dismantling intersecting oppressions in IRB processes. Finally, this study illuminates how this blended framing could be used in future research to examine how educators, administrators, and IRB members must “do more to educate the public and raise consciousness about beliefs, behaviors, cultures, structures, and systems that harm people and sustain inequities,” (Harper et al., 2020) explicitly within IRB processes.

Author

• Amanda L. Miller, Wayne State University