Creating a Research and Resistance Agenda for Critical Qualitative Higher Education Research

• In Event: Critical Qualitative Research and the Corporatized University: On a Collision Course

Abstract

Traditionally, researchers have been left to their own interests to design and pursue a research agenda which is clearly integrated and which builds upon itself in increasingly sophisticated ways. This presentation argues that some subset of researchers consider building a research collaborative, where the interests of several or many researchers coalesce around a set of questions deemed critically important for preserving higher education as a public good, and re-establishing academic freedom and tenure as cornerstones of free and unfettered inquiry, and the protection of faculty to pursue topics which may be deemed inimical to corporate interests. Some of the issues and forms of resistance which need to be addressed, however, include:
1. Qualitative researchers should be alert to the changes in universities occurring around them, particularly at their own institutions.
2. Critical qualitative researchers should examine proposed changes in governance structures and regulations regarding hiring, promotion and tenure to try to understand how such shifts will affect their progress through the ranks, and those whom they will be permitted to hire.
3. Efforts to “define” science rigidly—much as the National Research Council has attempted to do—by various committees on campus should be strongly resisted, which can only be done by having qualitative researchers and critical social scientists agree to serve on those committees whenever asked. Having a “seat at the table” will become more critical than ever.
4. Critical qualitative researchers in the fields of higher education and K-12 education need to engage larger audiences with careful, reasoned arguments tailored for a wide range of readers. This will usually be Op- Ed pieces in newspapers and news magazines, blogs, listservs, and other multimedia venues, as a way of countering the discourses of neoliberalism, late capitalism, and corporatization.
5. Qualitative and critical qualitative researchers need to recognize that qualitative inquiry is “under fire” (Denzin, 2009), and collaborate to construct a multi-sited but coherent research agenda that serves to “open up” what is hidden around efforts to commercialize the universities and privatize public education.

Author

• Yvonna S. Lincoln, Texas A&M University - College Station