When Good Publicity Constrains What's Good for the Public: A Neoliberal Analysis of Diversity Done Right

• In Event: For What Public and Whose Good? Critical Reflections on Research Practices for Advancing "Public Good"

Abstract

Consistent with their treatment of individual participants, educational researchers regularly use pseudonyms to reference their study sites. The rationales, strategies, and implications of masking place may differ from those for masking people (Nespor, 2000). However, both practices are so pervasive as to have become unexamined defaults (Lahman, Rodriguez, Moses, Griffin, Mendoza, & Yacoub, 2015; Lang, Zaretsky & Euler, 2016). They are methodological and ethical steps taken because little good can be imagined from actually naming our study sites or participants (Guenther, 2009; Jerolmack & Murphy, 2017; Stein, 2010).

Drawing on ethnographic work I conducted in Garden City, Kansas, I previously explored how the decision to identify my research site—and thus study this place rather than a place like this place—mattered through my fieldwork, writing, and dissemination processes. Garden City is a remote, small town that experienced rapid growth and racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic transformation as a result of two beefpacking plants opening there in the early 1980s (Author, 2016). This history would have made masking Garden City’s identity a superficial guise. Furthermore, this history has been essential to resulting analyses that situate insights from Garden City in the larger body of “rural” educational scholarship, provide time depth across separate studies of the same community, and establish Garden City as a “bellwether” for other Midwestern small towns that have undergone similar economic restructuring and rapid growth in more recent years (Stull & Broadway, 2013).

Garden City’s story has interested not only academics but also journalists, writers, filmmakers, and others—all of whom have referenced Garden City by name. In the scholarly articles, newspapers, short stories, film, and even commercials we have collectively produced, Garden City is celebrated as a community that has always welcomed the rich diversity associated with “new destination” immigration (Massey, 2008). This distinguished reputation is not without some merit. Over more than three decade’s time, however, these accounts have converged in an increasingly simplistic, dominant narrative where Garden City has become synonymous with diversity itself. As a result, the existence and needs of the community’s newest newcomers goes without further consideration. Drawing on a neoliberal analysis of diversity talk that centers an increasingly commodified and static treatment of the concept (Ahmed, 2012; Bell & Hartmann, 2007), this paper examines how such a characterization of diversity can advance good publicity for a community while simultaneously constraining the public goods of greater equity and inclusion.

Author

• Jennifer C. Ng, The University of Kansas