Ryan Evely Gildersleeve

“Am I going crazy?!”: A Critical Race Analysis of Doctoral Education

The graduate school experience for students of color has been theorized as oppressive and dehumanizing (Gay, 2004). Scholars have struggled to document how students of color navigate and negotiate oppressive and dehumanizing conditions in their daily experiences of doctoral education. We provide a critical race analysis of the everyday experiences of Latina/o and black 1 doctoral students. We draw from critical inquiry and critical race theory to establish and describe an overarching and powerful social narrative that informs, influences, and illustrates the endemic racism through which black and Latina/o students struggle to persist in pursuit of the doctorate. We call this social narrative, “Am I going crazy?!” Deconstructing the narrative into its core elements, we provide an extended definition that illustrates a dehumanizing cultural experience in the everyday lives of doctoral students. We problematize these cultural norms to promote a more humanizing experience of doctoral education for black and Latina/o students.

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.

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.

Dangerously Important Moment(s) in Reflexive Research Practices with Immigrant Youth.

As a white, working middle‐class adult queer from the Southwest USA, my subjective relation to the Mexican (im)migrant, poor, working, straight adolescent boys in California participating in my study was tentative, politicized, controversial, and surveilled from both social and individual lenses. Our relationships were also mutually caring, loving, supportive, stimulating, and challenging. Our ethnographic encounters carried with them some long‐standing and dynamic social narratives that surround relations between and across groups of relative privilege and oppression. These narratives produced ‘ethically important moments’ wherein I confronted microethics of research practices that remained largely under‐theorized and misunderstood in methodological literature. By critically examining my reflexive processes and practices within one of these moments, insights into the workings of social narratives about race, class, and sexuality are revealed that can potentially assist future researchers as they confront the politics and microethics of working within and across the intersectionalities of oppression and marginalization.

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).

The Neoliberal Academy of the Anthropocene and the Retaliation of the Lazy Academic

Focusing on production and dissemination of academic knowledge, this article discusses the role of higher education as it serves the neoliberal imperative. Emphasis is given to two fundamental realities that are influencing higher education today: neoliberalism and the Anthropocene. These two realities shape the crisis of the Professoriate: differentiating faculty into the romantic individual while simultaneously forcing the production of human capital in the name of neoliberalism. The production and performance of the neoliberal knowledge imperative is illustrated through the faculty performance review system. To reclaim the knowledge imperative the article argues that the refusal of work must occur. The refusal of work generates a posthuman subject, the “lazy academic” that is able to reconceptualize how the faculty can confront the neoliberal university.

Sociocritical Matters: Migrant Students' College Access.

Migrant students face many educational, economic, social, and cultural challenges to college access. Anti-bilingual, anti-affirmative action, and anti-immigrant policies also constrain their postsecondary pathways. With these issues in mind, this article draws on quantitative and qualitative research to examine the influence of a residential outreach program at a public university on migrant student participants’ college access. We find evidence that cultivating sociocritical skills to challenge exclusionary political and economic systems while also cultivating academic skills and knowledge about college can broaden migrant students’ sense of postsecondary possibilities. To expand college access for migrant students, we suggest that outreach programs address the development of these and other skills.

Laziness in Postqualitative Inquiry

Laziness is commonly perceived as lethargy and carries a negative connotation. In this article, I argue to understand laziness as a political stance and suggest that lazy practices can become useful for postqualitative inquiry that seeks to disrupt normative explanations of the world. As political action, laziness, then provides postqualitative inquiry with an additional tool for contributing to social justice via social research. Laziness combats the neoliberal condition in which academic research is situated and might serve as a virtue of postqualitative inquiry.

Dialogue as a Requiem for Analysis1

In this article, we offer dialogue as a means to avoid the objectification of data and the procedurization of analysis that so permeates traditional visions of educational inquiry. For our work, dialogue operates simultaneously as a means of inquiry, an engaging form of data, and an entwined means of analysis that disrupts normative formations of research as progressively linear. In this way, dialogue brings about the productive death of data-as-object for analysis. Functionally, our article is a dialogue, one that serves as a requiem for conceptions of analysis as outside data while simultaneously foregrounding data as dialogue. We present our dialogue asynchronously so as to exacerbate our resistance to synthesis and our commitment to a constant rebuilding of understanding. Our asynchronous representation underscores our commitment to dialogic contact, wherein texts live in contact with other texts, joining these texts to our dialogue.