Mobilizing Traditional Methods for Transformational Ends: Subversive Possibilities When Combining Critical Frameworks and Conventional Methodologies

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Social science research has traditionally been a project of classification and measurement (Ghaziani & Brim, 2016; Smith, 1999; Lather, 1992). Scholarship in critical theory, in contrast, has long been invested in questioning, troubling, and exploding fixed categories and taken-for-granted assumptions about the social world (Wilson & Laing, 2018; Gillborn, 2007; Berlant & Warner, 1995). When combined, social science methods and queer, decolonizing, and Black feminist theoretical frameworks form what Ward (2016) calls a “productive oxymoron” (p. 72). As Ward emphasizes, such a contradiction is generative because it lends itself to subversive possibilities. The papers in this symposium explore such possibilities in education research by examining the role of qualitative methods and researchers through reflection on several distinct research projects.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Qualitative Research

Chair

• Harper Benjamin Keenan, University of British Columbia

Papers

• The Survey as a Drag Performance: Allowing for Openness and Complexity When Designing a Survey for Trans Workers in K–12 Schools - Lee Iskander, The University of British Columbia; Harper Benjamin Keenan, University of British Columbia

• Qualitative Data Analysis Through a Queer Métis Lens - Lucy Fowler, University of Manitoba

• "The Scandal Is My Gender": Disrupting Risk Discourses During a High School Ethnography - LJ Slovin, The University of British Columbia

• Vanishing: Storying Educational Research - Kyle M. Halle-Erby, University of California - Los Angeles

Discussant

• Rob Simon, University of Toronto