Navigating Digital Media Analysis in Multi-Sited Justice Seeking Research

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel results from over two years of conversation and intellectual development around methodological questions regarding media analysis in different kinds of empirical work. It addresses how the relationship between theoretical commitments (the presenting authors essentially share these) and empirical reality helps change, consolidate or disrupt the construction of methodology in educational research. The papers presented are all similarly oriented in theoretical analysis, using liberationist writings from Black feminist research, critical race studies, Marxist social theory, anti-capitalist research and feminist theory. They each examine specific realities and attempt to give an account of how the existing systems of marginalisation construct these empirical realities to serve the goal of maintaining structures of power. Some papers address disruption of this maintenance; others address how these systems might extend what appears to be disruptive opportunities that are coopted into maintaining the system. The authors use media analysis as part of their more extensive methodology, and a vast amount of this media is digitalised due to the multi-sited nature of the papers presented. The panel's main objective is to showcase how methodology needs to be adapted to empirical circumstances and that this can happen without sacrificing the theoretical underpinnings for why such methods are effective in the case of liberatory or justice-seeking research. The panellists seek to reconsider the secondary place of methodology in recent liberation literature and centre it as a site of radical possibility in creating an episteme that resists. The following paragraphs further outline what the panellist means when discussing digital media, multi-sited study, and justice-seeking, liberatory study.

Digital media refers to a broad range of platforms and technologies that facilitate the creation, distribution, and consumption of digital content (Dewdney & Ride 2006). In our research, digital media is used as a critical lens through which we examine justice-seeking narratives and practices. It is characterised by its interactive nature allowing users to consume, create and share content (Leaning, 2017). This participatory nature allows for the engagement of diverse perspectives which can alter political landscapes and popular culture (Schroeder, 2016) by reorienting a dominant and hegemonic understanding of who knowledge producers are. Thus we frame digital media not just as a technological phenomenon, but a critical site of ideological contestation. In the context of multi-sited justice seeking research, therefore, digital media is both a medium of content and a dynamic process influenced by socio-political factors. We particularly focus on the interweaving of digital media such as social media, television programmes, movies and websites within our chosen methodologies. Critical Discourse Analysis is employed to scrutinise the ways underlying power structures and ideological biases are shaped by and shape digital media content (Fairclough, 2013). Intersectional and decolonial lenses further expose how digital media can perpetuate or disrupt systemic inequalities (Noble, 2018).

To examine the multiple realities, contestations and positionalities of liberatory research, the panel will explore digital media analysis in multi-sited research, which examines the logics of relationship, translation and association through cultural meanings, objects, identities in diffuse time-space (Marcus, 1995). We use multi-sited frameworks to investigate geographically, spatially and temporally distinct yet connected heterarchical sites to understand how colonial-modern racial and capitalist hierarchies sustain through them (Gille & Riain, 2002; Pierides, 2010). In our varied empirical and theoretical understandings, we explore sites both through larger lenses of oppressive systems and local and temporal manifestations of multiple realities and contexts. These explorations imbue our research with different frames of reference of scale, system and participation for interstitial and intersectional contestations and conversations in-between and within multi-sited realities (Falzon, 2005; Fortun, 2009; Cook et al, 2009; McAdam-Otto & Nimführ, 2021). The digital and physical co-exist as sites within their space-time contexts, and are approached within the panellists' research studies through varied discursive and critical lenses. The panel will expand on their navigations of this interaction, from following the medium to unpacking co-engagements (Rogers, 2013; Marino, 2020) of the digital with the social and physical aspects of multi-sited research.

Our conceptualisation of justice depends upon a dynamic and liberatory approach, capable of addressing the various violent systems which our projects are concerned with. In the same way that oppressive systems are global, so too are struggles for justice. The dynamic nature of justice also necessitates a synthesis of different spaces of transformation, paying homage to the tradition of combining efforts of those within theoretically-oriented academic spaces with activist and practitioner spaces (Choudry, 2015). Through our application of both theory and method, we speak to a justice which is critical. After all, working with theory is a liberatory practice (hooks, 1994), one which we see as inherently feminist, anti-racist, decolonial and anti-capitalist. The justice we subscribe to ensures the curation of a world where liberation is joyful, creative and embodied – a pleasurable experience (brown, 2019), taking lead from Black feminist and decolonial scholarship. Resistance should be a venture that is restorative, not extractive, and the methods chosen in this increasingly digitised world become ever more significant. As we imagine transformed institutions, societies and worlds, we must not lose sight of this.

We do this work not solely to critique but in exploration of alternatives to the logics and material conditions of all co-formed systems of oppression which permeate our educational and digital spaces (Bacchetta, 2009). The panellists recognise that ‘decolonisation is not a metaphor’ (Tuck and Yang, 2012) and that completely dismantling these forms of subordination in our education systems would necessitate the total undoing of colonial institutions. But rather than submitting to obstacles which make justice work in our neoliberal educational environment feel like ‘banging one’s head into a brick wall’ (Ahmed, 2012), our attention to the resistances against liberatory transformation opens analytic and epistemological paths to reparative alternatives that extend beyond easily co-opted calls for diversity within the same systems (Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nişancıoğlu, 2018; González Stokas, 2023). Though this panel centres our use of digital media analysis to this end, it is but one of many tools the authors put forth as a part of necessary justice-seeking research and praxis.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Educational Alternatives: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy, Militarism, and the Climate Crisis

Chair

• Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• “If I’m Paying £400 Towards Your Rent, I Own You”: How anti-Blackness and misogynoir inform ‘toxic’ Black masculinity. - Melissa Anoble, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Signifying the Subaltern: Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity in Higher Education in USA, UK and India - Shahnaaz Khan, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Stories, Letters, and Laughter: Black Feminist Activism and Community Building at ‘Elite’ British and American Universities - Tyra Edwina Amofah-Akardom, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Exploring Legacies of Whiteness and Coloniality in Anglo-American Universities Through the Knowledge Politics of Historical Reckoning - Connor Middleton, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

Discussant

• Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge