A Postcritical Spatial Approach to Interrogating Un/Masking: Practices of Reading Geography
Location
DeSantis Room 2060
Format Type
Plenary
Format Type
Paper
Start Date
16-1-2020 4:00 PM
End Date
16-1-2020 4:20 PM
Abstract
The questions that interest qualitative researchers are necessarily placed—in specific geographies, historical moments, and social relations. Drawing upon a four-year postcritical ethnography (Noblit, Flores, & Murillo, 2004) conducted in the rural-rustbelt, I begin with the premise that such placing is itself a choice that warrants critical examination. I have found writing the rural rustbelt is imbued with struggles related to histories of domination where production of research context, including anonymization as practice and product, “is a meeting of histories” (Massey, 2005, p. 72) that is imperfect, constructed, with political implications. I offer reflexive interrogation of methodological premises of neutrality/anonymity from which alteration of identifying features has become a taken-for-granted exercise of research ethics (Jerolmack & Murphy, 2017). I offer three stories that trouble (Lather, 2008) maintaining anonymity in the face of privileging social context through examination of relationality/answerability, research as a practice of whiteness, and un/masking choices towards decolonization beyond metaphor (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Specifically, I consider how “places are not always justly named” (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, p. 14) even when as postcritical researcher I have worked to invite the “partial, personal, and political” (Anders & Lester, 2018). I examine how stories “carry out a labor” (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, p. 34): the choices we make when storying place in our research include their construction as mediating production of knowledge including how entangled futures come to be named, explored, researched, taught, experienced, erased, excavated, forgotten.
Keywords
postcritical ethnography, geography, masking, decolonizing, whiteness
A Postcritical Spatial Approach to Interrogating Un/Masking: Practices of Reading Geography
DeSantis Room 2060
The questions that interest qualitative researchers are necessarily placed—in specific geographies, historical moments, and social relations. Drawing upon a four-year postcritical ethnography (Noblit, Flores, & Murillo, 2004) conducted in the rural-rustbelt, I begin with the premise that such placing is itself a choice that warrants critical examination. I have found writing the rural rustbelt is imbued with struggles related to histories of domination where production of research context, including anonymization as practice and product, “is a meeting of histories” (Massey, 2005, p. 72) that is imperfect, constructed, with political implications. I offer reflexive interrogation of methodological premises of neutrality/anonymity from which alteration of identifying features has become a taken-for-granted exercise of research ethics (Jerolmack & Murphy, 2017). I offer three stories that trouble (Lather, 2008) maintaining anonymity in the face of privileging social context through examination of relationality/answerability, research as a practice of whiteness, and un/masking choices towards decolonization beyond metaphor (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Specifically, I consider how “places are not always justly named” (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, p. 14) even when as postcritical researcher I have worked to invite the “partial, personal, and political” (Anders & Lester, 2018). I examine how stories “carry out a labor” (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, p. 34): the choices we make when storying place in our research include their construction as mediating production of knowledge including how entangled futures come to be named, explored, researched, taught, experienced, erased, excavated, forgotten.
Comments
References Cited in Abstract:
Jerolmack, C. & Murphy, A.K. (2017). The ethical dilemmas and social scientific trade-offs of masking in ethnography. Sociological Methods & Research, 1-27.
Lather, P. (2008). Against empathy, voice and authenticity. In A. Y. Jackson & L. A. Mazzei (Eds.), Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research (pp. 29-38). London, UK: Routledge.
Massey, D. (1995). Places and their pasts. History Workshop Journal, 39, 182-192
Massey, D. (2005). For space. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Noblit, G. W., Flores, S. Y., & Murillo, E. G. (2004). Postcritical ethnography: Reinscribing critique. Hampton Pr.
Tuck, E., & McKenzie, M. (2014). Place in research: Theory, methodology, and methods (Vol. 9). New York, NY: Routledge.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society, 1(1).