Aaron M. Kuntz

England expects: English newspapers’ narratives about the English football team in the 2006 World Cup

The essence of global sports has been competition among nations at the international level. For football, arguably the world’s most popular sport, global rivalries are paramount, and every four years since 1930, it has been the World Cup that has provided this excitement. English newspaper narratives about the English men’s national football team competing in the 2006 World Cup were examined to gain insight into how English national identity was portrayed. Using a qualitative textual analysis methodology, this study drew on Anderson’s (1983) theory of the imagined community, Hobsbawm’s (1983) notion of invented traditions, and the Eliasian (1991) concept of habitus codes. Set against the contemporary trends of devolution, globalization, and a post-7/7 discourse the newspapers relied on a reductionist, essentialist construction to elicit an emotional connection with a homogenous form of English national identity. The narratives seemed designed to galvanize support for the English team through references to historic English military victories and speeches. These served to rekindle images of bygone, mythical, and imperialistic eras. The newspapers also reverted to an ‘us vs them’ invective in blaming Swedish manager, Sven-Göran Eriksson, for England’s failure to win the tournament with the ‘greatest generation’.

The Role of Critical Inquiry in (Re)constructing the Public Agenda for Higher Education: Confronting the Conservative Modernization of the Academy

As higher education seeks to become more socially responsive, the public agenda is one form that has taken root in explicating the relation of higher education to society. In this paper, we critically analyze two different instantiations of the public agenda for higher education, placing them against the backdrop of what Michael Apple (2006a) calls the conservative modernization of education. We demonstrate how these examples fall victim to and perpetuate the conservative modernization of the academy and argue for ways of incorporating critical perspectives into the generative process of constructing the public agenda for higher education.

Reconsidering the workplace: faculty perceptions of their work and working environments

In an effort to foreground the impact of the material environment on faculty activities, this study examines the dynamic intersections among faculty work practices, the academic workplace and professional identity. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 16 social science faculty at one public university in the United States, this study reveals the impact of the physical environment on faculty perceptions of what they do, where they work and who they are. Analysis of interview data revealed overlapping themes regarding perceptions of faculty work practices, the inability of places to contain faculty work, faculty socialization, and questions concerning the ownership and distancing of particular work types. Findings from this study point to a need for administrative policy changes to be accompanied by a respatialization of the local campus that resists tendencies toward isolating environments.

Wandering the Tactical From Interview to Intraview

In this article, we address the simplistic use of the interview as a methodological technique that abstracts the humanist subject as an object for analysis. Rather than simply a tool of inquiry, we present the interview as a wholly engaged encounter, a means for making accessible the multiple intersections of material context that collude in productive formations of meaning. In this process, we hope to indicate the possibility for the interview to function as intervention at the level of what Michel de Certeau terms the tactical. As such, the research process may include, adjacent to and alongside the proper artifact of the transcript, the material basis of its metaphors, affecting and affected by the meanings made possible in the design, encounter, and interpretation of the interview. We suggest that the embodied act of walking mobilizes the tactical and makes possible thoughts that would not find expression in the seated interview. Drawing upon theorizations of Deleuze, de Certeau, and Barad, we point to the possibilities inherent in embodied metaphor and indirect logic formations as a means to better understand daily practices and expressions of tactical resistance. In this intra-action, and through the newly framed intraview, diffractive seeing is made possible, an integrative becoming with knowing.

A Dialogue on Space and Method in Qualitative Research on Education

In this article, the authors critically examine the use of space in education research and illustrate how spatial analyses of education reframe persistent educational problems in productive, actionable ways. The authors juxtapose critical spatial analyses with traditional temporal analyses. The authors approach the knowledge-construction process in dialogue, emphasizing the spatial identity-markers of the historical moments and social spaces within/through which they investigate these ideas. The authors problematize traditional temporal notions of education research and illustrate how educational problems and research practices might be reconceptualized through a dialogic process. Cumulatively, the authors hope that their dialogue will promote understanding of how space matters in education research through dialogic knowledge construction.

Obama's American Graduation Initiative: Race, Conservative Modernization, and a Logic of Abstraction

The American Graduation Initiative stands as the cornerstone of the Obama administrations higher education agenda. To investigate the state of the politics of education in the Age of Obama, this article employs critical discourse analysis to unveil the hidden meanings and ideological commitments inherent in Obamas policy discourse. Read within and against the backdrop of what Apple (2006) called the era of conservative modernization, Obamas policy discourse relies on a logic of abstraction that serves to promote a falsely “postracial” society in which hegemonic notions of education are perpetuated.

Disrupting the Ethical Imperatives of “Junior” Critical Qualitative Scholars in the Era of Conservative Modernization

In this article, we wrestle with the core issue of how early career researchers translate central tenets and core concepts of critical theory and critical methodology into their research practice. By way of creative representation, we draw from bell hooks and Cornel West’s (1991) written rendition of their verbal dialogue in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. Their hope was to offer the book in a dialogic format in such a way that mirrored the synergy in their verbal discussions as friends and intellectual colleagues. In a similar vein, we hope to share with readers the synergy and depth of the narratives that have transpired during our ongoing discussions on the important topic of critical praxis as part of a collaborative research group called the Disruptive Dialogue Project (Gildersleeve, Kuntz, Pasque & Carducci, 2010; Kuntz, Pasque, Carducci, & Gildersleeve, 2009).

Creative Pedagogies and Collaboration: An Action Research Project.

This action research study involves nine elementary school teacher-researchers, one university faculty member, and one graduate student engaged in developing creative pedagogical practices in one elementary school in an urban school in Alabama, USA. Participants found that a teacher’s experience of agency and their ability to work creatively depended upon a clear articulation of structures and the identification of areas of flexibility and possibility. Further, participants endeavored to promote avenues for ongoing communication and collaboration between teachers and the principal with the view that creativity based in communication would sustain transformative dialogues in the school.

The Politics of Survival in Foundations of Education: Borderlands, Frames, and Strategies

In this article, the authors consider the ways that faculty in the Foundations strategize the placement of Foundations in teacher education in a politics of survival. Drawing on archival and interview data, the authors discuss the strategies invoked as boundary-work. They then situate boundary-work within the broader interpretive lens of cognitive framing. The authors then consider how the very language that faculty members use reveals the cognitive frames that simultaneously inform and shape their strategies. In this way, faculty members strategically invoke and are influenced by larger contemporary discourses. Current strategies, we argue, will tend to reinscribe the existing neoliberal order or substantially dilute the Foundations. The authors call for a new sense of boundary-work by going back to the future and invoking Foundations of disciplines against a current trend of generalism.

Turning from Time to Space: Conceptualizing Faculty Work

This chapter traces the overreliance on temporal frames in the scholarship on faculty work and offers a theory of space as an alternative frame. In order to counter temporal determinisms, Kuntz points to the unacknowledged spatial metaphors that abound in research on faculty and the new meanings that such spatializations make possible. He proposes a shift from time to space for research in higher education, involving first a critical awareness of our metaphors and, second, an inquiry into the social spaces and material places from which these metaphors emerge. In order to link social conceptualizations with embodied experience, Kuntz calls upon embodied metaphor as a theoretical heuristic and suggests possible avenues for understanding faculty work at the level of patterned daily practices within institutional spaces that produce professional identities. Finally, he ends the chapter with a series of methodological considerations for the practical application of the theoretical concepts that currently dominate research on space and place.