For What Public and Whose Good? Critical Reflections on Research Practices for Advancing "Public Good"

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Drawing on research conducted in three rural sites, presenters examine public good as a term and practice taken up by researchers, practitioners, and policy makers as one of ethical practice. Our goal is to engage, through reflexive interrogation, notions of public, good, and, more specifically, the methodological premises of neutrality/anonymity from which the alteration of identifying features has become a taken-for-granted exercise of research ethics. Across our papers, we focus on the implication of customary practices we-as-researchers use to hide, distort, or “mask” identifying information about people, places, and organizations (Jerolmack & Murphy, 2017) in the name of public good. We wonder together as researchers what publics we serve and represent and for whose good?

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 5: Inquiry, Transformation, and Communities

Chair

• Carolyn A. Colvin, University of Iowa

Papers

• Socialization Into Serving Public Good in Educational Research: A Dialogue Around Representation and Masking - Alexandra Panos, University of South Florida; Jessica Nina Lester, Indiana University

• Exploring the Impossibility of Public Scholarship in the Contested Nature of Public and Good - Carolyn A. Colvin, University of Iowa

• When Good Publicity Constrains What's Good for the Public: A Neoliberal Analysis of Diversity Done Right - Jennifer C. Ng, The University of Kansas

• Stories of Public, Stories of Good: Scaled Approaches to Educational Research in the Rural Rust Belt - Alexandra Panos, University of South Florida

Discussant

• Jennifer Laura Seelig, NORC at the University of Chicago