When Restoration Impedes Transformation: Interrogating Researcher Reflexivity and Practices of Repair in Community-Based Education Research

• In Event: Collaborative Inquiry as a Rehearsal of Educational Transformation: Issues of Race, Justice, and Community in Detroit

Abstract

Critical education scholarship has attended to various notions of care in relation to pursuing racial equity and justice—including care as an individual ethic or form of political agency, as a collective practice, and as an ideological discourse (Ginwright, 2010; Rolón-Dow, 2005; Siddle Walker & Snarey, 2004; Valenzuela, 1999; Wilson, 2014; 2015; 2016). Still, within scholarship exploring how these notions of care introduce risks and possibilities for advancing educational justice, researchers’ own reckoning with care as part of their scholarly reflexivity is often underexplored. In this paper, I analyze my own work designing and conducting a research study with a community-based education program in Detroit to illustrate the exigency of interrogating ideologies of care and repair for conducting transformative, anti-racist collaborative inquiry. Drawing on and building from theories of critical care (Author1, 2021; Author2, 2021; Sosa-Provencio, 2019; Wilson, 2015), as well as critical organizational studies of repair (Callahan, 2019; Graziano & Trogal, 2017), I interrogate the practical work of my own experience as a white woman conducting community-based research (CBR) with a cross-racial organization. In doing so, I demonstrate how, for scholars committed to advanced educational justice, the work of CBR constitutes a “regime of practice” (Graziano & Trogal, 2019, p. 204) vis-a-vis repair. I illustrate this notion by detailing contemporaneous and retrospective instances of my own researcher reflexivity: in formulating research questions, in entering research communities (including the communities of focus in my research and other communities influential in my work), in conducting research, and in representing my research. I conclude that the practical work of reflexive repair can be understood as mediating material and immaterial restoration—i.e., the maintenance and sustenance of our relations with each other and the communities in which we live—as well as mediating material and immaterial transformation—i.e., the re-making of these relations vis-a-vis institutionalized power. Interrogating how our particular practices of repair mediate restoration and transformation is critical for (re)aligning our work—including our decisions about what work is ours to do and in what communities we undertake that work—with the goals of CBR.
By detailing my own research experience to demonstrate how common CBR practices and norms relate to commodified and transactive notions of care and repair, I use this paper to invite other researchers to join me in asking how interpersonal, community, and systemic restoration and transformation animate our work. Just as Graziano and Trogal (2019) noted that “broader practices of care and social reproduction” share “a recalcitrance to be reduced to…inherently or intrinsically ‘good’” (p. 208), I ask us to resist framing such practices as inherently or intrinsically ‘bad.’ Instead, with careful attention to lineages of scholarship and thought forged largely by people of color in the pursuit of liberation, I consider reflexive repair as a form of praxis supporting anti-racist commitments in community-based research.

Author

• Carolyn Hetrick, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author