I come to this work as a graduate of the 2002 class of the Detroit Public Schools (DPS). My experiences as a student activist in the district has shaped my subsequent life experiences and academic research interests. Though traditional educational research methods have emphasized neutralizing personal bias in research design in order to achieve an imagined objective viewpoint, this dissertation has been intentionally developed in relation to my experiences in the city and its schools. Further, this relation afforded me numerous opportunities that advanced this work that otherwise would not have been possible. Rather than represent a limitation of this study, recent scholarship highlights how mutually constitutive relationships in research contexts
…show more content…
The Moynihan Report federalized debased racial ideologies and legitimized their use in scholarly activity, a practice that continues in contemporary policy and research contexts, as Kelley argues. This report authored by a research team headed by Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan was commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Moynihan’s analysis of race relations in U.S. society centered on the underdevelopment of the Black family. More pointedly the report states, “The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure…So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself” . Legitimized by federal authority, this report perpetuated an idea that transforming societal inequity began with the Black family …show more content…
Education researchers are not exempt in this systemic reproduction. This is not to say that all forms of traditional research design are problematic, but all forms of research design are ideological, and therefore bracketed by political economic decisions. Eve Tuck explains “Considering educational research's role in the perpetuation of settler-slave-Indigenous relationships, those of us employed as educational researchers are answerable to these deep trajectories” . Tuck calls on researchers to engage in practices that seek to dismantle the very structures that have allowed the production of research akin to what Kelley describes as ghetto ethnography, a practice that fortifies a settler colonial knowledge system. Further, Tuck and Yang signal that the “…the academy as an apparatus of settler colonial knowledge already domesticates, denies, and dominates other forms of knowing” . It is within this broader settler colonial context, in which the politics of knowledge production function, that research design must be
The Moynihan Report federalized debased racial ideologies and legitimized their use in scholarly activity, a practice that continues in contemporary policy and research contexts, as Kelley argues. This report authored by a research team headed by Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan was commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Moynihan’s analysis of race relations in U.S. society centered on the underdevelopment of the Black family. More pointedly the report states, “The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure…So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself” . Legitimized by federal authority, this report perpetuated an idea that transforming societal inequity began with the Black family …show more content…
Education researchers are not exempt in this systemic reproduction. This is not to say that all forms of traditional research design are problematic, but all forms of research design are ideological, and therefore bracketed by political economic decisions. Eve Tuck explains “Considering educational research's role in the perpetuation of settler-slave-Indigenous relationships, those of us employed as educational researchers are answerable to these deep trajectories” . Tuck calls on researchers to engage in practices that seek to dismantle the very structures that have allowed the production of research akin to what Kelley describes as ghetto ethnography, a practice that fortifies a settler colonial knowledge system. Further, Tuck and Yang signal that the “…the academy as an apparatus of settler colonial knowledge already domesticates, denies, and dominates other forms of knowing” . It is within this broader settler colonial context, in which the politics of knowledge production function, that research design must be