Tracing, Tracking, and Troubling Readings of Lather

• In Event: 52.084 - Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: 52.084-7 - Putting the Work to Work: Getting Smart, Messy, and Lost With the Work of Patti Lather

Abstract

The first paper takes up the politics of gendered knowledge production through tracking and scrutinizing the surprising turns, unexpected readings, and diverse appropriations of Lather's work as it has traveled across disciplinary boundaries and theoretical allegiances. Putting others’ work with her work to work, I engage in an eclectic empirical/literature/archival analysis of select book reviews and articles since the 1980s that mobilize Lather’s ideas to consider how diverse scholars construct the figuration of “Lather” and "Lather's ideas" in a range of sites. I seek to explore which ideas gain traction and energy in new lines of flight, which seem static and stuck, and which seem to side-step the ruins to reify normative qualitative approaches at odds with their critical, generative beginnings. I am particularly interested in how scholars have applied her work to positivist ends, and whether, like Spivak’s early efforts (1987) to consider the value of momentary, strategic essentialist identity coalitions to advance group politics and interests, such positivist moves might be/have been put to work in strategic ways that advance emancipatory evaluation and policy projects in positivist fields.

Author

• Lucy E. Bailey, Oklahoma State University