Studying Lives: Ethical Imperatives and Opportunities in the Postmodern Condition

• In Event: Learning Through Stories: Life Story Methodologies in the Study of Higher Education

Abstract

As a researcher engaged in critical inquiry with historically marginalized cultural communities in education, I have fixated my methodological consternation around what it can mean to be a democratic subject producing knowledge in the Twenty-First Century America. This work calls into question the relationships between subjects engaged in research and the kinds of productive “truth” that can be generated from such engagement. Within this context, community members and I are forced to confront the entrenchment of dehumanizing discourses of oppression (e.g., racist nativism) and their material effects (e.g., disenfranchisement from social opportunity) amidst the hyperreal production of discursive realities in our daily lives (Denzin, 2003). My response has been to take a cue from the performative turn in critical ethnography (Madison, 2005). This turn calls for a more embodied representation of meaning-making and asks for autobiography to enjoin itself to ethnography. Furthermore, I seek a humanizing critical inquiry that resists the colonial project of late capitalism (Smith, 1999), but rather vigilantly engages in reflexive practices to make power visible and afford the opportunity to interrogate that power from multiple and competing subjective geographies (Gildersleeve and Kuntz, 2010). In this symposium, I will problematize my own methodological assumptions and practices by sharing excerpts from a performance (auto)ethnography (Denzin, 2003) that I produced based on my engagement with Latino immigrant youth around college access/choice (see Gildersleeve, 2010).

Author

• Ryan Evely Gildersleeve, University of Denver