RESEARCHING CORPOREALITY IN EDUCATION: AN INVESTIGATION OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN GENDER AND EDUCATION RESEARCH ON BOYS AND MASCULINITIES
A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities
2019
OMAR A KAISSI
SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT, EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT
MANCHESTER INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION List of Contents
List of abbreviations ...... 7
List of tables ...... 8
List of figures ...... 9
Abstract ...... 10
Declaration of original contribution ...... 11
Copyright statement ...... 12
Acknowledgements ...... 13
Chapter 1: Toward creating a collective story of scholarship in the field of education ...... 16
1.1. Introduction ...... 16
1.2. Rationale ...... 19
1.2.1. Gender identity, the body and extra-rational, corporeal knowing ...... 20
1.2.2. Neoliberalism, higher education and knowledge production ...... 22
1.2.3. Recognising positionality: a tit-for-tat with the field ...... 25
1.3. Structure of the thesis ...... 27
Chapter 2: Scoping the landscape of sociological knowing in the field of education ...... 32
2.1. Introduction ...... 32
2.2. Sociology: a troubled and troubling profession ...... 32
2.3. From certainty to uncertainty and back again: sociological knowing in education ...... 37
2.3.1. Political Arithmetic: knowing as replication ...... 38
2.3.2. New Sociology of Education: knowing as reflective ...... 40
2.3.3. School Effectiveness and School Improvement: knowing as demonstration ...... 44
2.4. Corporeality and corporeal knowing: past, present and future ...... 47
2.4.1. The location of corporeality in the sociology of education ...... 48
2.4.2. The future of corporeal knowing: demise or continuity? ...... 52
2.5. Summary of chapter two ...... 54
Chapter 3: Methodology ...... 55
3.1. Introduction ...... 55
3.2. Critical realism: a methodology for investigating knowledge production ...... 56
3.2.1. Ontological and epistemological assumptions ...... 57
3.2.2. Operationalising critical realism ...... 61
3.3. Phase one: knowing and knowledge ...... 64 2
3.3.1. Rationale ...... 64
3.3.2. Data generation ...... 65
3.3.3. Data analysis ...... 68
3.4. Phase two: knowing and knowers ...... 70
3.4.1. Rationale ...... 70
3.4.2. Population list and sample ...... 73
3.4.3. Access ...... 74
3.4.4. Designing and conducting the interviews ...... 76
3.4.5. Analysis and interpretation ...... 78
3.5. From documents to interviews: writing a collective story of scholarship ...... 81
3.6. Trustworthiness and research integrity ...... 83
3.7. Constructing the thesis ...... 85
3.7.1. A critical realist investigation of knowledge production in gender and education research on boys (chapter four) ...... 85
3.7.2. Corporeal knowing and the participation-protection dilemma in gender and education research on boys (chapter five) ...... 86
3.7.3. Knowledge, the body and the challenges of doing intellectual work in gender and education research (chapter six) ...... 86
3.7.4. On corporeal knowing, educational research and state-led hysteresis in the neoliberal university (chapter seven) ...... 87
3.8. Summary of chapter three ...... 87
Chapter 4: A critical realist investigation of knowledge production in gender and education research on boys ...... 89
Abstract ...... 89
Introduction ...... 89
Investigating ways of knowing in research on boys and masculinities...... 91
Methodology ...... 92
Methods ...... 93
The predominance of agency...... 96
Examining the shift from sociological to social theory in the field ...... 98
Sociological theory and the view of the social from above ...... 99
Social theory and the views of the social from below and from within ...... 101
The corporeal, the sociological and the persistent tensions of gender theorising ...... 102
Summary and concluding thoughts for future research ...... 104 3
References ...... 106
Chapter 5: Corporeal knowing and the participation-protection dilemma in gender and education research on boys ...... 114
Abstract ...... 114
Introduction ...... 115
Investigating potential limitations to knowing about boys and gender ...... 116
Methods ...... 118
Researching boys as children ...... 120
Deconstructing the right to childhood ...... 122
The normative participation-protection dilemma ...... 123
On the interrelationship of representation, epistemology and knowledge ...... 125
Summary and implications for reflexive research practice ...... 127
References ...... 129
Chapter 6: Knowledge, the body and the challenges of doing intellectual work in gender and education research ...... 135
Abstract ...... 135
Introduction ...... 136
Using critical realism to investigate knowledge production as personal commitment ...... 137
Recruitment, data generation and data analysis ...... 139
Juggling the personal and the professional in the academic workplace ...... 142
Personal struggle ...... 142
Personal development...... 144
Personal and social change ...... 147
The (re)professionalisation of intellectual work in the neoliberal university ...... 149
Object-bondage, or self- and body-alienation ...... 150
Implications for research practice: the spectre of epistemic violence ...... 152
Rooting for corporeal-epistemic reflexivity in research practice ...... 153
References ...... 156
Chapter 7: On corporeal knowing, educational research and state-led hysteresis in the neoliberal university ...... 159
Abstract ...... 159
Introduction ...... 160
A critical realist investigation of research practice in the field of education ...... 161
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Recruitment and methods ...... 163
Scholars’ dispositions revealed ...... 165
Understanding, explaining and assessing ...... 166
Maneuvering and adapting ...... 169
Mapping state-led hysteresis in the field of education ...... 172
Hysteresis-through-purposes ...... 172
Hysteresis-through-resources ...... 174
Hysteresis-through-identities ...... 175
An imminent closure/end-of-knowledge? ...... 176
Conclusions and implications for corporeal knowing in G&E research ...... 177
References ...... 180
Chapter 8: A collective story of scholarship in the field of education ...... 185
8.1. Introduction ...... 185
8.2. Summary: research focus, aims and findings ...... 185
8.3. Sociological bondedness: a story of scholarship in the field of education ...... 193
8.3.1. Ruptures and continuities: the journey (back) to materialism ...... 195
8.3.2. Alienation and hysteresis: to know or not to know? ...... 202
8.3.3. The promise of unbondedness: socioanalysis and the “snakes” of positioning ...... 207
8.4. Contributions to the field ...... 211
8.5. Recommendations and directions for future scholarship and research ...... 214
References ...... 221
Appendix 1: A map of knowledge production in research on boys and masculinities ...... 255
Appendix 2: Mappings of the intellectual history of gender research in education ...... 256
Appendix 3: Deploying generative causation to investigate knowledge production ...... 258
Appendix 4: Mapping research on boys and masculinities against site of publication ...... 259
Appendix 5: A sample of the literature on boys and masculinities in education ...... 261
Appendix 6: Assessing trustworthiness in document analysis ...... 265
Appendix 7: Document analysis excerpts ...... 267
Appendix 8: Information power model to assess sample size ...... 274
Appendix 9: Interview sheets and letters ...... 276
Interview invitation letter (for scholars in the UK) ...... 277
Interview invitation letter (for scholars abroad) ...... 278 5
Participant information sheet (for scholars in the UK) ...... 279
Participant information sheet (for scholars abroad) ...... 282
Consent form ...... 285
Thank- you letter ...... 286
Appendix 10: Interview schedule...... 287
Appendix 11: Thematic analysis excerpts ...... 289
Appendix 12: Copy of data management plan ...... 292
Appendix 13: Authorisation to submit a Journal Format Thesis ...... 298
Word count: 72579
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List of abbreviations G&E Gender and Education
HE Higher Education
IW Intellectual Work
NSoE New Sociology of Education
PA Political Arithmetic
RCiE Researching Corporeality in Education
SESI School Effectiveness and School Improvement
SoE Sociology of Education
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List of tables Tables are listed in the order of their appearance in the thesis, namely in chapters 2, 3, 4, 5 and 8. Within each chapter, the table sequencing commences at 1.
(Chapter) Table number Title Page (2) 1 Three perspectives on the body in the sociology of 49 education, based on Evans et al., 2009 (3) 1 Methodological toolkit to investigate knowledge 63 production in G&E research on boys and masculinities (3) 2 Heuristic of key areas to examine knowledge and 68 knowing in a journal article (3) 3 Open-coding entries from the condensed record of 69 document data in phase one of the RCiE project (4) 1 A methodological toolkit to investigate ways of knowing 93 in G&E research on boys and masculinities (5) 1 A methodological toolkit to investigate potential 118 limitations to knowing in G&E research on boys and masculinities (8) 1 Regularities and causal mechanisms: summary of main 187 findings from the RCiE project
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List of figures Figures are listed in the order of their appearance in the thesis, namely in chapters 3 and 6.
(Chapter) Figure number Title Page (3) 1 A stratified social ontology (Bhaskar, 1979) 60 (3) 2 Generative causation – Regularity = Mechanism + 61 Context (Pawson & Tilley, 1997) (6) 1 Deploying critical realist tools to investigate knowing in 139 G&E research through interview data
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Abstract This thesis reports on the Researching Corporeality in Education (RCiE) project, a qualitative investigation into knowledge production in Gender and Education (G&E) research on boys and masculinities in schools in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America, within the field of education in higher education. The project is centrally concerned with the present state and future continuity of corporeal knowing, that is, knowing for, about and through the body, in G&E research. The aim of the investigation is to examine both the existing knowledge base regarding boys’ gender identity formation and the academic career and life histories of G&E scholars in order to construct a collective story of scholarship in the field of education that makes visible the theoretical, ideological and political challenges undermining corporeal knowing in the current neoliberal era. Moreover, the project uses critical realism as a methodology and is divided into two phases. The first phase explores knowing and knowledge using document data generated through an integrative literature review of empirical research outputs. The second phase explores knowing and knowers using data generated from semi-structured interviews with eight G&E scholars. Two sets of thinking tools based on Margaret Archer and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of social reality and practice are deployed to analyse and interpret the interview data. The project findings, explanations and insights are reported in four chapters styled and formatted as journal articles. Chapters four and five comprise the first and second journal article outputs from the RCiE project. These chapters reveal limitations and challenges of a theoretical and ideological nature and make the following two main arguments. The first is that the shift from sociological to social theory in the field has intensified epistemological disputation regarding the role of the overemphasis on agency in obscuring social structures and, in turn, the need for de-individualising, corporeal-structural links in gender analysis. The second argument is that G&E scholars are entrapped within representationism, defined as a condition of uncertainty regarding how to balance between the participation and protection of children in research in ways that prevent over-protectionist public- and policy-led discourses from obstructing participation, which is integral to corporeal knowing. Chapters six and seven comprise the third and fourth journal article outputs from the RCiE projects. Using interview data, these chapters reveal challenges of a political nature. Here, too, two main arguments are made. The first is that, due to performative regimes that exacerbate self- and body-alienation, scholars’ predisposition toward intellectuality may come to function, rather paradoxically, as a limitation to corporeal knowing. The second argument, more in relation to scholars as higher education practitioners than individual knowers, is that intellectualist (idea-driven) dispositions in the field of education are being systematically de-privileged to put an end to any type of complex, such as corporeal-based, knowledge that fails the test of economic viability. Collectively, these arguments convey the sociological bondedness of G&E scholars, in the sense that, despite their disagreements, they confront the same set of internally and externally imposed challenges to/constraints on their agency of knowing in the field. In chapter eight, in addition to revealing and explaining this bondedness through the means of a collective story of scholarship, I present a general framework for corporeal- epistemic reflexivity that aims at unbondedness, that is, how to approach positioning in the field with more strategic awareness of the challenges involved. Also, in this final chapter, I provide a summary of main findings, draw conclusions and set out in detail the RCiE project’s contributions and recommendations for future research. 10
Declaration of original contribution No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.
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Copyright statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trademarks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=2442 0), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/about/regulations/) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses
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Acknowledgements
What is it about? What is that—literature? Where does it come from? What use is it? What questionable things! Add to this questionableness the further questionableness of what you say [about it], and a monstrosity [ein Ungeheuer] arises. (Kafka, 1922, cited in Corngold, 2009, p. 1)
A note on writing It has not been easy doing this project and writing this thesis. I, like Kafka, think writing is a monstrosity, especially if the task is to theorise about theorising, know about knowledge and write about writing. For me, to write is to ache, and I still cannot determine why. Is it me, or is it the tyrannical compulsion to literalise the knowable – that knowledge must be written, labelled, indexed, ranked and stored somewhere, in reality or in some hyperspace, in order to be knowledge? Indeed, there is power involved, for if writing is a condition of monstrosity, what/who is the monster? What/who today is using writing and writers to govern? Maybe, then, the illumination of my uneasy relationship with writing lies in the interrelationship of writing, knowledge production and professionalism. As I continue to write, and think at the same time about how writing shapes my being and doing in the world, I am grateful to those people who, each in their own way, have helped me better understand who I am and what/who my pen and thoughts should be devoted to.
Many thanks Many thanks to Steven Courtney. I could not have completed this piece of work without his invaluable support, incisive commentary on my written submissions and faith in the purpose and meaning of my research work. I want him to know that I have thoroughly enjoyed and learnt from our rich discussions in the past three years. In many ways, he has challenged me to think socially-critically and develop political and analytical sensibilities toward how, why and for what ends knowledge is produced and governed. Many thanks to Helen Gunter. I can think of no better words to express my gratitude to her than what Hannah Arendt said about Karl Jaspers, her former professor: “When Jaspers comes forward and speaks, everything becomes luminous.” Many thanks to Bee Hughes. Let her know that she is dearly held, and that our coffee breaks were not just intellectual conversations: I thrived on them. Many thanks to Suhaib Zafar. His genius, gift for precision of statement and, most importantly, shared emphasis on ontology as integral to the explication of social and
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educational issues have greatly contributed toward enhancing my theorisations over the years. Many thanks to Muhammad Demashkieh. Let him know that he has a special place in my heart, and that his belief in me and words of encouragement have been integral to surviving through the last days of writing and finalising this thesis. And lastly, many thanks to my mom and sister. Year 2016 marked the beginning of a wave of unanticipated developments in our lives that left us dislocated, dispossessed. Still, both of them welcomed my decision to move to the UK to pursue a PhD degree. With infinite love and gratitude, I dedicate my work to them.
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To Iman and Massy
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Chapter 1: Toward creating a collective story of scholarship in the field of education
1.1. Introduction This thesis reports on research undertaken for the Researching Corporeality in Education (RCiE) project, an investigation of knowledge production in Gender and Education (G&E) research on boys and masculinities in schools in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America, within the field of education in Higher Education (HE). The aim of the investigation is to create and tell a collective story (Richardson, 1997) of scholarship in the field of education that identifies and explains common theoretical, ideological and political challenges to the future continuity of corporeal knowing, or knowing for, about and through the body, in G&E research. To achieve this aim, the project examines the field literature on boys and masculinities and the academic career and life histories of eight G&E scholars who have contributed significantly to shaping it, and whose engagement in knowledge production continues to be shaped by the location of their research practice in the modern-day neoliberal university. The investigation has been guided by the following research questions: 1. How is knowledge in G&E research on boys and masculinities produced, and with what implications for corporeal knowing? 2. What are the challenges for G&E scholars engaged in knowledge production as personal commitment, and with what implications for corporeal knowing? 3. What are the challenges for G&E scholars engaged in knowledge production through research practice in HE, and with what implications for corporeal knowing? Moreover, the RCiE project uses critical realism (Archer, 1995, 2000; Bhaskar, 1979, 2011) as a methodology which enables scholarship that is socially critical (Littlejohn & Foss, 2010), in the sense of in-depth and attentive to social structures and power relations, as well as an ontological view of knowledge production as relational (agential- structural), morphogenetic (non-deterministically constrained) and strategic (involving decision-making on the part of social agents). Moreover, epistemologically, the methodology enables a retroductivist logic of inquiry (Collier, 1994; Pawson & Tilley, 1997)
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operationalised through the means of a toolkit that performs the following four functions: first, designating corporeal knowing in G&E research on boys and masculinities as the phenomenon under investigation; second, designating the predominant way of and potential limitations to knowing about boys and gender identity formation as regularities (reified patterns or tendencies); third, positing and explaining causal mechanisms (or generative forces) that underpin the regularities in ways that may pose challenges to the continuity of the phenomenon; and, fourth, designating the G&E research literature and the oral histories of G&E scholars as two distinct but interrelated contexts for investigating knowledge production. This differentiation between the literature and oral histories has enabled the division of the project into two phases. The findings from phase one are reported in chapters four and five of this thesis and provide explanations to answer the first research question. Documents, namely journal articles, were used to locate the sociological focus on corporeality and examine knowing and knowledge. Deploying the integrative literature review (Torraco, 2005, 2016) as a data generation and analysis method, I constructed, analysed and interpreted a non- exhaustive, representative sample of literature outputs. This has led to the identification of two regularities, one denoting a predominant way of knowing and the other a potential limitation to knowing about research subjects in G&E research. To explain what underpins these regularities, I posited and explained two causal mechanisms using both the document data and secondary literature on issues concerning sociological theorising and what it means, entails and involves to undertake educational research as child-centred research, particularly in these neoliberal times. The findings from phase two are reported in chapters six and seven of this thesis and provide explanations to answer the second and third research questions. In this phase, I move from documents to the oral career and life histories of knowers. Using thematic analysis to analyse new data generated through semi-structured interviews with eight G&E scholars, I generate explanations and insights regarding engagement in knowledge production on two levels: scholars as individual knowers (relevant to the second research question) and scholars as a community (relevant to the third research question). While the first level uses Archer’s (2000) theory of social reality, namely her conceptualisation of personal identity formation, to understand knowledge production as a personally valuable commitment, the second uses Bourdieu’s (1990a) theory of practice to understand knowledge production more holistically, as an activity moulded by the 17
institutional and professional arrangements of HE. Although it is difficult to distinguish between the personal/individual and the professional/communal (L. Archer, 2008; Clegg, 2008; Taylor, 2007), I still maintained a distinction in order to utilise the empirical potential of the interview data to the fullest extent possible (Malterud et al., 2016). Also, the distinction is informed by the project’s methodological treatment of agency and structure as two discrete concepts that cannot be reduced to each other (see chapter three). As with its predecessor, this phase has culminated in the identification of two regularities denoting potential limitations to corporeal knowing about research subjects in G&E research. Similarly, too, to reveal what underpins these regularities, I posited and explained two causal mechanisms using both the data and secondary literature on issues concerning the political1 organisation and control of intellectual work and research practice in the current neoliberal era. Importantly, the reason why no theory is used in phase one is that the document data were judged to be sufficient on their own to examine knowing and knowledge. In phase two, however, theory was essential to make sense of the interview data and provide rich insights into the politics of positioning in the field. The thinking tools developed from Archer’s (2000) theory – i.e. “order of reality,” “concerns” and “commentaries” – were deployed to guide data analysis and think about scholars’ knowledge work as reflective of an intimate relationship with ideas (Furedi, 2004). Likewise, the Bourdieuian tools – i.e. dispositions, habitus and hysteresis – were deployed to guide data analysis and think about the field of education as a field of cultural production, where social agents play a “game” of positioning governed by doxa (or the illusion of objectivity). That is to say, research practice is not done through the “conscious aiming at ends” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72), but rather through a system of “subjective dispositions,” or habitus, “that produce[s] structured actions which, in turn, tend to reproduce [the] objective structures” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 203) that shape and precondition practice. Moreover, it is through deploying Bourdieu’s (2000) concept of hysteresis in conjunction with Young’s (1998) notions of “intellectualist” (idea-driven) and
1 The words “ideological” and “political” tend to be used interchangeably. In this thesis, however, I distinguish between them in the following manner. While the ideological conveys the overarching directions or orientations that characterise the existence, lives, attitudes, deliberations and/or belief systems that groups of people subscribe to, the political is more about the actual, everyday life politics and policies which governments enact to effect order and stability in societies. In this sense, the ideological always precedes and underpins the structuration of the political sphere.
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“politicist” (interest-driven) stances in the sociology of education, in chapter seven, that I have been able to illuminate the role of state intervention in restructuring (de- intellectualising) habitus to dispose of economically useless knowledge. In short, the use of thinking tools has enhanced my understanding of the challenges that current arrangements in HE create for corporeal knowing in G&E research. These challenges are identified and explained in the collective story of scholarship presented in the final chapter of this thesis. Lastly, the RCiE project makes the following contributions to the field of education. First, conceptually and empirically, what is original about the project is the specific focus on sociological knowledge production about boys and masculinities. The first of its kind in the field, this focus has been intended to provide G&E scholars with a critical knowledge base to assess, reflexively consider and collaborate to overcome common challenges to their investments in corporeal knowing. Second, theoretically, a contribution is made through, on the one hand, designing a new set of thinking tools based on Margaret Archer’s work and, on the other, creatively deploying Pierre Bourdieu’s theory and concepts, namely habitus and hysteresis. In addition to enhancing the quality of data analysis, the incorporation of social theory is intended to emphasise its vital role in countering the ongoing neoliberal de-intellectualisation of educational research (Ball, 1995). Finally, this is the first time that critical realism is used as a methodology in a qualitative study of knowledge production in the field of education (see Craig & Bigby, 2015, Fletcher, 2017 and Pratt, 2013 for examples of how critical realism has been operationalised in social work, human geography and nursing practice studies). Mainly, what critical realism offers is the possibility of thinking afresh, outside the positivist-constructivist binary, about political, economic and sociocultural phenomena in education. These three areas of contribution are presented and expanded in more detail in the final chapter.
1.2. Rationale In this section, I set out why the RCiE project is timely and important in relation to two types of debates in the field of education: first, those which concern gender identity, the body and the significance of corporeal knowing about research subjects; and second, those larger debates which concern HE, academic professionalism and knowledge
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production in the current neoliberal era. In addition, I reflect on issues of situatedness, namely how aspects of my own biography and career speak directly to the rationale for this project.
1.2.1. Gender identity, the body and extra-rational, corporeal knowing In the field of education, decades of constructivist theorisation and empirical investigation into gender have led to a proliferation of identity categories (Francis, 2002) that continues to divide G&E scholars more or less along the following lines. First, there are those scholars who argue that it is “untimely and inequitable” (Rasmussen, 2009, p. 434) to move beyond a focus on gender identity at a time when identity-related issues (e.g. instability, fluidity, non-conformity, plurality and democratisation) are strongly needed to further understand the real-life problems of gender (and sexual) minorities, particularly transgender and non-binary youth and children. Moreover, the argument for gender identity is political; although it is acknowledged that “life, as a form of identification, necessarily exceeds the abstract boundaries of identity” (Dillabough, 2009, p. 457), it is maintained that a focus on identity remains integral to the liberal-feminist struggle against forms of oppression, inequality and injustice in society. Second, there are scholars who argue that gender identity categories fall short of capturing the range of complex ways in which research subjects labour to perform their gendered selves in the school (Mac an Ghaill & Haywood, 2012). Here, masculinities and femininities are viewed not only as imaginary constructions, “illusions of substance that bodies are compelled to approximate” (Butler, 1990, p. 146), but also as illusions of dualistic thinking combined with anthropomorphic ignorance, or disregard, of considerations related to the multi-layered constitution of the social world. For this group of scholars, what is needed is an alternative, post-identity (post-gender, post-masculinity) model of social theorising that gives recognition to both the human and post-human dimensions of beingness – the material assemblages of objects, things, spaces and temporalities through which subjectivities form and interact (Garlick, 2016; Jackson, 2013; St. Pierre et al., 2016; Taylor, 2016). The problem with such a model, however, is that its replacement of “categorical sensibility” (Haywood, 2008, p. 4) by “socio- materialist sensibilities” (Edwards & Fenwick, 2015, p. 1386) may be seen as an invitation
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to prioritise description over explanation, thus raising the question of the political role of educational research in exposing forms of oppression. In considering these two positions, I find myself agreeing with Youdell (2005) that a post-identity paradigm is not imminent. Indeed, “gender binaries are currently so strongly embedded in psychic identifications” that it is “unthinkable for most of us that we could de-invest in these identities and move to a gender-free world” (Francis & Paechter, 2015, p. 785). This is not to say, of course, that there is no need for “deterritorialisations [of theorising about gender] to occur, [for] lines of flight to be released” (Tamboukou, 2008, p. 372), but rather, following Paechter (2003), it is to argue that the masculine/feminine divide is an analytically necessary “formal dualism,” without which “one’s identification as male or female, and one’s recognition as such by a community of masculinity or femininity practice” (Paechter, 2009, p. 452), would not be taken seriously, let alone theorised and researched accordingly. Moreover, with regard to typologies of masculinities and femininities, which, indeed, have contributed to the reification of sex (Cealey & Hood-Williams, 1998; Maclnnes, 1998), it is important to point out that it is not the concept of identity itself which allows for the multiplication of gender, but rather particular trends in deploying and researching it, such as loose theorisation, ultra-liberalist methodologies and the normalisation of research which identifies “highly diverse, and yet often overlapping, [gender performativities], with no criteria offered by which to distinguish them” (Skelton & Francis, 2009, p. 22). Most importantly, however, identity should remain a useful unit of analysis because it enables reflective sociological knowing which relies on corporeal data – words, spoken and written; behaviours, voluntary and involuntary; actions, purposive and non- purposive; encounters, semiotic and somatic; and thoughts, emotions and desires. As Bailey and Graves (2016) argue in their review of G&E research, it is the merger of the “corporeal turn2” (Turner 1992) in the social sciences and the “boy turn” in the sociology of education (Weaver-Hightower, 2003) which has equipped G&E scholars with the intellectual resources they needed to counter the powerful, media-fuelled discourse of boys as the “new disadvantaged” in education. Through theorising about the body both
2 The term “turn” is controversial. It may denote an objective shift in what and/or who has been researched in the field, when, where and how. However, it may also be politically understood as the result of the external imposition of change on research practice. In this thesis, the term is merely used to point out major transformations regarding the focus of research in the field of education.
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as “a social and discursive object … bound up in the order of desire, signification and power” (Grosz, 1994, p. 19) and as an affective and material meaning-making system (Budgeon, 2003; Coffey, 2013; Longhurst, 2001), they have been able to map and critique the construction of masculinities both inside and outside the school (e.g. Connell, 2008; Martino, 1999; Paechter, 1996; Renold, 1997; Skelton, 1993; Smith, 2007; Stoudt, 2006; Swain, 2006; Warren, 1997). In short, it can be said that what has been revealed and done about boys and masculinities in the school thus far, including such things as interventions and programmes for promoting gender equality and equity (Weaver-Hightower & Skelton, 2013), has been achieved to a great extent through establishing an identity- corporeality nexus in the field as a fundamental means or mode of knowing about research subjects. Today, more than any time before, the gender identities of boys and young men are undergoing complex transformation as a result of shifts and developments in political landscapes, economic paradigms and educational systems. As Connell puts it to McMahon (2015), [the study of masculinities] is a huge research field. We are facing fast- moving processes of transformation. Theoretical models both of masculinities and of the economy are in need of reshaping to deal with our strange new world. (p. 72, emphasis in original) Thus, because there is a need to know more and better, the RCiE project has set out to investigate the present state and prospects for future continuity of corporeal knowing in G&E research on boys and masculinities. On the one hand, there is ontological and epistemological disputation among G&E scholars. On the other, there is the “slouching rough beast” (Ball, 2016, p. 1046) of neoliberalism which threatens to dispose of all forms of complex, such as corporeal-based, knowledge that cannot contribute toward the economisation of goals, functions and subjectivities in education. It is to this “beast,” to some of its troubling effects on HE, that I now turn.
1.2.2. Neoliberalism, higher education and knowledge production I agree with Zanoni et al. (2017) that “we are today witnessing epochal changes, which are fundamentally redefining the social, economic, political and environmental realities we [inhabit] in unforeseen and unimaginable ways” (p. 575). Evans (2018)
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stipulates that these changes, which include the election of Donald Trump, a “politically inexperienced” businessman, to the US presidency, serve as early signs “that the [neoliberal] model has run its course and a new day is about to dawn” (pp. 23-24). However, until it is clear when, how and with what implications and challenges such day will dawn, “the triumph of neoliberalism in academe” (Kauppi, 2015, p. 32) remains the current reality. Evident across both the Global North and the Global South3 (Connell, 2007), neoliberalism is predicated on the “fundamental principle [of] the superiority of individualised, market-based competition over other modes of organisation” (Mudge, 2008, p. 706-707). Cribb and Gewirtz’s (2013) notion of the “hollowed-out” university depicts concisely how neoliberal structural reform has radically reconfigured HE: It would appear that the university as an institution with a distinctive rationality and social purpose (what Kogan & Hanney, 2000 call its “exceptionalism”) has been replaced with the idea of the university as a generic large-scale social organisation, what we are calling a hollowed-out university, that can increasingly be seen less as a community of learners and more as a social site that can be engineered to serve any social function. The increased emphasis on marketing and corporate identity and a concern with institutional competition and success, and gloss and spin all make the university look, feel and act like countless other non-educational corporate institutions. (p. 344) This hollowing-out of the university has occurred through a process of neoliberal economisation aimed at inculcating dispositions of productivity, profitability and competitiveness into the collective thinking and styles of management, teaching and/or research practice of HE practitioners. Some of the consequences of this process include consumerism (visible through the re-designation of students as “customers”), commodification (visible through the growth of contractualism), corporatisation (visible
3 In this thesis, I do not pose such genealogical questions as, “why this term, why now, with which forces does it resonate, what material and ideal interests does it serve, can it empower subaltern groups, how is it being translated into academic research and/or policy?” (Jessop, 2014, p. 214). Nor do I wonder about how this term has historically come to displace “Third World” or “Developing World.” Due to considerations of scope, mainly that the RCiE project is not, after all, concerned with North-South power/knowledge relations, I am compelled to use the term “Global South” (or “southern”) in the same way Connell (2007), Spivak (1987) and other scholars who have written from post-colonial perspectives use it: that is, as a descriptor of a different, non-European world that does not necessarily subscribe to the presuppositions of the Western canon in the humanities and social sciences.
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through the expansion of HE-business partnerships) and the emergence of new bodies of professionals (e.g. research policy officers and academic developers) (Newman & Clarke, 2009; Olssen & Peters, 2005; S. C. Ward, 2012). Perhaps most damagingly, however, economisation has led to the intensification of surveillance through, for instance, teaching and research excellence frameworks, scientometrics and bibliometrics. These managerialist technologies are modelled on performative labour in the private sector, and their aim is to ensure restless productivity across HE, especially in the humanities and social sciences, where research is regularly criticised for lacking practicality and social and economic impact (Cribb & Gewirtz, 2013). Moreover, because of its proximity to both school children and policymakers, the field of education has been particularly targeted by neoliberal structural reform (Ozga, 1998). Building on long-standing critiques of educational research as useless (e.g. Hargreaves, 1996; Kaestle, 1993; Labaree, 2004; Tooley & Darby, 1998), policymakers pushed for restructuring it substantially. In response, university education departments stepped up their investments in teaching training in the hope that an increased focus on educational practice would leave scholarship and research outside the limelight of policymaking discussions (Deem, 1996). Yet the neoliberal assault continued, with qualitative scholars, particularly within the sociology of education, finding themselves in the most vulnerable positions (St. Pierre, 2002; St. Pierre & Roulston, 2006; Waller, 2011). This is mainly because the qualitative paradigm, generally speaking, enables critical theory, corporeal knowing, reflexive deliberation, the view of research as an anti- oppression tool and, perhaps most distinctively, the understanding that, not least because of the complexity of social reality and subjects, the study of education is, indeed, a hard social science, if not “the hardest science of all” (Berliner, 2002, p. 18). Such characteristics, however, are unconducive to the kind of generalising and prescriptive knowledge that suits policymakers’ interests, and so intervention is seen as necessary, not only to instrumentalise research practice, but also, more insidiously, to reform the entire institutional culture of HE in such a manner so as to preclude the formation of oppositional identities. Thus, realising that the neoliberal makeover of the university has serious implications for “what we [i.e. scholars] know, how we know it, when we know it, who knows it and why” (Gunter, 2006, p. 201), I have set up an interview phase in the RCiE project to further explore potential challenges to corporeal knowing in G&E research. 24
Importantly, here, I want to emphasise that, although the present thesis concurs with the critique of “golden-ageism” in contemporary HE studies (see, for instance, Murphy, 2011; P. Scott, 2005; Tight, 2010), it holds that scholars, particularly those in senior positions, are justified in feeling dislocated or dispossessed as a result of being forced to reproduce oneself as a de-intellectualised, “‘bounded rationalist’ engaged in ‘knowledge management’” (Fuller, 2009, p. 4). Evans (2016), for instance, shows in her recent work on “professorial professionalism” in the UK that there is wide dissatisfaction with the model of the “entrepreneurial professor” (p. 11) who is preoccupied with positioning, reputation-building and bidding for funding. She argues that, instead, what is longed for is the conventional model of “the mono-focused academic,” who is intellectually distinguished, “hardworking,” “agreeable,” “approachable,” “generous with her/his time,” “altruistically collegial,” “challenging, stimulating and thought-provoking” (Evans, 2016, p. 11). As neoliberalism, however, does not seem to be showing any signs of abating in HE, it is most likely that today’s scholar will end up struggling to position themselves somewhere between these two models. How this complex dilemma forms, and what it ultimately means for children, the primary research subjects in G&E research, is what the RCiE project has sought to make visible and explain to the field.
1.2.3. Recognising positionality: a tit-for-tat with the field Ome and Bell (2015) argue that research reflexivity demands the recognition of “[one’s] own location in social life, with all the partiality of vision and political commitment that comes with anyone’s social location” (p. 40). To begin with, on the level of personal positionality, although I have never self-identified as a researcher from the Global South, I have repeatedly found myself confronted with questions regarding the choice to focus on G&E research on boys and masculinities in the UK, Australia and North America, and not, for instance, in Lebanon, my home country. In a sense, I have risked my positionality in this regard being understood as concealing a cultural identity bias against non-Western or Southern knowledges, knowing and knowers – what Bhabha (1994) describes as cultural self-alienation imposed by the coloniser on the colonised. Thinking about how this bias can be mitigated, I have found consolation in Bourdieu et al.’s (1991) notion of intellectuals rising above narrow ideological barriers to locate themselves within a network of “true cultural internationalism” (p. 667, emphasis in original). Thus, what my
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project offers in terms of insights and explanations regarding corporeal knowing in G&E research should, a priori, contribute to enhancing the understanding of boys and masculinities everywhere, and not in the liberal West only – I am particularly thinking here of the Latin American and South African contexts, where gender studies in the field of education has a strong focus on masculinities in schools and local communities (see Gutmann & Vigoya, 2005 and Shefer et al., 2010). Moreover, on the level of professional positionality, two issues stand out. First, my past career as a high school teacher may potentially be viewed as concealing a practitioner identity bias, in the sense that my arguments regarding the indisposability of corporeal knowing may be skewed by the history of mundane, embodied interactions with boys in the classroom. Although this form of bias is unproblematic, I want to emphasise that my interest in the gender identities and relations of boys has mainly developed through a Master’s dissertation (Kaissi, 2014) that aimed at mapping the role of schooling in constructing masculinities in and through the body. Second, my current career as a PhD researcher may potentially be viewed as concealing an academic identity bias, in the sense that my arguments regarding educational research in the current neoliberal era may be deliberately made and/or presented in such a way so as not to upset the field, lest my own membership be interrogated. Yet, regardless of whether my intention is to confront or to please field members, the focus of the investigation in the RCiE project may itself be cause for antagonism. Indeed, not everybody will accept my authority in placing G&E scholars’ knowing, let alone identities, under scrutiny, especially if they disagree with my methodological choices. Thus, perhaps the best way to deal with this bias is to invite the field to view the RCiE project as a form of education. The following quote by Biesta et al. (2019) says more: Educational research that operates in a problem-posing rather than a problem-solving mode is, in this regard, not just research on or about or for education, but is, in a sense, itself a form of education as it tries to change mindsets and common perceptions, tries to expose hidden assumptions, and tries to engage in ongoing conversations about what is valuable and worthwhile in education and society more generally … In addition to an educative stance towards educational policy and practice itself, it also remains important for educational researchers to educate everyone who wants something from it about what research can achieve, 26
what can legitimately be asked or expected from research, and what lies beyond its scope, so that the expectations about research remain realistic. (p. 3) If, for the sake of argument, I were to view the RCiE project as a pedagogical tool, I would focus in particular on its potential to educate scholars about “working for change” (Gunter, 2005, p. 170). Indeed, I would like to think that there are valuable lessons to be learnt regarding agencies, structures (policies, ideologies, traditions and systems), power relations, identities and dispositions and knowledges and modes of knowing. The most valuable lesson, perhaps, is that what we, as knowers, say (or do not say), do (or do not do) and experience (or do not experience) in HE is subtly, and not so subtly, related to the constitution, organisation, governance and, crucially, possibility of change in the social worlds that we co-inhabit with research subjects. In short, with regard to the field of education, I have deployed my positionalities in such a way so as to “disguise” as someone who only partially belongs, both an insider and an outsider, “near and far at the same time” (Simmel, 1950, p. 407). In other words, rather than claiming co-extensiveness with the identities and experiences of G&E scholars, I have chosen to maintain a positive distance, one that can be productively harnessed to enhance the creativity, initiative and overall quality of the investigation.
1.3. Structure of the thesis This is a Journal Format Thesis, meaning that main findings are reported in the form of journal articles, or texts that are styled and formatted in a way that makes them ready for publication as such (The University of Manchester, 2019, “Presentation of Theses Policy (PGR)”). The RCiE project has culminated in four articles, or main discussion chapters, arranged linearly, from phase one, chapters four and five, to phase two, chapters six and seven. Issues regarding how each article was conceived and developed are provided in chapter three. In this section, I merely describe the structure of the thesis in terms of the aim, focus and, where applicable, main findings and arguments of each chapter. The aim of chapter two is to contextualise the RCiE project using literatures within and beyond the field of education. I begin with the notion that sociology has always been a troubled and troubling profession, highlighting four essential markers that distinguish sociological knowing from other types of knowing in the social sciences. This is followed
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by narrowing down the discussion to the sociology of education, its intellectual projects, key research traditions and the location of G&E scholarship and research within each tradition. Next, I introduce the phenomenon under investigation by explicating corporeal knowing both generally, within the social sciences, and specifically, within G&E research. Finally, I raise the issue of the continuity of corporeal knowing in the current neoliberal era. The scoping of the landscape of sociological knowing in the field of education presented in this chapter serves as a basis to inform analysis and interpretation throughout the thesis, as well as to formulate concluding thoughts and recommendations in the final chapter. The aim of chapter three is to set up the RCiE project as a qualitative investigation informed by critical realism as a methodology that enables a view of knowledge production as relational, morphogenetic and strategic human action. Building on Pawson and Tilley (1997), I construct a toolkit made up of four tools – phenomenon, context, regularity and causal mechanism. The toolkit enables the division of the project into two phases: examining knowing and knowledge through research literature documents in phase one, and examining knowing and knowers through interviews regarding the oral career and life histories of G&E scholars in phase two. For each phase, I describe how data generation and analysis methods were used. For phase two in particular, I provide details concerning the research process (e.g. respondent recruitment and access) as well as how thinking tools were devised/adopted and deployed to guide analysis and help generate new insights. Moreover, in this chapter, I set out the approach to achieving the central aim of the investigation with regard to creating a collective story of scholarship in the field of education. Finally, in addition to issues of trustworthiness and research integrity, I conclude with an account of the manner of construction of the present thesis. Importantly, this chapter and its predecessor provide the basis for contextualising and constructing the methodology and methods sections for the project’s four journal article outputs (i.e. chapters four to seven), and so some duplication in this regard, although can be minimised, cannot be wholly avoided (The University of Manchester, 2019, “Presentation of Theses Policy (PGR)”). Chapter four is the first journal article output from the RCiE project. Using the integrative literature review (Torraco, 2016) as a data-generation and data-analysis method, I begin by constructing a non-exhaustive, representative sample of documents from the G&E research literature on boys and masculinities. Using the sample, I create 28
technical records of data regarding scholars’ theories, methodologies and methods, approaches to corporeal knowing and key statements through which to examine knowing about research subjects and gender identity formation. The findings reveal that agency (and its attendants, such as voice and experience) has been a predominant way of knowing, and that there is a causal link between this predominance and the poststructural turn within the sociology of education. In particular, I show how the shift from sociological to social theory in the field has intensified epistemological disputation regarding the role of the overemphasis on agency in obscuring social structures and the need for de-individualising, corporeal-structural links in gender analysis. My main argument is that, while disputation is necessary and desirable, the continuity of corporeal knowing in a neoliberal world requires bridging between different theoretical positions. Thus, the main contribution of chapter four is a critical examination of the theoretical landscape of G&E research that reveals and explains the implications of persistent theoretical tensions for enhancing corporeal knowledge and knowing. Chapter five is the second journal article output from the RCiE project. Working with the same technical records of data used in the previous chapter, I select a new set of statements to identify and explain potential limitations to (rather than ways of) knowing that arise from the prevalence of certain ideological discourses about research subjects in society. The findings reveal that boys’ right to childhood has been a predominant limitation in G&E research, and that there is a causal link between this predominance and the ideological construction of children in Western societies as entitled to both protection and sociocultural participation at the same time. My main argument is that G&E scholars are entrapped within representationism, or what can be defined as a condition of uncertainty regarding how to approach research subjects. This condition can only be managed, not resolved, so that the normative imperative of protecting children does not override their participation in research, which is crucial to ensuring the continuity of corporeal knowing. The main contribution of chapter five, thus, is a critical account of limitations in empirical G&E research that shows that challenges to corporeal knowing are not just theoretical, but also concern the constraining effects of entrenched norms, attitudes and preconceptions regarding children, among both publics and policymakers, on what scholars can/cannot say in research. Finally in this chapter, I conclude by highlighting the significance of corporeal-epistemic reflexivity for reframing complex, such
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as corporeal-based, knowledge work as indispensable ethical-epistemological responsibility toward school children. Chapters six and seven are the latter two journal article outputs from the RCiE project. Together, they constitute phase two, where the context of the investigation is the oral career and life histories of eight G&E scholars who have contributed to shaping G&E research on boys and masculinities. Both chapters use the same dataset, generated through semi-structured interviews and analysed through thematic analysis. While chapter six, however, deploys thinking tools developed from Archer’s (2000) conceptualisation of personal identity formation to explore engagement in knowledge production as personal commitment, chapter seven deploys Bourdieuian tools, namely dispositions, habitus and hysteresis, to explore this engagement as informed by the institutional and professional arrangements of research practice in HE. Overall, the findings from this phase reveal more potential limitations to knowing about boys and gender identity formation. Two main arguments are made: first, that self- and body- alienation in the neoliberal university, which is identified in chapter six as causally underpinning scholars’ predisposition toward intellectuality, may be transferred onto the empirical construction of research settings and subjects, thus threatening to undermine the continuity of corporeal knowing in G&E research; and second, that state-led hysteresis through altering or controlling purposes, resources and identities in research practice, which is identified in chapter seven as causally underpinning the interplay between intellectualist and politicist dispositions, may impose a closure on anti- economistic epistemic labour, thus, here too, threatening to put an end to corporeal knowing in G&E research. The main contribution of these two chapters is an empirical account of personal and professional identities in HE that shows that challenges to corporeal knowing are not merely internal, concerning theory or the politics of representation, but also external, concerning state politics and policies designed to assimilate intellectual work and research practice into the post-industrial knowledge economy. Finally in these two chapters, in addition to suggesting a fourfold model for corporeal-epistemic reflexivity aimed at reclaiming the body and body consciousness, I emphasise, more broadly, the significance of hope, realistic optimism and socioanalysis as tools of academic resistance. Chapter eight is the final chapter in this thesis. In addition to a summary of the research focus, main findings and arguments of the RCiE project, the chapter presents a 30
collective story of scholarship in the field of education. Adopting Richardson’s (1997) notion of sociological bondedness between subjects who share, live and/or work in the same sociocultural setting, the story brings the two phases of the project together to answer the research questions and, in doing so, identify and explain common theoretical, ideological and political challenges to the future continuity of corporeal knowing in G&E research. In addition to this story, the chapter concludes by setting out in detail the contributions made through the project, as well as recommendations and directions for future scholarship and research on sociological knowing in contemporary HE and the wider social world.
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Chapter 2: Scoping the landscape of sociological knowing in the field of education
2.1. Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to contextualise the RCiE project through an exploration of past and present histories, traditions, structural issues and key institutional locations and developments in the Sociology of Education (SoE) in general and G&E scholarship and research in particular. The chapter will unfold as follows. First, I distinguish between sociology and sociological knowing and other disciplines and forms of knowing in the social sciences. Next, I move from the discipline to the subdiscipline through providing an account of three key intellectual projects within the SoE: knowing as replication, knowing as reflection and knowing as demonstration. Each of these projects is then exemplified through a research tradition that represents it. For each tradition, I discuss its formation, political and ideological underpinnings and approach to scholarship interested in gender. Finally, in relation to the phenomenon under investigation in the RCiE project, I elaborate on corporeal knowing both generally and specifically, within G&E research, and then conclude by raising the issue of the continuity, or potential discontinuity, of this type of knowing in the current neoliberal era. This holistic scoping of sociological knowing in the field of education is important to inform analysis and interpretation in the four discussion chapters in this thesis and, with regard to the central aim of the investigation, set the background for producing a collective story of scholarship that answers the three research questions introduced in chapter one.
2.2. Sociology: a troubled and troubling profession In 1991, David Coleman, a professor of demography and special advisor to John Major’s Conservative government (1990-1997), described the relationship between sociologists and politicians as follows: Most British sociologists are not supporters of the present [Conservative] Government … Many eminent British social scientists have served Labour Governments as advisers in various areas, notably in the 1964–1970
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government, helping to form its policy on schools, welfare, rent control and race relations. This was the Golden Age of the research-policy link and of the standing of researchers as advisers; the ideal is the example most commonly cited. But this commitment is double-edged. The present government sees little point in turning for advice to specialists who have been their unrelenting critics. It effectively ignores British sociology. (D. A. Coleman, 1991, p. 431) In those times, dubbed by Halsey (2004) the “years of uncertainty 1976-2000” (p. 122), two contradictory views of sociology prevailed. The first view, endorsed by education policymakers, was that the discipline is largely implicated in the intellectual corruption of the teaching workforce, destabilisation of education provision and, ultimately, the subversion of social norms and traditions. The second view, predominant among sociologists themselves, was that sociology can be useful in political governance and the social and cultural reformation of the public sphere. Halsey (2004), for instance, argued that, in the presence of “a culture of citizenship, political support for an open society and professional commitment to a difficult intellectual discipline,” sociology would come to function as a highly adequate “apparatus of accountability” (p. 132). In order to develop a nuanced understanding of this chasm between policymakers and sociologists, it is important to first define what sociology is, as well as which type of sociological knowing in particular is problematic for education policymaking in the UK and elsewhere. Auguste Comte, who coined the term “sociology,” defines the discipline as concerned with the study of the “social physics” of the world (Lenzer, 1975). Connell (2017), however, views sociology from a more socio-political perspective: as a knowledge production enterprise “embedded in a global economy of knowledge” (p. 278) controlled by the Global North. Moreover, she contends that it is in the so-called centres of excellence in social science across Western Europe and North America that the myth of the three founding fathers of the discipline – Marx, Weber and Durkheim – was formalised and hegemonised. This myth, in fact, has been so central to the establishment and organisation of the discipline that it is possible to read the entire history of sociological knowing within and beyond the field of education as a history of reckoning with the “founding fathers.” While some sociologists asserted the possibility of an objectivist-universalist (but not deterministic) study of society (e.g. the social realism of Michael F. D. Young and Rob Moore; the generative structuralism of Pierre Bourdieu), 33
others sought to renounce the early teachings of the “holy trinity” through endorsing philosophical schools of thought which give recognition to sociality and subjectivism as fundamental elements in the construction of knowledge and the social world (e.g. the poststructuralism of Michel Foucault). As for those sociologists who were influenced by the postmodernist interrogation of all forms of knowing (see, for instance, Lyotard, 1984 and Rorty, 1989), they could not be more indifferent to debates regarding the impasse between objectivism and subjectivism. Lamenting the ways in which excessive theoretical borrowing from such post-Truth paradigms as postmodernism and poststructuralism has dramatically remoulded understandings of science and knowledge, Walter Runciman (1998), British sociologist and President of the British Academy, welcomed with apparent gladness what he saw as the beginnings of the restoration of sociology as a proper social science in the late 1990s: “Postmodernism,” he declared, “has retreated, taking with it those aspects of human social behaviour which properly belong with literature rather than science” (p. vii). The objection to particular modes of sociological knowing is informed to a great extent by the concern with the relationship with policymaking. Halsey (2004), for instance, explains that the culturalistic tendencies of poststructuralist theorisation have significantly exacerbated policymakers’ condescending view of the discipline as an unholy (impure) species of knowledge that cannot be depended on to find solutions to social and educational problems. However, although it cannot be denied that post-Truth paradigms have left an indelible mark on the discipline, there are still common markers of engagement in sociological knowing that all sociologists/sociologically informed scholars recognise, regardless of their theoretical orientations, and that do not sit well with policymakers. These markers are: Non-commonsensical: Insofar as science involves the use of specialised languages and “marks the perfecting of knowing in highly specialised conditions of technique” (Dewey, 1916, p. 223), such as research methodology, sociology is a form of science. Moreover, the point at which sociological knowing matures into “responsible speech,” that is, scientifically relayed and defensible knowledge, is when it can be distinguished, however impurely, from “this rich yet disorganised, non-systematic, often inarticulate and ineffable knowledge that we call common sense” (Bauman & May, 2001, p. 6).
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De-privatising: By virtue of their location in a discipline concerned with the study of society as a whole, sociologists have a tendency to reject ideological privatisation, or the reduction of political, economic, social and cultural issues into private matters (e.g. Hargreaves, 1980; Macfarlane, 1978). Sociology gives recognition to the individual social subject, albeit always within a theoretically construed entity (e.g. a context, a social discourse or a political reality) that is bigger than their immediate existence and situation. No matter how much sociologists disagree over the nature or constitution of social reality, their preoccupation with the social, broadly conceived, contradicts individualism and other such particularistic dogmas which gained tremendous momentum with the rise of Thatcherite/Reaganite hyper-liberalism in the late 1970s. Holistic: Sociologists might epistemologically dispute the merits of different modes of knowing, but they do recognise the importance of taking into account all dimensions of reality– i.e. rationality, sociality and corporeality. This is partly due to the expansiveness of their sociological imagination (Mills, 1959) and partly as a result of a cumulative body of sociological literature that makes visible “the manifold web of human interdependency” (Bauman & May, 2001, p. 9). Power-conscious: Sociology “speaks in tones that can offend, about power, privilege, and the possibilities of change” (Connell, 2017, p. 283). For some sociologists (e.g. Althusser, 1971; Blau, 1994; Hawley, 1950; Lenski, 1966), powerful social structures predetermine reality. For others (e.g. Giddens, 1984; Foucault, 1990), power is both dynamic and ordered, discursive and coercive. Its configurations may reify into macro-structures, but it is primarily formed and mediated through social subjects’ localised, micro-political participations in the construction of reality. The status of power itself, however, as an organising principle of the real, is rarely denied. Without attention to it, sociological knowledge production may be done in ways complicit with existing political, policymaking and/or ideological agendas. This last signifier is particularly important. Bauman and May (2001) argue that sociological knowing is “often cherished only by those who cannot take-it-for-granted, and when it comes to those who can, it is frequently undervalued” (p. 12). Because it asks questions
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aimed at promoting democratic citizenship, its status is always prone to ideological attack. Moreover, hostility toward sociology has never been so acute as lately, with the onset of neoliberal structural reform. As Halsey (2004) argues, although the 1990s have witnessed an expansion of provision and access to higher education in the UK that gave a new lease of life to sociology departments, there is no doubt that the hostile anti-socialist neoliberalism of the previous decade had left behind a severe, seemingly irreparable damage. According to S. C. Ward (2012), neoliberal structural reform has reduced the university into “just another locale where knowledge work is carried out” (p. 169). Drawing on Gibbons et al. (1994), he argues that a major shift has taken place from “Mode I” to “Mode II” knowledge production. In the first mode, knowledge has “an emancipatory mission to spread reason” and is seen as “politically disinterested, epistemically and internally focused, professionally controlled, organisationally independent and publicly available” (S. C. Ward, 2012, pp. 107-108). Conversely, in the second mode, knowledge has to be useful to technological and economic progress and is controlled through a “vast and unwieldy knowledge-generating and -disseminating innovation system” (S. C. Ward, 2012, p. 110). Not only does this latter mode impose a market logic on research practice, but it is also intended to steer academics toward a purely economistic conceptualisation of positioning, whereby knowledge is not to be prized as a sacred object or public good that is somehow outside or above the dynamics of private exchange, but as an object that can and should be turned into a commodity in the same manner as land, money and labour … Regardless of what [it] may [contribute] to “society,” its legitimacy must be first vetted by the economic demand created by consumers before its intellectual merits are considered tenable. (S. C. Ward, 2012, pp. 104-105) Thus, it is not difficult to see why, at a time when “what is thinkable” (Swidler & Arditi, 1994, p. 314) has become a function of what makes profit, sociological knowing is being rendered undesirable. Its distinctive scientificity, tremendous de-privatising potential, holistic quality and power-consciousness make it vulnerable to neoliberal instrumentalism, with qualitative research suffering the gravest consequences, given its limited marketability. Indeed, particularly in the field of education, where relationships with policymakers are abiding (Ozga, 1998), it is becoming increasingly difficult to do 36
research on complex sociological topics, such as gender identity formation. In what follows, I further contextualise the RCiE project by narrowing down the discussion to sociological knowing within the SoE in particular, paying close attention to issues regarding the history and contemporary interest in gender scholarship and research.
2.3. From certainty to uncertainty and back again: sociological knowing in education In the UK, North America and Australia, the field of education remains one of the largest fields of study. It is practised in higher education and non-traditional centres of knowledge, has a variety of government and private funding sources, produces research published in both education and non-education academic journals and draws on a range of disciplines, including sociology. Waller (2011) maintains that, in the UK, although the SoE has had several centres of excellence (e.g. The Open University, London School of Economics, The University of Leicester, The University of Keele, The University of Nottingham and The University of Manchester), the Institute of Education, part of University College London, has played the most significant role in its initiation and development. In Australia and North America, too, the SoE has flourished across several locations. The University of Sydney, for instance, continues to be at the forefront of sociological studies in education. In the US, alongside some elite universities (e.g. Harvard and Columbia), private universities such as Chicago and public research universities such as California and Illinois remain prominent international magnets for sociology scholars (Connell, 2017). Although I agree with Lauder et al. (2009) that the SoE should not be seen as the same everywhere, particularly with regard to its relationship to policymaking, I argue that SoE scholars, not least because of globalisation and, ironically, a neoliberal economic order which reinforces ties between intellectuals, have more or less been part of one of the following three projects identified by Bauman and May (2001): Sociological knowing as “replication of the scientific enterprise”: In this project, the researcher, emulating Durkheim, “is like a seafaring explorer, seeking to discover a terrain over which no one has claimed sovereignty” (p. 171). They contend that there are social structures (“social facts”) that can be identified and studied through observing the world in an objective, detached manner. Knowing, in a sense, should “replicate the characteristics of the physical world … [for to] ignore [structures] is akin to assuming that one can ignore gravity” (p.
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171). Driven by this emphasis on the structural, the researcher sees no point in learning about the social world through subjective intentions and meanings. Sociological knowing as “reflection and modification”: In this project, “human reality is different from the natural world because human actions are meaningful” (p. 172). The researcher contends that there are no inherent facts to explain, but rather meaningful beings and doings to understand. The multiplicity of descriptions and interpretations that accrue from this hermeneutical approach is seen as desirable; the pursuit of precision and robustness in sociological research, it is argued, should not be conflated with the positivism of the physical sciences. Sociological knowing as “demonstration by effect”: In this project, “the aim … is to show that sociology [has] direct and effective practical applications” (p. 173). The researcher contends that sociological knowing must be concerned with answering to policy. Here, sociology is instrumentalised, placed “at the service of the construction and maintenance of social order, and is seen to share the concerns of social administrators,” whatever these may be (p. 173). There are several tensions among these projects. While the first and second projects entail a concern, utilitarian or not, with the human condition, the third project is overwhelmingly informed by the demands of instrumentalist education policy. In the remainder of this section, I elaborate on each project through an exemplary research tradition. For each tradition, I discuss its formation, political and ideological underpinnings and approach to G&E scholarship and research in particular.
2.3.1. Political Arithmetic: knowing as replication Up until the 1970s, SoE research was mainly dominated by the Political Arithmetic (PA) tradition (Mac an Ghaill, 1996a). According to Heath (2000), notable PA works, such as Glass (1954), Floud et al. (1956) and Halsey et al. (1980), “were largely descriptive and empirical, collecting together hard data (or at least the hardest data available) for informing public debate and policymaking. They were quantitative, hence the use of the term arithmetic, but they were geared more or less closely to issues of government policy, hence the term political” (p. 313). Banks (1974) argues that the contributions of PA Scholars, the early statisticians of education, proved so impactful that there were
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“grounds for thinking that the sociology of education has changed to some extent policymakers’ ways of thinking about educational issues” (p. 6). Indeed, underpinned by “values of compassion and justice, as well as efficiency” (Mishra, 1990, p. 5), PA research revealed the various negative ways in which socioeconomic conditions breed and perpetuate social inequality; its overarching aim, in a sense, was to inculcate into the minds of both public and policy actors the view of education as redemptive, concerned with the prosperity of all children (Dale, 2001). Not everybody, however, was enamoured by the PA tradition. Objections varied, but they all centred on critiquing the objectivism and universalism of PA conceptions of social science and the social world. Guided by influential philosophical treatises on the nature of scientific reasoning, notably Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934/1959) and The Poverty of Historicism (1944/1957) by the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper, PA scholars viewed context-less rationality (the antithesis of religious revelation) as the most efficient basis for knowing about any society or culture (Gellner, 1992). According to Hugh Lauder, Phillip Brown and Albert Henry Halsey (2004), three of the most senior PA authorities in the UK, although questions of agency and voice are important to consider, social reality would always be far more robustly and reliably knowable through the “physics” of its structural formation than the “poetry,” so to speak, of its subjects’ everyday life interactions. The fundamental concern here is that conceding too much to voice would not only deviate sociological knowing from the imperative of contributing toward a responsible, “policy-informing social science” (Lauder et al., 2004, p. 19), but also threaten the scientific legitimacy of the SoE itself. Mainly, it was feared that the slippage into relativism, as a result of the overvaluation of voice, would weaken the ability of sociological knowing to harness the key theoretical constructs (i.e. agency and structure) which have always enabled it to stake competing claims in higher education. Thus, it is not surprising that G&E research could not develop within the PA tradition. To be sure, Heath (2000) reminds the field that PA studies have given ample recognition to gender inequalities in academic achievement and socioeconomic status. In and of itself, however, the focus on (in)equalities reduces gender to sex, which is one of the primary reasons why many socially critical SoE scholars found in the later emergence of constructivism, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, the kind of political project they needed to divorce sex from gender and open up educational research to a hitherto unexplored territory: gender identities, relations, systems and the politics of masculine 39
domination and feminine subordination. It is to this deep, paradigmatic chasm between PA and what became known as the “poststructural turn” in the SoE that I now turn.
2.3.2. New Sociology of Education: knowing as reflective In 1971, Michael F. D. Young published Knowledge and Control: New Directions in the Sociology of Education. This landmark collection of sociological essays ushered in the New Sociology of Education (NSoE), whose effect Ball (2008) sums accurately: “Education was no longer [perceived as] the solution, but the problem” (p. 657, emphasis in original). While PA research portrayed the school as a passive institution that can only be reformed as part of greater social reform, NSoE research repositioned it as an active agent of social exclusion. The general stance toward school teachers, for instance, was that “they could either identify themselves as ideological policemen or as cultural dopes” who are complicit in the social reproduction of capitalist class relations (Shain & Ozga, 2001, p. 114). To be sure, NSoE scholars had an ambitious agenda for teachers. Using postmodernist and poststructuralist theories, they aimed to enlighten them to the regressive role of the school “not only in the unequal distribution of life chances, but in the construction of unequal identities” (Power & Rees, 2006, p. 2). More generally, however, and in sharp contrast to the PA tradition, neither policymakers nor practitioners could come to terms with the NSoE: We thus arrive at a situation in which the sociology of education is no longer close to practitioners (because it lost connections with them in the theoretical turn of the 1970s, and because it has been eliminated from professional formation), nor is it as influential in policy terms. (Shain & Ozga, 2001, p. 114-115) Moreover, it was the different theoretical feminisms of the twentieth century that played the most substantial role in shaping the NSoE. Each feminism had its own unique approach to reflective sociological knowing, but they were all propelled by the presupposition that gender is both a real, lived social category and a theoretical construct. Feminist academics fought hard to legitimise G&E as an important research area (Weaver- Hightower & Skelton, 2013). In 1989, the journal Gender and Education was launched, and it remains to this day the only journal in the UK which explicitly caters to scholarship on gender issues in education. In its very first editorial, Purvis (1989) described the journal as
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a long-awaited initiative to acknowledge “gender as a category of analysis in education that furthers feminist knowledge, theory, consciousness, action and debate” (p. 3). Indeed, the feminist impact on G&E research cannot be emphasised enough. Dillabough and Arnot (2001) identify a spectrum of feminist modes of sociological knowing, beginning with liberal feminism. The liberal feminists challenged longstanding religious and scientific dogma regarding the intellectual inferiority of women (Tuana, 1993). They produced work that was crucial in terms of understanding barriers to girls’ educational access (e.g. Byrne, 1978 and Deem, 1978 and Delamont, 1980 in the UK; Sadker & Sadker, 1994 and Thorne, 1993 in the US; the Girls, Schools and Society report by the Commonwealth Schools Commission, 1975 in Australia). There was much criticism, however, and it mainly came from the radical and socialist feminists of the SoE. While both these groups charged liberal feminism with essentialising sex roles and ignoring cultural identity politics, they disagreed over what sort of structural analysis is needed to account for the gendering of the social world. The radicals saw in patriarchy a pivotal conceptual device to undermine all conventional conceptions of femininity (e.g. motherhood, domesticity, the ethic of care and the private sphere) (e.g. Mahony, 1985; Thompson, 1983). In contrast, the socialists viewed patriarchy as too ahistorical to enable nuanced explanations of the role of schooling and culture in producing and reproducing gender orders. For instance, questions concerning capitalism, the labour market and the reproduction of a hierarchically stratified (gendered) workforce were thought to have been sidelined by the indiscriminate, all-knowing conceptual language of patriarchy. This characteristically socialist sensitivity toward economic issues led to an intensified focus on social class in G&E research (e.g. Acker, 1989; Arnot, 1982, Gaskell, 1983; Connell, 1987). Yet the radical and socialist feminists were criticised too, particularly by the poststructuralists, not only for denying the political agency of social subjects, but also for failing to adequately account for the social constructedness of gender (McLeod, 2008). Dominating roughly from the 1980s onward, poststructuralist feminism in G&E research enabled the view of the sociological focus on corporeality, namely the discursive formation of the self in and/or through the body, as paramount “to identify how ‘identities’ are generated and regulated in schools, and how these regulative functions lead in turn to the reconstitution of gender hierarchies in schools and society” (Dillabough & Arnot, 2001, pp. 41-42). Moreover, through the centralisation of the notion of discourse, poststructuralist feminism buttressed scholars’ sensitivity to intersectionality 41
(e.g. A. Skelton, 1993; Martin, 1998; Pharr, 1997; Walkerdine, 1990; Weis, 1988), although some have argued (see, for instance, Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 2001 and Whitty, 2012) that intersectional analysis has tended to obscure issues related to social class. Most importantly, poststructuralist feminism provided a solid basis for theorising about masculinity as a social construction (Connell, 1995, 2000). Indeed, as G&E research on boys and masculinities formed into a relatively discrete interest in the field (see Appendix 1 for an illustrative map of knowledge production in this research), “the dangerous cultural fiction that men are not gendered” (Baym, 1990, p. 61) started to gradually fade away, upsetting in the course of its demise many ideological forces inside and outside the academy. To be sure, the boys had always been on G&E scholars’ minds (e.g. Delamont, 1976; Willis, 1977), but it was the media-fuelled “boy problem” in the late 1990s that brought boys’ issues in education to the fore in the most acute terms. In that period, questions such as “What about the boys?” dominated academic conferences, journal special issues, book launches and public events (Kenway & Willis, 1998). According to Yates (1997), the official (policymaking) narrative went something like this: About 20 years ago, governments became aware that girls were being disadvantaged in schooling. They developed policies and funding to improve girls' career aspirations, to make curriculum and pedagogy more “girl-friendly,” and to ensure equal spending on girls and boys. At the same time a huge amount of research and writing (academic and professional) was carried out on girls, their development and their needs. Over this period we have seen a large increase in the proportion of girls completing school as compared with boys, and their increasing success in “non- traditional” subjects such as mathematics. Now it is time for more attention to the boys. Boys' retention rates, learning difficulties, delinquency, suicide rates and general self-esteem are all cause for concern. We don't want to take away from the girls' programs, and more needs to be done in relation to issues such as sexual harassment in schools, but there is a real dearth of good research and professional support for boys, and this is what should now occupy our urgent attention. (Yates, 1997, p. 338, emphasis in original)
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The “turn” from girls to boys, however, was not simply a matter of distributing attention more fairly. According to Weaver-Hightower (2003), several political, economic, social and cultural factors were at play. First, gender gaps in academic performance were framed by the media as a national crisis regarding “boys’ underachievement,” particularly white working-class boys (Eate et al., 2017; Foster et al., 2001). Second, the feminist critique of sex-role theory (e.g. Connell, 1996) made a focus on boys possible. Third, the use of enrolment figures and test score gaps to draw attention to disadvantages for girls had set an undesirable precedent. The same type of indicators was later used to argue that boys are the “new disadvantaged” in education (Weaver-Hightower, 2003, p. 476). Fourth, neoliberal reforms, particularly regarding the standardisation of testing, have led to a structural backlash against feminist gains (Lingard & Douglass, 1999; Mills & Lingard, 1997; Mills et al., 2007). For instance, under the pretext of boys ranking lower than girls in test scores, governments started allocating more funding to interventions, programmes and research focused on boys and their needs (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000). Fifth, there was explicit backlash too. Boys’ advocates (e.g. Sommers, 2000) fuelled public fears of feminist activism. Sixth, the moral panic over boys grew sharper with the increasing acknowledgement of a so-called “crisis of masculinity.” Government, society and schools, it was widely claimed, have failed to prepare boys for a world where “new [non- patriarchal] sets of values, aspirations and skills were being asked of men as workers, husbands and fathers” (Arnot et al., 1999: 126). Seventh, the more white middle-class parents grew concerned over the future of their boys, the more the New Right, especially in the Australian and US contexts, saw a need to intervene (Yates, 2000). Finally, the “boy turn” had “the allure of a ‘hot’ field that is wide open for new and ‘sexy’ research” (Weaver-Hightower, 2003, p. 479). With boys’ issues prioritised by funders, G&E scholars were under pressure to conform. However, rather than pushing in the direction of recuperating conventional masculinity, as it was hoped they would, scholars investigated and wrote about boys’ worlds using their poststructuralist sensibilities. On the macro level, they showed that masculinities are constituted and reconstituted through the dynamics of political governance and economic structures, including the shift to late-modernity (Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 2001). On the micro level, they developed and used such influential concepts as “hegemonic masculinity” (or the most socially accepted form of masculinity) and “inclusive masculinity” (or masculinity free from sexism and homophobia) to explain 43
gender identity formation as multiple, contextual, historical, relational and corporeally (linguistically, affectively and materially) performable (e.g. Anderson, 2010; Connell, 1995; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Martino, 1999; Martino & Pallota-Chiarolli, 2003; Renold, 2004; Robinson, 2005; Skelton, 1997; Youdell, 2005). Moreover, intersectional perspectives were deployed to further understand the complexity, plurality and fluidity of masculinities. Sexuality, in particular, could not be avoided, since, as Mac an Ghaill and Haywood (2001) argue, “in mainstream contemporary Anglo-American cultures, at least, heterosexuality and gender are profoundly imbricated” (p. 32). In short, the NSoE tradition appears to have survived the test of time, but not without its fair share of criticism. Some of the concerns that have been raised include its call for epistemologies of uncertainty and methodologies of “interruption and disruption” (Stronach & MacLure, 1997, p. 4), its theoreticism and identitarianism (Moore & Muller, 1999), its claim to transcending dualisms (Maton & Moore, 2011), its promise of emancipation for social subjects (Young & Muller, 2007), its antagonisation of statistics and numbers and, as some G&E scholars (e.g. Martino, 2016; Martino & Cumming-Potvin, 2018) have recently argued in relation to transgender issues, its anti-normative politics. Apart from these concerns, however, one can hardly deny that the social theories, methodological innovations, analytical lines of thinking and ethical principles of the NSoE still constitute an attractive mode of sociological knowing for many an education scholar interested in, as Lather (1991) puts it, contributing to “the theory and practice of liberatory education” (p. xvii, my emphasis). In the final subsection below, I introduce and discuss a research tradition that poses a threat to the sustainability of this mode in the SoE and the field of education more broadly.
2.3.3. School Effectiveness and School Improvement: knowing as demonstration The celebration of complexity and uncertainty was soon to give way to a neoliberal drive for certainty. Almost four decades of business-led economisation and privatisation have seen the replacement of social welfarist values, namely education as a “public good,” by the post-Fordist values of devolved responsibility, efficiency, mobility, flexibility, adaptation, competition, productivity and individualism (Brown & Lauder, 1992; Clarke & Newman, 1997; Lucas, 2014; Nixon et al., 2001; Olssen & Peters, 2005; Shahjahan, 2014).
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In terms of knowledge production in HE, one of the most drastic consequences has been the complete overhaul of research practice. Not only has the university scholar become an “achievement-oriented subject whose actions have an almost imperial quality, namely the forging of alliances and reputation in order to land lucrative and prestigious research projects” (Burstscher et al., 2006, p. 249), but their rights to intellectual autonomy and trust-based workplace relations have been further undermined: “The more the researcher depends on external sources of funding, the less autonomous he or she is when choosing a problem to study” (Lamont, 2009, p. 11). Indeed, there is no free knowing in the neoliberal university. Any form of knowledge that reflects a “dubious marketability … [an] inability to be easily simplified and made formulaic and transportable in the knowledge market” is subject to systematic disposal (S. C. Ward, 2012, p. 121). That is why the NSoE was denounced as “an unnecessary, costly and harmful ideology” (Dawson, 1981, cited in Arnot & Barton, 1992, pp. viii-ix); not only did it radicalise teachers in ways that rendered them unfit to teach, but its theoretical complexity also meant that it had low “exchange value.” Moreover, the devaluing treatment of the scholar as a mere contributor to the knowledge economy has led to a profound shift in the perception of the role of sociological knowing in the SoE. Rather than reflecting on social reality and the culture, goals and directions of education policy, knowing has become for many scholars a routine practice of justifying through research the rationale and viability of existing policies, systems and trends. Perhaps best exemplifying this shift is the work of most, not all, School Effectiveness and School Improvement (SESI) scholars. Founded by Ron Edmonds at Harvard University, the SESI tradition is practised across several locations, including the Institute of Education in London (Angus, 1993). In 1997, it received significant institutional and political support through the establishment of the Standards and Effectiveness Unit in the Department for Education and Employment under New Labour. Scholars like David Reynolds, who co-authored Effective Teaching: Evidence and Practice (2001), and Jaap Scheerens, whose books include Effective Schooling: Research, Theory and Practice (1992) and The Foundations of Educational Effectiveness (1997), remain two of the tradition’s most influential shapers in the UK and worldwide. In a recent review of the literature, Reynolds et al. (2014) trace the development of SESI scholarship through mapping key organisations, societies, conferences, handbooks and journals. These include, for instance, the International 45
Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (an organisation), the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (based in the US) and the journal of School Effectiveness and School Improvement. Despite continual expansion, the founding premise of the tradition remains intact: “All children are eminently educable and … the behaviour of the school is critical in determining the quality of that education” (Edmonds, 1979, p. 20). This coupling between an individualistic focus on children and an atomising, responsibilising approach to schooling is precisely what makes SESI research an ally to policymaking (Ball, 2004; Stark, 1998). Unlike NSoE research, it is not slow, laborious, complex and critical. Using mainly quantitative methods, it appears to specialise in providing ready-made educational solutions based on such “objective” determinants as “good”/”sick” schools and “right”/”bad” school leadership (Reynolds, 1992). According to Whitty (2012), SESI research has proven to be a “politically respectable tradition” (p. 72) that threatens to undermine critical scholarship in the SoE. Three recurrent objections to SESI thinking and knowing can be brought up here. First, there is the functionalist focus on the school, evident, for instance, in the rejection of the conclusions of the landmark J. Coleman (1966) report regarding the influence of outside-school factors on teaching and learning (Angus, 1993). This focus is seen as anti- sociological because it ignores fundamental questions about agency and structure in society. Second, there is the claim to context-transcendence, reminiscent to a certain degree of the PA tradition. This, too, is seen as anti-sociological, especially by NSoE scholars, because it ignores questions about power, discourse and subjective experience. Finally, the positivism of SESI research is problematic. In contrast to the positivism of the PA tradition, which can be described as humane, since the predominant view among PA scholars is that numbers and statistics can be useful tools in achieving desirable social change, the positivism of SESI is based on strategic alignment between the interests of policymaking and those of a select clique of education scholars who are willing to put their knowledge work in the service of the government (Elliot, 1996; Hamilton, 1996). Willmott (1999), for instance, describes SESI research as “ideological commitment” (p. 253), and Pring (1995) sees SESI scholars as working “under the watchful eyes of their political mentors” (cited in Goldstein & Woodhouse, 2000, p. 354) to promote the pathologising view of schools as responsible for economic and social problems. In short, the role SESI research has played in repositivising educational research and further instrumentalising policy-research relationships had led to vexatious debates 46
regarding what it means to be a sociologically informed scholar and do sociological knowing in the current neoliberal era (Apple, 2015; Ball, 1995, 2003, 2007; Hargreaves, 1996). For socially critical academic communities, the SESI model of knowing is utterly unappealing, not only because it is dissonant with their theoretical and methodological choices, but also, more dangerously, because it implicates knowledge production in the normalisation and, sometimes, essentialistic justification of inequalities and injustices in the school and wider society. Moreover, the SESI model is seen as regressive because of its failure to accommodate the interests and dispositions of those whose engagement in knowledge production, like G&E scholars’, is never merely bureaucratic or instrumental, but rather is ontologically crucial, “embodied and integral to their lives” (Gunter, 2002, p. 390). There is, thus, a legitimate concern to raise regarding how communities of scholarship within the SoE which have been shaped through the cultural turn of the NSoE tradition are currently dealing with the implications of this either/or, bureaucrat or intellectual, dilemma for their investments in reflective sociological knowing, particularly with regard to their reliance on such alternative, post-positivist tools of understanding as corporeality. In the next and final section of this chapter, I focus specifically on issues related to corporeal knowing, namely how it has come to be an integral part of sociological knowing more broadly, how it has been useful in G&E research and, finally, how its future looks like amid the systematic de-intellectualisation of educational research in universities.
2.4. Corporeality and corporeal knowing: past, present and future Toward the end of the twentieth century, the call for “bringing bodies back in” (Frank, 1990, p. 131) rang out across the social sciences, including sociology. Although many have argued that corporeality had in fact always been there (Crossley, 1995; Shilling, 1993; Williams & Bendelow, 1998), it was still generally perceived as an absence. Morgan and S. Scott (1993), Mellor and Shilling (1997) and Turner (2006), among others, have delineated the reasons for the early lack of interest in it. These include the concentration of research in the university (where the cerebral overrides the corporeal), the persistence of orthodox religious worldviews (which chastise carnality), the dichotomy between culture and nature, the over-rationalism of early sociological thought, the feminist rejection of the emphasis on the body as essentialist (sexist) and the view that foregrounding the
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body risks personalising knowledge production, especially in a discipline founded on the assumption that society matters and should be studied as a whole, not just from the perspective of the individual body/subject. However, the series of drastic social and cultural developments that have swept across the liberal-democratic West from the 1960s onward has made a focus on corporeality in academic research inescapable. Some of these developments include the experience of ontological insecurity in the wake of late-modernity (Giddens, 1991), the rise of consumerism (Featherstone, 1982), the gay and women’s liberation movements which advocated social justice and, particularly in relation to the social, cultural and ethical dimensions of corporeality, the spread and public fear of the HIV epidemic (Morgan & S. Scott, 1993). Confronted with such an unprecedented explosion of interest in the body in popular culture, sociologists could not afford disengagement. The subject of how “bodies grow, work, flourish and decay in social institutions that produce bodily effects” (Connell, 1987, p. 86) became centre stage in the discipline, including in the SoE.
2.4.1. The location of corporeality in the sociology of education Evans et al. (2009) have studied the evolution of corporeal knowing across three subdisciplines: the SoE, the sociology of health and the sociology of sport. Their findings, summarised in Table 1 below, foreground three main perspectives on the body.
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Perspective 1: the body-without-flesh Definition The body is a discursive relay for social and cultural messages. Descriptors of sociological Approaches tend to be constructivist, and knowing discussions emphasise, among other things, society as discursive, identity as a social construction, the body as a discursive construction and notions like control/disciplinary surveillance, social hierarchies, discursive regimes, discursive practices (linguistic and bodily), embodiment, (re)inscription and body work and body projects. Perspective 2: the body-with-fleshy-feelings Definition The body is a discursive relay, but also an agent that can reinforce or undermine messages by means of in-built forces. Descriptors of sociological Approaches tend to be phenomenological/social knowing interactionist, and discussions emphasise, among other things, society as a network of bodies, identity as emerging through processes of symbolic interaction, the body as formed through affective and/or semiotic encounters and notions like affective forces, corporeal generation, corporeal presence, corporeal communication, feelings, emotions, sensation and sensuality. Perspective 3: the body-made-flesh Definition The body is a real (material) and independent meaning-making system that forms within and entangles with other meaning-making systems. Descriptors of sociological Approaches tend to be corporeal-realist or new knowing materialist, and discussions emphasise, among other things, society as both material and discursive, identity as both biophysical and representational, the body as both biologically and culturally generative and notions like sociobiology (and the relevance of a renewed focus on sex), flesh-and-blood corporeality, the mind/body dualism and physique/somatotype.
Table 1. Three perspectives on the body in the sociology of education, based on Evans et al., 2009
The first perspective, the body-without-flesh, is constructivist. Here, corporeal knowing relies on poststructuralist conceptualisations of the body as both actor and acted upon (Foucault, 1977). Although it is acknowledged that there are pre-discursive, affective and material elements to the body, not much is offered in the way of defining and understanding the compositions and generative capacities of affectivity and 49
materiality: “The more we read about the body, the less we see it as a material biological presence and, even when it goes badly wrong, we get barely a glimpse of its flesh and blood corporeality” (Evans et al., 2009, p. 397). In addition to Butlerian notions of identity formation and performativity (Ahmed, 2000; Bronfen, 2000), some of the key theoretical frameworks which draw on this perspective include Turner’s (1984) top-down model of the “four R’s” – Reproduction, Representation, Regulation and Restraint – and Frank’s (1991) triangular model – “Institutions, Discourses and Corporeality” forming within, through and between body, self and society. The second perspective, the body-with-fleshy-feelings, is phenomenological, but it does not differ radically from the first. Phenomenological corporeal knowing holds that the body is imbued with inherent qualities, “affective forces,” which give meaning to discursive interactions between agents and shape their very “modes of existence” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 337). These forces are not limited to feelings and emotions, but rather include the whole range of pre-thought human conditions, such as elations, frustrations, desires, pleasures, gratifications, fulfillments, fantasies and self- and other- identifications (Evans et al., 2009). Moreover, in terms of the ontological representation of social reality, both the body-without-flesh and the body-with-fleshy-feelings perspectives advance an understanding of human embodiment as relational-dialogical, or the product of the co-constitution of agency and structure. While the former, however, tends to reduce embodiment to a relay of the discursive-semiotic construction of the real, the second pushes for a more “experientially grounded view of human embodiment as the existential basis of our being-in-the-world” (Williams & Bendelow, 1998, p. 8, emphasis in original). Embodiment, in other words, is as much impulsive as intentional. In addition to Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) phenomenology, Goffman’s (1970) symbolic interactionism is considered to be one of the key theories that shaped the view of the body as a fleshy, feeling entity. The third perspective, the body-made-flesh, is materialist. Here, scholars acknowledge constructivist and phenomenological contributions, but they raise concerns regarding the biological materiality of the body. The main argument is that there is a need to rethink the body “as a real, material entity, which is connected with but different from the many different frameworks of meaning in which it is variously represented in human cultures” (Prout, 2000, p. 3). Subjects are not merely embodied, but rather emplaced, indefinitely co-extensive with time and space. Thus, according to this perspective, if 50
corporeal knowing is to remain useful, the traditional dualism between agency and structure should be transcended, and “border crossings” (Evans & Davies, 2011, p. 265) between the social and natural sciences should be encouraged. These “crossings” may have de-stabilising effects, but they are necessary to produce “as-yet unimagined” (Davis & Sumara, 2008, p. 38) knowledge. Some of the theories which build on and develop this perspective include corporeal realism (Shilling, 2005) and new materialism (Barad, 2007). Although these perspectives are claimed on distinct ontological and epistemological grounds, what they have in common is their deep-rootedness in what has been described in the previous section as reflective sociological knowing. Indeed, it can be argued that it is the promise of the resourcefulness of corporeality – namely, that what can be learnt for, through and about the body is not only valuable, but also analysable and interpretable in ways that are no less scientific and illuminative – which has provided the basis for the break with the objectivist-universalist paradigm of sociological knowing. Moreover, alongside research on race, sexuality and (dis)ability in the SoE, G&E research has been at the forefront of the exploitation of this resourcefulness for the purpose of understanding subjectivity formation in the school. Relying mainly on ethnographic and interview methods, and using theoretical concepts such as interpellation (Althusser, 1971), subjectivation (Foucault, 1977, 1990) and discursive performativity (Butler, 1990, 1993, 1997), scholars have mapped and examined the broad range of ways through which the school constructs, or acts as a site for the construction of, boys’ masculinities. These ways include physical education (e.g. Swain, 2003), posture and gait (Skeggs, 1991; Skelton, 1997), emotional expression/suppression (e.g. Kehler, 2007), the school uniform (e.g. Swain, 2002), sex talk (e.g. Dalley-Trim, 2009; Kehily & Nayak, 1997; Kehler et al., 2005; Phoenix et al., 2013) and peer group relationships (e.g. Epstein et al., 2001; Kehler, 2004; McCormack, 2014). Moreover, building on the “spatial turn” in the SoE (Gulson & Symes, 2007), scholars have explored the affective and somatic effects of school spaces (e.g. classrooms, playgrounds, gyms and locker rooms) on boys’ behaviours, interactions, relationships with teachers and, in the final analysis, performance of the masculine self (e.g. Kehler, 2007, Marsh & Noguera, 2017; Thorne, 1993; Youdell & Armstrong, 2011). Finally, scholars have addressed the material too, revealing how physical appearance discrimination, body image stereotypes and intra-active relations between subjects and objects (e.g. body hair, muscle and sports
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gear) converge to form patterns of normative masculinity construction (Burns & Kehler, 2014; Connell, 1995; Hill, 2015; Ringrose & Rawlings, 2015). There have been criticisms, however, within and outside the SoE, that while G&E research has shown how subjectivity and corporeality intermingle on the “pre-objective [i.e. phenomenological] level of lived ongoing experience” (Williams & Bendelow, 1998, p. 209), not enough consideration, at least not as expansively and deeply, has been given to how, beyond embodiment, agency, structure and corporeality interrelate on the “onto- formative” (Connell, 1995, p. 81) level – the macro-structural, politically and economically – to generate the conditions which, in the first place, make the consciousness and practical experience of a gendered identity possible. To pose an example, if one accepts the proposition that discourses of masculinities are “relatively cohesive systems of thought that identify particular bodies as male and particular human performances as masculine and, in the process, help constitute multiple and fragmented masculine subjectivities” (Pringle & Markula, 2005, p. 477), one still needs to address the question of what social structures underpin and cause these systems to work effectively, since, as Mouzelis (1995) argues, it is the concept of “social structure” which makes sociological knowing sociological. Yet, again, as previously discussed in relation to the tensions between the PA and the NSoE traditions, not everybody in the SoE would agree that the fundamental problematic of sociological knowing should be the relationship between agency and structure. It is evident, thus, that theorising about and practising corporeal knowing is conflictual, not least because of ongoing disputes regarding where and how to locate corporeality in the vast field of sociological thought, let alone, as will be shown below, the kind of complications that neoliberal structural reform creates for any complex, socially critical type of scholarship in the academy.
2.4.2. The future of corporeal knowing: demise or continuity? Disputation over theoretical issues continues to thrive in the field of education, but so does neoliberal performativity, instrumentalist policymaking and the new forms of “positivism, empiricism and scientism” (Lather, 2016, p. 503) which threaten to reduce knowledge production to a mere consent-manufacturing tool. Indeed, in the bigger scheme of things, one can argue that at the heart of the plight of sociological knowing is the issue that the field of education itself has never been truly autonomous. Rather, as it
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currently stands, the field is being subjected to pressures by a wide range of public, state and corporate actors to participate in the rationalisation and promotion of privatising policies as the only solution to social, economic and educational problems. What is on demand, as Gunter (2016) maintains, is a class of complicit knowers, “neutral simplifiers” (p. 27), who are comfortable with doing a nod-and-wink style of research practice, through which to exemplify what is and is not acceptable in terms of ontology, epistemology, methodology and the overall manner and purposes of engagement in knowledge production in a competitive market-led economy. From the policymaking perspective, de-intellectualised, simplistic-and-simplifying scholars make for perfect academic allies; their instrumentalist approach to knowledge, entrepreneurial identities and tendency to take for granted the political will and reforms of the government of the day, without any critical attention to underlying motives or hidden aims, constitute much more attractive dispositions than, for instance, the view among reflective sociological knowers that research should be done as “wondrous pursuit,” “experimentation,” “offence” or, perhaps most provokingly, “a headache” (MacLure, 2010, p. 284, emphasis in original) to people in power positions. Thus, given the reality of the forced assimilation of the field into a “new political economy of knowledge within which different [institutions and groups of people] are considerably altering their place and identity” (Dsizah & Etzkowitz, 2012, p. 1), what types of challenges confront G&E scholars today? What is the impact of the neoliberally reinforced hierarchisation of research knowledge on their reflective, extra-rational, corporeal knowing about research subjects and gender identity formation? Moreover, how can they be brought to realise the bondedness of common challenges in the field, as well as the need for collective action that is “independent of and potentially resistant to official external policy” (Gunter, 2016, p. 24)? Responding to these questions has provided the basis for achieving the central aim of the RCiE project with regard to creating a collective story of scholarship that reveals and explains potential challenges to corporeal knowing in G&E research on boys and masculinities. In general, the big picture in the field seems to be one of selves, beliefs, dispositions and practices suspended between the so-called “old” and the so-called “new,” with many grey areas in between: the “old” (truth-seeking) university and the “new” market-led university; the “old” (trust-based) model of research practice and the “new” (competitive) model of research practice; the “old” (relatively autonomous) 53
scholar and the “new” (self-surveilling) scholar; the “old” (liberalist) mode of knowing and the “new” (instrumentalist) mode of knowing; the “old” (welfarist) schooling system and the “new” (corporatist) schooling system; and, perhaps the prime distinction that encompasses all others, the “old” (industrial and anthropomorphic) world and the “new” (post-industrial and post-human) world. The change from the old to the new, especially in this case, is never neutral, never inevitable, but rather, as Connell (2011) argues, the result of power, politics and policymaking colluding to dispose of types of knowledge whose complexity, uncertainty and unpredictability render them useless in the process of perpetuating existing visions, narratives and/or structural arrangements. As corporeal- based knowledge is one such type, much hangs on what G&E scholars know about their situatedness in HE, and hence the significance of the contributions of the present thesis to the field.
2.5. Summary of chapter two In this chapter, I have engaged with key literatures within and beyond the field of education to contextualise the RCiE project. The discussion has developed in a linear fashion, from the general to the specific. First, I have provided an account of sociology and sociological knowing in the social sciences, and then narrowed down the discussion to the SoE, identifying, describing and differentiating between its key traditions, as well as locating G&E scholarship and research in general and research into boys and masculinities in particular. Second, to address the specific phenomenon under investigation in the project, I have shown how corporeal knowing has contributed to expanding knowledge about boys’ gender identity formation in the school. Finally, I have raised the issue of the potential continuity of this type of knowing in relation to the implications of neoliberal structural reform in higher education for G&E scholars’ identities and research practice. In the following chapter, I shall move to setting out the research design of the RCiE project.
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Chapter 3: Methodology
3.1. Introduction The aim of the RCiE project is to investigate knowledge production in G&E research on boys and masculinities in the school in order to produce a collective story of scholarship in the field of education that reveals and explains common theoretical, ideological and political challenges to corporeal knowing. To carry out the investigation, I have adopted critical realism (Archer, 1995, 2000; Bhaskar, 1979, 2011) as a methodology because of its endorsement of analytical dualism between agency and structure, which is important for understanding knowledge production as agential human action subjected to structural constraints. The methodology enables the division of the project into two phases: examining knowing and knowledge through the G&E research literature in phase one, and examining knowing and knowers through the oral career and life histories of eight G&E scholars in phase two. Here, the emphasis on identities, relations, concerns, dispositions and the interplay between the agency of knowing and structural arrangements in intellectual work and research practice in the field has called for the use of thinking tools developed from Archer’s (2000) theory of social reality and Bourdieu’s (1990a) theory of practice. Combined, the explanations and insights generated from these two phases form a complex and holistic characterisation of the present state as well as implications for the future continuity of corporeal knowing in G&E research. The purpose of this chapter is to explicate and account for the research design of the RCiE project. In addition to discussing ontological and epistemological assumptions and the tools used to operationalise critical realism as a methodology, I shall provide details regarding the rationale for each phase of the project, the data generation and data analysis methods used and the research processes undertaken, particularly with regard to fieldwork activity in phase two. Also, I shall describe the approach to achieving the central aim of the investigation with regard to creating a collective story of scholarship in the field. Finally, I shall discuss issues regarding trustworthiness, research integrity and the manner in which the four journal article outputs (chapters four to seven) which constitute the body of this thesis have been conceived and developed.
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3.2. Critical realism: a methodology for investigating knowledge production The RCiE project is a qualitative investigation into knowledge production that adopts critical realism as a methodology. According to Archer at al. (2016), “defining critical realism is not an easy task,” for “there is not one unitary framework, set of beliefs, methodology, or dogma that unites critical realists as a whole” (para. 2). One, for instance, can be a critical realist and also be a Marxist, Bourdieuian, Habermasian or even Foucauldian or Deleuzian scholar (Porpora, 2015; Sayer, 2000). This is because critical realism is not so much a theory as a “meta-theoretical position” predicated on the possibility of “an alternative paradigm both to scientistic forms of positivism concerned with … the quest for law-like forms; and also to the strong interpretivist or postmodern turn which denied explanation in favo[u]r of interpretation, with a focus on hermeneutics and description at the cost of causation” (Archer et el., 2016, para. 1). At the heart of this position, particularly as developed by Roy Bhaskar (1979, 2011) and Margaret Archer (1995, 2000), is a philosophy of ontological realism that holds that reality is constructed by social agents but nevertheless exists independently of their knowledge of it. This philosophy has significant implications for how to conceptualise agency and structure, or, in Archer’s (1982) words, “how to develop an adequate theoretical account which deals simultaneously with men [sic] constituting society and the social formation of human agents” (p. 455). For critical realists, the tensions between positivist sociology, which emphasises structure at the expense of agency, and interpretivist sociology, which centralises constructivism in ways that leave little to no room for a discrete treatment of agency and structure, are threatening to undermine the ability of sociological inquiry to contribute to social science. Hence, they emphasise the need for ontological “underlabouring” (Bhaskar, 2011, p. 1), that is, disentangling the complexity of the numerous epistemologies that have been proposed regarding social reality in order to understand what constitutes, mediates between and governs both the continuities and contingencies (including, potentially, interruptions or even reconfigurations) of the relationship between agency and structure (Bhaskar, 1978; DeLanda, 2006; Reed, 2009). Importantly, to “underlabour” is not to privilege ontology over epistemology, but rather to insist, particularly in response to the discursivism of poststructuralist social theorising, that asking sociological questions about agency and structure remains fundamental. Indeed, as Bhaskar (1978) argues, transcendental idealism, or the notion 56
that theory must grow out of dualisms, is more of an escapism than a coherent set of positions, arguments and propositions that can demonstrate convincingly that the division of the agential and the structural in everyday life is not real. Having said that, my aim below is to introduce the key ontological and epistemological assumptions which have underpinned the operationalisation of critical realism in the RCiE project.
3.2.1. Ontological and epistemological assumptions Critical realism rejects the co-constitution hypothesis, whereby “structure enters simultaneously into the constitution of the agent and social practices, and ‘exists’ in the generating moments of this constitution” (Giddens, 1979, p. 5). In contrast, the type of agency-structure relationality that critical realism promotes is based on “analytical dualism,” that is, the notion that although structures are an “outcome of human agency,” they are reified through the recurrence of human activity into an “ever-present condition (material cause)” that exercises objective influence on agency (Bhaskar, 1979, p. 44, emphasis in original). In other words, because, as Archer (1982) observes, all human beings are inevitably born into a reality “ever trammelled by past structural and cultural constraints and by the current politics of the possible” (p. 470), structures may be conceived of and studied independently, as irreducible to agency. The following three characteristics summarise what is meant by relationality from a critical realist perspective: Naturalistic: In his “transformative model of social activity,” Bhaskar (1979) argues that both the natural and social sciences adopt relationality as a foundational mode of reasoning about the world. For instance, just like grasping the gaseous state of real matter entails understanding the relationship between temperature and pressure (i.e. Guy-Lussac’s Law), grasping the complex process of gender identity formation entails understanding the relationship between agency and structure. Where the two sciences diverge, however, as Bhaskar (1979) explains, is that social science, especially hermeneutical theorising, often presupposes that relationality implies mutual reducibility. Put differently, that there is a relationship between temperature and pressure does not mean that they are one; by the same token, that daily life is constructed and flows discursively does not mean that
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agency and structure (society and individual) can be reduced to each other: “While social structures are dependent upon the consciousness which the agents who reproduce or transform them have, they are not reducible to this consciousness” (Bhaskar, 2011, p. 3). Anti-positivist (or morphogenetic): While relationality in natural science is fixed (for it is unthinkable that temperature and pressure would cease to be related), relationality in social science is dynamic. Insofar as social subjects are conscious, thinking and sentient, it would be deterministic to presuppose that structures are impenetrable, immune to deconstruction and reconstruction. Rather, because they are inevitably exercised through human agency, structures are anti- mechanical, “open-ended and not ‘finalistic’” (Archer, 2007a, p. 37). Moreover, according to Archer’s (1982) “morphogenetic approach,” structural change depends on the “implicative force” (p. 476) of actions and interactions, that is, the possibility that, over time, misfiring between structure and agency may yield different action. Such is the emergent relationship between society and individual in critical realism: it is both dualistic and “sequential, dealing in endless cycles of – structural conditioning/social interaction/structural elaboration – thus unravelling the dialectical interplay between structure and action” (Archer, 1982, p. 458). Strategic: Jessop’s (2005) “strategic-relational approach” adds considerations of “spatio-temporality” and “strategy” to the conceptualisation of agency-structure relationality in critical realism. His argument is that critical realists should give more recognition to both the “strategic selectivities” of structures – their ability “[to] privilege some actors, some identities, some strategies, some spatial and temporal horizons, some actions over others” – and the “structurally-oriented strategic calculation” of agents – their individual and/or collective awareness of “this differential privileging through ‘strategic-context’ analysis when undertaking a course of action” (Jessop, 2005, p. 48). Mainly, this emphasis on the “strategic” is intended to convey the notion that change does not simply “emerge,” but rather involves decision-making on the part of agents. This is not to say that agents are fully aware of which strategies are privileged, or that they are fully equipped to undertake strategic action in their own interest, but it is to say that
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liberation from structural constraints does not happen without the agent actively strategising in its direction. Collectively, these characteristics underpin what I want to refer to as the stratification (as opposed to co-constitution) hypothesis. The stratified social ontology shown in Figure 1 below represents a translation of analytical dualism. Here, reality is depicted as divided into three strata or levels of formation: the higher stratum, the empirical, is where the agential reproduction of events or phenomena takes place and thus can be empirically observed; the middle stratum, the actual, is where the tendencies or regularities (e.g. desires, dispositions, interests, orientations, concerns, trends or discourses) which give rise to events or phenomena form and reify into structures. This is the level at which the continuities that cut across the contingencies of events or phenomena can be illuminated. Finally, the real stratum is where the causal – in the sense of generative, not in the classical-successionist (cause-and-effect) sense of pre- determinative – mechanisms which underpin regularities are located. This is the level at which the continuities of events or phenomena, as well as the possibilities of, or challenges to, change, can be explained. Collier (1994) further clarifies what is meant by causal mechanisms in critical realism: Things have the powers that they do because of their structures … and we can investigate the structures that generate powers, and to an extent predict the powers from the structures. Structures cause powers to be exercised given some input, some ‘efficient cause’, e.g., the match lights when you strike it. In asking about the structure generating some power of some entity, we are asking about a mechanism generating an event. A mechanism in this sense is not necessarily mechanical in the sense of Newtonian mechanics. It could be an animal instinct, an economic tendency, a syntactic structure, a Freudian “defence mechanism.” (p. 43)
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Figure 1. A stratified social ontology (Bhaskar, 1979) Thus, on the basis of these assumptions, the RCiE project has adopted an ontological view of knowledge production as relational, strategic and morphogenetic human action which occurs in the stratified social reality of Higher Education (HE), where agency and structure are irreducible to each other. First, knowledge production is relational in that it cannot be simplistically reduced to a series of standardised operations, events and/or activities – think of the “person specification” section in any academic job description today. Rather, it is undertaken by an agency situated within a field fraught with pre-established norms and regulatory regimes which constrain action. Second, knowledge production is morphogenetic in that, although entrenched, the causal mechanisms which underpin constraints can be exposed and resisted: Constraints and enablements will only be tendential because of human reflexive abilities to withstand [their causal powers] and strategically to circumvent them. The effect of these structural and cultural causal powers is at the mercy of two open systems: the world and its contingencies and human agency’s reflexive acuity, creativity and capacity for commitment. (Archer, 2003, p. 7) Finally, knowledge production is strategic in that it involves a plurality of identities, relations, goals, choices, values, personal powers and dispositions that scholars capitalise on to take action. Their ability to strategise means that the interplay between agency and structure may be reoriented to contribute toward change rather than stability. In the context of the RCiE project, change, broadly speaking, denotes new structural arrangements regarding knowledge, knowing and knowers in HE.
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3.2.2. Operationalising critical realism Assumptions such as analytical dualism and the possibility of causal but open- ended explanations allow for a retroductivist logic of inquiry: “a distinctive form of inference … which posits that events are explained through identifying and hypothesising causal powers and mechanisms that can produce them” (Hu, 2018, cited in Price & Martin, 2018, p. 90). Represented in Figure 2 below, this logic is described by Pawson and Tilley (1997) as “generative causation” (p. 58) to distinguish it from other forms of retroductivist or causative logic which do not necessarily emphasise the morphogenetic characteristic of agency-structure relationality.
Context
Mechanism
Regularity
Figure 2. Generative causation – Regularity = Mechanism + Context (Pawson & Tilley, 1997) Moreover, Pawson and Tilley (1997) propose an operationalisation of retroductivism through adapting and deploying Bhaskar’s (1979) key concepts – i.e. phenomenon, context, regularity and mechanism – as methodological tools to conduct empirical studies. Accordingly, I have relied on my own research questions, reproduced below, to adapt these concepts in a manner suitable to the aims of the investigation in the RCiE project: 1. How is knowledge in G&E research on boys and masculinities produced, and with what implications for corporeal knowing? 2. What are the challenges for G&E scholars engaged in knowledge production as personal commitment, and with what implications for corporeal knowing? 3. What are the challenges for G&E scholars engaged in knowledge production through research practice in HE, and with what implications for corporeal knowing? First, regarding phenomenon, I have designated the project’s concern with corporeal knowing as a phenomenon related to knowledge (ideas, paradigms, presuppositions, 61
understandings, data, arguments and claims) about research subjects and gender identity formation. Second, regarding context, I have designated the field of education in HE as the broad context in which research knowledge production takes place. Moreover, I have identified two specific, thematically distinct but analytically interrelated, contexts for locating and investigating the phenomenon: the G&E research literature, and the oral career and life histories of G&E scholars. These two contexts constitute the empirical level of the occurrence of the phenomenon. Third, regarding regularity, I have designated the predominant way of and potential limitations to knowing that can be identified through examining contexts as regularities that either enable or constrain the agency of knowing in the field. These regularities constitute the actual level of the occurrence of the phenomenon. Finally, regarding causal mechanism, I have designated the theoretical, ideological and political forces that can be identified through examining contextual issues (i.e. themes arising from the research literature and oral histories) as causal mechanisms which underpin the regularities in ways that pose challenges to the phenomenon (i.e. the continuity of extra-rational, corporeal knowing in the field). These mechanisms constitute the real level of the occurrence of the phenomenon. Presented in Table 1 below, these concepts constitute the methodological toolkit of the RCiE project (see Appendix 3 for diagrammatical illustrations of their interrelations). Importantly, as Jessop (2005) notes, although there can be an infinite number of identifiable regularities and mechanisms for any given phenomenon, let alone an infinite number of ways of thinking about and determining which mechanism underpins which regularity, the work of analysis and explanation remains necessarily circumscribed by the contextual boundedness of the data available on or generated for the purposes of the study, be it done through an etic or emic approach. In other words, because regularities and mechanisms are essentially “empirical possibilities that are not necessarily empirically evident [i.e. expressed in the data]” (Moore & Muller, 2002, p. 634), they can only be identified and explained through the in-depth examination of the contextual issues relevant to the phenomenon that the data, in the first place, bring forth to the researcher’s attention.
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Phenomenon: corporeal knowing in G&E research on boys and masculinities Research question Context Regularities Causal mechanisms 1. How is knowledge in G&E G&E research Predominant Identified through research on boys and literature on boys way of and examining masculinities produced, and and masculinities potential contextual issues with what implications for limitations to regarding theorising corporeal knowing? knowing about and doing about boys empirical research and gender on, with and/or for identity research subjects formation 2. What are the challenges G&E scholars’ oral Predominant Identified through for G&E scholars engaged in life and career potential examining knowledge production as histories limitations to contextual issues personal commitment, and knowing regarding with what implications for about boys engagement in corporeal knowing? and gender knowledge 3. What are the challenges identity production both as for G&E scholars engaged in formation personal knowledge production commitment and as through research practice in part of an HE, and with what institutionally implications for corporeal organised knowing? community of research practice
Table 1. Methodological toolkit to investigate knowledge production in G&E research on boys and masculinities
In effect, through differentiating between the research literature and the oral histories of G&E scholars, the methodology enables the division of the RCiE project into two phases: knowing and knowledge, and knowing and knowers. Each phase has culminated in the identification and explanation of two regularities and two causal mechanisms that helped answer the research questions through illuminating challenges to the continuity of corporeal knowing in G&E research. In the next two sections, I provide further details regarding the rationale for each phase and the methods and processes used to generate, analyse and interpret data.
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3.3. Phase one: knowing and knowledge In phase one, I examine knowing and knowledge in G&E research literature on boys and masculinities. The findings from this phase are reported in chapters four and five and provide explanations to answer the first research question: How is knowledge in G&E research on boys and masculinities produced, and with what implications for corporeal knowing?
3.3.1. Rationale Examining knowledge claims in existing literature is integral to identifying current trends and anticipating future directions. Essentially, an academic research literature constitutes a compendium of unique documents, “traces of activity” (Shipman, 1981, p. 126), which contain the intellectual, theoretical, conceptual and empirical contributions of a particular community of scholarship in HE. The explicit purpose of these contributions is the advancement of knowledge and knowing in a given area of research. The notion, however, at least in the Western hemisphere, that processes of knowledge production, dissemination, mobilisation and exchange necessarily involve varying degrees of political control and power (Foucault, 1989) means that, for any literature document, there is a need to analyse “the distance between [it] and reality” (Shipman, 1981, p. 18), between what is presented as knowing and what more deeply underpins, enables or limits knowing. After all, as in all other social and cultural fields or institutions involved in knowledge production, knowing in HE is never the sole property or business of those who do it (Connell, 2007). Thus, in generating, analysing and interpreting a sample of the literature on boys and masculinities in the field of education, I have practised what Gunter (2004) refers to as “sociological critique” (p. 29). That is to say, rather than engaging in hostile criticism, ad hominem or, worse, the reactive denunciation of the names, works or institutional affiliations of scholars, I have used literature documents in such a way that reflects my understanding of knowledge as a vast assemblage of ontological, epistemological, methodological and/or empirically grounded statements whose examination can be useful in identifying theoretical and ideological challenges to the continuity of corporeal knowing in G&E research. Also, in adopting such a line of critique, I have been partly guided by Foucault’s (1989) historical-archaeological sensibility toward the implicative
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power of each and every statement consecrated as legitimate knowledge simply by virtue of its location in an institutionally approved document: “We must grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence, determine its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish its correlations with other statements that may be connected with it and show what other forms of statement it excludes” (p. 28).
3.3.2. Data generation The methodological designation of the research literature as the context of investigation in this phase has called for the construction of an evidence base of empirical research outputs using the integrative literature review as a data-generation and data- analysis method. Torraco (2016) defines this type of review as a distinctive form of research that generates new knowledge about the topic reviewed. It reviews, critiques, and synthesizes representative literature on a topic in an integrated way, such that new frameworks and perspectives on the topic are generated. Integrative literature reviews are conducted on dynamic topics that experience rapid growth in the literature and that have not benefited from a comprehensive review and update during an extended period. (p. 404) The topic in the RCiE project is boys’ gender identity formation in the school, and it is a “mature,” as opposed to an “emerging” (Torraco, 2016, p. 409), topic because there already exists a body of literature on masculinities in the field of education that could benefit from a targeted, integrative review. Moreover, the particular purpose of the review has not been to reconceptualise the topic (e.g. develop a new theory or typology of masculinities), or to identify “deficiencies, omissions, inaccuracies and other problematic aspects of the literature” (Torraco, 2016, p. 420), but rather to answer the first research question regarding how the topic has been studied and with what implications for extra-rational, corporeal knowing. To mitigate bias in searching the literature, the following inclusion/exclusion criteria have been devised: Target audience (or who to include in the evidence base): only outputs produced by G&E scholars in the field of education who have significantly contributed (or continue to contribute) to research on boys and masculinities in schools in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America.
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Coverage (or what to include in the evidence base): only independent or project- based qualitative outputs that report on research on gender identity formation conducted in primary or secondary school settings. Sources (or where to obtain outputs): from education and non-education journals accessed through Google Scholar, Scopus and university library-based digital databases (e.g. Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, SAGE and JSTOR). Three main points are noteworthy here. First, regarding target audience, restricting the evidence base to education scholars serves as an indication that research into gender issues in education can be found across a range of other disciplines and fields of study (e.g. sociology, social psychology, social work and human geography). Second, regarding sources, databases were searched using as many keywords as possible (e.g. “boys in education,” “boys and schooling,” “masculinities and education,” “masculinities and schools,” “boys and gender identity” and “masculinities and gender relations”). Most of the outputs selected are published in Gender and Education. Other education journals include British Journal of Sociology of Education and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. A considerable number of outputs have been selected from non- education journals too (see Appendix 4). Examples include journals where the focus on boys is seen as a focus on young men (e.g. Men and Masculinities and The Journal of Men’s Studies) and journals where gender construction in the school is regarded as a significant social and cultural issue (e.g. Journal of Social Studies and Culture, Society and Masculinities). Third, regarding coverage, scholars nowadays strive to publish in academic journals because journal rankings, especially since the introduction of research assessment regimes, have become indispensable for drawing the boundaries of fields of study, defining field membership, distinguishing “good” from “bad” scholarship, allocating research funding and informing decisions on staff appointments and promotions (Weiner, 1998; Wellington & Torgerson, 2005). Rather than a mere machinery for the “literary [or textual] production of academic discipline” (Agger, 1991, p. 3), they are the ultimate yardstick whereby knowledge, knowing and knowers are shaped and (de)legitimised. Thus, by giving particular attention to journal articles, I have sought not only to generate a rigorous evidence base, but also to demonstrate my sophisticated understanding of the critical impact of journal publishing on knowledge production today.
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Having decided on the inclusion/exclusion criteria, the next step was to conduct a “staged review of the literature” (Torraco, 2005, p. 361). Aiming at a non-exhaustive, representative sample, where “the entire literature is examined, but only selected pieces of the literature are discussed in detail” (Torraco, 2016, p. 405), I began with an initial stage of reviewing abstracts that culminated in the selection of 137 articles in total. Then, through a more extensive process of reading and in-depth engagement with article contents, particularly findings and arguments, I sampled sixty-eight articles for analysis (see Appendix 5). The following three aspects were taken into consideration: Duplicate publication: This refers to the publication of the same findings in different journals. The sample was examined repeatedly to ensure there are no duplicate outputs included. Time relevance: This refers to dates of publication. Sociologically informed G&E research on boys and masculinities pre-dates the mid-1980s (e.g. Delamont, 1976; Willis, 1977). What is particularly important about the mid-1980s period, however, is that it witnessed the mainstreaming of interest in masculinity in the sociology of education (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Messerschmidt, 2012). Thus, to ensure this period is properly accounted for, the sample has been restricted to outputs published roughly from 1985 to 2017 (the year during which data generation took place). Topical relevance: This aspect concerns the ontological view of gender. Given that the integrative literature review is intended to examine how a complex topic such as gender identity formation has been studied, only outputs which ask socially critical (in-depth and power-sensitive) questions and are theoretically engaged have been included in the sample. Outputs in which, for instance, gender is reduced to sex in order to facilitate the investigation of other topics (e.g. asking why boys under-achieve rather than how discourses of academic achievement shape boys and their masculinities) have been deemed irrelevant, and thus they were excluded. In addition to these aspects, sampling was informed by a concern with trustworthiness. All sampled outputs were assessed against criteria for authenticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning (see Appendix 6).
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3.3.3. Data analysis Data analysis, the final process in the integrative literature review, was staged too. First, following Fereday and Muir-Cochrane (2006), I developed a technical record of data using the heuristic presented in Table 2 below. Area 1 Theories, concepts, methodologies and methods that reveal the ontological, epistemological and axiological assumptions of the author(s). These components tend to be explicitly described in the introduction, theoretical (or conceptual) framework and methodology (or research design) sections of the article. Area 2 The research focus, aim(s) of investigation, findings and main argument(s) that reveal the interests and contributions to knowledge of the author(s). These components tend to be explicitly defined or reported in the introduction, data generation and data analysis, discussion and conclusion sections of the article. Area 3 Statements thought by the reviewer to reveal predominant ways of thinking and knowing about the topic. These can be identified anywhere in the article, and they can be: Theoretical and conceptual: concerning the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the author(s) Methodological and methodical: concerning logic of inquiry and how (and to what ends) theories, concepts and/or methods are deployed Analytical and interpretive: to reveal how empirical data are used to produce and link between arguments and claims Area 4 Statements by the author(s) themselves, or statements thought by the reviewer, to reveal potential limitations to knowing about the topic. These can be identified anywhere in the article, and they can be: Positional: concerning the theoretical, methodological and/or ethical limitations encountered by the author(s) Dispositional: concerning how the intellectual, personal, professional and social and cultural life experiences of the author(s) shape their understanding of research subjects Argumentational: concerning how knowledge claims are reinforced, refuted or refined by the author(s)
Table 2. Heuristic of key areas to examine knowledge and knowing in a journal article
The technical record (see Appendix 7) deconstructs each of the sixty-eight sampled outputs in the following manner: it lists the theory/ies, concept(s) and method(s) deployed by the author(s) to investigate gender identity formation in the school, provides a summary of the research focus, findings and main arguments, locates the sociological focus on corporeality (based on the mapping of the three perspectives on the body – i.e.
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constructivist, phenomenological and/or materialist – offered in chapter two) and identifies key statements through which to examine knowing about research subjects and gender identity formation. The second stage of data analysis consisted of producing a condensed version of the technical record. Through a process of open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), I generated conceptual themes from the statements identified in the first stage, and then inferred ways of and potential limitations to knowing. Table 3 below provides examples of this process. Article Location of Conceptual Way(s) of Limitation(s) to phenomenon themes knowing knowing Mac an Ghaill, Constructivist *Masculinities *Agency Childhood 1991 and social class *Structure sexuality *Masculinities, femininities and power relations *Gender and the material conditions of gender oppression *Investigating homosexuality in the school setting Kehler, 2004 Constructivist *Masculinity, *Agency --- negotiation, resistance and subversion McCormack, Constructivist *Adults *Agency Childhood 2014 investigating *Experience sexuality children *Masculinity and the decline of homophobia
Table 3. Open-coding entries from the condensed record of document data in phase one of the RCiE project
To avoid the trap of reinscribing document content as themes, I defined a conceptual theme as an overall descriptor of the type of issues investigated by the author(s). For instance, the theme of “masculinities and social class” is an overall descriptor of the various ways in which social class structures, and thus structure itself as a source of 69
knowing, are given recognition in gender analysis. Also, through the reiterative reading of outputs, I ensured that inferences are made and presented in such a way that enables their recognition as important characteristics of knowing in G&E research on boys and masculinities, and not merely elicitations from statements found in documents. Finally in this stage, I applied a “creative process” of synthesis that “weaves the streams of research together” (Torraco, 2005, p. 362) through identifying and designating as regularities one predominant way of knowing and one predominant limitation to knowing in the literature. To identify the causal mechanisms which underpin these two regularities, I used both the document data and secondary literature (e.g. sociological studies literature in chapter four and childhood studies literature in chapter five) to critically engage with theoretical and ideological issues. This process culminated in explanations that made visible the role of two causal mechanisms, one regarding the use of social theory and the other regarding the ideological construction of children, in constraining the agency of knowing in the G&E research.
3.4. Phase two: knowing and knowers In phase two, I examine the oral career and life histories of G&E scholars through interview data. The findings from this phase are reported in chapters six and seven and provide explanations to answer the second and third research questions: What are the challenges for G&E scholars engaged in knowledge production as personal commitment, and with what implications for corporeal knowing?
What are the challenges for G&E scholars engaged in knowing and knowledge production through research practice in HE, and with what implications for corporeal knowing?
3.4.1. Rationale Understanding the challenges to corporeal knowing in G&E research requires not only examining the existing literature, but also the extension of research scope from “the printed disembodied text [i.e. the document] to the professional life story of the researcher and publisher through interviews and dialogue” (Gunter, 2005, p. 34). 70
Accordingly, the aim of phase two in the RCE project has been to make heard the voices of G&E scholars through generating interview data regarding their academic career and life histories. The data were primarily intended to serve two broad purposes: Humanising knowing about knowing: Eliciting the oral histories of scholars “in the know,” who are immersed in intellectual work and research practice on a daily basis, is not about proving or disproving facts (e.g. who said what, when, where and how), but rather about the complex “truths beyond the fact” (Summerfield, 2018, p. 106), that is, the politics, ideologies, discourses and subjectivities which intermingle to give shape and form to expert knowing. Without the inclusion of scholars’ subjective voices and experiences, the RCiE project’s aim of creating a collective story of scholarship in the field of education would be reduced to the mere reporting of evidence regarding past knowledge. Situating knowing about knowing: Investigating knowledge in G&E research can be done through examining the generative relationship between the intimate “I” of the scholar, which crystallises through the reiterative self-authoring of personal identity, and the collective “we” of the field, which crystallises through the reiterative co-authoring of intellectual work and research practice (Holland & Lave, 2001, p. 11). In addition to the characterisation of individual and collective subjectivities, this approach allows for the use of oral histories as means to explore the political struggles in the field that result from perpetual tension between agency and the “forces at work in the agent’s milieu” (White, 1991, p. 145). Without this situated understanding of knowing as occurring through “local contentious practice” but nevertheless achieving “stability and thickening” (Holland & Lave, 2001, pp. 18-19) through the constant negotiation of structures, the RCiE project would be reduced to a functionalist, asocial and apolitical description of contemporary identities, practices and discourses in the field of education. Moreover, situating knowing in this manner, as concerned with both the individual scholar and the community of scholarship in the field that they belong to, has enabled the division of phase two of the project into two parts. The first part is concerned with the intimate “I” and attends to the second research question regarding engagement in knowledge production as personal commitment. Here, it is presupposed that G&E
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scholars’ involvement in knowledge work is rooted in the love of ideas (Furedi, 2004) and the pursuit of “real and substantive expertise” (Collins & Evans, 2007, p. 3). According to Gramsci (1971), “all men [sic] are intellectuals,” since everybody “participates in a particular conception of the world,” but “not all men [sic] have in society the function of intellectuals” (p. 9). In other words, it is only few who make a living out of it. Thus, the aim of this part has mainly been to examine G&E scholars’ personal identity formation in order to reveal how the intimate “I,” or individual subjectivity, is shaped by the neoliberal university in ways that may create potential limitations to corporeal knowing about research subjects. The second part of this phase is concerned with the collective “we” and attends to the third research question regarding engagement in knowledge production through research practice. Although strongly embedded in the personal, intellectual work cannot be extricated from the professional considerations and discourses which form the “political positions [of knowers in HE] … [and are thus] significant factors in the constitution of knowledge” (Griffiths, 1998, p. 52). Scholars may seem to have power as leading intellectuals, experts or heads of schools/departments, but their collective positioning in the academic field remains that of “the dominated among the dominant” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 245). In Hunter’s (1993) words, they constitute “a professional understructure [which] may have something to say about policy, but it usually goes unheeded” (p. 4). Moreover, theorists have proposed several explanations regarding this state of domination. While Gramsci (1971), for instance, argues that it is essentially a psychological state, Bourdieu (1990a) speaks from a more sociological perspective about doxa, or the self-evident belief that the parameters (e.g. conditions, standards, targets and criteria) which govern social practice, understood as a “game,” are objective, reasonable and neutral to all involved agents. Indeed, one possible explanation for the normalised domination of the “objective interests” of political and economic elites over knowledge, knowing and knowers in academia is the “codification of doxa,” whereby it is unthinkable not to comply, not to engage in economic and economising practices such as data management, performativity and bidding in order to access funding streams, in ways that are modernising and generate equivalence “with” and “as” entrepreneurs, with an espoused value system that is orientated on producing children as a work-ready human resource. (Gunter, 2016, p. 28) 72
Thus, the aim of this part has mainly been to examine contemporary research practice in the field in order to reveal how the collective “we,” much like the intimate “I,” of G&E scholars is also reshaped by dominant forces in ways that may cause limitations to corporeal knowing about research subjects. Importantly, thinking tools based on Archer (2000) and Bourdieu’s (1990a) theories of social reality and practice are used in this phase to analyse and interpret the interview data. These tools are sociological in nature, meaning that they concern the big macro-social questions of identity, agency, structure and practice, and not the personalities or psychological states of respondents as individuals. As Hammersley (2014) cautions, hiding behind theory to psychologise interview respondents may amount to unethical research conduct, for it is not for the researcher to “diagnose,” or to speak in any such terms which may offend the researched subject by putting them under the impression that a breach of trust has taken place. Indeed, if the RCiE project delves deep into the subjectivities of G&E scholars, it is not to individualise them, nor to individualise knowledge production for that matter, but rather to theorise about knowing and knowers “in ways that relate what might be regarded as every day, and perhaps even unremarkable encounters, to wider social and political processes” (Gunter, 2016, p. 28).
3.4.2. Population list and sample Relying on curricula vitae and online university staff profiles, I compiled a list of thirty-three potential respondents selected from an initial population that comprised 143 G&E scholars in the field. The following inclusion/exclusion criteria were used: Location: The potential respondent is (or has been) engaged in research practice in the field of education in a HE institution in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America. Research interests: The potential respondent undertakes (or has undertaken) funded G&E research projects, particularly on boys and masculinities. Context of empirical research: The potential respondent undertakes (or has undertaken) G&E research in primary and/or secondary schools in particular. To create a sample from this list, I used Malterud et al.’s (2016) model of “information power,” or the power of the sample to generate robust interview data. This model, conceived as an alternative for the concept of saturation (Glaser & Strauss, 1999),
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comprises five strategic areas – the aim of the interviews, the specificity of the potential respondents’ characteristics, the use of theory, the intensity of dialogue between researcher and researched and the purpose of data analysis. Using these areas, I produced information power assessments that led to the choice of small sample size (see Appendix 8). There are no fixed rules, however, regarding how small a small sample can be. To give a few examples, while Bernard (2000) recommends thirty-six respondents, Bertaux (1981) recommends fifteen, Kuzel (1992) recommends six to eight for a homogeneous sample (i.e. respondents of similar sociocultural characteristics) and twelve to twenty for a heterogeneous sample and Malterud et al. (2016) recommend a provisional number of ten. Taking into account the timeline of the RCiE project, I decided on a range of six to twelve respondents and then applied “purposeful sampling” to select twelve names that would constitute “information-rich cases” (Patton, 1990, p. 169, emphasis in original). Going beyond the factual information in my list (e.g. academic rank and research interests), I engaged with the potential respondent’s research work in order to form a better idea of their contributions to knowledge about boys and gender identity formation. Also, I looked at additional information (e.g. conferences, taught courses, PhD supervisions and recent academic appointments) to compare and contrast between different scholars in terms of influence and impact on the field, both locally and internationally. The twelve scholars who made it into the sample share many characteristics in common. At the time of planning for the interviews, they had been engaged in research practice for a long time, some for over twenty-five years, had been professors at their respective institutions, had had experience in teaching and management (e.g. as department heads) and had led on or been part of funded research projects on boys in education. Also, importantly, I was aware of the interconnectedness between them; some had been colleagues, collaborating on projects and publishing articles together. This quality has vitally contributed to enhancing the “dense specificity” (Malterud et al., 2016, p. 1755) of the sample.
3.4.3. Access Although no gatekeeping assistance was needed to gain access to the potential respondents, some form of negotiation was required. The respondents may not be
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politicians, policymakers or celebrities, but they are still, by dint of their academic titles, powerful people who “are able to make you wait and thus determine the organisation and place of research” (Fitz & Halpin, 1994, p. 34). Indeed, “wait” accompanied me throughout the entire interviewing period, from the time when contact was first made to the time when further consent for using quotes in chapters was needed. Each potential respondent received a letter inviting them to read a participant information sheet that introduces the RCiE project and gives details regarding the focus of the interview, why they had been chosen, the structure of the interview, how data will be generated and analysed and how their rights to withdrawal, confidentiality and anonymity will be protected (see Appendix 9). In my letter, I sought to encourage their participation by asking them to make date and time arrangements as their own diaries allow. For those in the UK, I assured them I can afford traveling to their locations; for those abroad, I suggested using Skype. Nine out of twelve scholars accepted the interview invitation, describing the RCiE project as “interesting” and “exciting.” I was grateful for their kind words. I also felt that, in addition to intellectual curiosity and an altruistic desire to help “make a difference,” part of their decision to participate may have been their understanding that I am their peer, a fellow colleague who shares their research interests, theoretical orientations and awareness of the political relevance of G&E research. According to Bogner et al. (2009), “a common scientific background or relevance system can increase the level of motivation on the part of the expert to participate in an interview” (p. 2). As for those who apologised, the reasons they generously (not upon my request) provided varied from finding it difficult to spare some time for an interview to probably being unable to answer questions related to an area of research (i.e. G&E) exited long time ago. Notably, one respondent expressed reservations regarding the project’s focus on career and life histories, but none questioned my position in the field or authority to investigate knowledge production. I wrote back to all twelve scholars, thanking those who apologised for having considered my invitation. As for those who accepted, I contacted them to make date and time arrangements. However, due to attrition, as one potential respondent did not follow up on my request, the final sample comprised eight respondents in total, four men and four women. Once arrangements have been confirmed, I sent through a consent form to be signed and returned (see Appendix 9). The interview period extended from September 75
2017 to February 2018. Four interviews were face to face, and four were Skype interviews conducted from my place in Manchester, UK. Of the former, two were conducted at the respondent’s home, upon their request, and two at the respondent’s office. All respondents received me with warmth and friendliness. This promised good rapport, as it signified a certain willingness to admit me into their “shared community membership” (Platt, 1981, p. 82).
3.4.4. Designing and conducting the interviews The eight interviews were semi-structured. This format allows the researcher to “be receptive to what respondents say, and to their ways of understanding” (Mason, 2002, p. 231, emphasis in original). Also, it “[offers] the possibility of exerting some control over interviews conducted in different situations” (Fitz & Halpin, 1994, p. 36). Whether in a traditional or online interview, the challenge is one: to ensure that there is a conversation flowing with a purpose. To this end, I created an interview schedule (see Appendix 10) using three main resources: chapters one and two of this thesis, selected literature on educational research practice and organisation in HE and, if available, the biography of the respondent. The schedule is divided into four domains, each comprising a number of main questions followed by prompts to elicit deeper insights into what is being said. I was aware that my questions were not written in stone, but rather “intended to provide opportunities for respondents to take the account forward, with the possibility of it moving in unanticipated directions” (Fitz & Halpin, 1994, p. 37). The following list is a summary of domains with examples of questions: Academic career: beginnings, goals, choices, actions and ongoing progress – e.g. “How have you managed to stay creative, connected and up to date in your career?” Research: projects, funding and impact – e.g. “What can you tell me about the funding of your research projects?” The field: current developments and work relations – e.g. “How would you characterise the current state of the field?” Novice researchers: advice and caution – e.g. “What would you tell novice researchers interested in joining the field?”
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The interviews lasted between sixty to ninety minutes each. I negotiated the use of an audio recorder and explained that I will be using an interview schedule and taking notes. At the beginning of the interview, I reiterated essential points regarding the aims of the RCiE project and the respondents’ rights to withdrawal, confidentiality and anonymity. In building rapport, I was guided by Ball’s (1994) insight that the interview is “a confrontation and a joint construction” (p. 97). In fact, that the respondents themselves had had substantial experience in qualitative interviewing was a crucial factor in creating an atmosphere of intimacy and informal interaction. Following each interview, I wrote a thank-you letter to the respondent (see Appendix 9) and, months later, sent the transcript for correction and feedback in order to enhance the trustworthiness of the data. Like Ribbens (1989), I was excited about the prospects of the interview developing into a long-term intellectual and professional relationship, particularly with those respondents who explicitly asked me to stay in touch and update them on my future career plans. Overall, the interviews were successful, insofar as success can be measured by the “pre-established fit between the characteristics the respondent possesses and those the schedule presupposes” (Platt, 1981, p. 85). It is true, however, that there is no “hygienic research,” no “proper” interview (Stanley & Wise, 1983, p. 153). The following issues are some of the challenges that I have countered. First, I took it for granted that my respondents would not need much prompting, as it is within them, being the intellectuals they are, to speak thickly. Yet, in reality, each respondent had their own style or approach to answering questions. This needed to be recognised and adapted to on the spot. Second, there are the inescapable setbacks of online interviewing. According to Bogner et al. (2009), in the absence of face to face contact, the interview is reduced to “a purely linguistic level” (p. 10). Although I was able to see my respondents through the Skype camera, except in one case, it was difficult to remain fully concentrated, let alone predict unwanted interruptions. I was compelled, for instance, to reschedule one interview due to noisy renovations on the second floor of my building. Finally, the third challenge is more like a situation that needs to be negotiated. Drawing a line between the personal and the professional is important for managing time and achieving satisfying results (Ribbens, 1989). Thus, to ensure that the integrity of the research process is not compromised by my own personal desire to display willingness to engage with the “rules of the game” in the field, I balanced my performance between, on the one hand, 77
professional role-playing and, on the other, maintaining a friendly demeanour through doing such things as returning smiles, showing polite interest in the respondent’s personal space (e.g. a book on the table; a picture on the wall) and, most importantly, accepting invitations to post-interview, “off the record” chats.
3.4.5. Analysis and interpretation In analysing the interview accounts, I have considered the issue that “analysis and interpretation [remain] the prerogative of the investigator” (Graham, 1984, p. 119). What is constructed as meaning or argument from empirically generated data is necessarily contestable, and so, to buttress thematic analysis in chapters six and seven, I made use of thinking tools. In chapter six, to examine engagement in knowledge production as personal commitment, I relied on Archer’s (2000) conceptualisation of personal identity formation as the crystallisation of a “continuous sense of self” in the “social order of reality” (p. 7). According to Archer (2000), individuals are constantly developing and using “personal emergent powers” to define, prioritise and seek to satisfy concerns with self-worth that mature within the “inner conversation” (i.e. the site of agential-structural negotiation) (p. 199). Moreover, they occasionally produce “emotional commentaries” to share with others some of what goes on in their inner conversations, thus consciously or unconsciously revealing their concerns. As such, I approached data analysis in this chapter with an understanding of the interview data as fragments of “inner conversation” shared between the researcher and the researched subject. The three tools that have been developed on the basis of this conceptualisation are: Order of reality: the social order, namely HE, where G&E research practice in the field of education takes place. Concerns: the values, beliefs and commitments that define G&E scholars’ sense of self-worth against normative arrangements, including the arrangements of research practice in HE. Commentaries: the reflexive statements through which G&E scholars reveal their concerns with self-worth. Using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis model, I started with familiarising myself with the interview accounts, focusing in particular on the first domain
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of the interview schedule – i.e. academic career. Through a process of open coding, I generated initial codes and grouped them on the basis of similarity in meaning into subthemes that represent personal powers (e.g. personal difference; pragmatism). Then, I arranged these powers into conceptual themes (e.g. personal struggle; personal development) that denote predominant concerns with self-worth (see Appendix 11 for a detailed example of this process). Each theme was named, defined and assessed to ensure that it adequately captures the overall picture of the data. Moreover, deploying the project’s methodological toolkit, I re-examined the interview accounts and drew relations between the themes to identify and designate as a regularity a common aspect or pattern that cuts across the data. Finally, through thinking critically, with the aid of secondary literature, about some of the contextual issues that have emerged from the data, namely in relation to scholars as intellectuals in neoliberal times, I posited and explained one causal mechanism that underpins and enables this regularity to function as a potential limitation to knowing about research subjects. In chapter seven, the move from examining engagement in knowledge production as personal commitment (scholars as individual knowers) to engagement as occurring through research practice (scholars as a community) has called for a new set of thinking tools based on Bourdieu’s (1990a) theory of practice. According to this theory, social agents are not rule-followers, but rather players in a social game of positioning, whereby they strategise to accumulate and deploy a range of capitals – social, cultural, economic and symbolic – embodied in the form of a “system of dispositions” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 487) referred to as habitus. One of the key characteristics of this system is that it is subject to restructuring through practice, in the sense that any change in the “rules of the game” in the field may lead to the formation of new dispositions that challenge (enable or constrain) existing practice. Bourdieu (2000), moreover, speaks of the hysteresis effect, or the field-habitus mismatch that forms objectively whenever field change occurs, rendering ineffective and obsolete those dispositions which oppose or fail to align with the strategic aims of change. Thus, in this chapter, the same interview dataset was analysed, albeit with a tendency to view the data more holistically, not only as fragments of “inner conversation,” but also as “intriguing cultural documents” (Erben, 1993, p. 15) that contain traces of the shared professionalism and institutional research culture of G&E scholars. The following is a list of the three Bourdieuian concepts which have been used as thinking tools: 79
Dispositions: the embodiments of economic and symbolic (social, cultural, academic and scientific) capitals in the field of education. Mapping G&E scholars’ dispositions can reveal the type(s) of concerns that preoccupy them in research practice. Habitus: the system of dispositions brought to or developed through research practice in the field of education. Understanding the restructuring of habitus can lead to a better characterisation of the nature and effects of field change on knowledge and knowing in G&E research. Hysteresis: the condition of field-habitus mismatch which forms as a result of change in the field of education. Identifying and probing a hysteresis effect can lead to better explanation of the cause(s) of change and its implications for knowledge and knowing in G&E research. To maintain consistency, I reapplied Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis model, focusing more on the second, third and fourth domains of the interview schedule – i.e. research work, the field and advice to novice researchers. I followed the same order of analysis, from enhancing my familiarity with the data to generating initial codes, subthemes and themes. Here, each subtheme represents a unique scholarly disposition. I grouped dispositions of similar substance into sets that reflect specific concerns in research practice (e.g. “gender justice” and “social justice” as two dispositions reflecting a concern with “understanding” the gendered social world). Then, I arranged concerns into conceptual themes (see Appendix 11), naming, defining and assessing each theme to ensure that it accurately captures the data. Moreover, as in chapter six, I drew relations between the themes to identify and designate as a regularity a common aspect or pattern that cuts across the data. Similarly, too, I critically engaged with some of the contextual issues foregrounded by the data, namely in relation to scholars as research practitioners (and not only intellectuals) in the neoliberal university, to posit and explain a causal mechanism that underpins and enables the identified regularity to function as a potential limitation to knowing. Overall, the insights developed in phase two of the RCiE project reveal the role of two additional causal mechanisms, one regarding the body politics of doing intellectual work and the other regarding political control over research practice in HE, in de- sensitising G&E scholars to extra-rational, corporeal knowing. These mechanisms, along
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with the ones posited in phase one, are essentially the product of reliance on two interrelated components of critical realist research: first, the contextual groundedness of explanation in the data generated, in the sense that the substance of the causal mechanism should not be strange to the substance of the data (Collier, 1994). For instance, if the data concern theorising about research subjects, the mechanism should directly speak to issues related to the making, composition, use and/or evolution of the theoretical landscape in the field; second, the exercise of “judgmental rationality,” or the ability to “make rational judgments between competing claims” (Jessop, 2005, p. 43). For instance, in chapter six, my choice of issues regarding the reprofessionalisation of intellectual work in HE reflects my own judgment that these issues in particular, to the exclusion of others, are most likely to lead to sensible (though not absolute) explanations of what has been observed as a regularity in the data. In the next section, I elaborate on the approach that has been taken to bring together and use all four mechanisms to create one collective story of scholarship in the field of education.
3.5. From documents to interviews: writing a collective story of scholarship Having investigated knowledge production in G&E research on boys and masculinities, the next and final task was to achieve the central aim of the investigation in the RCiE project with regard to creating a collective story of scholarship in the field of education. Presented in chapter eight of this thesis, the story builds on the main findings and arguments to answer the project’s research questions and, in doing so, elucidate common theoretical, ideological and political challenges to corporeal knowing in G&E research. Moreover, it is not a story that makes claims to a certain “truth,” but rather one that offers a critical and evaluative account of G&E scholars’ knowledge work in order to “buttress the epistemological security of sociology” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 36, emphasis in original) in ways that would enhance knowledge about gender. The concept of the “collective story” was adopted from Richardson’s (1997) semi- autobiographical work, Fields of play: Constructing an academic life, through which she contributes new ways of thinking about the collective interests, concerns and problems of real-life communities in HE. The presentation of subjects “as historical actors by telling their collective story,” she argues, is vital to fulfilling “the promise of the ‘sociological
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imagination,’” and to enabling subjects to “gauge … [their] own fate” (Richardson, 1997, p. 15). In terms of definition, a collective story tells the experience of a sociologically constructed category of people in the context of larger socio-cultural and historical forces. The sociological protagonist is a collective … of similarly situated individuals who may or may not be aware of their life affinities as co-participants in a collective story. [The] intent is to help construct a consciousness of kind in the minds of the protagonists, a concrete recognition of sociological bondedness with others, because such consciousness can break down isolation between people, empower them, and lead them to collective action on their behalf. (Richardson, 1997, p. 14, emphasis added) Thus, following Richardson (1997), I have viewed the community of G&E scholars in HE as one sociologically constructed category of people. In addition to the eight scholars interviewed in phase two of the project, this category includes the voices of those scholars whose documents have been examined in phase one41. Moreover, to tell a collective story of scholarship that foregrounds this community’s “sociological bondedness,” I have sought to identify and explain a common set of challenges using the four causal mechanisms that have been uncovered in the project. The story’s overarching theme is that, in the age of the mandatory neoliberalisation/economisation of HE, what is at stake is not only theoretical paradigms, epistemological disputation, academic positions and the struggle for an intellectualist and humanist professionalism, but also the very continuity, if not existence, of complex, corporeal-based knowledge and knowing. More specifically, concerning theoretical and ideological challenges, the story provides a mapping of different positions in G&E research, making visible the tensions between scholars regarding how to theorise about gender in a constantly changing world. Because, however, there is more to knowledge than theory and ideology, the collective story also explores political challenges regarding the external, policy-led restructuring of intellectual work and research practice in purely economistic directions. Mainly, it is shown that G&E scholars are being forced into a very
41 By virtue of shared field membership, my own voice is included in this story too. According to Steier (1991), story-telling involves “telling ourselves a story about ourselves” (p. 3). In the same vein, Mills (1959) argues that the construction of the past entails, by definition, reconstructing “both biography and history, and the range of their intricate relations” (p. 226).
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difficult situation involving potential compromise between, on the one hand, doing a de- intellectualising (and de-corporealising) labour of positioning and, on the other, doing epistemic labour to contribute toward emancipating and enhancing the lives of research subjects. Finally, to bring both the collective story and the present thesis to an open-ended denouement, I present a general framework regarding corporeal-epistemic reflexivity in research practice. Such reflexivity, to quote Richardson (1997) again, “[would] break down isolation between people” (p. 14); it would empower G&E scholars to assert themselves as legitimate definers of what counts as knowledge, empirical data, epistemic labour and expertise in an era of increasing governance from a distance, through the vehicle of “big data.” Kneading between affinities, reflexivities and resistances, I shall offer optimistic but careful suggestions for change, my intention being to go beyond illuminating sociological bondedness to show how unbondedness, or the movement from collective challenges to collective actions, is not impossible.
3.6. Trustworthiness and research integrity The RCiE project falls within the qualitative paradigm, and so concepts such as validity and reliability are inappropriate for demonstrating its “truth value.” Instead, Lincoln and Guba (1985) suggest four criteria – credibility, dependability, confirmability and transferability – for judging trustworthiness in qualitative research. Here is how I have sought to meet each: Credibility: Compatibility between ontology, epistemology, methodology and methods is fundamental to ensure quality. As shown in the sections above, I have been explicit about the project’s critical realist ontological and epistemological assumptions. Also, I have described in detail how both the document and interview data have been generated, analysed and interpreted. Particularly for phase two, I have explained that care has been taken regarding anonymising verbatim quotes, allowing member checks of interview accounts and maintaining contact with the respondents to update them on my research progress. Dependability: This criterion presupposes that replicating a study using a similar respondent sample and choice of context should yield similar findings. To enhance dependability, I have provided a clear account of the trail of the investigation from
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phase one to phase two, including examples and appendices (e.g. data coding, theme generation and participant information sheets) that other researchers may find useful. Confirmability: To enhance confirmability, I followed Robson (2011) in keeping a research diary to reflect on the value-ladenness of the research process. My diary exceeds 180 pages of handwritten notes that cover all aspects of the RCiE project, including my thinking on critical realism, my field observations and my work on constructing themes. Moreover, there are documents which reveal my researcher intentions and dispositions. These include the research proposal, the research plans report, a preliminary interview schedule, a methodology essay and two pilot studies. Transferability: Findings and arguments in qualitative research are defined by context-specificity, but this does not mean they are not generalisable. As far as the study of knowledge production is concerned, the methodology and thinking tools in the RCiE project are representative and, as such, may be adopted and/or adapted by other researchers. Moreover, the generalisability of the interview findings in particular is enhanced by the richness of data, the thickness of descriptions and the adoption of purposive sampling. Reflexivity, too, contributes toward trustworthiness. According to Stanley (1991), it enables the researcher to “produce accountable knowledge, [through] which the reader would have access to details of the contextually-located reasoning processes which [gave] rise to the ‘findings,’ the outcomes” (p. 209, emphasis in original). Hence, I have used the introduction to this thesis to set up a reflexive account regarding who I am as a scholar and researcher and how the project speaks to my own personal history. In relation to research integrity, the RCiE project was approved by the University’s research ethics committee, and the document and interview data, organised and archived in Word Document format, were stored using the University’s storage service (see Appendix 12 for more details regarding storage, safeguarding respondents’ personal information and controlling data access in the future). Also, as previously mentioned, all respondents were sent a participant information sheet with details regarding confidentiality and anonymity, and they were asked to sign a consent form. Finally, I should note that I have been confronted with one ethically sensitive issue with respect to
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the relationship between the researcher and the researched subject. On the one hand, G&E scholars’ academic career and life histories must be treated with a fair amount of respect to seniority of field membership; on the other hand, there is “the need of assertiveness on the part of the researcher in defending the study’s purpose vis-à-vis the powerful expert” (Bogner et al., 2009, p. 10). To mitigate this tension, I reflected on my own field membership, namely the implications of being included in the sociological bondedness of scholars with regard to common challenges. This led me to the realisation that the ethical emphasis in the RCiE project should not be placed so much on what/whose knowledge is being examined as on what injustices and inequalities are being exposed to help provide a sound basis for social transformation toward an emancipated model of academic professionalism (Ozga, 2011). The possibility, and necessity, of such a model has to a great extent guided my ethical thinking and research work throughout the entire project.
3.7. Constructing the thesis In chapter one, I explained that the thesis is a Journal Format Thesis (see Appendix 13), meaning in this case that the main findings are reported in a format that marks them as being ready for publication as journal articles. Here, I shall provide details regarding how I moved from the research questions and the data to the writing and submission of manuscripts. For each output, I shall briefly describe its aim, outline the history of its conception and justify the choice of the journal to which I intend to submit it. The order in which the outputs appear in this section is the same as that of the thesis.
3.7.1. A critical realist investigation of knowledge production in gender and education research on boys (chapter four) This is the first output from phase one of the project. It was conceived to contribute toward answering the first research question regarding the implications of theoretical challenges in G&E research for ensuring the continuity of corporeal knowing. As explained in section 3.3, the output mainly reports on the analysis and interpretation of the document data. In developing it, I initially relied on extensive notes (Kaissi, 2017) written for the 35th Standing Conference on Organisational Symbolism (Rome, July 2017), held under the theme, “Carne – Flesh and organisation.” Following feedback from my
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supervisory team, I introduced some critical changes to redirect the research from a narrow focus on the body and flesh to a broader focus on issues of corporeal knowing in the field of education. The manuscript included in this thesis will be submitted to Current Sociology, mainly because this journal is interested in publishing articles which review conceptual, theoretical and/or methodological issues and challenges in sociologically informed research.
3.7.2. Corporeal knowing and the participation-protection dilemma in gender and education research on boys (chapter five) This is the second output from phase one of the project. Like its predecessor, it is concerned with knowing and knowledge and was conceived to contribute toward answering the first research question. Through exploring issues related to researching boys as children, I identify and explain persistent ideological challenges regarding corporeal knowing in education. In terms of developing the output, I seized the opportunity of my invitation to speak at the European Gender Summit 15 (London, June 2018) to share and discuss main findings with colleagues. The focus of the output remained intact, but its content, particularly regarding the conceptualisation of childhood today, has been significantly influenced by the feedback I received. Following consultation with my supervisory team, I will use the version included in this thesis to produce a final manuscript and submit it to Gender and Education, mainly because this journal remains, at least in the UK, the leading destination for research interested in gender issues in schools and education more broadly.
3.7.3. Knowledge, the body and the challenges of doing intellectual work in gender and education research (chapter six) This is the first output from phase two of the project, and it was conceived to answer the second research question regarding the implications of engagement in knowledge production as personal commitment for the focus on corporeality and corporeal knowing in G&E research. As with the two previous outputs, the version included in this thesis will be used to produce a manuscript which will be submitted to Gender, Work & Organization. The choice of this journal has been mainly informed by its broad interests in scholarship and research on issues related to the organisation of labour and professional cultures today, including in HE. 86
3.7.4. On corporeal knowing, educational research and state-led hysteresis in the neoliberal university (chapter seven) This is the second output from phase two of the project, and it was conceived to answer the third and final research question regarding research practice in the field of education. The thrust of my argument here is that advancing knowledge is as much a function of the political forces that control the academic field as it is a function of prevalent theories and ideologies. In 2018, halfway through the project, an opportunity arose to present my findings at the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association (Newcastle, September 2018). Feedback from colleagues heightened my sensitivity to key debates within the sociology of education (e.g. the controversy over narrative inquiry). Accordingly, I redrafted the output to incorporate new arguments and further refine it in terms of conceptual precision and methodological rigour. The manuscript included in this thesis will be submitted to Studies in Higher Education, mainly because this journal’s interest in enhancing the understanding of HE policies, institutional management and professional environments sits well with the output’s focus on issues related to neoliberal structural reform and its impact on the politics of knowledge and knowing.
3.8. Summary of chapter three In this chapter, I have introduced critical realism as the methodology for the RCiE project, explaining how it has enabled me to understand research knowledge production as relational, morphogenetic and strategic human action, as well as how it has enabled the division of the project into two phases: knowing and knowledge, where the G&E research literature forms the context of investigation, and knowing and knowers, where the context shifts to the oral career and life histories of G&E scholars. For each phase, I have set out its rationale and the methods used to generate, analyse and interpret document/interview data. For phase two in particular, I have discussed in detail the ways in which thinking tools had been deployed to guide data analysis and generate insights into the links between intellectual work, research practice and knowledge production. This was followed by an account of the approach adopted to achieve the central aim of the investigation with regard to creating a collective story of scholarship in the field of
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education. Finally, in addition to issues of trustworthiness and research integrity, I have briefly described the manner of construction of the thesis with regard to how outputs were conceived and developed.
The next chapter is the first of four discussion chapters styled and formatted as journal articles. Following these four, I draw together my findings and arguments to answer the project’s research questions in chapter eight.
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Chapter 4: A critical realist investigation of knowledge production in gender and education research on boys
Status: Pending submission. Output: Kaissi, O. (forthcoming). A critical realist investigation of knowledge production in gender and education research on boys. Current Sociology. DOI: Pending.
Abstract In this article, I report on research undertaken as part of the Researching Corporeality in Education (RCiE) project, an investigation of knowledge production in Gender and Education (G&E) research on boys and masculinities in schools in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America, within the field of education in higher education. The project is concerned with the future of corporeal knowing in G&E research. Using critical realism as a methodology, I examine ways of knowing about gender identity formation in a qualitatively constructed sample of empirical documents. The findings reveal that agency has been a predominant way of knowing. To explain this predominance, I explore the historical shift from sociological to social theory, showing in particular how it has intensified epistemological disputation regarding the role of the overemphasis on agency in obscuring social structures, and thus obstructing the establishment of corporeal-structural links needed to de-individualise corporeal knowing in gender analysis. While emphasising the importance of disputation, I argue that, in the current neoliberal era, ensuring the continuity of complex knowing through corporeality requires bridging between theoretical positions. Finally, I conclude by offering some thoughts regarding this need for serious dialogue between G&E scholars in the field.
Keywords: gender identity formation; knowledge production; sociological theory; social theory; structure and agency; corporeality
89 Introduction This article reports on research undertaken as part of the Researching Corporeality in Education (RCiE) project, an investigation of knowledge production in Gender and Education (G&E) research on boys and masculinities in schools in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America, within the field of education in higher education. The central concern of the project is the present state and future continuity of corporeal knowing, or knowing for, about and through the body, in empirical research on boys’ gender identity formation. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the discipline of sociology and its offshoots in higher education witnessed a resurgence of interest in the body, both very broadly and in a more targeted manner, as a tool to expand the conception of social science and study of society (Frank, 1991; Shilling, 1993; Turner, 1984, 1992). Among others, Morgan and S. Scott (1993), Mellor and Shilling (1997) and Turner (2006) have argued that the disappearance of the physical body in the wake of de-industrialisation has driven sociologists to abandon the Enlightenment paradigm of the “founding fathers” – Marx, Durkheim and Weber – in favour of a more reflective mode of sociological knowing that relies on extra-rational, corporeally produced, mediated and/or understood data, such as words, feelings and actions investigated through a predominantly qualitative set of research methods (e.g. ethnography and the interview). There have been, of course, other, political and ideological reasons for the emergence of this mode of knowing. Waller (2011), for instance, highlights the important role that the retreat of feminist activism into academia, in the late 1970s period, has played in radically liberalising approaches to conceptualising data, knowledge, reflexivity and the construction of relationships with research subjects in the field of education. Particularly in the sociology of education, the centralisation of corporeality has contributed toward enhancing scholarly interest in gender issues in schools, and not just in relation to girls’ wellbeing and gender (in)equality, but also in relation to boys, whose gender identities had traditionally been dismissed as pre-conditioned by nature or biology (Weaver-Hightower, 2003). Indeed, the corporealisation of boys, so to speak, through the empirical exposure and documentation of the social constructedness of their embodied gender performances has been one of the landmark achievements of feminist- poststructuralist knowing in the field. It seems to me, however, that this achievement, and the entire legacy of deploying the body as a system of discursive, affective and 90
material modalities of knowing aimed at interrogating the gendering of subjectivities in everyday life, is being threatened today by the neoliberally spearheaded relapse into positivist and instrumentalist knowledge production in the field (see Clarke & Newman, 1997; Nixon et al., 2001; Olssen & Peters, 2005; S. C. Ward, 2012). That is why I have set up the RCiE project to identify and explain some of the contemporary challenges confronting corporeal knowing in sociologically informed G&E research. My particular aim in the present article is to foreground one of the project’s conceptual and empirical contributions: a critical examination of the theoretical landscape in G&E research on boys that reveals persistent tensions, challenges and implications regarding theorising about the interrelationship of agency, structure and corporeality from a sociological perspective. The article is divided into four sections. First, I provide an account of the project’s critical realist methodology and data generation and analysis methods. Second, I report the project findings, identifying a predominant way of knowing about boys in G&E research. Third, I rely both on what has been revealed through the document data and on relevant secondary literature to explain what underpins this predominance. Finally, I conclude by summarising my main points and arguments and offering some thoughts for future research.
Investigating ways of knowing in research on boys and masculinities The concern with the future of corporeal knowing in empirical G&E research on boys and masculinities has led to a focus on ways of knowing, or the fundamental theoretical systems, sources or locations of knowledge about research subjects that scholars have relied on to explore gender identity formation in the school and wider society. To identify and examine these ways, I have adopted critical realism as a methodology. Providing a clear-cut definition of critical realism risks crude generalisation, but, following Archer et al. (2016), critical realism can be described as a “meta-theoretical position” that seeks “an alternative paradigm both to the scientistic forms of positivism concerned with … the quest for law-like forms; and also to the strong interpretivist or postmodern turn which denied explanation in favour of interpretation, with a focus on hermeneutics and description at the cost of causation” (para. 1). In this section, in addition to adumbrating the critical realist ontological and epistemological assumptions that have underpinned the
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investigation, I describe the ways in which the integrative literature review has been deployed to generate and analyse document data.
Methodology There are two central ontological assumptions within critical realism: analytical dualism and a stratified ontology of reality (Archer, 1995, 2000; Bhaskar, 1979, 2011). First, the notion that social reality is the “outcome of human agency” but at the same time “an ever-present condition (material cause)” (Bhaskar, 1979, p. 44, emphasis in original) allows for a measure of discreteness in conceptualising the relationality of agency and structure, in the sense that they may be viewed as irreducible to each other. Second, it follows that, if agency and structure may be treated discretely, their condition of interrelatedness becomes one of complex and ceaseless interplay, rather than co- constitutiveness. Moreover, the reality that forms morphogenetically (i.e. open-endedly, non-finalistically) as a result of this interplay becomes necessarily stratified, fragmented into layers or levels which can be distinguished by the degree of agential determination accorded to the social subject at each (Archer, 2007a). Bhaskar (1979) identifies and distinguishes between three levels: the empirical (observable) level, where agential action and the reproduction and/or transformation of events or phenomena takes place; the actual (formative) level, where the tendencies, regularities or continuous patterns which give rise to events or phenomena form and reify into structures that either enable or constrain agency; and the real (hidden) level, where the causal-generative (not causal- determinative) mechanisms which underpin regularities, thus reinforcing the continuity of events or phenomena, are located. Taken together, these assumptions have enabled an ontological view of knowledge production in G&E research on boys and masculinities as relational human action undertaken by subjects, here scholars, who attempt to assert their agency of knowing in a stratified social reality, here the reality of higher education in general and research practice in the field of education in particular. Epistemologically, the empirical study of this action has entailed a retroductivist logic of inquiry, that is, “a distinctive form of inference … which posits that events are explained through identifying and hypothesising causal powers and mechanisms that can produce them” (Hu, 2018, cited in Price & Martin, 2018, p. 90). Pawson and Tilley (1997) refer to this logic as “generative causation” (p. 58), and they propose using the key
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concepts described above – i.e. phenomenon, context, regularity and causal mechanism – as one methodological toolkit. Table 1 below shows how these concepts/tools have been adapted to examine ways of knowing in the RCiE project: Tool Definition Mode of deployment Phenomenon The event or phenomenon The sociological focus on corporeality of interest which occurs at and corporeal knowing in G&E research the empirical, observable on boys and masculinities level of reality and is thus prone to investigation Context The medium within which The G&E research literature the event or phenomenon occurs Regularity The continuous pattern The predominant way of knowing about that characterises the research subjects and gender identity occurrence of the formation phenomenon at the actual level Causal The hidden force which The theoretical force which underpins mechanism underpins the regularity at the identified regularity and can be the real level, thus posited and explained through examining potentially posing contextual issues (i.e. themes arising challenges to the from the research literature) continuity of the event or phenomenon
Table 1. A methodological toolkit to investigate ways of knowing in G&E research on boys and masculinities
Notably, as Moore and Muller (2002) remind critical realist researchers, although regularities and mechanisms are essentially “empirical possibilities that are not … empirically evident [i.e. expressed in the data]” (p. 634), they cannot be identified/posited and explained adequately without due reference to the data. Thus, the explanations offered in this article should not be seen as judgments or evaluations, but rather as critical statements made to scope and reflect on the theoretical landscape of G&E research in order to tease out potential challenges to corporeal knowing.
Methods Designating the G&E research literature as a context for investigating knowledge and knowing, as shown in the table above, has called for the use of the integrative literature review as a data-generation and data-analysis method. Torraco (2016) defines
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this type of review as “a distinctive form of research that … reviews, critiques, and synthesizes … literature on a topic in an integrated way such that new frameworks and perspectives on the topic are generated” (p. 404). In terms of scope, he explains that the integrative literature review “ranges from exhaustive, to exhaustive with selective citation (i.e. the entire literature is examined, but only selected pieces of literature are discussed in detail), to representative, to central or pivotal (i.e. only literature that is influential, highly original, controversial, or provocative is reviewed)” (p. 405). My aim has been to construct an empirical evidence base regarding the topic of boys’ gender identity formation in the school, and then create a non-exhaustive, representative sample through which to examine the location of corporeality and corporeal knowing, the phenomenon under investigation in the RCiE project. The first stage of the integrative review spanned a period of eight months to one year and involved collecting and reviewing the abstracts of outputs published in the form of journal articles. Priority has been given to this form of research publication in particular because it remains the ultimate measure for distinguishing “good” from “bad” scholarship, and for drawing and redrawing the boundaries of knowledge (see Agger, 1991; Weiner, 1998; Wellington & Torgerson, 2005). Moreover, the following restrictions were imposed on the construction of the evidence base. First, regarding who to include, only outputs produced by G&E scholars who have contributed (or continue to contribute) to research on boys and masculinities in schools in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America, within the field of education in HE, were included. Second, regarding what to include, only qualitative, independent or project-based, outputs that report on research on gender identity formation in primary or secondary school settings were included. And third, regarding sources to obtain outputs, both education (N = 25) and non-education (N = 30) journals, accessed through Google Scholar, Scopus and university library-based digital databases (e.g. Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, SAGE and JSTOR), were used. Examples include Gender and Education, where most research on boys and masculinities is published, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Men and Masculinities and Youth & Society. A total of 137 articles were selected to the second stage of the integrative review. Here, I read, reflected on and took notes regarding the findings and arguments of all articles in order to create a sample of articles suitable for analysis, with the following three aims in mind: ensuring that duplicate outputs are removed; ensuring that the 94
specific period from the mid-1980s to 2017 (the year during which data generation took place) is duly covered, for this is the period that witnessed the formalisation of research on masculinities in the field (Bailey & Graves, 2016); and, importantly, ensuring that, in line with the aim and topic of the RCiE project, only outputs which engage in critical scholarship about gender identity, namely through asking questions and exploring issues concerning power relations and forms of oppression and resistance in social contexts, are sampled. Finally, to ensure trustworthiness, all outputs were assessed for authenticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning (Forster, 1994; May, 2011; Shipman, 1981; J. Scott, 1990). Sixty-eight articles were sampled. To analyse them, I followed Fereday and Muir- Cochrane (2006) in developing a technical record of document data that deconstructs each of the sixty-eighty articles in the following manner. First, it lists the theory/ies, concept(s) and method(s) deployed by the author(s). Second, it provides a summary of the research focus, findings and main arguments in the article. Third, it locates the sociological focus on corporeality in terms of what and how dimensions of the body and embodiment (discursive, affective and/or material) are used in gender analysis. And fourth, it identifies examples of key types of statements through which to examine corporeal knowing. These types are: Theoretical and conceptual: concerning the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the author(s) Methodological and methodical: concerning logic of inquiry and how (and to what ends) theories, concepts and methods are deployed Analytical and interpretive: concerning the ways in which empirical data are used to produce and link between arguments and claims The second stage of the analysis involved condensing this technical record into a shorter, more concise version. Through a process of open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), I generated conceptual themes from the statements identified in the first stage, and then inferred ways of knowing about research subjects (e.g. agency; structure; experience; voice). For instance, the theme “masculinities, negotiation, resistance and/or subversion” has been generated to capture the various ways in which subjective confrontations with school/peer group authority (and thus, by inference, agency as a way of knowing) have been accounted for in gender analysis. Also, through reiterative reading of the outputs, I
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ensured that inferences are made and presented in such a way that enables their recognition not just as elicitations from key statements in the literature, but rather, more holistically, as principal, defining characteristics of knowing in G&E research on boys and masculinities. Finally in this stage, I applied a “creative process” of synthesis that “weaves the streams of research together” (Torraco, 2005, p. 362) through identifying and designating as a regularity a predominant way of knowing in the literature. To posit and explain the causal mechanism which, as per the methodology, underpins this regularity, I used both the themes and secondary literature (e.g. the history of sociological studies in the field of education) to critically engage with theoretical issues. The explanations that resulted from this process make visible the role of the shift from sociological to social theory in constraining the agency of knowing in the field, namely through posing challenges regarding how to theorise about and use corporeality to advance the understanding of boys’ gender issues in education.
The predominance of agency G&E literature on boys and masculinities contains three main types of theoretical approaches to the conceptualisation and investigation of gender identity formation. First, there are approaches based on the concept of hegemonic masculinity, which denotes the most valorised form of masculinity in a given social and cultural context (Connell, 1995; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Messerschmidt, 2012). Second, there are approaches based on the concept of inclusive masculinity (Anderson, 2010), whose proponents argue that in contexts where “overt homophobia” is in decline, hegemonic masculinity is not an adequate concept through which to investigate gender identity formation (McCormack & Anderson, 2010, p. 846). And third, there are approaches, such as Halberstam’s (1998), which reconceptualise gender “as distinct from the sexed body,” and thus open to possibilities of reconfiguration (Francis, 2010, p. 478). Among these three types, hegemonic masculinity has been the most consistently deployed to make sense of the hierarchisation, but also co-constitution and interrelatedness, of boys’ masculinities both in the school and wider society. Moreover, theoretical approaches have been operationalised using a variety of qualitative, mainly ethnographic and interview-based, research methods. These methods have enabled scholars to investigate boys’ multiple masculinity construction
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engagements. Examples include (contact) sports, physical education and extra-curricular activities (e.g. A. Skelton, 1993; Keddie, 2007; Parker, 1996; Skelton, 1997; Walker, 1988; Weaver-Hightower, 2010), academic (under)achievement (e.g. L. Archer et al., 2016; Arnot et al., 1998; Francis, 2009; Jackson, 2003; Reay, 1990; Renold, 2001; Francis et al., 2010; M. R. Ward, 2014), adolescence (e.g. Mac an Ghaill, 1991; Mora, 2012), bullying, (sexual) harassment and other forms of physical and verbal (homophobic) violence (e.g. Martino, 1999; Phoenix et al., 2003; Redman, 1996; Renold, 2004; Robinson, 2005), laughter, banter and sex talk (e.g. Farrell, 2016; Kehily & Nayak, 1997; McCormack, 2014), future career-planning (e.g. Bartholomeaus, 2013; M. R. Ward, 2014), relationships with girls and other boys (e.g. Phoenix & Frosh, 2001; Redman et al., 2002; Renold, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004; Skelton, 1996) and, last but not least, emotional expression/suppression (e.g. Heinrich, 2013; Lingard et al., 2012; McCormack & Anderson, 2010). These masculinity construction engagements have been examined intersectionally, in relation to such variables as social class, race, sexuality, ability and disability, as well as using poststructuralist thinking tools. In particular, Foucauldian and Butlerian concepts of discourse, power, subjectivity and the struggle for legitimacy and intelligibility (e.g. Butler, 1993, 1997; Foucault, 1990) have been found to profoundly permeate analyses and interpretations in G&E research on boys and masculinities. Part of what constitutes their appeal is that they enable G&E scholars to de-essentialise and reclaim agency as a rich source or way of knowing about the ongoing construction of gendered selfhood. The emphasis on the analytical utility of agency is evident in claims about identity as an “ongoing life project” (Swain, 2000, p. 96), the self as “a social product of performances ” (M. R. Ward, 2014, p. 102), gender as “purely performative, rather than emerging ‘naturally’ from a pre-discursive, sexed body” (Francis, 2009, p. 647), masculinities as “storylines” (Keddie, 2003, p. 184), power as “produced and mobilised in discourses” (Bartholomeaus, 2013, p. 281), individuals as “shifting subjects” (Robinson, 2005, p. 54) and boys as “agents in their own lives” (Phoenix & Frosh, 2001, p. 31). Moreover, the emphasis on agency is also evident in scholars’ interest in developing methodological approaches that enable children “to exercise more control over the focus of the research” (Renold, 2000, p. 310). Kehler and Martino (2007) argue that “it is imperative to hear not so much about the boys but from the boys” (p. 108, emphasis in original). Thus, to ensure boys’ participation, scholars have undertaken research in ways
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that centralise subjectivity, including inviting participants themselves to contribute to research planning, design and decision-making (e.g. McCormack & Anderson, 2010). Having said that, feminist poststructuralism in G&E research does not seem to have come at the expense of critical attention to the need to bridge, in Skelton’s (1997) words, the “macro-micro theoretical gap” (p. 352). Some of the scholarly debates in the field do give recognition to the importance of structural gender analysis for conceptualising masculinities (and femininities) as real, material manifestations of the structural power relations contained within them, and not merely the performative projections of the gendered selfhood of the individual onto external reality (e.g. Connell, 1989; Francis, 2010; Mac an Ghaill, 1991, 2000). Examples of structural issues from the literature include, but are not limited to, masculinity, social class and neoliberalism, masculinity and global capitalism, masculinity and legislation (e.g. the 1988 Education Act in the UK), masculinity and institutional racism, masculinity and Right-wing conservatism (especially in the US context) and, generally, masculinity and the structural politics of masculine domination (e.g. Francis, 2010; Kehily, 2001; Lingard et al., 2012; Marsh & Noguera, 2017; Paechter, 2007; Reay, 2002; Skelton & Francis, 2011; Smith, 2007; Swain, 2002; Weaver-Hightower, 2008). Still, however, I have found that, overarchingly, the main emphasis in scholars’ corporeal, reflective and interpretivist, sources or ways of knowing about boys and gender identity formation has been placed more on agency and its attendants, namely subjective voice and experience, than on social structures. This predominance of the agential, as Dillabough (2004) argues, can be problematic, for it obscures structural-material causality by reducing the ontology of gendered selfhood into a normative account of the double-edged, enabling and constraining, relationship between agential determination and social discourse.
Examining the shift from sociological to social theory in the field The problematic regarding the predominance of agency in G&E research is reflective of broader historical tensions within the sociology of education between, on the one hand, the more structure-oriented paradigm of sociological theory and, on the other, the more agency-oriented paradigm of social theory (Mouzelis, 2000). Given the transformative impact of the poststructural turn on G&E scholars’ thinking and knowing (McLeod, 2008), it can be argued that the latter paradigm functions as a causal mechanism that
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legitimises, underpins and reinforces the centralisation of the agency of the research subject as the most reliable way to know about them and their gender identities and relations. Below, I shall explore in more detail the transition from the sociological to the social in the field, explaining, with reference to the findings above, the implications of different theoretical positions for corporeal knowing in G&E research.
Sociological theory and the view of the social from above There are two types of sociological theory: scientistic and historicist (Seidman, 1996). Both grant that the social can be objectively explained, but they differ fundamentally in how objectivity itself is conceptualised. While in the scientistic tradition objective scientific knowledge is “non-local, non-ideological knowledge – that is, representations that reflect the structure of reality” (Seidman, 1996, p. 701), in the historicist tradition (e.g. Marxist and neo-Marxist/socialist feminism), it is less positivistic, representing not structures of reality, but rather structures of interests. In other words, structures from the historicist perspective are real not by virtue of some inherent real- ness, but rather by being the cumulative effect of reified knowledge-, power- and interest-based action in a socially constructed world. Insofar as scientistic sociological theory is at odds with the post-positivist re-imagining of knowledge, G&E scholars have consciously distanced themselves from it. Indeed, there is only historicist sociological theory in G&E research on boys and masculinities, and so my references to “sociological theory” from this point onward should be understood as a short term for “historicist sociological theory.” Sociological theory, then, has been particularly evident in research where structure is the principal source or way of knowing about boys and gender identity formation. As “institutionalised features … which stretch across time and space … over and above the individuals involved in any one instant” (Walby, 1989, pp. 220-221), structures enable a view of the social from above. Their explanatory powers ensure that gender analysis does not occur in a macro-sociological vacuum. Examples from the literature examined in the RCiE project show how structural gender analysis allows G&E scholars to go beyond the mere description of agential struggle to explain gender identity formation in terms of the coherences and continuities of larger social, political and economic processes (e.g. Connell, 1989, 1995; Mac an Ghaill & Haywood, 2012; Skeggs,
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1991; Reay, 1990). Social class structure, in particular, has been an effective explanatory device in G&E research. Far from undertaking masculinity as a discrete category of analysis, scholars have acknowledged the intermeshing of gender and social class stratification systems, showing how all “social relations are constituted through processes in which the linkages are in-built” (Acker, 1989, p. 239). Moreover, reliance on structures as explanatory devices has led scholars to two important mutually reinforcing realisations: first, that mainstream, male-dominated sociological theory has tended to deny women and girls access to the realm of the social, assigning them instead to a position of physical corporeality (Witz, 2000); and second, that a feminist sociological project concerned with restoring women’s sociality need not discard a sociological focus on corporeality. Rather than abandoning it, G&E scholars have come to see the body as a structuring structure of selfhood, a situation [that] allows one to consider how, why and when in concrete lived experience, class, ethnicity and other social locations are co-present and may be more important at both an explanatory level … and experientially. (Clegg, 2006, p. 321) In a sense, structural gender analysis has enabled scholars to show how corporeality, the body and embodiment are integral to what makes research subjects socially and culturally intelligible as feminine or masculine. In research on boys and masculinities in particular, corporeal knowing has been vital for removing boys from the realm of the social to that of the biological or natural, without falling into the trap of biological determinism. Despite its explanatory powers, however, sociological theory has been thoroughly critiqued. It has been argued, for instance, that sociological theory is a paradigm that falsely presupposes that knowledge production can happen from the outside, as a detached engagement, whereby “knowledge, as well as the knowing subject, becomes context-free” (Usher & Edwards, 1994, p. 36). According to Seidman (1991), sociological theory is a neo-positivist mode of reasoning that obscures social difference, deceiving itself into thinking that speaking the “language of particularity” (p. 132) is counter- scientific. Thus, it is primarily because of concerns with the need to explore, explicate and account for agencies and agential struggles that G&E scholars in the field of education started shifting course from sociological theory to what has arguably been a more difference-friendly model for the scientific study of society. 100
Social theory and the views of the social from below and from within According to Mouzelis (1993), the shift from neo-positivist to post-positivist sociological theorising “was reflected in the very terminology; sociological theory [became] social theory” (p. 678, emphasis in original). Whereas sociological theory seeks to explain social reality in terms of structures, social theory is informed by epistemological pluralism and notions of heterogeneity, context-dependence and the social constructedness of all knowledge, knowing and knowers: “As Foucault has said, all is surface, meaning not that everything is superficial, but that everything happens at the surface, within the context of human activity” (Scheurich, 1994, p. 303). In a sense, it can be argued that social theory is a paradigm that enables an ontological view of the social not from above, but rather from below, at the level of the mundane, contextual formation of identity. Moreover, the onset of the poststructural turn in the social sciences has greatly intensified the sensitivity of social theory toward the implications of the rationalistic tendencies inherent in its counterpart, sociological theory, for understanding social reality and its subjects, let alone the need to think about possibilities of emancipation from oppressive social structures. Mainly, poststructuralist social theorising maintains that reality is always already sous rature (i.e. under erasure) (Derrida, 1976), “a piece of stained or faceted glass” (Levine, 1991, p. xvi), and that, as such, knowing should not only be perceived as partial, contingent, achievable through tracing and problematising “the constitutive force of discourse” (Davies, 1997, p. 272), but should also be done with, not only on or for, research subjects. Still considerably dominant in G&E research and the sociology of education more broadly, at least since the 1980s (Waller, 2011), poststructuralism can be said to have enabled a mode of corporeal knowing based on an ontological view of the social that comes not only from below, at the level of contextual formation, but also from within, at the level of the discursive citation of agency. What such views of the social from below and from within risk, however, is the de- centralisation of structures in corporeal knowing about research subjects. Indeed, the overabundance of the contextual and the discursive in G&E research on boys and masculinities, as is evident from the strong emphasis that scholars place on being more reflexive and doing more nuanced, relational, emancipating and empowering research
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(e.g. Arnot et al., 1998; A. Skelton, 1993; Kehily & Nayak, 1997; Martino, 1999; Phoenix et al., 2003; Renold, 2001; Smith, 2007; Tischler & McCaughtry, 2011), makes it difficult to rethink the topic of gender identity formation outside its current axiomatic poststructuralist framing, namely as an ongoing system of linguistic and cultural performativities made intelligible by power relations both inside and outside the school. In short, social theory in the field of education has been endorsed as an alternative project of reflective sociological knowing aimed at celebrating difference, recognising historical inequalities and injustices, using research as a political platform to campaign for emancipation and, most importantly, redefining knowledge as synonymous with “socially-accomplished knowledge-systems” (Muller & Taylor, 1995, p. 264) – agencies, standpoints, experiences, voices, identities and subjectivities. In Haraway’s (1988) words, it has vitally contributed to the rejuvenation of social science through opening up scholars’ eyes to the “radical multiplicity” (p. 579) of (knowledge about) mundane, everyday life. Particularly within the sociology of education, had it not been for feminist poststructuralism, corporeality would not have been recognised as the primary – discursive, affective and material – shaper of social and cultural identity markers such as gender and sexuality (de Certeau, 1984). The biological essentialisms of masculinity, for instance, including violence, aggressiveness and emotionlessness, would not have been rewritten, both theoretically and empirically, as nothing but constructed instruments of male domination.
The corporeal, the sociological and the persistent tensions of gender theorising That being said, there have been voices from within G&E research (see, for instance, Francis, 2008 and Paechter, 2009, 2011, 2012) that, while acknowledging the significant contributions of social theory, lament how decades of recognition politics in the field have led to the loss of gender analysis which, in the spirit of the neo-Marxist socialism which had dominated before the poststructural turn, rejects subjectivism in favour of a structuralist, albeit non-totalising, understanding of social reality. Two main considerations in this regard are worth highlighting here. First, the contingent materiality of everyday life seems to have been overemphasised at the expense of the materiality of structures. For instance, Popoviciu et al. (2006) argue that, notwithstanding the importance of subjective accounts regarding
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the gendering and/or sexualising conditions of schooling, it should not be presupposed that such accounts are “telling it as it really is,” or “speaking a truth” about social reality, for “there is no simple ‘reading off’ from experience to a specific subject position” (p. 401), let alone from experience to issues related to power structures more broadly. Without an equal emphasis on structures, the explanatory potential of experience is insufficient to produce “politically useful theory” and knowledge that can speak to the global as much as to the local and “make usable recommendations to those who work for a more humanitarian, more equitable society” (Anyon, 1994, p. 117). Second, concerning the interrelationship between the materiality of structures and the materiality of bodies, it has been argued that corporeal knowing in G&E research has, paradoxically, led to a condition of “disembodied textualism” (Archer, 2000, p. 2), whereby what is foregrounded is not so much the agency of the research subject as the agency of the highly subjectivist, personalising theoretical languages which scholars use to articulate the gendered self/body. For instance, although the concept of corporeal embodiment has been invaluable for showing how boys’ bodies are discursive and affective, its deployment using such languages as interpellation, inscription and reinscription and negotiation and resistance has obscured not only the body itself, but also the potentially illuminative theoretical links that could be made between the micro/personal/corporeal in everyday life context and the wider, macro-structural organisation of society (Wacquant, 2015). Witz (2000) sharply (if indirectly) critiques this slippage into the individualisation (or, better, personalisation) of corporeality when she argues that such concepts as “male embodiment” have served as a “conceptual manoeuvre” to distract scholars from problematising the root, structural causes of masculine domination by preoccupying them with the so-called “rediscovery” of the male self/body and the nature and meaning of boys’ and men’s personal identity/bodily projects. Tensions, then, persist in G&E research regarding exactly which theories and epistemologies of reality and corporeality ought to steer sociological knowledge production about boys and gender identity formation. Agreeing, however, with Apple and Whitty (1999) regarding the need for middle-range educational research that engages both the cultural aspects and political economy of schooling, I want to argue that while epistemological disputation is necessary and desirable (Taylor, 2016 and Tubbs, 2016), scholars should be aware that the pressing realities of the neoliberalisation of education, 103
including children themselves, demand that their collective investments in complex, corpoeal knowing be protected through constructive bridging between different theoretical positions in the field. For instance, while continuing to emphasise structures, scholars with structuralist tendencies may want to take heed of their poststructuralist counterparts’ call for more attention to biopolitics, or the set of discourses through which governments render bodies (un)thinkable, (un)usable, (un)manageable and (un)translatable (i.e. into profit) (Foucault, 2000). By the same token, the latter, while continuing to emphasise agency, subjectivity and the discursive construction of so-called truths, may want to reconsider working with notions of structuration which reveal the role of corporeality in (re)constituting social realities and subjects. This way, through the recognition of the equal epistemic value of different approaches to corporeal knowing about gender and society, G&E scholars would be producing knowledge that is not only capable of better informing policies and practices designed to enhance children’s lives, but also can contribute toward countering the resurgence of “the paraphernalia of positivist research” (Thomas, 1998, p. 144) in the field.
Summary and concluding thoughts for future research In this article, I have reported the findings from the RCiE project regarding the predominance of agency as a source or way of knowing about gender identity formation in G&E research on boys and masculinities. To explain this predominance, I have identified the shift from sociological to social theory as a causal mechanism that intensifies tensions between, on the one hand, those G&E scholars who are overdependent on the materialities of everyday life and, on the other, those who blame this overdependence for obscuring both structures and the corporeal-structural links needed to further illuminate the gendered social world. While emphasising the significance of epistemological disputation, my main argument has been that the continuity of corporeal knowing in the neoliberal era demands bridging between different theoretical positions in the field. To reiterate, the challenge for G&E scholars is to recognise that, indeed, each and every position is crucially needed, both epistemologically, to yield better knowledge about the social and educational lives of
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school children, and politically, to reinforce resistance to the neoliberal repositivisation and instrumentralisation of educational research. In this regard, one topic for future research concerns the way(s) in which newly emerging theoretical positions that centre on the primacy of material matter may mitigate or complicate the challenges arising from the tensions between sociological and social theory. Generally speaking, these positions are aligned with “what may be termed the post-constructionist, ontological, or material turn” (Sencindiver, 2017, para. 1) in the social sciences. To date, there are not many G&E scholars who have written from an explicitly matter-centred position. Those who have, however, tend to present themselves (see Alldred & Fox, 2015, 2017; Ringrose & Rawlings, 2015; Taylor, 2013) as concerned with raising deep, critical ontological issues about what it means to be human in an increasingly post-human world. Thus, some of the important questions that need to be addressed here include: Should matter matter? What does paying attention to the post- human entail in terms of approaches to corporeal knowing? And how does knowing through matter both speak to and differ from knowing through agency, context, discourse and/or social structures? The notion that matter, such as objects, spaces and physical bodies, should be a central consideration in social theorising about the world is not new. What is new, rather, is that it is “quickly gaining traction in educational research” (Petersen, 2018, p. 5), making further inquiry into the theoretical landscape of G&E research all the more important.
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Chapter 5: Corporeal knowing and the participation-protection dilemma in gender and education research on boys
Status: Pending submission. Output: Kaissi, O. (forthcoming). Corporeal knowing and the participation-protection dilemma in gender and education research on boys. Gender and Education. DOI: Pending.
Abstract This article reports findings from the Researching Corporeality in Education (RCiE) project, an investigation of knowledge production in Gender and Education (G&E) research on boys and masculinities in schools in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America, within the field of education in higher education. Concerned with corporeal knowing – or knowing for, about and through the body – in the current neoliberal era, the project uses critical realism as a methodology to construct a sample of the literature and examine potential limitations to knowing. Boys’ right to childhood, it is revealed, is a predominant limitation, underpinned by the ideological construction of children as socioculturally competent and innocent at the same time. My main argument is that G&E scholars are entrapped within representationism, defined as a condition of uncertainty regarding how to approach research subjects that cannot be resolved, only managed, in such a way as to counter discourses of over-protectionism that hinder the effective participation of children in empirical research. In addition to emphasising the importance of this management for ensuring the continuity of corporeal knowing, I conclude by suggesting the need to reframe and present corporeal knowing as, fundamentally, ethical-epistemological responsibility toward school children.
Keywords: gender and education research; corporeality; children and childhood; knowledge production; ideology; education policy
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Introduction The Researching Corporeality in Education (RCiE) project investigates knowledge production in Gender and Education (G&E) research on boys and masculinities in schools in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America, within the field of education in higher education. Focusing on sociologically informed G&E research in particular, it reveals challenges of an ideological nature regarding the present state and future continuity of corporeal knowing about gender identity formation. In this article, my aim is to present the project findings and offer new insights and explanations into what it means and entails to do educational research as child-, and voice-, centred research. The crux of my contribution is that, at least in the social sciences, there is an in-built relationship between type of knowledge and authorial intention toward research subjects, and so the imperative to protect complex, such as corporeal-based, knowledge in G&E research is also about protecting school children from social injustices and all forms of exploitation. In recent decades, the social sciences witnessed an intensification of emphasis on corporeal knowing, or knowing for, about and through the body, that revolutionised the conception of science itself and led to the emergence of new ontological and epistemological perspectives and approaches to the empirical study of society (Frank, 1991; Morgan & S. Scott, 1993; Shilling, 1993). In the field of education, G&E research was significantly transformed. Working with a myriad of theories within cultural, gender and queer studies scholarship (Butler, 1990; Connell, 2002; Daniels, 2009; Friedan, 1997; Kimmel & Messner, 1998; Seidler, 2006), scholars not only reinforced the fundamental distinction between sex and gender, but they also produced reflective, de-essentialising sociological knowledge that demonstrated, empirically, how masculinity is socially and culturally constructed by both individuals and structural forces inside and outside the school, and how, as such, there can be no one masculinity, but rather masculinities that vary within and across contexts. Understanding this significance of corporeal knowing in G&E research, I have set up the RCiE project to investigate the challenges of engaging in it today. The project is particularly timely amid concerns regarding neoliberal governance by numbers, which has systematically hierarchised knowledge in higher education according to a strict barometer of usefulness and uselessness with regard to economic growth and development (Ball, 2017). Through this article, I intend to make visible one of the project’s key conceptual
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and empirical contributions: a critical account of the nature and causes of the potential limitations to knowing that G&E scholars encounter in doing research on boys in schools. By limitations, I mean the problems that arise from the prevalence of certain ideological discourses about research subjects in society. There is no clear-cut definition of the term ideological, for, as McLelland (1986) rightly points out, ideology remains perhaps “the most elusive concept in the whole of social science” (p. 1). Suffice it to say, however, that, as used in this article, the term stands for the “systematic bod[ies] of ideas” (Hall, 1977, p. 9) that core institutions (e.g. the government, the family, the school, the church and the media) produce and/or adopt to justify existing relationships of control, dominance, subordination and/or interdependence between groups of people and between them and their social positioning (see Althusser, 1971; Eagleton, 2007; Gramsci, 1971; Manning, 1980; Marx & Engels, 1970). First, I begin by describing the RCiE project’s critical realist methodology and the methods used to generate and analyse document data from the G&E research literature on boys and masculinities. Second, I present the project findings, identifying, with reference to the data, a predominant limitation to knowing about boys’ gender identities and relations. Third, I provide explanations regarding what underpins this limitation in ways that pose challenges to corporeal knowing in the field. Finally, I offer some concluding thoughts regarding corporeal knowing as, fundamentally, ethical- epistemological responsibility toward research subjects.
Investigating potential limitations to knowing about boys and gender Critical realism is a middle-range theoretical position in philosophy and the social sciences that enables the empirical study of social reality outside of the conventional positivist- constructivist divide (Archer, 1995, 2000, 2003; Bhaskar, 1979, 2011). To deploy this position as a methodology in the RCiE project, I have adopted two of its main ontological assumptions. The first is analytical dualism, or the assumption that agency and structure are irreducible to each other: “Agents possess properties and powers … such as thinking, deliberating, believing, intending, loving and so forth, which are applicable to people, but never to social structures or cultural systems” (Archer, 2003, p. 2). The second assumption is that reality is stratified, fragmented, multi-layered, for if agency and structure are conceived as discrete units of analysis, lived experience necessarily becomes
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the by-product of their interplay (Archer, 2007a). Analytically, according to Bhaskar (1979), any reality can be divided into three levels: the empirical level, where the occurrence of phenomena can be observed; the actual level, where the regularities (patterns or tendencies) which characterise the occurrence of phenomena can be identified; and the real level, where the generative causal mechanisms or forces which underpin regularities can be revealed and explained. Two implications have followed from these assumptions regarding the subject of the investigation. First, knowledge production in G&E research on boys may be viewed as relational human action – relational in the sense that the agency of scholars is independent of, and not co-constituted or co-extensive with, the structures which operate in the field of education and higher education more broadly, including not only the institutional matrix of formal rules for doing research practice, but also the norms, traditions, values, beliefs and ideologies which distinguish any given social and cultural context. Second, the field itself may be viewed as a stratified social reality, wherein issues or phenomena concerning knowing about research subjects occur and can be observed, characterised and explained. Moreover, epistemologically, the emphasis on the possibility of causal (but open-ended) explanations within critical realism has implied a need for retroductivism: a logic of inquiry whereby the researcher, acting like a detective, seeks to recreate the available evidence of a given phenomenon in order to determine which actors/mechanisms are most likely behind it (McEvoy & Richards, 2003). To operationalise this logic, I followed Pawson and Tilley (1997) in using Bhaskar’s (1979) key concepts – i.e. phenomenon, context, regularity and causal mechanism – as one methodological toolkit. Table 1 below shows how each concept has been adapted to the aim of the present investigation.
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Tool Definition Mode of deployment Phenomenon The event or phenomenon The sociological focus on corporeality of interest which occurs at and corporeal knowing in G&E research the empirical, observable on boys and masculinities level of reality and can thus be investigated Context The medium within which The G&E research literature the event or phenomenon occurs Regularity The continuous pattern The predominant limitation to knowing that characterises the about research subjects and gender occurrence of the identity formation phenomenon at the actual level Causal The hidden force which The ideological force which underpins mechanism underpins the regularity at the predominant limitation to knowing, the real level, thus and can be identified through examining potentially posing contextual issues (i.e. themes arising challenges to the from the research literature) continuity of the event or phenomenon
Table 1. A methodological toolkit to investigate potential limitations to knowing in G&E research on boys and masculinities
Importantly, the explanations offered in this article should be seen as contestable, not only because the sociological, as opposed to the technical, critique of other people’s contributions to knowledge may in and of itself invite interrogations of researcher positionality (see Gunter, 2003), but also because such units of analysis as regularities and causal mechanisms remain, however grounded they may be in the data, the construction or positing of the researcher involved (Moore & Muller, 2002). That is to say, different researchers may come up with different regularities and/or mechanisms.
Methods Using the integrative literature review (Torraco, 2005, 2016), I generated a non- exhaustive, representative sample comprising empirical research outputs in the form of journal articles that address the topic of boys’ gender identity formation inside and outside the school. The first stage of the review consisted of collecting and examining abstracts using the following inclusion/exclusion criteria:
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Target audience (or who to include in the evidence base): only outputs produced by G&E scholars who have contributed (or continue to contribute) to empirical research on boys and masculinities in schools in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America, within the field of education in higher education. Coverage (or what to include in the evidence base): only qualitative research outputs that report on inquiry into gender identity formation in primary or secondary school settings. Sources (or where to obtain outputs): from education (N = 25) and non- education (N = 30) journals accessed through Google Scholar, Scopus and university library-based digital databases (e.g. Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, SAGE and JSTOR). Examples of education journals include Gender and Education, British Journal of Sociology of Education and Men and Masculinities. The second stage of the integrative review process consisted of an in-depth examination of the selected articles (N = 137) in order to create a sample suitable for analysis. Sixty- eight articles were sampled in total, in such a way that all duplicate outputs were removed and only those outputs which are theoretically engaged and primarily concerned with questions or issues regarding gender identity formation were included. Finally, to ensure trustworthiness, all sampled outputs were assessed against criteria for authenticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning (Forster, 1994; May, 2011; Shipman, 1981; J. Scott, 1990). Document analysis was then used to analyse the sample. I started with a process of developing a technical record of document data (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006) that divides the review of each of the sixty-eight articles into three areas: conceptual frameworks and methodologies; findings, main arguments and the location of the phenomenon, that is, whether (and how, and to what end) the sociological focus on corporeality is present; and statements by scholars that explicitly address, or that can be used to infer, potential limitations to knowing about research subjects and gender identity formation. The following three types of statements were identified: Positional: concerning the theoretical, methodological and/or ethical limitations encountered by the author(s) in doing research
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Dispositional: concerning how the intellectual, personal, professional and social and/or cultural life experiences of the author(s) shape their understanding of research subjects Argumentational: concerning how knowledge claims are reinforced, refuted and/or refined by the author(s) The next step involved open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Using the statements in the technical record, I generated conceptual themes and then inferred potential limitations to knowing about research subjects. For instance, from themes such as “investigating homosexuality in the school setting,” “children’s sex cultures” and “masculinity and homophobia,” I inferred “childhood sexuality” as a potential limitation. Finally, I identified and designated as a regularity the limitation which appeared more or less to be predominant in the sampled literature. In order to tease out the mechanism which, as per the methodology, underpins this regularity/limitation (i.e. reveals why it is predominant), I critically reflected, with the aid of secondary literature, on some of the sensitive political, ideological and ethical issues regarding researching children that the data had brought to the fore. Overall, data analysis and interpretation has led to explanations that reveal how contradictory ideological views of children and childhood in contemporary Western societies are implicated in constraining the agency of G&E scholars, in the sense of posing challenges to the legitimacy and continuity of corporeal knowing about research subjects.
Researching boys as children Boys’ right to childhood is a major concern in G&E research on boys and masculinities. Below, using examples from the examined literature, I present a reflective synthesis of key findings that shows how, more than a mere concern, this right acts as a potential limitation to knowing imposed by prevalent ideological assumptions about children in society. G&E scholars acknowledge that “researching young children’s understandings can be difficult” (Swain, 2000, p. 97). Reay (1990), for instance, argues that the biggest challenge to G&E research is that “adults [do not want] to know” (p. 276) about children. Some of the issues that have been identified as problematic by scholars include (homo)sexuality and sexual knowledge/activity (e.g. Mac an Ghaill, 1991; McCormack,
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2014; Redman, 1996; Renold, 2000; Skelton, 1997), masculinity and adolescence (e.g. Redman et al., 2002; Farrell, 2016; Mac an Ghaill & Haywood, 2012) and the male body (e.g. Swain, 2003). One argument commonly made in the literature with regard to dealing with such issues is that contesting the right to childhood through insisting on researching the gendered lives of children (which, in effect, means forcing adults to know) is not intended to undermine their unique social positioning, but rather to interrogate the assumption that they are neutral bystanders in society – that they do not participate in the complex gender and/or sexual politics which informs their social and cultural contexts. Accordingly, G&E scholars have sought to use empirical research as a tool to deconstruct and replace common sense notions with a more sociological understanding of gender as related to, in Connell’s (2002) words, “the way human society deals with human bodies, and the many consequences of that ‘dealing’ in our personal lives and our personal fate” (pp. 9-10). Combined, their contributions to the literature show how they have managed to position themselves not as willfully ignorant adults, but rather as adults who are interested in knowing more and better about children, and, importantly, whose knowledge mandate cannot be implemented without the kind of corporeal data – words, actions and behaviours – needed to understand complex phenomena, such as gender identity formation, independently of adult preconceptions. Adopting the theories of the “corporeal turn” (see Turner, 1984), and using qualitative approaches and methods, G&E scholars have critiqued biological and social (sex-role) determinism in education in such a way that enabled them to reconceptualise masculinity as a construct performed recurrently (formatively, negotiatively and resistively) on, in and through the body (e.g. Connell, 2008; Martino, 1999; Paechter, 1996; Renold, 1997; A. Skelton, 1993; Smith, 2007; Stoudt, 2006; Swain, 2000, 2003, 2006; Warren, 1997). Despite, however, the sheer amount of research that has been produced thus far, problems persist with regard to the effect of dominant ideological imaginings of children’s identities and roles, on both the public and policymaking levels, on scholars’ analytical purchase and capitalisation on corporeality as a source of knowing about research subjects. In addition to the media-fueled concerns that periodically erupt into public panics about children in general and the well-being, mental health and academic achievement of boys in particular (Eate et al., 2017), child corporeality itself remains an extremely controversial and socially divisive issue. According to Swain (2003), the nature of what G&E scholars’ empirical work entails in terms of observing, speaking to 121
and being in close proximity with children can itself be cause for opposition, suspicion or unease on the part of concerned adult communities (e.g. parents and teachers). In the same vein, Kehler et al. (2005), Paechter (2011), Renold (2000, 2003, 2005) and Keddie (2003), among others, have argued that, in general, education policymakers’ dismissive attitude toward gender issues in education may be attributed to difficulties both in conception and in translation, meaning that even if policymakers accepted the notion that children’s bodies are key to understanding and enhancing their social and educational lives, they would still disapprove of research based on corporeal knowing because it defies quick translation into policy. In short, the literature examined in the RCiE project reveals that the tensions in G&E research between, on the one hand, adult control over children and, on the other, the liberal foundations, interrogative purposes and overwhelmingly reflective- interpretivist underpinnings of corporeal knowing are unlikely to go away any time soon, thus posing ongoing challenges with regard to how best to deal with the right to childhood. It is to the roots of these challenges and tensions that the remainder of this article now turns its focus.
Deconstructing the right to childhood Harcourt and Sargeant (2011) argue that scholars in child-centred fields of study, such as education, find it difficult to “manag[e] the fine balance between protection and participation in research” (p. 479). Whereas protection entails a view of children as vulnerable and incompetent, participation encourages a treatment of them as agential, capable actors or decision-makers who can and should be included in research. This binary ideological construction of children can be seen as the causal mechanism that underpins the constant concern with the right to childhood in G&E research, pushing scholars to think carefully about how to improve their abilities to know more and better about gender without forgetting that their research involves children. In this section, I intend to further illuminate this causal mechanism through offering explanations regarding the normative underpinnings and relationship between protection and participation in the context of school-based educational research. Also, I shall establish a linkage between, on the one hand, what will be referred to as entrapment within representationism (as a consequence of constant negotiation of the
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participation-protection dilemma) and, on the other, the critical need to advance corporeal knowledge and knowing about gender identity formation.
The normative participation-protection dilemma The assumption that children are “incompetent, pre-social, less knowledgeable, less able subjects” reigns outside and inside academia (Valentine, 1997, p. 83). Mayall (1999) argues, for instance, that mainstream academic psychology renders children in need of supervision, socialisation and steerage “through dangerous waters” (p. 10). This adult-centred construction of childhood incompetency, however, has not emerged from an ideological vacuum. Historical approaches within childhood studies attribute the social and cultural requirement to protect children to the Romantic ideal of childhood innocence, which, with the dawn of the twenty-first century, is said to have faded away into an ideological narrative of the “erosion or even disappearance of childhood” (Cunningham, 1995, p. 172). Indeed, moral panics over child engagement in non- normative behaviour, such as drug intake, binge-drinking and knife-carrying, are often premised on notions of deteriorating innocence (Kehily, 2009). Thus, put together, incompetency and innocence are two of the main normative notions which delimit the ideological construction of children and constitute the powerful basis of separation between childhood and adulthood. Important here is the question of how this ideological construction establishes the rationale for the protection requirement. One answer may be found in Butler’s (2004) structural understanding of personhood as consequential for justice: Justice is not only or exclusively a matter of how persons are treated or how societies are constituted. It also concerns consequential decisions about what a person is, and what social norms must be honoured and expressed for “personhood” to become allocated; how we do or do not recognise animate others as persons depends on whether or not we recognise a certain norm manifested in and by the body of that other. (p. 58) Thus, the ideological construction of children precludes the possibility of personhood through two mutually reinforcing presuppositions. First, the notion of childhood incompetency presupposes that, due to their inferior cognition, children cannot honour
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and understand existing social norms. Second, the notion of childhood innocence presupposes that, due to their immature corporeality, children cannot adequately use the body to express existing social norms. Their minds are not minds, but minds of children; their bodies are not bodies, but “bodies of children” (Paechter, 2017, p. 283, emphasis in original). What this implies is that as they mature into normative subjects, children are thought to be in need of protection from their own easy-to-mould minds and bodies. Having said that, as theorisation shifted from the psychological model to the sociocultural model of the “social child” (James, 1995, cited in Morrow, 2008, p. 14), incompetency and innocence gave way to two other, less essentialist but not any less ideological, normative notions. Resonating with the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989), the “new social studies of childhood” foregrounded an understanding of children as capable subjects and “moral agents in their own right” (Ignatieff, 2000, p. 108). Like adults, they are aware of their surroundings and capable of thinking autonomously, and so it is unjust not to ensure their full participation in social, political and cultural life. Similar to childhood incompetency, however, childhood capability is not a notion borne out by purely academic knowledge, but rather is the outcome of historical transformations and ideological shifts at the beginning of the twenty-first century. On the macro level, the contemporary neoliberal world is replete with political tensions, economic disparities, work-life imbalances, changes in family patterns and other such phenomena that impact on children’s (and adults’) identity formation (Prout, 2005). Technological progress, in particular, has created new discursive spaces for children to reverse their position as passive recipients of culture (Hutchby & Moran-Ellis, 2001). Childhood knowledgeability, then, or the realisation that children are “in the know,” underpins the ideological construction of childhood capability. Moreover, just as exclusion from personhood establishes the rationale for the protection requirement, inclusion into personhood establishes, dialectically, the rationale for the participation requirement. Also, if exclusion from personhood is predicated on the fear of bodies deviating from social norms, inclusion into personhood is a matter of trusting children with the norms.
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On the interrelationship of representation, epistemology and knowledge The participation-protection dilemma in the social sphere engenders a perpetual concern with representation in academic research. To begin with, the participation requirement has been vital to the introduction, legitimisation and justification of the sociological focus on corporeality in G&E research. The literature examined in the RCiE project shows how taking for granted children’s social and cultural competence has played a major role not only in the reconstruction of research itself, that is, from research on or about to research with children, but also in the corporealisation of sociological knowing: the more children were allowed to participate, the more knowing for, about and through the body became accessible and, with time, indispensable for understanding gender identity formation. Moreover, the poststructural turn in the field of education, roughly from the 1970s onward, has intensified participation through reconfiguring the purposes of research practice as aimed at critical action and the political emancipation of subjects (Bauman & May, 2001; Davies, 1997; Flax, 1993; St. Pierre, 2000), with the result that corporeal knowing expanded considerably, as it was seen necessary to include the agencies, voices, experiences, bodies and embodiments of all groups of children at the school. The question remains, however, as to how G&E scholars have been able to negotiate the protection requirement without causing much obstruction to participation and the focus on corporeality, with all what this focus has offered in the way of reflective sociological knowing about educational subjectivities. I argue that the protection of children has been mainly negotiated through using research itself to challenge both public and policy expectations in two ways: Interrogating the rationale for protection: Problematising the notion of childhood innocence, scholars have shown that boys are subjected, from an early age, to discourses that implicate their bodies in the construction of gender and sexual identities (Connell, 1995, 2000; Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Paechter, 1998; Renold, 2004; Skelton, 2001; Youdell, 2006). Great emphasis has been put on the notion that boys are not merely passive recipients of common understandings of gender, but rather active agents who form and embody their own understandings of identity (James et al., 1998; Renold et al., 2015). Hence, one of the important contributions of G&E research has been the de-naturalisation of masculinity (that it is no less constructed than femininity) as well as the de-sacralisation of male
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corporeality (that it is no less ponderable, investigable, a source of knowing than the female body). Interrogating the aim of protection: This is more about policy than public expectations. Although G&E scholars and policymakers agree that enhancing the social and educational lives of children is a priority, they profoundly disagree over the question of why. For scholars, contemporary education policy is a vehicle for “recuperative masculinity politics” (Lingard et al., 2012, p. 407) aimed at moulding school children into economic subjects. Among others, Martino and Pallota- Chiarolli (2003), Lingard et al. (2009), Weaver-Hightower (2008) and Youdell (2009) have argued that, whereas raising gender consciousness lies at the heart of G&E research, policymakers do not see how such consciousness can be useful in the real world, where nations compete, and the better skilled survive and victor. Hence, in addition to de-naturalising masculinity and de-sacralising the male body, another major contribution of G&E research has been the production of knowledge which, unlike numbers and statistics, offers a complex, humanistic view of research subjects that does not fit with education policy “in the national interest.” Thus, G&E scholars have had to negotiate the protection requirement by maneuvering both with and against it. While recognising that children have irrevocable rights to protection by virtue of their vulnerable social positioning, they sought to question the extent to which the ideologies of vulnerability professed by both publics and policymakers not only tend to be utterly misinformed (e.g. the denial of childhood sexuality), but also, paradoxically, dangerous for children – witness, for instance, how childhood innocence is used as an argument to deny children access to vaccination, to liberal arts education or even to basic human rights education, as the recent protests over LGBT+ classes at Anderton Park Primary School in Birmingham, UK, have shown (Busby, 2019). To draw a conclusion, there are issues confronting corporeal knowing in the field that have less to do with science, theory, epistemic labour or even representation itself and more to do with entrapment within representationism, which can be defined as a condition of uncertainty regarding how best to handle the normative-ideological trappings of doing research with children. Simply, more participation will mean more subjective voices that need to be represented, which, in turn, will mean more reliance on 126
reflective, corporeal knowing, which, nevertheless, will mean the inevitability of clash with one or more dominant discourses on child protection, particularly amid neoliberalism, whereby children’s bodies are subject to exploitation everywhere, and not just in education (see Graf & Schweiger, 2016). In a sense, as long as both the civil contract in Western liberal democracies and, more broadly, the international conventions and agreements which set up common human rights agendas and goals, such as the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, allow for the dualistic treatment of children as “simultaneously ‘human beings’ and ‘human becomings’” (Invernizzi & Williams, 2008, p. 6), citizens and non-citizens at the same time, there can be no conceivable transcendence of representationism, but rather only regular, strategic and effective management. The main challenge, thus, for G&E scholars is to ensure that social and political ideologies do not stand in the way of producing discomforting, complex and critical knowledge about research subjects. That is how the continuity of corporeal knowing in G&E research has been achieved in the past, and how it will most likely be achieved in the future.
Summary and implications for reflexive research practice In this article, I have reported and expanded critically on some of the findings from the RCiE project regarding the predominant concern with research subjects’ right to childhood in G&E research on boys and masculinities. I have conceptualised this concern as a potential limitation to knowing underpinned by the contradictory ideological construction of children in Western societies as socioculturally participative and vulnerable at the same time. Moreover, I have explained that this construction functions as a causal mechanism that entraps scholars within representationism, that is, uncertainty regarding how to understand, approach and do epistemic labour about children. My main argument has been that, in addition to critical theory and the development of epistemological inquiry in the field, the future of corporeal knowing hinges upon scholars’ ability to manage representationism in a strategic and effective manner. To draw an analogy, if research practice were to be viewed as an academic game (Bourdieu, 1988), then the negotiation of the participation-protection dilemma would resemble playing a game-within-a-game, one from which disengagement is not an option. What is at stake in the current neoliberal era is not the loss of corporeal knowledge per se, but rather the loss of the possibility of producing any such complex type of knowledge
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which would enable reimagining the place and role of children in society away from purely economic considerations. Bearing all this in mind, I want to conclude by emphasising the inextricability of ethics and epistemology in the field of education (Bridge, 2017). G&E scholars are in need of a collective politics of positioning that reframes their investments in corporeal knowing as crucial, not only because of its contribution to epistemological and methodological openness, but also as a matter of ethical responsibility toward children. Such corporeal- epistemic-ethical reflexivity would enable a more confident navigation of the difficulties of doing child-centred research. It would also serve as a political tool to defend scholarship that is socially critical (in-depth and power-sensitive) from the neo-positivist economism of the neoliberal state (Miller, 2017). While one might argue that reflexivity can only do so much, for “nothing seems to stop the triumph of neoliberalism in academe” (Kauppi, 2015, p. 32), it is worth reminding the field that being reflexive is not so much about problem-solving as problem-posing, so that such tyrannies as, for instance, the social consensus over what gender is, how children differ from adults and what ultimately counts as knowledge about them are exposed and problematised rather than taken for granted.
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Chapter 6: Knowledge, the body and the challenges of doing intellectual work in gender and education research
Status: Pending submission. Output: Kaissi, O. (forthcoming). Knowledge, the body and the challenges of doing intellectual work in gender and education research. Gender, Work & Organization. DOI: Pending.
Abstract Set up as an investigation of knowledge production in Gender and Education (G&E) research on boys and masculinities in the field of education in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America, the Researching Corporeality in Education (RCiE) project aims at exploring potential limitations and challenges to corporeal knowing, or knowing for, about and through the body, in the neoliberal university. My intention in this article is to report and discuss the findings of an interview-based inquiry undertaken as part of the project. Working with the notion of engagement in knowledge production as personal commitment, I interviewed eight G&E scholars, and then used thematic analysis to analyse their career and life histories in higher education. My main argument is that the predisposition toward intellectuality, strongly evident in the data, may function, rather paradoxically, as a potential limitation to corporeal knowing about boys. This is because, from a Marxist perspective, the performative exploitation of intellectual work exacerbates the body alienation of the scholar in ways that may be inadvertently transferred onto the empirical construction of research settings and subjects. In conclusion, I emphasise the importance of academic resistance and suggest a model for corporeal-epistemic reflexivity in research practice.
Keywords: personal identity; intellectual work; gender and education research; corporeal knowledge; body alienation; neoliberalism
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Introduction This article reports on research undertaken as part of the Researching Corporeality in Education (RCiE) project, as investigation of knowledge production in Gender and Education (G&E) research on boys and masculinities in schools in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America, within the field of education in Higher Education (HE). The project is centrally concerned with exploring potential challenges to the continuity of corporeal knowing, or knowing for, about and through the body, in the wake of neoliberal structural reform in HE. Using interview data about career and life histories in academia, as well as an original set of thinking tools, I examine the personal identity projects of eight G&E scholars. My findings and insights reveal that the ways in which scholars engage in intellectual work and knowledge production as personal commitment has long-term implications both for their own bodies and for how they theorise and deploy corporeality as a way of knowing in empirical research. In the social sciences, the body has been theorised in different ways, both as a “discursive object … bound up in the order of desire, signification and power” (Grosz, 1994, p. 19) and as an affective and material meaning-making system that plays a mediative role between agency and structure (Shilling, 2005). Particularly in G&E research in the field of education, the focus on the corporeal embodiedness of the research subject – the speech, actions and behavioural patterns which make one intelligible – has been vital to the de-essentialisation and pluralisation of gender. Scholars have theorised masculinities and femininities as simultaneously bodily and linguistic, abstract and real, discrete and intersectional (i.e. forming in relation to social class, dis/ability and other variables) and contingent as well as continuous constructions of power, control and/or resistance (Connell, 1996; Mac an Ghaill, 1996b; Skeggs, 1991; Paechter, 2003). In a sense, it can be said that the field owes much, if not all, of what is currently established as basic knowledge about gender identities and relations in the school to the insights of corporeal knowing about research subjects. However, given neoliberal structural reform and the repositivisation of knowledges in HE, including in the field of education, it is apt to wonder what will become of such type of knowing in future G&E research. This concern encapsulates the rationale for the RCiE project. Because, as Gunter and Mills (2017) argue, the “’what’ and ‘who’ of education professionals” matter (p. 58), I have set out to interview and construct the oral
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career and life histories of eight G&E scholars who contributed to shaping research on boys and masculinities in the field. The aim of this article is to make visible two of the major contributions of the project. First, conceptually and empirically, I offer new insights regarding the relationship between the personal, the professional, the corporeal and intellectual work in the neoliberal university. These insights illuminate the serious implications of the body politics of doing intellectual work for how research subjects are approached, theorised and empirically studied to produce knowledge regarding their social and educational lives. Second, theoretically, I offer an original set of thinking tools – “order of reality,” “concerns” and “commentaries” – based on Margaret Archer’s (2000) conceptualisation of personal identity formation in the social order of reality. These tools are important to develop robust understandings of the connections between power, agency, structure and change in such highly striated (institutional and professional) spaces as HE. To begin, I describe the RCiE project’s critical realist methodology, data generation and analysis methods and some aspects of the interview process. Next, I report the project findings, and then use both the interview data and secondary literature to draw theoretical linkages between the professionalisation of intellectual work, both in general and in the contemporary neoliberal era in particular, and the formation of structural constraints on corporeal knowing in the field of education. Finally, thinking about how to protect and enhance corporeal knowing, I conclude by suggesting a fourfold model for corporeal-epistemic reflexivity in research practice.
Using critical realism to investigate knowledge production as personal commitment Critical realism is a meta-theoretical position in philosophy and the social sciences built on the possibility of overcoming the positivist-constructivist divide in the study of society (Bhaskar, 1978). Central to this position is the stratification hypothesis, whereby it is maintained that, first, social reality is the product of the interrelationship of agency and structure as discrete entities (both conceptually and as exercised/experienced in everyday life) and, second, that any given reality is contextually bound and formed of three ontological layers. These are: the empirical, where an event or phenomenon occurs, either through social reproduction or change; the actual, where the regularities (patterns or tendencies) of the occurrence of the event or phenomenon reify into structures that
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either enable or constrain action; and the real, where the causal (generative, open- ended) mechanisms which underpin regularities (and, as such, are the intrinsic reason why the event or phenomenon persists) reside (Bhaskar, 1979). Frauley and Pearce (2007) clarify that neither the identification of regularities nor the positing and explanation of causal mechanisms is infallible: “Whereas positivism attempts to find regularly occurring events or patterns in order to yield predictions, realism supposes that we can find tendencies or things that may or may not take place, that may help us explain the event in question” (p. 17, emphasis in original). In other words, rather than predictions, regularities and mechanisms should be perceived as informed explanations of the deep workings of a given phenomenon that are identified/posited through the rigorous tracing of available evidence (McEvoy & Richards, 2003). Epistemologically, this presupposition that phenomena have deep, causal workings implies a retroductivist logic of inquiry, which, nevertheless, according to Luke (2009), can be combined with a critical hermeneutics approach to enhance the explanatory power of the causes posited to explain phenomena. On the basis of these assumptions, I adopted a view of knowledge production in G&E research on boys and masculinities as relational human action, that is, action undertaken by an agency that co-constitutes, but is at the same time independent of, the structural conditions which organise the social reality of the field of education and HE more broadly. Moreover, my choice to investigate knowledge production through interviewing G&E scholars shows keenness with regard to using a hermeneutical approach to enhance the operationalisation of critical realism in the RCiE project. To carry out the investigation, I followed Pawson and Tilley (1997) in using Bhaskar’s (1979) key concepts – i.e. phenomenon, context, regularity and causal mechanism – as one methodological toolkit. Figure 1 below reveals the mode of deployment of each tool in the project.
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Figure 1. Deploying critical realist tools to investigate knowing in G&E research through interview data
Importantly, I am aware that my methodological choices may be cautiously received in the field, especially in areas like G&E research, where theorising about knowledge has mostly been done from poststructuralist perspectives (Bailey & Graves, 2016). My aim, however, has been to use critical realism in such a way that demonstrates its potential to complement, and not compete with, existing constructivist and other qualitative approaches to educational research, be it in relation to studies on knowledge production or any other topic.
Recruitment, data generation and data analysis The respondent recruitment process involved two steps. First, I collected and organised information found in the public domain (e.g. online university staff profiles and professional curricula vitae) to survey the population of G&E scholars. From the population (N = 143), thirty-three potential respondents were selected using the following inclusion/exclusion criteria: in terms of location, the potential respondent is (or has been) an education scholar in the field of education in a HE institution in the UK, primarily, Australia or North America; in terms of research interests, the potential
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respondent undertakes (or has undertaken) independent or funded G&E research on boys and masculinities; and in terms of context of empirical research, the potential respondent undertakes (or has undertaken) G&E research within primary and/or secondary education. Second, through an in-depth examination of academic profiles and research publications, I created a sample of twelve potential respondents and approached them with an interview invitation. Eight, four women and four men, accepted the invitation. At the time of recruitment, all of them had been positioned in the top ranks of the formal academic hierarchy, had had experience in teaching and management (e.g. as department heads) and had been practising educational research for a long time, some for over twenty-five years. The interviews were semi-structured and lasted approximately from sixty to ninety minutes. According to Mason (2002), the semi-structured interview allows the researcher to “be receptive to what respondents say, and to their ways of understanding” (p. 231, emphasis in original). I was particularly interested in learning more about how knowing in the academic field is shaped by personal life journeys and identity projects, and so the interview schedule comprised the following three domains of inquiry: Career beginnings: to understand how life experiences have created pathways into HE and contributed to shaping the personal identities of G&E scholars Career goals, choices and actions: to understand how major influences, ideas and ideologies, significant others, past experiences and/or critical historical events have defined careers and contributed to shaping the personal identities of G&E scholars Career progress: to understand how various career and social engagements have bolstered creativity, connectivity and contemporaneity in research practice, thus contributing to shaping the personal identities of G&E scholars Each domain contained a number of main questions and sub-questions. For instance, under “career progress,” I asked, “how have you managed to stay creative, connected and up to date in your career?” Moreover, all interviews, four face-to-face and four online (via Skype), were audio-recorded and transcribed. To enhance trustworthiness, I shared a copy of the transcript with the respondents. This allowed them to correct factual errors, reflect on the quality of transcription, suggest minor or major changes in structure and content and either confirm their participation or, for any reason, withdraw from the
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project. Also, all respondents had signed consent forms regarding their rights to confidentiality and anonymity. In this article, in addition to using numbers to protect anonymity (e.g. “R1” for respondent one), care has been taken to remove elements of contextual specificity that could otherwise be used to identify the respondents (e.g. the names of PhD supervisors; the titles of books, journal articles or research projects). Having familiarised myself with the interview data, I performed theory-driven data analysis using Archer’s (2000) conceptualisation of personal identity formation. The chief contribution of this conceptualisation is that it has enabled a complex understanding of how the personal is a significant factor in the construction of knowledge. In brief, Archer (2000) maintains that individuals acquire a personal identity, their “continuous sense of self” (p. 7), when they are able to develop a unique manner of negotiating and prioritising between concerns within and across three orders of reality: the natural order, where concerns generally pertain to physical well-beingness and are realisable through appraising “body/environment relations” (e.g. the irrational fear of a natural phenomenon); the practical order, where concerns generally pertain to performative mastery and are realisable through engagement in the “subject/object relations” that constitute the material culture of the world (e.g. the competence of passing the ball in a soccer game); and the social order, where concerns generally pertain to self-worth and are realisable through engagement in the “subject/subject relations” that constitute the various discursive environments of reality (p. 199). As for how concerns are prioritised, Archer (2000) speaks of an “inner conversation” (or “interior dialogue”) through which the individual agent develops and exercises “personal emergent powers” (p. 318). It is, moreover, through producing “emotional commentaries” (Archer, 2000, p. 195), or reflexive (intentional and intensional) statements about the world, that agents grant others access to their inner conversations (or personal powers), thus rendering some of their concerns visible. The list below shows how these concepts – i.e. order of reality, concerns and commentaries – have been appropriated as thinking tools in the RCiE project: Order of reality: the social order, including HE, where G&E research in the field of education takes place
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Concerns: the values, beliefs and commitments that define G&E scholars’ sense of self-worth against social norms, including institutional and professional arrangements in HE Commentaries: the reflexive statements through which G&E scholars reveal concerns with self-worth. These tools have been deployed conjointly with the project’s methodological toolkit. Using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) flexible model for thematic analysis, I started first with a process of open coding to generate initial codes from commentaries. Second, I grouped these codes on the basis of similarity in meaning into subthemes that represent personal powers, and then combined subthemes to create different themes which represent predominant concerns with self-worth. All themes were named, defined, reviewed and refined to ensure they provide an overall picture of the data. Third, I re- examined the obtained themes to identify and designate as a regularity a common aspect or pattern that cuts across the data. Finally, using relevant secondary literature, I engaged with some of the contextual issues that have emerged from the data, namely concerning neoliberalism, performativity and scholars’ corporeal embodiedness, in order to posit and explain one causal mechanism that underpins and enables this regularity to function as a potential limitation to knowing about research subjects and gender identity formation in G&E research.
Juggling the personal and the professional in the academic workplace The interview accounts encapsulate a wealth of experiences that reveal three overarching concerns with self-worth: the concern with personal struggle, the concern with personal development and the concern with personal and social change. Below, drawing on direct quotes, I explore each concern by revealing the personal powers or properties of the self that G&E scholars utilise to satisfy it.
Personal struggle A never-ending struggle to negotiate social norms is strongly evident in the interview accounts. Respondents described such formative experiences as “being raised by a single parent” (R4) and being “the only one in my family who went to university” (R7) as identity-building milestones that instilled in them the power to reflect upon one’s 142
location in the social world. For some of them, this includes the power to recognise rather than ignore the different, non-normative elements of personal identity. Self- identifying as a non-heterosexual researcher, for instance, not only informs one’s “deep sense of being-in-the-world” (Clegg, 2008, p. 336), but also renders research practice a deeply personal commitment, pushing one to be more vigilant and critical: The thing is that for the academic gays, if you like, you need to be able to have some distance. (R5)
I’m wondering if I didn’t identify as gay, would I have done this sort of work? I don’t think so. I mean that it is integral to it how you are in the world and what your experiences are in the world. (R6) One respondent in particular described a “defining moment” in which a colleague presupposed that his sexuality had helped him gain access to gay participants in schools. The incident seems to have influenced his research practice substantially, shifting the personal closer to the professional: It really made me think harder about how I represent masculinities and how my privilege and my ability to navigate masculinities has allowed me to raise questions around being a boy, being a man … It’s a defining moment because it … got my back up to say, how dare you discount my work because you think it’s because maybe I’m gay that I would be only invested in this kind of work? … The assumption is that I’m less than a man in some way, and that’s the only reason that I do masculinities research. (R4) Moreover, the interview accounts reveal that personal struggle in HE is also, perhaps more crudely, about individual economic security. One respondent, for instance, had wanted to become an eminent novelist before he figured out that, “I probably needed to do something that actually earned money, since capitalism wasn’t going to go away any time soon” (R1). Another respondent explained that his retreat from activism was driven by the need for stability: “I thought I ought to get a job, so I became a teacher” (R8). What these and other commentaries show is that G&E scholars are pragmatic. Like all social subjects, they have to find their way around the “emergent structural and cultural properties” of the social realities in which they are immersed (Archer, 2000, p. 215). 143
Alongside critical reflection, personal difference and pragmatism, one last personal power to point out here is independence. Acquired through different experiences in different settings, such as living with a hardworking single parent (R4), or becoming a single parent (R5), or working with a PhD supervisor who leaves you alone instead of telling you, “show me your work” (R8), independence was frequently cited as important for a successful and self-satisfying life and career. Notably, independence here is not just in the material sense (e.g. earning your own money or having your own house), but also in the political sense of entitlement to “academic freedom” (R6) in the university and, more broadly, the freedom of thought in society.
Personal development Personal struggle gives rise to the concern with personal development. Here, too, the respondents spoke about negotiating social norms. Taking a mere reflective stance toward reality does not suffice; the more there is struggle, the higher the stakes, and the more agents are in need of new powers to better handle social structures. First, there is the power of pedagogic expertise. All respondents expressed a passionate interest in teaching: I came from a family with quite a number of teachers both in school and in university, so teaching is very close to being my family trade. (R2)
I came [into academia] knowing how to teach, which is important … I think it had a big impact on my writing, maybe less so now than in the early days when I was writing for the teachers like the teacher I had been … I suppose what you call for a short term, reflective teachers. (R5)
I entered university when I was about twenty-three, and really loved it. I also had a passion about education and social justice from that age, and before. I started my bachelor in education, and I wholeheartedly threw myself into that. (R7) Like research, teaching enables the respondents to engage in yet another assemblage of subject/subject (here, teacher/student) relations that develop both personally and professionally. They teach as well as learn from their students, and they also learn how to
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use the classroom setting to reimagine students empirically, as reproducible research subjects. Second, there is the desire to be scholarly. For instance, speaking of his PhD journey, one respondent emphasised, “I was really, just really sort of taken in by academic culture, by the intellectual pursuits, by the richness of conversations” (R4). Another respondent described her PhD career as “phenomenal … fantastic … such a rich educational experience” (R5). And a third respondent was so much excited by academic life that she “didn’t actually want to do anything else” (R2). This eminent value attached to scholarliness is most evident in the irritation expressed at having to do non-academic, managerial work: The worst year I had was last year, and partly because I was [title of position] … I took [the job], but in terms of being out to maintain my academic work, that was much harder, and I’ve always liked if I am part of a research team to be involved in the fieldwork as well, not just send people out to collect the data; I like to have a feel for it. So some of that was harder because of the admin responsibilities, and also dealing with issues that were kind of not why I became an academic, like “somebody has stolen my stapler” or whatever, that kind. (R8) Moreover, developing as a scholar entails constructing a personal economy of tastes and takes on what goes on in the academic field. From fascination with feminist theorisation to wariness about the New Materialisms and frustration with an intersectional metaphor that seems to have grown into a “very static … slogan-y thing” (R5), the respondents unapologetically disclosed their relationships to mainstream social theory. The following commentary depicts how theoretical thinking evolves in a dynamic and open-ended fashion throughout one’s academic career: I think that I’ve shifted in my research. Even though gender is still there, I became very invested in transgender scholarship … I know we’re deconstructing the binaries; intersectionality is important. But I didn’t feel I was learning anything more, and I started reading the transgender stuff basically because I started to read some critiques of queer theory and became interested in embodiment. There’s something about what that offers that takes me further, takes me beyond the limits of current scholarship and engages me in debates that I find stimulating. (R6) 145
Perhaps most importantly, however, being scholarly is about acquiring a set of cognitive skills, such as reading and writing, paying attention to evidence, making arguments, identifying and neutralising biases and prejudices, acknowledging situatedness and creating new ways to address issues in practice: I certainly picked up my [family member’s] … habit of attention to evidence, of being concerned to acquire lots and lots of materials, even if one only made sense out of a few. (R2)
I mean, in some ways, the most influential thing in my entire career is that I studied philosophy … And although I cannot really remember who said what, what I do know is how to pull an argument together, how to get to the root of an argument and see where the gaps are. (R3)
You have to be able to be surprised by your work. You have to be able to find things that you didn’t expect to find, and not just to have your prejudices confirmed. (R5)
You have to look at yourself as a researcher because there’s no neutral sort of objective knowledge, given the paradigm that I’m working within. (R6)
… there’s always different ways of theorising … different dynamics, different contexts for me to stay motivated and creative about the ways in which I research these issues. Creating new ways of thinking or new lines of thinking about particular equity issues is always there. (R7) Having said that, there is more to scholarliness than passion and skills. Interpersonal relationships are important too. Through doctoral studies, participating in conferences, convening research groups, co-editing/authoring publications, co-founding leading organisations in the field and many more such examples, the respondents have further steeped themselves in the academic workplace. Moreover, not all respondents were fond of the modern-day model of the enterprising scholar. As one put it, “I mean, I’ve been a bit of the classic sort of academic, and sort of been research-focused toward academia, which I haven’t felt as comfortable with in the latter part of my career” (R7). In the same vein, when asked about the importance of conferences in his career, another respondent 146
replied, “I don’t like that sort of conferencing and stuff. I don’t do a lot of conferences. I’d rather do one maybe a year. I don’t spend a lot of time and energy into it” (R6). Finally, scholars develop not only through pedagogic and scholarly powers, but also through being critical. In many instances, the respondents presented themselves as intellectuals who critique, and feel indignant over, social injustices in the world. Here is one example: So if you think about masculinities … it started with a BBC Panorama program that just made me so angry. I could have screamed, because the whole thrust of the program wasn’t just that girls are doing better than boys; “it’s awful, what can we do? This is not right. This is not natural. Boys should always do better than girls.” And so, I really started doing that work because I was absolutely infuriated by the program. (R5) Also, being critical is about the intellectual ability to identify and/or contribute to closing gaps in knowledge. For instance, speaking of what had stimulated his interest in boys’ and masculinities, one respondent argued that “there were authors … getting things wrong … There were issues going on for boys that were not being addressed” (R1). Other respondents discussed problems on a broader level (e.g. the use of gender theory in empirical research), offering ways through which G&E research can be moved forward. One such way is through eclecticism: I read a lot of stuff outside my field, for pleasure. I read novels as well. That allows me to make connections that other people may not see because they’re staying in their field … It’s eclecticism probably. It’s the fact that I read psychology, and most educational researchers, certainly most gender researchers, do not read ordinary psychology … So that makes me different. (R3)
Personal and social change Concerns with personal struggle and personal development are complemented by the greater concern with personal and social change. In this regard, the interview accounts reveal that political consciousness is one of the respondents’ strongest personal powers, both inside HE, with regard to positioning in the field, and more broadly, with regard to interest in world politics. One respondent, for instance, cited the September
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2001 terrorist attack on the US as a significant historical event that led him to pursue an interest in recuperative masculinity politics: 9/11 … was an ideological turning point for a lot of people in the US towards a vastly more conservative culture, one that is increasingly becoming unabashedly racist and unabashedly recuperative in terms of class, race and other things. So I had to spend a lot of time fighting against these kinds of recuperative ideologies that started back then and continued to develop as things happened increasingly. (R1) Moreover, all of the respondents cited the women’s liberation, gay and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s as major influences. They all, without exception, self- identified as (pro-)feminist: The other thing is that I’ve been a feminist … and being a feminist is very important. It affects the sort of research I do and the approach I take to it. (R3)
And, if I think of myself as a feminist … that sort of informed my concerns about equity and about social justice. (R4)
Social justice permeates everything I do … The feminist movement was very important to me and very fortunate … It impacted upon the way I thought about the world as well. (R8) As the twentieth century neared its end, however, feminist activism went into gradual decline, rendering research the only available alternative to resume opposition and the fight against social injustices. As Glucksmann (1994) argues, “we [i.e. scholars] find a quasi-solution for frustration in the current political climate by focusing down onto the research process, perhaps the one situation where we can have an active role, and over which we can and do have some control” (p. 151). The following two commentaries go some way toward illustrating this reappropriation of research as activism: I wanted to live with and be with people to understand them and their lives. I think there’s activism in that because the more you’re doing that, you’re playing the space of how you do then engage them in the world in ways that will lead them to living fuller lives and not in depression … So I mean I don’t see [academia and activism] as separate. (R6) 148
I love the fact that there are still people who are protesting and doing things, and in my own way, I guess, I’m trying to write and help work with. So I do work with education systems and work with schools to try to make them better for young people from marginal backgrounds. So it’s activism as well, but of a different kind. (R8) But the question begs itself here: given the neoliberal university today, where one is constantly “on an academic treadmill” (R4), striving “to publish, publish, publish” (R7), can research realistically serve as a tool for social change? Possibly, for despite their deep involvement in performative regimes, the respondents’ socially critical research on gender shows that they have been able to resist and keep their political consciousness and belief in the inevitability of change intact. Had it not been for this belief, their personal struggles and developments – self-reflections, individual differences, independence, pedagogic and scholarly powers and critical awareness of social reality – would not have cohered to give meaning and purpose to their personal identity projects.
The (re)professionalisation of intellectual work in the neoliberal university Common among these concerns with personal struggle, personal development and personal and social change is the predisposition toward intellectuality. Indeed, the word “intellectual” itself crops up everywhere in the interview data, prompting questions regarding the respondents’ relationship to their own bodies and to corporeality more broadly. As Rasmussen (2009) argues, “there are connections to be made between the embodiment [of the G&E scholar] and theorising” (p. 440); in other words, there is a connection between the mental and the material, “the body and the body of knowledge” (Shapin & Lawrence, 1998, p. 1). What follows, then, is a critical discussion that builds on Marxist labour theory to understand the centrality of the intellectuality-corporeality nexus in the professionalisation of Intellectual Work (IW), both generally and with specific regard to contemporary HE. Mainly, my intention is to examine how academic professionalism paradoxically renders scholars’ predisposition toward intellectuality a potential limitation to, rather than a facilitator of, corporeal knowing in G&E research.
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Object-bondage, or self- and body-alienation In an often quoted passage from The German Ideology, Marx and Engels (1846/1970) contend that “the division of labour only becomes truly such when a division of material and mental labour appears” (p. 51). The latter labour, Sohn-Rethal and Sohn- Rethal (1978) explain, constitutes an impersonal baggage of “non-empirical concepts” (i.e. concepts not grounded in real – transactional – relationships between subjects) whose development over an extended period of time necessitates the elimination of their social origins, meaning that for labour to become mental, it must stand, “as it were, with its back to society” (pp. 68-71, emphasis added). This anti-anthropomorphism of IW, or the non-sociality of mental labour, is integral to its ontological formation and definition, for there can be no abstract, supra-transactional knowing of reality without the denial, however partial, of the rootedness of thought in the materiality of human nature, body and society. In fact, it can be argued that it is precisely at the moment in which the intellectual worker loses sense of their own mundane, corporeal embodiedness that their mental labour is formed: The obligation of subjective experience to mental activity concomitantly encourages the absenting or denial of corporeality. “The body” comes to be objectified as something distinct from “the mind” and to be understood, even to understand itself, as an entity opposed to the agentive self, a corporeal appendage or energising medium rather than an aspect of the agentive self. (Boyer, 2005, pp. 248-249, emphasis in original) Moreover, Sohn-Rethal and Sohn-Rethal (1978) argue that the manual-mental division of labour has been intensified by the industrialist shift toward institutionalisation and professionalisation as two vehicles for the macro-structural organisation of society. The inner logic of these vehicles is that the continuity of IW is dependent upon its simulation of the transactionality of commodities in the real world, and so abstract (or non-empirical) concepts must be commodified into multiple, tangible, marketable and exchangeable intellectual products (e.g. books or articles). This, however, can only happen if a relationship of “object-bondage, appropriation as estrangement, as alienation” (Marx, 1844/1963, p. 297, emphasis in original) occurs between product and producer in ways that fetishise the former and ensure its endurance and superiority over the latter. Indeed, as is evident from the interview accounts in the RCiE project, that none of the respondents makes references to the somatic/physical body, let alone to how it 150
both shapes and is shaped by knowledge work, shows how substantive involvement in professional IW can lead to the alienation of corporeality from the social agent’s self- reflexive, “inner conversation” (Archer, 2000, p. 318). It seemed to me that the more the respondents had done IW, the more they became, in Pelias’s (2004) words, “removed from who they [are] … their mind … split from their body” (pp. 10-11). Particularly today, the intensification of object-bondage can be considered one of the most, if not the most, distinctive feature of doing professional IW. My respondents, like countless other scholars in the neoliberal university, face enormous pressures to comply with policies aimed at maximising mental labour to “satisfy the increasingly technical requirements of a modernized economy” (Boggs, 1993, p. 110). It is not, however, the epistemic labour of disputation, “critique and contestation” (Smyth, 2017, p. 56) that is on demand. Rather, due to the performative regulation of research practice through metrics, standards, goals and targets, IW has significantly deteriorated: “The mental work of the professional [intellectual] is [now] focused on the provision of services, not the promotion of ideas” (Furedi, 2004, pp. 38-39). He or she is expected to be, act like and present themselves as a banal knower, someone who is capable of being both an outputs machine – “I think, therefore I produce” (Castells, 1998, p. 359) – and an entrepreneurial, “elastic self” (Devine et al., 2011, p. 379) that strategises, competes and manoeuvres endlessly to survive in the field. However, while Ball (2015a) sees in this profound shift in the nature of IW an attempt to impose “excruciating visibilities” (p. 826) on scholars, I see in it a neo- Cartesian form of cerebral serfdom: it is not scholars who are becoming more and more visible, but rather their mental labour. Engrossed in the pursuit of performative politics, they fail to notice how “the paraphernalia of bureaucratisation” (Johnson, 1994, p. 379) is effectively alienating, exhausting and effacing their corporeality, quite literally sometimes – think about sleeplessness, chronic anxiety, disease and the rise in suicide rates in academia (see Acker & Armenti, 2004 and Barcan, 2013). Corrigan (1988), for instance, argues that “publish or perish” (or, to be up to date, “publish and perish”) involves the technical-rationalistic reduction of the professional intellectual to nothing more than a disembodied citation or, worse, a mere indexical relation. Interestingly, the same can be said of summits, conferences or symposia. The view expressed by three of my respondents that conferences involve attending to additional, undesirable workload goes some way toward showing that such events are not so much an enablement of visibility 151
or corporeal embodiment as an extension of the cerebrality of the academic workplace – an Ivory Tower (or, in the case of women academics, an Ivory Basement) on the move (Shapin & Lawrence, 1998; A. Brooks & Mackinnon, 2001). Thus, in a sense, the producer becomes their product under neoliberalism, and the object-bondage between the two becomes an ontologically binding condition of professionalism that spreads everywhere, across all the spaces inhabited by the academic, within and beyond the HE institution.
Implications for research practice: the spectre of epistemic violence Based on the preceding insights, I argue that the politics of doing IW in the neoliberal university has serious implications for G&E research as an area of research practice which demands substantial investment in corporeal-based knowledge and knowing. In essence, self- and body-alienation in the academic workplace may be conceived as a long-term natural side effect of extensive involvement in IW. In this case, the object-bondage between the scholar and the intellectual product would be reduced to a mere intrinsic phenomenon. However, considering the imperative of reprofessionalisation toward an economic model of HE, it is not a far-fetched proposition that alienation functions as an efficient, tacit and multi-form – discursive, affective and material – causal mechanism for disposing of scientific paradigms and modes of knowing which stand in the way of achieving economic goals. Here, object-bondage would be seen through a socio-political lens: as rediscovered, manipulated and exploited by policymakers. Indeed, “we do not do policy, [but rather] policy does us” (Ball, 2015b, p. 2), and not necessarily prescriptively, through pre-establishing the aims and directions of research. Consider, for instance, the following chain of causal relationships with regard to G&E research: the more scholars do the banalising IW of the neoliberal university, the more they become alienated, and the more it becomes possible that this alienation may be transferred onto the empirical construction of research settings. With time, this would threaten to discontinue or even totally de-root the whole spectrum of empirical dependencies on corporeality as a source of knowing about research subjects in the field. Eventually, too, long-standing qualitative-interpretivist methods such as ethnographies, interviews and the use of arts would disappear. If this potential loss of corporeal knowing became reality, it would essentially be, among other things, the result of several (both
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symbolic and real) inflictions of violence upon scholars’ bodies transmuting into inflictions of epistemic violence1 upon research subjects as part of the greater scheme to delegitimise and get rid of knowledge which does not comply with the economic agenda of education policymaking. There is no doubt that gender remains an important subject to investigate through what the bodies of research subjects say, do, show or signify. The main political challenge for G&E scholars, however, is to develop a robust understanding of how neoliberal discourses on such things as social reality, scientific evidence and national priorities and interests reshape their own personal identities and bodies in ways that preclude the possibility of pursuing corporeal knowing in the field. It is to this challenge of reversing the effects of object-bondage or alienation that I now finally turn.
Rooting for corporeal-epistemic reflexivity in research practice In this article, I have reported the interview findings from the RCiE project regarding the implications of G&E scholars’ engagement in knowledge production as personal commitment for the continuity of corporeal knowing in research on boys and masculinities in the field of education. The main thrust of my argument is that doing IW in the neoliberal university intensifies the object-bondage or self- and body-alienation that scholars are already susceptible to as a consequence of their personal identities being strongly predisposed toward intellectuality. The problem, however, is not so much in alienation itself, for sitting on a desk chair all day long to think, transcribe, analyse, tabulate, read or write will naturally involve some degree of corporeal detachment from the outside world. Rather, it is in how policies are enacted, material and human resources are regulated and hierarchies of knowledge and knowledge actors are created in ways that enable alienation to act as a limitation regarding what is (not) accepted as educational knowledge. In a reality such as this, is there anything that G&E scholars can do apart from insisting that “a new poetry of the university” (Barnett, 2012, p. 204) is needed?
1 In her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak (1999) uses the term epistemic violence to describe how the subjugation of non-Western understandings and approaches to knowledge production is integral to the constitution of the post-colonial subject. My own use of the term follows a similar logic: the demise of corporeal knowing is integral to the reconstitution of school children as productive economic subjects.
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To conclude, I want to suggest a model for corporeal-epistemic reflexivity that would enable scholars to engage in academic resistance through reclaiming and potentially using their own bodies to advance corporeal knowing in the field. Devised on the basis of the predominantly intellectual type of personal powers attributed to the respondents in the RCiE project, the model comprises the following four courses of action: Interrogating the politics of doing IW: Using their critical reflection powers, scholars may want to question why IW demands their disembodiment, “why only certain forms of discourse [count] as knowledge” (Pelias, 2004, p. 11) and why, in this respect, scholarship which takes the body as a “site of knowledge production” (Ellingson, 2006, p. 308) is usually subject to systematic political degradation. Documenting the ways in which performativity effaces bodies: Using their pedagogic powers and intellectual skills, scholars may want to speak up and write more about how neoliberal performativity, particularly the ceaseless drive for more research output, drains mental energy and abuses the body in the academic workplace (see Somerville & Vella, 2015). This is important in terms of raising awareness among publics, policymakers and school practitioners regarding the implications of the politics of doing IW today for knowledge production about children. Strategising to redefine intellectual autonomy as ethical struggle: Pels (1995) protests that the struggle for intellectual autonomy often takes the form of an interest politics centred on the notion that scholars “must no longer feel remorse in defending their own corporatist privileges” (p. 93). In response, using their pragmatism, scholars may want to propose that the right to do IW without performative pressure is not only about intellectual autonomy, self-interested or not, but also, from an ethical perspective, about seeking mental, emotional and physical wellbeing. Linking between mind and body in this way is important to draw attention to the manner in which HE body cultures shape knowledge production in the field. Transferring the body into research practice: Using their political consciousness, scholars may want to adopt or design embodied methodologies that enable them to write their own bodies into the aims, design, execution and/or presentation of
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research (see, for instance, Kehily, 2004). Moreover, without falling into essentialisms, they may want to use their own real or abstract encounters with Cartesianism, both inside and outside academia, as a tool to generate more creative ways of conceptualising and thinking about approaches to qualitative data generation and analysis. Overall, one might argue that the threat to corporeal knowing in G&E research is a reflection of more general trends regarding the decay of the human body in an increasingly biopolitical social world (see Harvey, 2005; Phipps, 2014). Although such a macro-structural view is undoubtedly warranted, my reflexivity model urges G&E scholars to look closer to home. The politics of doing IW matters too, and so, rather than big pictures, scholars may want to start with examining the disappearance of their own bodies in the academic workplace, and how this may seriously impact upon theorising about and researching gender identities and relations in the future.
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Chapter 7: On corporeal knowing, educational research and state- led hysteresis in the neoliberal university
Status: Pending submission. Output: Kaissi, O. (forthcoming). On corporeal knowing, educational research and state- led hysteresis in the neoliberal university. Studies in Higher Education. DOI: Pending.
Abstract This article reports findings from the Researching Corporeality in Education (RCiE) project, an investigation of knowledge production in Gender and Education (G&E) research on boys and masculinities in schools in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America, within the field of education in higher education. The project is centrally concerned with the future of corporeal knowing, that is, knowing for, about and through the body, in G&E research. Eight G&E scholars are interviewed to examine the interrelationship between research practice and knowing about gender today. The thematic analysis of the interview data reveals an interplay between intellectualist (idea-driven and policy-critical) and politicist (interest-driven and policy-aligned) dispositions and concerns. Using Bourdieuian thinking tools, I argue that de-intellectualising habitus through state-led hysteresis (or forced, not genuine, field-habitus mismatch) threatens the imposition of a closure on complex, namely corporeal- based, epistemic labour which cannot be translated into policy directives or measures for economic growth and development. In conclusion, I highlight the significance of hope (without illusions) and socioanalysis as indispensable discourses of academic resistance in the neoliberal university.
Keywords: neoliberal higher education; educational research; knowledge production; corporeality; habitus; hysteresis
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Introduction The Researching Corporeality in Education (RCiE) project is an investigation of knowledge production in Gender and Education (G&E) research on boys and masculinities in schools in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America, within the field of education in Higher Education (HE). The focus of the project is the future of corporeal knowing in the field, namely knowing for, about and through the discursive, affective and material bodies and embodiments of research subjects. Integral to reflective (e.g. phenomenological and poststructuralist) sociological knowing (Bauman & May, 2001), attention to the body has drastically transformed educational research. For decades, G&E scholars have generated and used extra-rational (e.g. ethnographic- and interview-based) data to problematise the role of schooling in constructing gender identities, relations and discourses (see, for instance, Connell, 1989; Epstein et al., 2001; Keddie, 2003; Kehler, 2004; Lingard et al., 2012; Martino, 1999; McCormack, 2011; Reay, 1990). Much has been said about boys and masculinities, but, for a variety of institutional, cultural and psychological reasons, not least that masculinism (including patriarchy) as a physical and symbolic system of domination is yet to be fully understood (Gilligan & Snider, 2018; Horlacher & Floyd, 2017; Walker & Roberts, 2018), there is still a need to invest in the sociological focus on corporeality. Thus, the RCiE project has been set up to explore potential limitations and challenges to corporeal knowing in G&E research today. The main aim of this article is to report the findings from interviews conducted with eight G&E scholars about their academic career and life histories. Using Bourdieuian thinking tools, I make the following two contributions. First, on the conceptual and empirical level, I offer new insights regarding neoliberal structural reform in HE. These insights reveal that economistic policymaking and performative regimes have negative implications for continuing and enhancing complex, namely corporeal-based, knowledge and knowing in G&E research and the field of education more broadly. Second, on the theoretical level, I establish a link between, on the one hand, Young’s (1998) characterisation of “the rise and fall of [the] sociology of education” (p. 173) as a matter of conflict between intellectualist (idea- driven and policy-critical) and politicist (interest-driven and policy-aligned) stances and, on the other, Bourdieu’s (2000) concept of hysteresis, or field-habitus mismatch as a result of field change. This link is useful to examine scholarly dispositions in such a way to
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reveal problematic aspects of the macro-structural organisation of the academic field and knowledge production in HE. Taken together, these contributions render the RCiE project an education about the field of education itself (Biesta et al., 2019). Building on the experiences of G&E scholars, field members can learn more about their own academic positioning and knowledge work through tapping into the complex interrelationship of state politics, education policymaking and the steerage of research practice in the neoliberal university. In this article, I begin by describing the project’s critical realist methodology and data generation and analysis methods, as well as some aspects of the interview process and the manner in which key Bourdieuian concepts were deployed. Next, I present the project findings, using direct quotes to delineate themes regarding G&E scholars’ dispositions and concerns in research practice. This is then followed by a discussion that foregrounds, explains and reveals the political challenges to corporeal knowing arising from a particular interplay of scholarly dispositions. Finally, I conclude by revisiting the interview data to highlight the significance of academic resistance and outline two of its effective discourses.
A critical realist investigation of research practice in the field of education Critical realism is a theoretical position in the social sciences based on the notion of generative structuralism, whereby agency and structure are treated as real and discrete (as opposed to dialogically constituted) entities that interplay in many various ways to produce action (Bhaskar, 1978; Vandenberghe, 1999). To be sure, critical realism does not reject the idea that social reality is produced by human agency, but it is more concerned with the question of what efficient forces or causes make the contextual and contingent (re)production of reality acquire qualities of continuity (and liveability). Moreover, Bhaskar (1979) offers an elaboration of generative structuralism through a stratified model of social ontology that divides reality into three levels, each representing a degree of agential implication in the construction of phenomena. These levels are: the empirical, where phenomena occur; the actual, where patterns of the occurrence of phenomena reify into regularities or structures that either enable or constrain action; and the real (or the hidden level), where the causal mechanisms which underpin regularities, thus ensuring the continuity (or, potentially, interruption and/or reconstruction) of
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phenomena, reside. Epistemologically, the main implication of this ontology is that a given phenomenon may be explained retroductively, that is, through rigorously examining contextual evidence (i.e. social, cultural, political and/or economic variables or issues) in order to posit a cause or set of causes. This is not the same as the mechanistic matching between causes and effects; rather, critical realist inquiry, particularly if buttressed by hermeneutical methods, allows for generative (open-ended) causation, whereby a cause (or causal mechanism), far from being posited absolutely, represents a plausible, contextually bound and coherent explanation of how the phenomenon has come about and how it might develop in the future (Jessop, 2005). These ontological and epistemological assumptions have enabled an operationalisation of critical realism to investigate research practice in G&E research in the field of education. First, I have conceptualised knowing in the field as relational (i.e. agential and structural), morphogenetic (i.e. characterised by both relative permanence and openness to change) and strategic (i.e. informed and voluntary) human action (Archer, 2007a). Second, I have chosen the interview as a hermeneutical data generation method to develop new insights through the subjective voices and experiences of G&E scholars. And third, building on Pawson and Tilley (1997), I have adapted Bhaskar’s (1979) key concepts – i.e. phenomenon, context, regularity and causal mechanism – in the following manner: Phenomenon (occurring at the empirical level of reality): the sociological focus on corporeality and corporeal knowing in G&E research on boys and masculinities in the school Context (in which to investigate the occurrence of the phenomenon): interview data regarding the career and life histories of G&E scholars in the field of education in HE Regularity (or a predominant pattern in the data that may potentially function as a limitation to knowing): the common aspect or situation characterising the research practice of G&E scholars Causal mechanism (or what underpins the regularity/limitation): the political force in the field which can be posited through examining issues arising from context All in all, my choice of critical realism as a methodology has been informed partly by the realisation that there is a paucity of empirical educational research from a critical realist
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perspective and partly by my understanding that critical realism, in attempting to dismantle the dichotomy between empiricism and interpretivism, can contribute significantly to “a properly argued defence of educational research” (D. Scott, 2000, p. 7) against neoliberal education policymaking. As such, field members are invited, through the RCiE project, to view critical realism as a politically significant position that can offer new ways of being critical and doing research that makes a positive impact on the lives of marginalised groups.
Recruitment and methods Using online information (e.g. university staff profiles and professional curricula vitae), I conducted a survey of the population of G&E scholars that led to a list of thirty- three potential respondents. The following criteria were applied: Location: The potential respondent has been (or remains) involved in research practice in the field of education in HE, primarily in the UK, as well as in Australia and North America. In these locations, the shift to neoliberal governance in the past four decades or so has produced more or less the same set of strategic arrangements regarding the relationship between state, economy, education and research knowledge production (S. C. Ward, 2012). Research interests: The potential respondent has undertaken (or still undertakes) independent or funded G&E research projects that investigate boys’ gender identity formation from a socially critical perspective – i.e. concerned with how, through what power relations, discourses or systems, “the prevailing order of the world … [has come] about” (Cox, 1996, p. 88). Context of empirical research: The potential respondent has undertaken (or still undertakes) G&E research in primary or secondary schools. Twelve names were sampled from the list and approached with an interview invitation. Eight, four men and four women, accepted. These scholars constitute a homogenous sample of respondents; their common intellectual backgrounds, high-ranking academic positions and decades-long experiences in research, teaching and management are all factors that enhance the representativeness and generalisability of the findings from the interview data (Malterud et al., 2016; J. Scott 1990).
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All interviews were semi-structured and lasted between sixty to ninety minutes. The interview schedule comprised three domains: first, the respondents’ research work, including challenges involved in seeking funding and accounting for the social and economic impact of research; second, the respondents’ professional identities, relations, politics of positioning and appraisal of progress and current issues and developments in the field of education; and third, broadly conceived, the respondents’ advice to novice researchers (including PhD candidates) interested in joining the field. Moreover, the interviews were audio-recorded, and then transcribed and edited to produce coherent accounts that can be shared with the eight respondents, so that the trustworthiness of the data is enhanced. In this article, in addition to using respondent codes (e.g. “R1” to “R8”), certain names (e.g. PhD supervisors), places (e.g. universities and research institutes), titles of books and other such elements of contextual specificity are sacrificed to protect anonymity. Data analysis was theory-driven. According to Bourdieu (1990a), individual agents are not norm-followers, but rather subjects involved in a complex game of positioning within and across economic and cultural fields of production. To play the game, they have to acquire and invest in capitals “in the pursuit of distinction, profit, power, health and so on” (Calhoun, 1993, p. 70). These capitals are embodied in the form of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977), or the system of structured, structuring, durable and transposable (i.e. from one field to another) dispositions or ways of being and doing that ensure both preparedness for practice and congruence between practice and field. The importance of the concept of habitus is that it can explain how, and with what effects, situations like change/stability, stagnation/dynamism and complacency/resistance occur in the field. For instance, theorising about field change, Bourdieu (2000) suggests that the reason why field members may experience estrangement, confusion or self-perceived incompetence (that they are “bad” players of the game) is that a “mismatch” (McDonough & Polzer, 2012, p. 362) forms between field and habitus, rendering obsolete those dispositions which oppose or prove inconsistent with change. He refers to this effect as hysteresis. The list below shows the ways in which three of Bourdieu’s key concepts have been appropriated and deployed as thinking tools in the RCiE project: Dispositions: These are the embodiments of G&E scholars’ economic and symbolic (social, cultural, academic and scientific) capitals in the field of education.
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Mapping dispositions can reveal the type(s) of concerns that preoccupy scholars in their research practice. Habitus: This is the system of dispositions which G&E scholars bring to or develop through research practice in the field of education. Understanding habitus can lead to better characterisations of the relationship between field change and the restructuring of knowledge production in HE. Hysteresis: This is the condition of field-habitus mismatch which forms as a result of change in the field of education. Identifying a hysteresis effect can explain the cause(s) of change and its implications for knowledge production. Using these tools alongside Braun and Clarke’s (2006) flexible framework for thematic analysis, I started by familiarising myself with the interview data. Through a process of open-coding, I generated initial codes and grouped them on the basis of similarity in meaning into subthemes that represent unique dispositions. Then, I grouped dispositions into two sets of concerns, each constituting a broad theme that was defined, reviewed and refined to assess its ability to convey with precision the meanings most likely intended by the respondents. Finally, I explored interrelations between the two themes to identify an overarching regularity that may potentially function as a limitation to corporeal knowing about boys in G&E research. In order to posit and explain a causal mechanism that underpins this regularity, I made use of both the interview data and literature relevant to some of the main contextual issues that have arisen from the data (e.g. structural reform in HE; neoliberalism, knowledge production and the drive for certainty). Mainly, my explanations reveal the role of state politics and education policymaking in restructuring habitus in the field of education in ways that pose political challenges to the continuity of corporeal-based knowledge and knowing in G&E research. These explanations, it is worth noting, are not absolute, but rather are “the work of construction” (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 608), meaning that they may be contested and critiqued by field members interested in the contemporary political economy of knowledge in HE.
Scholars’ dispositions revealed The interview accounts show that there are two conflicting types of concerns in research practice: concerns with understanding, explaining and assessing existing knowledge about
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gender and concerns with maneuvering and adapting to new field conditions. Below, I describe the dispositions pertinent to each type that have been revealed through the respondents’ statements.
Understanding, explaining and assessing G&E scholars are concerned with understanding a social world fraught with power relations: “You’ve got to be interested in … relations of power, or better be interested in nothing” (R5). Profoundly intellectual, this concern is informed by a disposition for gender and social justice in research practice. Some of the respondents were keen on emphasising that their research addresses gender as a relational, and not a purely identity-based construct, since the focus on identity alone risks the reification of sex. Some even asked me not to refer to their research work as “on boys and masculinities”: I never would like to see my work as boys’ education. It’s just not really about that; it’s more about gender justice and that’s where I see it. (R7) Moreover, the concern with understanding the social world is complemented by a concern with explaining it. Although all of the respondents highlighted the significance of epistemological pluralism, some expressed the desire to remain particularly committed to poststructuralist social theorising and approaches to the empirical study of society: I went down that path of discourse analysis for a long, long time, and that continues to be a major source of insight in my work. (R1)
I’m just trying to think about gender using Judith Butler’s work as a construction, and the ways in which boys perform or present masculinities. I reject the bio-determinist argument that boys are naturally aggressive and girls are naturally passive … It’s much more fluid. (R4)
When I started off, I was totally going to write a critically Marxist PhD … And then I kind of started reading Foucault obviously … and I started thinking about power in a slightly different way … [Now,] I think, I started bringing back Marx more. (R5)
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This disposition for poststructuralist theorising is buttressed with a disposition for feminist sensibilities. In addition to broadening gender analysis, a feminist sensibility can be useful in understanding persistent problems in educational practice: It’s not just about gender for me … It’s very poststructural. It’s about seeing things as discursive, as constructed, speaking ourselves into existence through language, as we always live in a gendered space. So I’m always informed by that sensibility. (R7)
Feminism has been really important … When I was first a school teacher, problems with violence and behaviour were always boys, and so, for me, [that is how I came] into trying to understand … the feminist literature that talked about men’s privilege, and the radical feminist literature in particular; this is a problem that men have to sort out, for you can’t just expect women to deal with this. (R8) Finally, the interview accounts reveal a concern with assessing existing knowledge about gender. The respondents possess a disposition for epistemological vigilance. One, for instance, spoke at length of how transgender revelations have put G&E research at a critical crossroads between gender deconstruction and gender democratisation: Trans scholars have given me another way to extend my thinking … that it’s not just about deconstructing binaries but … about gender democratisation … I think now spaces have been created – you’ve got all this proliferation, what they call gender expansiveness, gender creativity, gender independence, and it is taking us beyond the binaries in a way. But there are some tensions, because … do we want to do away with gender? And where does that leave us? (R6) Other respondents pointed out what they perceived as incompatibilities between particular strands of social theorising and the purposes of educational research practice: I wonder if the extraordinary cult of Bourdieu’s work is part of the reason for things grinding to a halt in some ways, because Bourdieu on education seems to me very much a functionalism, a deeply pessimistic position that offers very few resources to teachers in the way that feminist-socialist inspired research was trying to do in the 1970s and the 1980s. (R2)
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I think [the field] is a mess because the turn to the new materialisms is highly problematic … Now, a lot of people disagree with me … They go to Karen Barad [– feminist theorist, author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007)]. Now, Barad is a physicist, and she’s got quite interesting things to say, but she doesn’t really know about social structures … You know, they don’t understand the physics and [Barad] does not understand the social, so what does it mean when you try to put these things together? (R5) Scholars are not critical just for the sake of it. The interview accounts suggest that epistemological vigilance is closely associated with a disposition for solid knowledge, that is, knowledge which uses subjective voices and experiences not merely to give recognition to individual agency, but also to provide critical explanations of the structural formation of social reality. One respondent, for instance, expressed the view that the shift from large-scale to small-scale studies in the field has weakened the explanatory power of educational knowledge: The very characteristic form of research became small-scale ethnography, based on interviews with a small number of people in a particular situation, people of a particular type. The interviews could then be computerised, fitted into a qualitative analysis program, an indexing process whereby you get certain themes and you write up those themes as journal articles … This did for a while eclipse the statistical study of large aggregates, which has been quite important in documenting class and race inequalities in education, and to some extent gender patterns. (R2) Another respondent argued that future G&E research should pay more attention to the “material relations” (R5) of gender with race, sexuality, social class and other such social and cultural identity markers. In fact, with regard to the issue of intersectionality, there was unanimous agreement among the respondents that, regardless of how it evolves in the future, the field should remain focused on the pursuit of intellectually compelling ideas, socially critical scholarship and situated, partial and intersectional research knowledge.
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Maneuvering and adapting The interview accounts reflect the notion that research practice in HE is poised at the nexus of political interest-seeking and intellectual truth-seeking (Griffiths, 1998). Some of the respondents’ dispositions foreground concerns with maneuvering and adapting to new conditions in the field of education. In terms of maneuvering, there is the disposition for interest politics. Most of the respondents have been around long enough to witness the effects of neoliberal structural reforms on the university sector. One, for instance, spoke of the “enormous pressure” her younger colleagues have to endure: “Workloads are horrendous; there is a lot of bureaucratic garbage that people have to do … Back in my day, there was pressure, but it wasn’t in the same way” (R5). Today, being a HE practitioner is all about “appeal[ing] to Government” (R8) through contributing to teacher education, publishing, participating in conferences, seeking tenure and, most importantly, securing research funding: “If you can’t secure funding, then you’re vulnerable” (R6). It is possible to resist, of course, but one also needs to be able to “move the agenda forward, and that’s only going to happen if you have the fuel, and the fuel is money and the money is funding and the funding gets you recognition” (R4). The following statements further capture the essence of interest politics in the field: You play the system a little bit; I have great belief in doing your own work on the back of other stuff. (R3)
Because I have a degree of capital, because I am a productive researcher, I publish. I’ve got some bargaining that maybe other people don’t because they can’t secure external funding easily. (R6)
I’m part of the machine, and I play the game to that extent, because you have to. (R7) To win research grants, it is not always enough to “[be] the right person in the right time and [have] the right topic and also track record” (R7). One needs to have a whole range of maneuvering strategies, such as diversifying funding options (e.g. private organisations, charities and consultancies) and, crucially, using management positions (e.g. Head of Department) to bring money into the university. As one respondent put it, “bringing in research funding or not is not the main question” (R3), for what matters is cash flow 169
itself, without which the university would risk losing its competitive edge in the HE market. Moreover, central to the respondents’ concern with maneuvering is a disposition for professionality. On the positive side, the respondents expressed gratitude for working with competent colleagues, describing it as a “privilege” (R1), a “really helpful and healthy way … to try to navigate academia” (R4). On the negative side, collegial bonds can sometimes act as a mere tool for positioning; colleagues can be “allies” (R4), but never friends – only one respondent referred to her colleagues as friends (and, in one instance, as “family”). A good deal of “nastiness” and “egocentric” character can be involved in research practice: I’m not interested in conversations that involve some nastiness … [which] sadly comes from this trying to get ahead of the other person and make a name for yourself. (R4)
I think academia is a very egocentric, interest-driven enterprise in lots of ways, and it has been impacted significantly by neoliberal governance and influences. (R6) Ironically, some of the respondents shared stories of feeling compelled to be “nasty” themselves. Here is an example: [As Head of Department,] I did have to talk to some people. I just had to be quite blunt with them … What I supposed I found difficult were people who were defensive, like, “oh, I am an academic who doesn’t need to have funding to do my research” or “they’ll never fund my kind of research because it’s too esoteric.” And I don’t buy that. (R8) If maneuvering is about the possibility of a margin of freedom through which to safeguard positioning, adapting is about the realisation that maneuvering is futile in the face of structural change. Two particular structural issues were discussed in the interview accounts: policy bias against specific research methodologies, and the external imposition of research funding priorities. Regarding the first issue, the respondents explained that prioritising quantitative over qualitative knowledge has always been a problem for G&E research:
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There are cases where quantitative method has been fetishised as the only scientific method, and very, very thin research has been presented as if it was the only thing that there was. (R2)
It’s … complicated by the fact that a lot of the research is quite based on ethnography or detailed case studies. [It’s] not always understood that, actually, if you do a very detailed case study of one or two schools or one or two classrooms, it’s still quite valid. (R3)
My hunch is that [G&E research is not a funding priority] because it’s qualitative research … There are many who still hang on to quantitative research as the highly valued sort of methodological domain within which we should do our research. (R4) Regarding the second issue, the respondents linked between the growing emphasis on measurable research outcomes and the prioritisation of economic interests: [Funding is] difficult because there’s not enough … And then, … increasingly, funding has been directed toward things that are seen to be useful to the economy. If you look at the guidelines of the Economic and Social Research Council and the other councils, they have these priorities, and they’re going to fund within the priorities, and the priorities are very instrumental. (R5) Policy priorities tend to be too strongly emphasised, and so scholars understand that a disposition for compromise and negotiation is important: “Sociological funding is very difficult … but if you are interested in STEM education and can bring [sociological] lenses to STEM … then you can find a lot of work, a lot of money” (R1). The problem, however, is that satisfying funders’ demands may often entail changing the rationale, focus and/or methodology of research projects. For instance, one respondent explained that the only way they had been able to secure funding for a gender-related project was through emphasising physical health and wellbeing priorities. The politics of funding, thus, significantly influences the form and content of research knowledge.
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Mapping state-led hysteresis in the field of education The interplay between the dispositions centred on understanding, explaining and assessing knowledge and the dispositions centered on maneuvering and adapting to new field conditions is strongly evident in the interview data, and thus seems to constitute a regularity of G&E scholars’ research practice. While the first set of dispositions conveys what Young (1998) perceives as an “intellectualist stance” that endorses complexity and “privilege[s] sociological questions” (pp. 175-176, emphasis in original), the second set conveys a “politicist stance” that encourages positioning in the field in ways that prioritise answering to policy over intellectual debate and epistemic labour. From a Bourdieuian perspective, it can be argued that the more field members embody the former stance, the more an intellectualisation of habitus takes place; by the same token, the more they embody the latter, politicist stance, the more a politicisation (or de-intellectualisation) of habitus takes place. The manner in which field members organise their dispositional alignments between these two structurally opposed directions is crucial to how they play the academic game, namely what capitals they accumulate, how they invest in these capitals and how they represent the field and their own positioning within it (Bourdieu, 1988). However, drawing on Courtney’s (2017) reappropriation of Bourdieu’s concept of hysteresis, I argue that, rather than simply being the byproduct of an objective hysteresis effect, or the mismatch between field and habitus as a consequence of structural change, the intellectualist-politicist interplay is the product of a state-led hysteresis, which can be defined as a causal mechanism intentionally deployed to de-intellectualise habitus in the field of education. In what follows, I use both the interview findings and literature sources to explain how hysteresis is sought through the manipulation and control of purposes, resources and identities, as well as what implications this might have for corporeal knowing in G&E research.
Hysteresis-through-purposes At least since the 1970s, educational research practice has been subject to an “extraordinary ideological coup” (MacDonald, 1991, p. 12) by the state (e.g. Thatcher in the UK). Seeking to undermine the opposition of scholarship which exposes power relations and the role of schooling in reproducing injustices, policymakers advocated a
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form of research focused exclusively on “finding out and disseminating ‘what works’” (Whitty, 2006, p. 189), namely for the economy. This massive shift toward instrumentalism in the rules of the academic game had many critics as well as champions in the field. Hargreaves (1996), for instance, argued that the purposes of educational research should be to “[demonstrate] conclusively that if teachers change their practice from x to y, there will be a significant and enduring improvement in teaching and learning” (p. 164). Moreover, the implementation of an instrumentalist view of research practice necessitated the substitution of intellectualist forms of accountability centred on epistemic labour by politicist forms centred on compliance, managerial effectiveness, output-orientedness and a ceaseless demand for expertise which conforms to policy (Beck, 1999; Cornell, 2013; Goodson, 1999; Olssen & Peters, 2005; Ozga, 2008). Today, under the mandate of what Demeritt (2000) describes as the “new social contract of science” (p. 308) in the neoliberal university, educational researchers are dispossessed of “the ‘free choice’ … to research what they wish” (Lawn & Furlong, 2007, p. 65). Unless it is done to promote a particular political position or policy choice, educational research is unlikely to receive attention, let alone legitimisation. The inconvenient truth, as Orland (2009) suggests, is that policymakers treat “research as ammunition, not as knowledge discovery” (p. 118). Thus, one form of state-led hysteresis in the field of education is through purposes. Research which, like my respondents’ work on boys and masculinities, tackles social injustices, is sociologically informed and, most importantly, relies on corporeality as a source of knowing about the social world is, at best, deemed “blue skies” (RAE Education Panel, 2001, para. 7), that is, interesting but too intellectualist to be aligned with the economic interests of the state. Indeed, it is particularly the centralisation of such reflective as corporeal-based modes of knowing in this kind of research that troubles policymakers. Failing to put an instrumental value on knowledge informed by subjective voices and experiences, they seek to eliminate the conditions of its possibility by intensifying hysteresis-through-purposes, in the hope that scholars would eventually yield and reposition their knowledge work in more favourable ways.
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Hysteresis-through-resources St. Pierre and Roulston (2006) argue that the delegitimisation of qualitative knowledge production in the field of education occurs through the systematic reinforcement of a discourse of “real science,” which “does not seem to be qualitative” (p. 678). Take as an example the Education Endowment Foundation, part of the UK Government-designated What Works Centre for Education. Under the title of “The Big Picture,” none of the twelve “school themes” (e.g. Mathematics; Science; Developing Effective Learners) that the Foundation identifies as funding priorities encourages a qualitative research focus (“The Big Picture,” 2019). What is more, the Foundation proudly celebrates randomised controlled trials as its preferred methodology: “We have commissioned more RCTs than any other organisation globally” (Dawson & Edovald, 2017, para. 1). Interestingly, although, as Torrance (2008) notes, the preliminary investigative work that experimental approaches to research design rely on is qualitative in nature, what makes this method appealing to policymakers is that commercial and private partners like the Foundation present it to them in “seductively simple” (p. 509) ways . Thus, another form of state-led hysteresis in the field is through resources. Because it recognises the multi-dimensionality – corporeality, sociality and structurality – of social reality and “does not divest human experience of its rich ambiguity” (Lather, 2006, p. 788), qualitative research practice represents a fertile site for the formation of intellectualist dispositions which clash with the imperative of economisation in HE. To control its proliferation, policymakers not only impose sanctions in the form of funding cuts, but also attempt to incite public sentiment through framing the qualitative paradigm as a waste of public money. The following comment by one of my respondents is particularly telling: [My collaborators and I] got [a] research grant … [for] our [masculinities] project, [but it] was denounced by [some politicians] as conspicuous waste of public funds … They thought our project was funny and silly … I remember being rung up by the [Research] Council in some distress because they’re not used to being trashed in public. They told me, “What can you say about your project that proves it is good use of public money?” (R2)
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Finally, with regard to resources, it is important to note that, in addition to placing restrictions on research focus and method, the implementation of hysteresis also includes the multiple performative and regulatory technologies, such as research impact measures (Lingard, 2013) and journal rankings (Hardy et al., 2011), which the state deploys to create hierarchies of knowledge that can be used to facilitate and justify the allocation of funding. The proliferation of “knowledge factories” (Moss, 2016, p. 931), too, such as independent policy institutes and government-funded think-tanks, can be seen here as a technology, since the more there are experts on educational issues endorsed or sponsored by the state, the further the traditional role of university-based scholars in defining knowledge boundaries is undermined.
Hysteresis-through-identities Both hysteresis-through-purposes and hysteresis-through-resources have been indispensable for the de-intellectualisation of habitus in the field of education. While the former has provided the rationale for neoliberal structural reform, the latter has been the processual and procedural means for realising it. Neither, however, could have been implemented without hysteresis-through-identities. Alienated from their own work, scholars in the neoliberal university have become “a de-professionalised and proletarianised labour force” (McCarthy et al., 2017, p. 1017), with their career lives threatened with insecurities, their research practice performativised and managerialised, their identities entrepreneurialised and their work relations constantly deteriorating into distrust and passive aggression as a result of increasing competitiveness (Nixon et al., 2001; Smyth, 2017; Sparkes, 2007). In Shore’s (2008) words, they have been reduced to self-auditing, “crude calculable units” (p. 284) who undertake research practice as mere delivery upon pre-set targets rather than critical thinking to unknot a complex social reality. Thomas and Davies (2005), however, warn against making totalistic claims in this regard, such as suggesting that everybody in the field of education is equally afflicted by, or equally discontented with, the reformation of academic identities to better fit market demand. Indeed, while one of my respondents described the academic game as “quite oppressive” (R8), another saw in it a rewarding experience of self-discipline and career-building:
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Doing … articles and doing … presentations … was good for me in the sense that it disciplined me early on in my career. And now I know what I need to do. I keep my eyes on the prize, and the prize is to keep putting yourself out there … into the conversation. (R4) These two statements, although seemingly contradictory, equally reflect the workings of hysteresis-through-identities in the field. Scholars want to be inside and outside the academic game at the same time. On the one hand, their intellectualist dispositions dictate a commitment to epistemic labour, whereby the main challenge is to increase investment in complex ways of knowing, social theory, feminist sensibilities, qualitative methodologies and, most importantly, the role of the academic knower as intellectual, not technician. On the other hand, their politicist dispositions impose a labour of positioning, whereby the main challenge is to supply policymakers with the numbers, statistics, rationales and/or arguments needed to govern and, more recently, justify the increasing intrusion of corporate culture into education (Lingard, 2014). Any attempt to exact a balance between these two labours risks prioritising the positional over the epistemic, or even misrecognising the positional as epistemic, in ways that not only “[demean] the whole of intellectual life” (Arendt, 2018, p. 442) in the field, but also deprive the field’s research subjects of valuable knowledge that may contribute toward improving their social and educational lives.
An imminent closure/end-of-knowledge? Ultimately, the de-intellectualisation of habitus through state-led hysteresis threatens the imposition of a closure on particular epistemic labour in the field. From the perspective of neoliberal policymakers, the only story or truth that matters about education is its economic usefulness, and so only types of knowledge and knowing which demonstrate a capacity to contribute toward economic growth and development should be paid attention to and supported. A multiplicity of knowledges, by contrast, is not only undesirable, but also dangerous. This is because to allow for the possibility of innumerable stories or truths is to convey a message that it is permissible to reimagine both the education system and the broader social order that it mirrors: As subjects, we create and recreate ourselves through the stories that are told, and we ourselves figure as the characters in the drama. But there is
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no one story, although there is a story, a very powerful story, that says there is. Some stories “enclose,” and by so doing provide a world which can be controlled. These are stories based on the fear … that without closure, the world, and in particular the social order, would get out of control. But if there are many stories, then the world in a sense is always out of control … Imposing a closure, therefore, denies openness and attempts to fix subjectivity. (Usher & Edwards, 1994, p. 147) No matter how hard one tries, some knowledge in the field of education cannot be decontextualised and simplified into bite-size recommendations for policymaking. This is one caveat that the respondents in the RCiE project strongly emphasised. All of them had been long enough in the field to witness how empiricist epistemologies and methods could not take G&E research beyond the reductionist-mechanistic measurement of sex difference in socioeconomic status, academic achievement, parental involvement in education and other such policy-friendly categories of social analysis (Connell, 2002). Then, later on, they invested in the corporeal turn, contributing alongside others to a post-empiricist opening up of epistemic labour that enabled the generation of more nuanced, subjectively and experientially based understandings of gender. Indeed, had it not been for corporeal knowing, the many stories or truths about the role of schooling in the masculinisation of boys (and feminisation of girls) would have remained untold. What, however, with the increasing prevalence of an “agency of ‘relevance’” (Ball, 2001, p. 266) in the field, one wonders whether there is an imminent closure or end-of-knowledge in the making, whereby unprecedented levels of hysteresis lead G&E scholars to compromise on corporeal knowing and, by implication, on their ethical and epistemological responsibility toward children as research subjects.
Conclusions and implications for corporeal knowing in G&E research In this article, I have reported and discussed the interview findings from the RCiE project with regard to potential limitations and challenges to corporeal knowing in G&E research on boys and masculinities in the current neoliberal era. The findings point to an interplay between intellectualist (idea-driven) and politicist (interest-driven) dispositions in the field of education. Using Bourdieuian thinking tools, I have argued that this interplay is not so much an objective fact as a situation constructed through state-led hysteresis (or
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manufactured field-habitus mismatch) to de-intellectualise habitus in three systematic ways: the instrumentalisation of research purposes, the selective management of resources, namely funding, and the entrepreneurialisation of academic identities through performative regimes that pit the positional against the epistemic in research practice. Moreover, I have explained that the ultimate aim of state-led hysteresis is to impose a closure on epistemic labour which is socially critical (not functionalist), corporeal-based (not numerical or statistical), humanisitic (not economistic) and intellectual (not entrepreneurial). Designed to advance the neoliberal truth about education as a vehicle for boosting economic growth, such a closure would constitute a threat to the future continuity of corporeal knowing in G&E research. Not only would it amplify the “vagueness and indeterminacy” (Bourdieu, 1990b, pp. 77-78) of scholars’ intellectualist dispositions, but it would also affect research subjects themselves by obstructing knowledge that is needed to enhance their social and educational lives. Given these insights into the reality of research practice in the field today, what can G&E scholars do to tackle the challenges arising from state-led hysteresis? The interview data from the RCiE project suggest that academic resistance is pivotal and can be pursued through two main mutually reinforcing discourses: Hope and optimism: Asked what advice they would offer PhD students and early career researchers in the field, the respondents said things like: “Be bold … Be prepared to chart your own path” (R2); “follow your passion” (R5); and “don’t buy into performative stuff … You don’t want to lose a sense of yourself” (R8). At the same time, they all pointed out that being a socially critical scholar is not easy, but rather involves constraints on self-actualisation, intellectual autonomy and professional positioning. Such optimism, with “no illusions whatsoever” (Apple, 2017, p. 919), is crucial in rebuilding relationships of trust and sustaining hope in the possibility of achieving a better, hysteresis-less model of research practice and knowledge production. Socioanalysis: This discourse is more concerned with the ways in which resistance manifests itself in the everyday experience of intellectual and academic labour. Asked in what ways the field of education locates today vis-à-vis the social sciences and HE more broadly, not only did the respondents raise issues regarding “the dominant sociopolitical powers … which rule the intellectual field, and
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therefore their practices” (Wacquant, 1989, p. 18), but they also spoke openly about their own role in reinforcing neoliberal performativity and constructing hierarchies of knowledge. To reiterate the words of one respondent, “I’m part of the machine, and I play the game to that extent, because you have to” (R7). This kind of socioanalytic awareness of power relations in the academic workplace, as well as one’s own subjective positioning in relation to them, is also crucial in resisting state-led hysteresis. It is noteworthy too that despite that each respondent had their own approach to overviewing field developments and anticipating future directions, they all emphasised that their right to thinking and knowing freely is as much personal as it is about a deep-seated political commitment to helping others, namely marginalised social groups, realise their freedoms (Horn, 1999). It may be argued that too much emphasis on reflexivity obscures the need for more activist forms of resistance. However, the significance of such discourses as hope and socioanalysis is that, although their use may be limited to creating micro-territories of resistance in the field, they may, with time, gain greater momentum, in such a way that enables scholars to take more material, activist and communal action. How this action might be conceived, what forms of mobilisation might it require and whether or not the case regarding the end of complex knowledge and knowing might be reframed as a public concern, rather than just an academic issue, are some of the questions that need to be addressed by the field in the future.
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Orland, M. (2009). Separate orbits: The distinctive worlds of educational research and policymaking. In G. Sykes, B. Schneider, D. Plank, & T. Ford (Eds.), Handbook of Education Policy Research (pp. 113–128). New York: Routledge. Ozga, J. (1998). The entrepreneurial researcher: Re-formations of identity in the research marketplace. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 8(2), 143-153. doi: 10.1080/0962021980020024 Ozga, J. (2008). Governing knowledge: Research steering and research quality. European Educational Research Journal, 7(3), 261-272. doi: 10.2304/eerj.2008.7.3.261 Pawson, R., & Tilley, N. (1997). Realistic evaluation. London: Sage. RAE. "Education Panel RAE 2001." Accessed October 8, 2018, https://www.rae.ac.uk/2001/overview/docs/UoA68.pdf Reay, D. (1990). Working with boys. Gender and Education, 2(3), 269-282. doi: 10.1080/0954025900020302 Scott, D. (2000). Realism and educational research: New perspectives and possibilities. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Scott, J. (1990). A matter of record: Documentary sources in social research. Cambridge: Polity. Shore, C. (2008). Audit culture and illiberal governance: Universities and the politics of accountability. Anthropological Theory, 8(3), 278-298. doi: 10.1177/1463499608093815 Smyth, J. (2017). The toxic university: Zombie leadership, academic rock stars and neoliberal ideology. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sparkes, A. C. (2007). Embodiment, academics, and the audit culture: A story seeking consideration. Qualitative Research, 7(4), 521-550. doi: 10.1177/1468794107082306 St. Pierre, E., & Roulston, K. (2006). The state of qualitative inquiry: A contested science. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19(6), 673-684. doi: 10.1080/09518390600975644 Thomas, R., & Davies, A. (2005). Theorizing the micro-politics of resistance: New public management and managerial identities in the UK public services. Organization Studies, 26(5), 683-706. doi: 10.1177/0170840605051821 Torrance, H. (2008). Building confidence in qualitative research: Engaging the demands of policy. Qualitative Inquiry, 14(4), 507-527. doi: 10.1177/1077800407309380 Usher, R., & Edwards, R. (1994). Postmodernism and education: Different voices, different worlds. London: Routledge. Vandenberghe, F. (1999). “The real is relational”: An epistemological analysis of Pierre Bourdieu's generative structuralism. Sociological Theory, 17(1), 32-67. doi: 10.1111/0735-2751.00064 Wacquant, L. (1989). Towards a reflexive sociology: A workshop with Pierre Bourdieu. Sociological Theory, 7(1), 26-63. doi: 10.2307/202061 Walker, C., & Roberts, S. (Eds.). (2018). Masculinity, labour and neoliberalism: Working- class men in international perspective. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 183
Ward, S. C. (2012). Neoliberalism and the global restructuring of knowledge and education. London: Routledge. Whitty, G. (2006). Education(al) research and education policy making: Is conflict inevitable? British Educational Research Journal, 32(2), 159-176. doi: 10.1080/01411920600568919 Young, M. (1998). The curriculum of the future: From the "New Sociology of Education" to a critical theory of learning. London: Falmer Press.
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Chapter 8: A collective story of scholarship in the field of education
8.1. Introduction In this chapter, I begin by providing a summary of the research focus and main findings and arguments from the four discussion chapters of this thesis. Next, I attend to the central aim of the investigation through presenting a collective story of scholarship in the field of education that brings the document and interview phases of the RCiE project together to reveal and explain the sociological bondedness of G&E scholars with regard to common theoretical, ideological and political challenges to corporeal knowing. Technically, what the story does is answer the three research questions of the project in detail: 1. How is knowledge in G&E research on boys and masculinities produced, and with what implications for corporeal knowing? 2. What are the challenges for G&E scholars engaged in knowledge production as personal commitment, and with what implications for corporeal knowing? 3. What are the challenges for G&E scholars engaged in knowledge production through research practice in HE, and with what implications for corporeal knowing? Finally, I shall set out the project’s contributions to the field and some recommendations and directions for future scholarship and research.
8.2. Summary: research focus, aims and findings The focus of the RCiE project, outlined in chapter one and contextualised in chapter two, has been knowledge production in G&E research on boys and masculinities in schools in the UK, Australia and North America, within the field of education in Higher Education (HE). Specifically, the project has been concerned with the present state and future continuity of corporeal knowing in G&E research. Corporeal knowing, or knowing for, about and through the body, is being challenged by a neoliberal agenda that conflates economic and educational ends. Successive governments in the UK and elsewhere have shown hostility toward research concerned with the growth of knowledge rather than economic growth and development. Scholars whose knowing is too complex to answer to 185
education policy are being increasingly labelled “dissenting” and their services to HE and the economy rendered unnecessary. Sociologically informed G&E scholars are a particular case in point. To illuminate their struggles and challenges, and what implications these may have for corporeal knowing, I have used critical realism as a methodology that enables an understanding of knowledge production as relational, morphogenetic and strategic human action occurring through regularities – ways of and potential limitations to knowing – underpinned by theoretical, ideological and political causal mechanisms or forces. Moreover, the methodology has enabled the division of the investigation into two phases: the first examines knowing and knowledge through document data generated from the G&E research literature regarding boys; the second examines knowing and knowers through interview data regarding the oral career and life histories of eight G&E scholars. To analyse and interpret the interview data in a socially critical manner, through which to address important questions related to agency, structure, power relations, academic identities and epistemic labour, I have used thinking tools based on Archer’s (2000) theory of social reality and Bourdieu’s (1990a) theory of practice. As explained in chapter three, the RCiE project was undertaken in a linear manner and culminated in four chapters styled and formatted as journal article outputs. The first and second outputs are chapters four and five (phase one), conceived to answer the first research question. The third and fourth outputs are chapters six and seven (phase two), conceived to answer the second and third research questions. My aim in this section is to expand the main findings from the project presented in Table 1 below to reproduce in concise statements the arguments made in each output or chapter.
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Phase Chapters Main findings Knowing and 4 Predominant way of knowing: knowledge The overemphasis on agency Causal mechanism: The shift from sociological to social theory 5 Predominant potential limitation to knowing: Research subjects’ right to childhood Causal mechanism: The contradictory ideological construction of research subjects Knowing and 6 Predominant potential limitation to knowing: knowers The predisposition toward intellectuality Causal mechanism: Body alienation in the academic workplace 7 Predominant potential limitation to knowing: The interplay of intellectualist and politicist dispositions in research practice Causal mechanism: State-led hysteresis
Table 1. Regularities and causal mechanisms: a summary of main findings from the RCiE project
In chapter four, I constructed and reviewed a sample of the G&E research literature on boys and masculinities comprising empirical documents in the form of journal articles. Mainly, I argued that the shift from sociological to social theory has intensified field debates regarding the role of the overemphasis on agency in obscuring social structures, and thus reducing corporeal knowing to an individualising focus on bodies and embodiments that cannot account for corporeal-structural interdependencies. The chapter’s main findings and arguments are as follows: 1. Agency (and its attendants, such as voice, standpoint and experience) has been a predominant way of knowing in G&E research on boys and masculinities. 2. There is a causal link between this predominance and the historical shift from sociological to social theory in the Sociology of Education (SoE). 3. While sociological theory (or the view of the social from above) grants that society can be known objectively, through identifying and examining social structures, social theory maintains that society can be known only partially, through examining subjective action and interaction within and across contexts and discourses characterised by permanent contingency, meaning 187
that although they perform structuring functions, they cannot be defined or analysed in ways that suggest they are real entities that have a definitive constraining or enabling effect. 4. Exemplifying gender analysis in the sociological tradition is research where social class structure is an effective explanatory device. In this research, corporeality is conceptualised as a structural unit of analysis denoting a population of material bodies (e.g. women; the capitalist class; the working class) that are subject to social reproduction and control processes. Exemplifying gender analysis in the social tradition is research with poststructuralist conceptual and methodological frameworks which foreground such notions as discourse, oppression and resistance, emancipation and empowerment. In this research, corporeality is conceptualised as a tool or medium for subjectivity formation and social and cultural intelligibility. 5. As a mode of reflective sociological knowing, social theory has helped illuminate the contingent materiality of everyday life. However, this has been at the expense of de-emphasising the materiality of structures in ways that have negatively affected the explanatory power of gender analysis. In particular, the use of individualising theoretical languages (e.g. interpellation; subjectivation; (re)inscription) in deploying such concepts as corporeal embodiment has obscured not only the body itself, but also the vital links between the body and the macro-structural organisation of society, including gender systems. 6. Tensions persist between structuralist (sociological) and poststructuralist (social) approaches to corporeal knowing about gender identity formation in education. Yet, while epistemological disputation is necessary and desirable, constructing bridges between different theoretical positions is crucial to protect corporeal-based knowledge (and its significance for school children) from the neoliberal repositivisation of educational research. Through mapping the theoretical terrain of G&E research on boys, I have problematised the hegemony of social theory, particularly constructivism. This chapter has brought to the fore critical challenges of understanding, namely with regard to the question of how
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to move corporeal knowing in gender analysis forward at a time when neo-positivism is rife in the field. In chapter five, I used the same document sample to explore potential limitations to knowing about research subjects in G&E research. Here, the focus on limitations is distinct from the focus on theoretical ways of knowing in the previous chapter. While the latter denotes aspects of research that may come to function as limitations, the former denotes aspects that scholars themselves have explicitly recognised and dealt with as limitations. The chapter’s main findings and arguments are as follows: 1. Research subjects’ right to childhood is a predominant limitation to knowing in G&E research on boys and masculinities. 2. Scholars contest the right to childhood only insofar as it places normative restrictions on corporeal knowing in empirical research. Social and cultural notions regarding, for instance, children’s gender innocence may be difficult to negotiate, thus forcing scholars to leave unexplored potentially valuable questions, issues or dimensions of corporeality in the school. 3. There is a causal link between the predominance of the right to childhood as a potential limitation to knowing and the ideological construction of children as socioculturally competent and innocent at the same time. On the one hand, the presupposition, endorsed by both publics and policymakers, that children are incompetent and innocent entails the need to protect them against deviance from accepted norms – what can be referred to as the protection requirement. On the other hand, the presupposition that children are capable, competent and knowledgeable entails the need to enable their inclusion and participation in social and educational research – what can be referred to as the participation requirement. 4. G&E scholars, thus, are entrapped within representationism: a condition of uncertainty regarding how to represent research subjects that can only be managed, not resolved, to ensure that public- and policy-led discourses of over-protectionism do not hinder the participation of children in empirical research. Success in maintaining such management is vital to securing the future of corporeal knowing in the current neoliberal era. This chapter has shown that challenges of understanding are not purely theoretical. Scholars have to deal too with ideological restrictions on what can and cannot be said or 189
made visible in research on, for and with children. To deal with the implications of entrapment within representationism, I have suggested the need for a reflexive politics of positioning which presents the focus on corporeality as not purely epistemological, but rather necessary for the ethical imperative to provide children with knowledge which can be used to enhance their lives. In chapter six, I examined knowing and knowers through data generated from interviews with eight G&E scholars regarding their career and life histories. The specific focus of the chapter has been engagement in knowledge production as personal commitment. Using thinking tools and secondary literature, I analysed and interpreted the interview data to understand personal identity formation in HE. This has led to new insights regarding the neoliberal reprofessionalisation of intellectual work in the academic workplace and its implications for corporeal knowing. The chapter’s main findings and arguments are as follows: 1. There are three concerns with self-worth among G&E scholars: the concern with personal struggle, the concern with personal development and the concern with personal and social change. Satisfying each concern depends on the deployment of efficient personal powers. 2. Personal struggle depends on the powers of critical reflection, personal difference (e.g. queer sexuality), pragmatism and independence (both intellectual and economic). Personal development depends on the powers of pedagogy, scholarliness (e.g. the mastery of analytical skills), interpersonal relationships and criticality. And personal and social change depends on the powers of political consciousness, feminism and belief in the intrinsic worthiness of such values as equality and social justice. 3. The latter concern with personal and social change is what gives meaning, purpose and coherence to scholars’ struggles and developments. Despite a hostile academic culture that reduces personal and professional self-worth to a mere track record, scholars are able to retain their political consciousness and hope for change. 4. There is a causal link between the predisposition toward intellectuality, a common pattern across scholars’ concerns with self-worth, and the self- and body-alienation that results from the institutionalisation and professionalisation of mental labour (Sohn-Rethal & Sohn-Rethal, 1978). 190
5. Alienation is intensified by the neoliberal reprofessionalisation of intellectual work. Performativity in the academic workplace, operationalised through competition, interest-seeking, reputation-building and the emphasis on accumulating scientific and cultural capital (e.g. publications, promotions, recognitions and awards), banalises mental labour in ways that exhaust and efface corporeality, including in physically tangible, visceral ways. 6. The possibility of an inadvertent transference of body alienation onto the empirical construction of research settings – what can be described as the infliction of epistemic violence by the researcher upon the researched subject – threatens to obstruct the continuity of corporeal knowing in G&E research. 7. Thus, not only does body alienation ensure the reinscription of academic professionalism in line with the desired ends of neoliberal structural reform in HE, but it also functions as a mechanism that facilitates policy intervention aimed at disposing of complex, such as corporeal-based, types of knowledge. 8. Ultimately, the central paradox of doing intellectual work in the neoliberal university is that one’s predisposition toward intellectuality may actually constitute a limitation to, rather than an enablement of, knowing about research subjects. This chapter has brought to the fore critical challenges of positioning as a professional intellectual in HE today. That none of the eight respondents spoke of their career in terms of the kind of toll it leaves on the somatic/physical body begs the question of how doing body-alienating intellectual work may affect their research practice. In this regard, I have emphasised the need for academic resistance, suggesting a model for corporeal- epistemic reflexivity aimed at enabling scholars to reclaim and potentially use their own bodies to advance corporeal knowing in the field. One of the four courses of action recommended by the model is strategising to redefine intellectual autonomy as an ethico-political struggle against the violation of bodily integrity in the academic workplace. This is important because of the link between embodiment and intellectual work, in the sense that exposing and resisting the body alienation imposed by the neoliberal university’s performative-managerialist systems is integral to revitalising and opening up corporeal knowing to new theoretical, epistemological and methodological venues.
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Finally, in chapter seven, I analysed the same interview dataset, using different thinking tools, to examine research practice in the field of education. If body-alienating intellectual work stifles corporeal knowing, there are trends in research practice that threaten to uproot it altogether. I have identified, characterised and critiqued some of these trends. The chapter’s main findings and arguments are as follows: 1. There is an interplay in the field between, on the one hand, dispositions toward understanding, explaining and assessing knowledge and, on the other hand, dispositions toward manoeuvring and adapting to new field conditions. 2. The former dispositions reveal scholars’ social justice principles, investments in poststructuralist theorising, feminist sensibilities (both in research and teaching), epistemological vigilance and commitment to solid knowledge (with a strong emphasis on intersectionality). In contrast, the latter dispositions reveal scholars’ skilled practice of interest politics, professional camaraderie as a means of positioning and the ability to compromise and negotiate in order to adapt to research funding priorities (mostly economic) and policy-friendly methodologies (mostly quantitative). 3. Through linking between Young’s (1998) notion of conflict between intellectualist and politicist stances in the SoE and Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus, I have argued that these dispositions make visible the restructuring of habitus in the field of education in two opposing directions. The first is toward intellectualisation, whereby epistemic labour is prioritised; and the second is toward politicisation, whereby the labour of positioning to answer to education policy is prioritised. 4. There is a causal link between the interplay of intellectualist and politicist dispositions and what Bourdieu (2000) calls the hysteresis effect, or the mismatch between field and habitus as a consequence of change. This hysteresis, however, is state-led (forced, not genuine). Its aim is to de-privilege intellectualist dispositions in order to ensure the alignment of academic research with the economic ends of education policy. 5. State-led hysteresis occurs through purposes and resources in the field. To provide “hard evidence” for their economic decisions, governments seek to orient researchers toward instrumentalist research foci and the choice of quantitative methods. Generally, but not absolutely, if a research project is 192
qualitative and involves the use of critical theory, it risks either under-funding or de-funding. 6. Moreover, state-led hysteresis occurs through identities. To create and empower a loyal followership, governments have introduced accountability regimes (e.g. research excellence frameworks) that promote entrepreneurial behaviour, competition, self-responsibilisation and self-capitalisation. These regimes have led to the corporatisation of academic identities and deterioration of workplace relations. 7. Resistance is possible, however. Scholars “play” both with and against the neoliberal university to pursue their own research interests, ways of knowing and methodologies. 8. Deployed to continue the ideological attack on the SoE, state-led hysteresis threatens the imposition of a closure on complex, namely corporeal-based, epistemic labour which cannot be translated into policies conducive to economic growth and development. This closure would have serious implications for G&E research, as it depends on corporeal knowing first and foremost to understand the role of schooling and education in constructing gender identities, relations and orders. This chapter has revealed another type of challenges of positioning confronting G&E scholars. These tend to be the result of external control by dominant socio-political powers. Politicians and policymakers come and go, but the cumulative effect of their structural interventions persists. This is why I have reiterated in this chapter the need for academic resistance and corporeal-epistemic reflexivity, inviting scholars to engage more in such discourses as complex (free-of-illusions) hope and socioanalysis. In the long run, these discourses are important to work toward actualising a hysteresis-less model of research practice, one whereby the de-intellectualisation of habitus is exposed and interrupted to ensure the continuous flow of knowledge needed to enhance the social and educational lives of school children.
8.3. Sociological bondedness: a story of scholarship in the field of education In this section, I intend to build on the findings and arguments generated from these four chapters to present a “collective story” of scholarship in the field of education that
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foregrounds the “sociological bondedness” (Richardson, 1997, p. 14) of G&E scholars with regard to the common challenges of corporeal knowing in G&E research. Technically, the story provides detailed answers to the three research questions that have guided the investigation in the RCiE project. As an open-ended conclusion to the story, I offer a general framework for corporeal-epistemic reflexivity aimed at reinforcing scholars’ body- consciousness as well as sensitivity to the positioning-knowing dilemma in the field. Essentially, the RCiE project has been an attempt at using critical realism as a methodology to identify and explain predominant tendencies or regularities regarding the occurrence of corporeal knowing, understood as a phenomenon, in G&E research on boys and masculinities. The investigation has culminated in positing four causal mechanisms or generative forces – the shift from sociological to social theory, the ideological construction of children, body alienation and state-led hysteresis – which underpin knowing in ways that pose two types of challenges in the field: Internal to knowledge: These are challenges of understanding that concern theories and ideologies about research subjects. Here, knowing is debated, and scholars agree to disagree. External to knowledge: These are challenges of positioning that concern the politics of intellectual work and research practice in the field of education in HE. Here, knowing is governed from the outside, and scholars struggle to set it free. The purpose of this distinction between internal and external is to give recognition to the reality that, although institutionalism is a ubiquitous and dominant discourse, social and cultural institutions still function relatively discretely: the government is not the university, and the university is not the government. Moreover, the overarching reason as to why G&E scholars continue to face challenges is that, despite more than seven decades since the SoE was first formalised and practised in the field of education, the epistemological security of sociological knowing remains contested. What is at stake, particularly in the current neoliberal era, is not only positions, professionalism and self- worth in the academic workplace, but also the very meaning, form, content, explanatory power and ends of knowledge itself.
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8.3.1. Ruptures and continuities: the journey (back) to materialism G&E scholars’ story is inextricable from the long and turbulent history of the SoE. In the UK, the birth of the New Sociology of Education, roughly in the 1970s, gave an extraordinary boost to gender as an independent analytical category, although many, such as Acker (1989), saw in it an unwelcome distraction from social class. G&E research grew into a diverse community that attracted all sorts of scholarship, from the functional focus on equality and equity to socially critical inquiry into the role of the school in racing, classing, sexing and gendering subjectivity. Moreover, toward the late 1980s, the interest in the education and wellbeing of girls gave way to a “boy turn” that received much attention, mapping and critical evaluation over the years. Scholars’ approaches to examining knowledge about boys differed, not least in terms of focus (e.g. Connell, 2000; Lingard & Douglass, 1999; Weaver-Hightower, 2008), but what was more or less a common aspect among these approaches is the emphasis on the importance of reflective sociological knowing for maintaining a socially critical view of gender, lest the study of masculinities in the field be essentialised. My own approach has focused on questions regarding the past, present and future of corporeal knowing. Asking the question, “how is knowledge in G&E research on boys and masculinities produced, and with what implications for corporeal knowing?” has led me to conclude that there are internal challenges to understanding that reflect historical tensions between sociological and social theory in the field of education. Troubled by the catastrophic outcomes of World War II, sociologists found in sociological theory a suitable paradigm to demonstrate through master, universal narratives the supreme role of social structures in defining the human condition and organising life and labour in any given society (Seidman, 1991). The 1970s, however, was a period that dealt a serious blow to sociological theory, as the classical base of sociology – Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim – was no longer viewed as a legitimate model for the scientific study of society (Waller, 2011). Moreover, postmodernist and poststructuralist (pro-)feminist scholars charged sociological theory with idealism, positivism (for speaking the language of conceptual casuistry) and theoreticism (for exaggerating the scientific virtues of epistemological disputation). Generally, it was assumed that sociological theory alienates the discipline (and, by extension, the university) from the public; sociological theorists were deemed zealous structuralists, too
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rationalistically committed to the idea of Truth to come to terms with the mundane worlds and knowledges of social subjects. The shift, thus, from sociological to social theory in the field was, in a great degree, the result of political determination on the part of some communities of scholarship to counter objectivism and universalism, or what I referred to in chapter four as “the view of the social from above.” In addition to retheorising social reality as constructed and all knowledge as inherently contingent and self-interested, the social theory paradigm allowed for the reconstruction of the purposes of research as centred on social justice principles and the “emancipatory potential of critical analysis” (Moore, 2007, p. 32). This is evident in the research work of my respondents, whose variously informed (e.g. Foucauldian, Bourdieuian, Derridean, Kristevian, Butlerian, Baumanian, Deleuzian) engagements with social theory converge in the view of social science as a tool to expose and critique power relations: it is “the art of not being governed quite so much” (Foucault, 1977; cited in Dussel, 2009, p.33, emphasis in original), of being able to go beyond “saying that things are not right as they are” (Foucault, 1988, p. 155) to suggest how things might be done differently. As Youdell (2009), arguing from a Butlerian perspective, reminds the SoE, the study of gender should always be done with the purpose of promoting political consciousness and willingness to resist inequalities: What is pressing to explore in the sociology of education … is whether [gender] performative practices can, need, or should be multiplied and/or corralled in ways that make them more recognizable as political practices; whether we might better reconfigure our understanding of what “counts” as the political; and whether we need more than a performative politics if we are to shift sedimented meanings and enduring inequalities in education and, if so, what understandings of power and political tactics we might take up. (p. 140) Although social theory remains pervasive in the SoE today, it seems to be undergoing a critical transformation. The observation by Wexler (2000), nearly two decades ago, that postmodernist “identity-centred political analyses … have blocked our vision of the ‘sociological imagination’” (p. 11) is becoming increasingly accepted in the field of education. According to St. Pierre (2016), for instance, education scholars are growing “fatigued by [the] overabundance of epistemological projects” (p. 25) that endorse subjectivist approaches to knowing. In the words of one of my respondents, 196
I think we’ve taken a very wrong turn in politics, and, intellectually, what we’ve seen is the loss of materialism in the old-fashioned sense, material structures of dominance in favour of identity politics. And I think that’s a really dangerous and regressive step … What happened … [is] the move from “the personal is political,” an old feminist slogan, to “the personal is the only thing that counts, and the only political is personal.” (R5) My contention, thus, is that G&E research is in the midst of the formation of a critical consensus among scholars regarding the need to put social theory on trial. To draw an analogy, the “Prosecutors’” (i.e. scholars’) opening statement might read something like this: constructivism has been useful, but its unintended consequences, which include the multiplication of subjective voice (Cole & Mendick, 2006), scepticism (Williams, 2002), hyper-descriptivism (Muller, 1997) and analysis by classification and typologisation (Collins, 1998), have impaired the explanatory power of G&E research. What is needed is some form of materialism that can act as a counterbalance, and not necessarily a substitution for, constructivism. The problem that the “Prosecutors” have, however, is that they disagree over which materialism to pursue. Nobody seems to be in favour of regressing into a Cartesian form of materialism that essentialises rational faculties, thus rendering research subjects totally discourse-free. Rather, what my analyses and interpretations of the document and interview data from the RCiE project suggest is that the move both with and against constructivism is taking place in two opposing post- Cartesian directions. On the one hand, there are G&E scholars, including the majority of my respondents (six out of eight), whose rupture with constructivism is about attempting to resolve the impasse between agential determination and discursive predetermination by reinstating the materialism of structure characteristic of sociological theory. These scholars are willing to reconsider and/or reconcile with a structuralist, albeit non- totalising, approach to the study of social reality. They see the possibility of return to models of causal-structural reasoning, including neo-Marxist or radical-feminist theories of social and cultural formation, as necessary to produce more power-sensitive gender analysis. On the other hand, there are those G&E scholars, not represented by any of my respondents, who similarly engage with the critique of social theory, but whose rupture with constructivism is not so much about resolving as transcending the agentic-discursive 197
impasse. Here, ongoing technological advancement (e.g. Information Technology, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence) and recent developments in the biological sciences (e.g. epigenetics and neuroscience) are cited as sharp evidence that postmodernism and poststructuralism have failed to be “post-“ enough about the human condition. The collapse of the “bio/social binary,” it is argued, should enable new ways of conceptualising and theorising about educational subjectivities that “differ from what has constituted the [SoE] in the last 20-30 years” (Gulson & Baker, 2018, p. 163). One such way is through “Deleuzian transcendentalism”: Deleuze does not adopt the classical understanding of empiricism that uses experience as the origin and source of true knowledge … Deleuze’s radical empiricism is not in the epistemic register; it does not follow the classical epistemological model of empiricism premised on a conscious human subject who has access to the given (lived experience, brute data) as the origin and justification of knowledge. Knowledge is not primary in transcendental empiricism, and we do not think in terms of knowledge or of a knower who can know the world. The word epistemology rarely appears in Deleuze’s work. Transcendental empiricism, then, does not have the status of an epistemology, and knowledge is not its concern. (St. Pierre, 2016, p. 33, emphasis in original) Building on the “spatial turn” (e.g. R. Brooks et al., 2012; Gulson & Symes, 2007; C. Taylor, 2009) and a wide range of theories, including affect theory (Greg & Seigworth, 2010), actor network theory (Latour, 2005) and new materialism (Barad, 2007; Coole & Frost, 2010), this group of scholars seeks not a materialism of structure but a materialism of matter, “of bodies, objects and things within a confederacy of meaning-making” (Taylor & Ivinson, 2013, p. 666). As Taylor (2013) argues, at the micro-political level, all matter, human and non-human, is agentic, in the sense of “mattering” (p. 701) – i.e. subjectivating, gendering. Moreover, the agentic-discursive impasse can also be seen as an impasse between representation and epistemology. In chapter five, I argued that the contradictory ideological construction of children in Western liberal-democratic societies as entitled to both protection and sociocultural participation at the same time functions as a causal mechanism that impedes corporeal knowing through forcing scholars to prioritise the labour of representation over epistemic labour. I referred to this constraint on scholars’ 198
agency as entrapment within representationism, highlighting the unique role of constructivist theorisation (Maton, 2009) in exacerbating it: the more subjective voice is multiplied, the more it is assumed that it is incumbent upon research to represent all voices so as to maximise and enrich knowledge. While the materialism of structure would have this entrapment removed through demanding more substantive engagement in epistemological debates (e.g. agency/structure, individualism/holism, conflict/order and micro-/macro-analysis), the materialism of matter would stipulate that, in the wake of the posthuman, the imperative to rewrite ontology precedes both representation and epistemology. That is not to say, of course, that the materialism of matter is devoid of epistemology, since the claim that objects, space and time are integral to sociological knowing is in and of itself, merely by virtue of its relation to knowing, an epistemological claim. Rather, the prioritisation of ontology here is intended to emphasise that the epistemological project in the SoE is not the only project worthy of intellectual work. That being said, I want now to weigh in on the issue of materialisms by first quoting one of my respondents. The following passage, worth quoting despite its length, is important to shed more light on the conflict of materialisms in G&E research: I remember … somebody saying to me, “oh, you still study Foucault.” As if it was hopelessly out of date. So I tend not to move on with the fashion; I’m still reading Foucault. I didn’t move on to Bourdieu … though I’ve read Bourdieu. And I am not particularly enamoured with new materialism, partly because I can’t see why anyone would bother when they can use actor network theory, which is a bit more rigorous. I think new materialism covers up an awful lot of woolly thinking; I would like someone to tell me what it has to offer or add that actor network theory doesn’t have. Actor network theory is actually quite useful and quite interesting. I haven’t used it much, but I had a student who did, and it does an interesting job if you’re particularly interested in the material. And it doesn’t require all these other extra elements. New materialism has all these other terms, some of which upset people. I mean, “schizoanalysis” is often seen as insulting to people with certain mental health conditions; people really hate it because it means analysis by splitting. One thing I don’t like is that there are always new terms to learn, so it’s obfuscating. It’s excluding of people outside the Academy in a way that most academic writing shouldn’t 199
be. Foucault’s own writing is in many cases very clear. So that’s another reason; I think all this language can be used to cover up very woolly thinking; so you get flights of writing, and when you actually try to unpick them, arguments don’t hold together. I get it when I’m reviewing, so I will review something and say, why is there no analysis in this five-page section? And they’ll come back and say, “well, it’s an assemblage,” which means I am just being presented with stuff. Well, you know, I’d actually like the academic to do some analysis. Otherwise, why am I publishing it? So that’s another thing. I think it’s become fashionable, and I get upset because people who are good thinkers are using it, and I’m not sure if it’s doing their thinking any good. (R3) Whether to defend, attack, mitigate or transcend it, dealing with constructivism is a messy business. This respondent is only one among five who, unprompted, spoke explicitly of concerns regarding the growing appeal of the materialism of matter. My other three respondents spoke generally about theoretical developments in the field, but the message was the same: they are not “enamoured” by Biosocial Becomings (Ingold & Palsson, 2013), Biocultural Creatures (Frost, 2016) or any such moving of sociological knowing in the direction of a new theory of the human. “Where is the social?” (R5), they ask. Are the structural materialities of education so well understood that it is now high time to make “the case for biosocial education” (Youdell, 2017, p. 1273)? Are the sexing and gendering potentials of power so well revealed that all that is left to do is illuminating their intricate materialisations in and through objects, bodies and spaces? And, importantly, is there any backstop against the potential deterioration of the materialism of matter into one form or another of theoretical revisionism (e.g. eugenics)? The new materialist response to these concerns, as I imagine it, would be something like: what is there to gain from refusing to engage with the sciences which show how materially material all knowledges, actions, behaviours, subjectivities and relationships are? Is not gendering micro-political too? What assurance is there that a return to the materialism of structure is not, in essence, a regression to some type of Durkheimian presupposition that “knowledge of the social must be objective in order to be knowledge” (Young & Muller, 2007, p. 194)? In fact, what makes both structuralist and poststructuralist theorising, in general, any less reductionist and obfuscating (“woolly thinking”) than new materialism? Have G&E scholars perhaps become so much sociological that they are failing to 200
appreciate that other disciplines can and do make important contributions to understanding gender identities? This list could go on indefinitely, the point being that the conflict between the two materialisms represents a theoretical and ideological fault line in the field. My position, however, is that these materialisms are not (or do not have to be) mutually exclusive. Instead of conflict, I see a continuum of reflective sociological knowing, with the theoretical materialism of structure at one end (the neo-structuralists), the social constructivism of discourse in the centre (the poststructuralists) and the actual materialism of matter at the other end (the new materialists). As paradoxical as it may seem, the SoE would be impoverished if any of the reductionisms frequently associated with these three modes of knowing – i.e. the “objectivist reductionism” of structural analysis (e.g. Marxist historical materialism), the “subjectivist reductionism” of discourse analysis (e.g. Foucauldian analysis of power) and the “micro-political reductionism” of diffractive analysis (e.g. new feminist materialisms) – were marginalised. In fact, rather than dismissively labelling theoretical positions as reductionist, one could argue, for instance, that the neo-structuralist objection to overemphasising the mundanity of bodies and realities is a reminder that structures exist and have their own independent properties and principles of formation (Niiniluoto, 2002). By the same token, one could argue that the new materialist argument for “a relational ontology … in which matter and meaning are co-constituted” (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2016, p. 112, emphasis in original) is not so much a reduction of bodies and realities to matter as a reminder that matter, which also has its own independent properties and principles of formation, is crucial to produce better explanations of both the contingent and recursive natures of the social. Thus, a co-existence of materialisms is necessary and desirable, for neither the neo-structuralists nor the new materialists, and definitely not the poststructuralists, are seeking to reconcile with the current resurgence of positivism in the field of education. Because their research interests are borne out of the experience (or witnessing) of social injustices that, not so long ago, were justified on scientific grounds (e.g. African-American “laziness,” homosexual “abnormality” and working-class “intellectual inferiority”), they still find it difficult to accept, despite being reassured to the contrary (see Gellner, 1992; Papineau, 1996; Popper, 1994), that “hard science” has dropped its claim to infallibilism. It is this insistence on the part of G&E scholars that the scientificity of reflective, subjective and corporeal knowing is no less valid and reliable than that of quantitative 201
measurements which, I argue, should be utilised to bridge the gaps between their different theoretical positions as they continue to investigate boys’ gender identity formation.
8.3.2. Alienation and hysteresis: to know or not to know? The stand-off with constructivism, however, is not merely a theoretical issue. There is another part of G&E scholars’ collective story of scholarship which concerns the fact that they are based in HE, meaning that their engagement in knowledge production is inseparable from issues related to the organisation of intellectual work and research practice. In chapter six, I focused on scholars as individual knowers. Asking the question, “what are the challenges for G&E scholars engaged in knowledge production as personal commitment, and with what implications for corporeal knowing?” has led me to conclude that there are serious challenges regarding being a professional, university-employed intellectual today. According to Archer (2007a), “each and every one of us has to develop a (working) relationship with every order of natural reality: nature, practice and the social,” and it is often the case that agents “invest more of themselves in one order than others – even though this must mean the subordination rather than the exclusion of the remaining orders” (pp. 39-40). Indeed, like all other institutionally and professionally positioned social subjects, my respondents have to subordinate “nature,” that is, the order of the body and embodiment, to the “social order of reality.” What is different about positioning in the academic workplace, however, is that it involves a predisposition toward intellectuality that elevates one’s “intimate relationship with the pursuit of ideas and of truth” (Furedi, 2004, p. 36, emphasis added) above the mundane and the corporeal, thus further subordinating “nature.” For instance, when asked what is most memorable about her career, one of my respondents mentioned being “buried” by piles of interview transcripts. Some form, then, of body denialism, mild or extreme, appears to be integral to the constitution of intellectual life. Shapin (1998) maintains that, for centuries, the identification of “authentic knowers” (sages, philosophers or “men” of letters) depended on their visible denial of “the demands of the stomach” (p. 22). Even today, associations between academic knowledgeability and corporeal disembodiedness persist in the public mind. Polan (1993) has found that the most widespread caricature of academic culture is
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that of a professor who, against their inherent intellectual nature, embodies themselves mischievously, as a drunkard, a pervert, a lunatic or a clown. Thus, despite decades of feminist deconstruction of that “most pernicious of all dualisms … body and consciousness” (Berleant, 1991, p. 167), the Cartesian legacy still lingers behind. What happens, though, when neoliberal governments take notice of this body- alienating predisposition toward intellectuality? According to Barcan (2018), a love of ideas can be “an employer’s gift from God” (para. 18); as one of my respondents put it, “we are paid to think” (R3). Scholars turn away from the carnal world to seek the “seclusion and quiet” (Newman, 1996, p. 6) of contemplative activity behind ivy-covered walls. When, in times past, this activity was held in high esteem, and professionalism was based on trust as a “structural principle and a guiding ethos” (Barcan, 2013, p. 95), the trade-off between body and intellect was not seen as a problem, but rather as a sign of serious commitment on the part of the scholar. The shift, however, to a neoliberal, market-led model of HE has been accompanied by a massive reprofessionalisation of intellectual work that intensified the self- and body-alienation of the scholar through reducing them to a crude, hyper-rational economic subject. Indeed, it is not only that their contemplative gaze has been banalised through the imposition of ceaseless performative labour to boost economic productivity, but also that this banalisation, most brutally expressed in the objectification of knowledge as “output,” has depended for its success on their corporeality being redundant. This is how Barcan (2013) describes doing intellectual work in the neoliberal university: At my most bleak, I feel like a milking cow: required to “produce” certifiable product at reliably regular intervals. This feeling ultimately cannot help but reverberate at the deepest level of embodiment. The relentless focus on outputs, without regard for the processes, temporalities or engagements that feed us, puts input and output drastically out of balance. And what kind of body can do output without input? The body knows this bulimic rhythm to be possible only through strain: minds and imaginations are milked for ideas; bodies squeezed for energy; and time mined for effects. (p. 104, emphasis added) Moreover, as has been argued in chapter six, body alienation in the neoliberal university is not merely the side effect of extensive engagement in intellectual work. Rather, given the possibility of its inadvertent transference onto the empirical 203
construction of research settings and subjects, body alienation may be conceived as a policy mechanism for the disposal of the sociological focus on corporeality, not only as an extra-rational mode of knowing about such complex phenomena as gender identity formation, but also, equally important, as an intellectual resource to enhance theoretical deliberations over corporeal knowing, particularly with the regard to the issue of materialisms explored in the previous subsection. Thus, in addition to alarming consequences for scholars’ bodies, including stress, anxiety and, increasingly, acts of suicide (see, for instance, “BBC News,” 2018; Flaherty, 2017; Parr, 2015), the contemporary politics of doing intellectual work in HE may be intentionally designed in such a way to preclude political and analytical sensibilities toward the body, thus potentially constituting a form of epistemic harm or violence against research subjects themselves. However, it is not only through the forcible pitting of the body against the mind that neoliberalism divests epistemic labour of corporeality. In chapter seven, I examined educational research practice as a site of knowledge production. Asking the question, “what are the challenges for G&E scholars engaged in knowledge production through research practice in HE, and with what implications for corporeal knowing?” has led me to conclude that there are challenges regarding G&E scholars’ positioning as qualitative researchers, compared to their more general positioning as professional intellectuals. Indeed, my eight respondents’ love of ideas finds its complement in the firm-rootedness of their intellectual work in qualitative research. Although they are aware that good sociological inquiry can be quantitative (Kelly et al., 1992), they tend to frame sociological knowing as intrinsically qualitative. Unlike some of their counterparts in the SoE (in School Effectiveness and School Improvement research, for instance), they are not willing to contribute to education policymaking that “create[s] a science of banal dispossession,” whereby research is merely used as a tool to demonstrate that “[s]tate programs don’t make up for historic and cumulative oppression” (Fine, 2012, p. 4, emphasis in original). True, they may often be seen as complicit with the overall policy agenda and priorities, but their complicity, I argue, does not stem so much from political and ideological conviction as from the need to survive: “Yes, this is neoliberalism, but people need to live in these neoliberal worlds” (Barcan, 2018, para. 40, emphasis in original). Moreover, in chapter seven, I reappropriated Bourdieu’s (2000) concept of hysteresis to explain the interplay identified in the interview data between intellectualist 204
dispositions centred on understanding, explaining and assessing knowledge and politicist dispositions centred on manoeuvring and adapting to new field conditions. My main argument was that hysteresis in the field of education is not a natural byproduct of change, but rather a manufactured, state-led mechanism intended to undermine the qualitative “realisations” (Bourdieu, 2004, pp. 69-70) of social science through restructuring habitus to get rid of intellectualist dispositions and, by implication, of those qualitative scholars who, like G&E scholars, are most persistent in embodying them. To “prove their worth,” these scholars are compelled to prioritise the labour of positioning over epistemic labour in a situation that, following Bourdieu (1988), can be described as “symbolic life and death” (p. 19). The brute neoliberal logic here is that scholars, after all, are human beings, and so they have survival instincts and, at least since modernity, one form or another of “existential anxiety” (Giddens, 1991, pp. 38-39) which can be exploited for economic gain. In other words, the implementation of hysteresis as a causal mechanism for structural change is underpinned by a simplistic philosophy of survivalism: that, at the end of the day, it is positioning favourably, and not doing knowledge work as one sees fit, which enables scholars to put food on the table. Essentially, the neoliberal state’s problem with the qualitative paradigm of knowledge production is its complexity. Even a quick glimpse of the existing literature would reveal that G&E research is too multi-layered, too theoretical, too open-ended and, most importantly, too reliant on corporeal data to be computed or enumerated in such a way to provide policymakers with the type of evidence they need to justify a “what works” agenda. Instead of a sanitised “science of measurement” (Elliott, 2006, pp. 180- 181) that “produce[s] generalisable, unambiguous and immediately applicable solutions to complex educational problems” (Freeman et al., 2007, p. 30), G&E scholars prefer to do a troubling science of understanding, where “to think with theory is not only useful, but essential, for without theory we have no way to think otherwise” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013, p. 269, emphasis in original). That is why reward systems and knowledge management technologies are put in place with a clear message: research is not about developing original ideas, but about ensuring that projects funded by public monies address “relevant” issues and yield “excellent” outputs with “applied” outcomes (Yates, 2005) – at the time of writing, the five national funding priority areas of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council were “mental health,” “housing,” “productivity,” “understanding the macro-economy” and “new ways of being 205
in a digital age” (https://esrc.ukri.org/about-us/strategy-and-priorities/research- priorities/). Now, of course, one can always “tweak” the focus, rationale or methodology of their research funding proposal to show that their interests have practical significance, but the question is: how much of complexity, theoretical and contextual, is compromised by doing so? Can ontological and epistemological disputation between G&E scholars survive at a time when gender itself is only considered a useful category if it contributes to the economy (e.g. research on gender and STEM education)? Concluding a brief report on G&E research in Australia from 1975 to 1985, Yates (1993) wrote about how feminist researchers, no longer having “to make the case for the legitimacy of gender as a field of inquiry in education,” are instead engaging “in extending, questioning and rethinking their earlier theories and inquiries regarding just how gender is an issue in education” (p. 7). I am afraid this is no longer the case today. The body of literature Yates reviewed was produced at a time when the “repositivisation” (Lather, 2006, p. 783) of knowledge in the interest of the national economy was still a nascent neoliberal project – the first impact assessment regime in Australia, known as the Research Quality Framework, was established only in 2005. This is not to say that qualitative knowledge was having its heyday in the seventies and eighties, especially if the Thatcherite attack on the SoE is taken into account; there was, however, a relatively autonomous professional culture that enabled G&E scholars to think and write freely. My respondents spoke about that period as a bygone golden age, significantly at odds with the present-day metricised model of research practice, which, as Fine (2012) rightly warns, might “soon [lead] our journals [to] be filled with articles that cleanse the complexity of lives across time and space” (p. 13). In fact, soon theorising about gender, especially with regard to such crucial issues as the turn toward post-constructivist materialisms in the field, might be rendered totally meaningless by the increasing focus on and funding for instrumental concerns in education (e.g. the number of girls studying STEM subjects; the number of boys dropping out of school). If, as Cummings et al. (2011) argue, any type of research driven by complexity, and not certainty, is blacklisted as “counter-productive” (p. 106) to government economic planning, then perhaps, indeed, the ultimate anti-moral aim of state-led hysteresis is to get rid of complex academic knowledge, knowing and knowers so that nothing/no-one is left to defend school children against neoliberal economic policies (Gunter, 2018). This question regarding children’s
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interests has been elaborated throughout the thesis and will be finally revisited in the subsection below, the last thread of G&E scholars’ collective story.
8.3.3. The promise of unbondedness: socioanalysis and the “snakes” of positioning The challenges of understanding and of positioning explained above foreground my respondents’ sociological bondedness against the normalisation of a “new commercialised professionalism” (Hanlon, 1998, p. 54) in HE. Because, however, it is only reasonable (if not optimistic) to assume that all struggles end at some point, I want to emphasise the possibility of “unbondedness,” by which I mean the movement from collective challenges to collective actions through models of corporeal-epistemic reflexivity that seriously address the implications for knowledge production of the ongoing crisis of positionality in the academic field (Goodson, 2003). In chapters five, six and seven, I discussed the need for such models, and so what I intend to do here is present a general framework that brings together the previous discussions to illuminate in more detail who scholars are as reflexive subjects and what constitutes the aim and purpose of their reflexivity. Archer (2007a) differentiates between three groups of reflexive subjects: Communicative (e.g. political parties; religious communities): These groups contribute to social stability and integration. They endorse social reality, struggling to protect its permanence through reshaping themselves in contextual continuity with it. Autonomous (e.g. civil society organisations; academic communities): These groups contribute to social progress and critical thinking cultures. To achieve their goals, they act strategically, struggling to avoid the “snakes” of social reality in order to climb its “ladders.” Their autonomy is defined by the “contextual discontinuity” of their beings and doings with the world. Meta-reflexive (e.g. revolutionary movements; anarchist groups): These groups contribute to social instability. They are immune to both the rewards of compliance and the penalties of dissidence. Their main aim is to subvert the existing social order, and they are willing to pay the price for their subversion. In general, HE practitioners can be seen as autonomous reflexive subjects. They are contextually discontinuous with the “lay” social reality, and they constantly work to
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augment this discontinuity through acquiring a scholastic point of view (Bourdieu, 1988) and positioning within an academic discipline or field of study. Moreover, they are reflexive in that they have a tendency to subject the social reality of their positioning to socioanalysis in order to determine how it affects their research practice and the goals they set out to achieve through epistemic labour – in simpler terms, they ask themselves two questions: “What are we seeking?” and “what are we doing?” (Kenway & McLeod, 2004, p. 529). Borrowing from Archer (2007b) her “snakes and ladders” metaphor, I propose that G&E scholars’ corporeal-epistemic reflexivity be based on a concerted effort to identify and tame the “snakes” (structural constraints) of positioning that are tossed in the field to prevent them from climbing the “ladders” of epistemic labour. The following is a list of the five “snakes,” and the socioanalytic “repellents” corresponding to each, that have been identified through the main findings and arguments of the RCiE project: “Snake 1”: the futility of hope: Neoliberalism works through inducements of nihilistic pessimism. Here, “the important task will be to prevent the avatars of neoliberal discourse from persuading us [in the SoE] and everyone else that this is all that there is, that there is nothing else conceivable” (Muller, 1997, p. 207) beyond the current model of research practice. True, scholars work within a system permeated by anti-intellectualism and socio-political inequalities, but this should not discourage them from prioritising the epistemic over the positional in order to protect such intellectualist dispositions as gender and social justice from de- privileging. “Snake 2”: the self-serviceability of intellectual autonomy: Gunter (2005) observes that much intellectual work in the field is concerned with the self-interested policing of boundaries rather than the advancement of knowledge. Fuller (2009), too, rightly argues that it is “entirely against the spirit of tenure” to use it “as an excuse never to stray from one’s intellectual comfort zone” (p. 37). Thus, the task here is twofold: first, to reinterpret the right to intellectual autonomy as a right to epistemic labour, first and foremost, and not to the pursuit of self-interest; and second, to undertake epistemic labour as ethical responsibility toward research subjects. Importantly, as G&E scholars
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continue to wrestle with the legacy of constructivism in the SoE, they should know better than to antagonise it in the same radical way the New Sociology of Education antagonised the positivist social science of its predecessors – i.e. the Marxists and the socialist-Fabianist reformers (Young, 1991). Be it neo- structuralism or new materialism, what matters is that scholars acknowledge that all modes of reflective sociological knowing can be useful in the effort to know more and better about the gendered social world. “Snake 3”: the insignificance and unscientificity of qualitative data: Quality assurance and research impact regimes limit scholarly debate and render disposable certain types of scholarship. As Burman (2003) argues, “the (internal or external) call to be useful can work to paralyse politically important work” (p. 110). Thus, the task here is also twofold: first, to defend complexity in epistemic labour, interrogate the emphasis on “usefulness” and insist that qualitative methodologies and data are scientific, legitimate and not a waste of public monies; and second, to invest more in embodied methodologies (Armour, 1999; Bairner, 2011; Evans & Davies, 2011; Giardina & Newman, 2011) in order to demonstrate the importance of extra-rational, corporeal knowing for advancing knowledge about gender identity formation in education. Whatever their theoretical positions, scholars need to maintain belief in human experience, broadly conceived, as a sound scientific basis, without which knowledge production would resemble mere information collection or factual reporting. More importantly, they need to start learning from each other: the neo-structuralists can illuminate with great theoretical sophistication the role of corporeality in the structuration of reality; the poststructuralists can remind the field of the discursive governance of bodies (bio-power); and the new materialists can help revitalise research practice through enabling others to recognise “data’s troublesome agency” (Taylor, 2013, p. 700). “Snake 4”: the irreversibility of body alienation: Scholars are made to believe that body alienation is entirely the natural outcome of detachment from manual labour (Sohn-Rethal & Sohn-Rethal, 1978). This is misleading, and so the task here is to reclaim body consciousness.
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First, there is the need for an open and honest conversation on both academic and non-academic platforms (e.g. journals, newspapers, radio stations and the social media) regarding what is happening to the body in academia. Second, recognising that bodily labour and epistemic labour are co-constitutive (R. Coleman, 2008; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Francombe-Webb et al., 2014; Giardina & Newman, 2011; Sparkes, 2002), scholars may want to consider writing their own bodies into research. Some might find such an approach a little too poststructuralist, but this should not stop them from realising its key contribution, namely that the inter-corporeality of the researcher and the researched subject (“self” and “other”) can itself serve as a tool for theorising and knowing. “Snake 5”: the metaphysicality of social science: Among others, Searle (2009) argues that, more than a mere theoretical position, social constructivism is underpinned by a “deep metaphysical vision” (p. 89) that holds that all intellectual activity should contribute toward the emancipation of social subjects. Accordingly, the task here is to protect all complex epistemic labour, and not just constructivism, from the charge of harbouring some sort of metaphysicality about the social world. I call upon G&E scholars to exercise more reflexivity regarding the relationship between, on the one hand, their assumptions, dispositions and theoretical and political alignments and, on the other, their engagement in knowledge production. In a sense, what is needed is an assertion that positional properties, such as who they are, where they come from, what they do and what they believe in, inevitably inform but do not predetermine their knowledge work (Harding, 1991). Moreover, scholars should help develop an awareness among publics, both through their own research and more directly through day-to-day interaction, that ideologically motivated attempts to reduce expert knowledge to what informs it – an inequality, an injustice or, why not, a grievance (see the recent “grievance studies” hoax by Lindsay et al., 2018; also, see the response by Spruce et al., 2018) – are dangerous because they undermine serious efforts to say something about the social world which, however complex and inaccessible, may end up serving the public good.
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This point regarding the public good brings me to the final thought in this section: should the improvement, defence and protection of children’s lives against neoliberal forces be the cornerstone of G&E scholars’ corporeal-epistemic reflexivity? Here, too, the answer can only be complex, for the devil lies in the details. While the poststructuralists have traditionally linked between sociological knowing and the commitment to emancipation and improving life conditions, scholars with neo-structuralist tendencies, including some of my respondents, are growing impatient with the particularistic focus on social subjects. Their stance is that children, and everyone else for that matter, would be better off in a structurally transformed social reality, which implies that the SoE should stop “dropping Marx (the politics of social justice) for Hegel (the politics of recognition)” (Muller, 1997, p. 205). For the new materialists, however, unless the new biocultural world is adequately understood, neither knowing to emancipate nor knowing to transform can be pursued in a well-informed manner. These different views are equally unique and legitimate, but it is important to remind field members of what they have in common, which is “thinking otherwise” (Ball, 1995, p. 266). Rather than “Smok[ing] Out Underachievement” (DfES, 2004), they do what they do in terms of research practice because they are concerned about children’s thoughts, feelings, self-identifications, social and cultural relations and bodies and experiences of corporeal embodiment in a thoroughly gendered world. Despite their deep involvement in the academic game, they are still seen by the neoliberal state as disruptive, oppositional agents who can speak up against economic reforms that empty education of its public values and purposes (Gunter et al., 2017). Indeed, they are feared, not necessarily because they object to performativity and the whole way in which HE is organised and governed today, but rather because their knowledge, intellectual orientations and sharp political consciousness make them stand out as allies to the children in the academy.
8.4. Contributions to the field Gunter (2005) argues that “field members [who] draw on conceptualisations of research from anthropology, history, philosophy, economics, politics, sociology, psychology and elsewhere … have a responsibility to make a reciprocal contribution to the development of these disciplines, not least through dialogue about knowledge boundaries” (p. 166). This is precisely what the RCiE project has attempted to do: honour the indebtedness of
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the field of education to the discipline of sociology through engaging in necessary and desirable dialogue about sociologically informed G&E research. As long as sociological ways of thinking and knowing are not yet constitutive of the common sense of education policymakers, practitioners and publics (Whitty, 1997), much important work needs to be done. Hence the contributions of the RCiE projects on three main levels: Conceptually and empirically: Sociologically informed knowledge production in the field of education has been investigated before (see, for instance, Gunter, 2011, 2013, 2016 for studies on educational leadership research), but it is for the first time that G&E research on boys and masculinities in particular is undertaken as a focus of such investigation. Through the integrative literature review in phase one of the project, I have offered a set of empirically informed explanations that reveal the persistence of theoretical and ideological challenges regarding how to theorise about gender itself (i.e. whether to stay with or exit constructivism) as well as how to represent research subjects (i.e. as passive recipients of gender arrangements or as active, gendering agents). These explanations have led to the mapping of theoretical positions – the G&E scholar as a neo-structuralist, a poststructuralist or a new materialist – that has been elucidated in this chapter. More of a guide than a typology, this mapping offers a nuanced understanding of the kinds of issues, tensions and stakes involved in trying to protect corporeal knowing from demise, particularly with regard to the risk of allowing epistemological disputation to slip into a theoreticism that feeds into policymakers’ plans for restructuring knowledge in HE. Moreover, in phase two of the project, the use of interviews to examine engagement in knowledge production both as personal commitment and through professional research practice has led to new insights regarding political challenges to corporeal knowing in G&E research. These insights offer to enhance existing knowledge on academic work and identities in the neoliberal university. First, through positing and explaining body-alienation and state-led hysteresis as two mechanisms for structural change, I have illuminated the causes and implications of “coercive de-professionalisation” (Beck, 2009, pp. 10-11) for G&E scholars’ labour of positioning and epistemic labour, namely with regard to their ethical and epistemological responsibilities 212
toward research subjects. Second, to raise political awareness of this positioning-knowing dilemma, I have contributed several ideas and suggestions that culminated in the general framework for corporeal-epistemic reflexivity presented in this chapter. Premised on the notion that positioning is no less consequential for knowledge than prevalent theories and ideologies, my framework sets out the five “snakes” or traps that should be avoided to ensure positioning is done in the best interest of children, and not “the servicing of careers … production of intellectual stars” (Yates, 1992, p. 130) or provision of economic needs. Theoretically: The RCiE project makes substantive contributions to the robust and creative use of thinking tools in educational research. While there has been no need for tools in phase one, as the document data were judged to be sufficient on their own to examine knowledge and knowing, the use of tools in phase two was important to make sense of the interview data. In chapter six, based on Archer’s (2000) theory of social reality, I have designed and deployed a set of thinking tools – i.e. “order of reality,” “concerns” and “commentaries” – that enables the researcher to accord equal recognition to agential and structural considerations in analysing the subjective statements of individual agents. Had it not been for Archer’s (2007a) middle-range theorising of action as agentially actualised, but not without the decisive influence of social structures, my insights into G&E scholars’ personal identity projects would have been reduced to a personalising analysis that pays no heed to the effects of neoliberal policies and systems on intellectuals and intellectual work. Moreover, in chapter seven, a unique contribution has been made too through the way in which key Bourdieuian concepts – i.e. dispositions, habitus and hysteresis – have been deployed to examine research practice. First, I have forged a theoretical link between habitus and Young’s (1998) notions of “intellectualist stance” and “politicist stance” in the SoE through arguing that the interplay of scholarly dispositions evident in the interview data reflects two opposing directions in the restructuring of habitus: toward more intellectualisation, on the one hand, and toward more politicisation, on the other. Second, in the attempt to explain how the institutional and professional realities of research practice affect corporeal knowing, I have offered a 213
reappropriation of Bourdieu’s (2000) concept of hysteresis through arguing that the mismatch between field change and G&E scholars’ intellectualist dispositions is not objective, but rather the result of state-led structural change. This theoretical contribution chimes with the way Courtney (2017) used the concept to examine change in educational leadership practice in the UK, and it is, in essence, a response to Bourdieu’s (1990a) own invitation to view his propositions as continuously developing through empirical work, and not fixed definitions that can be applied to any given context. Methodologically: The RCiE project is the first project in the field of education to use critical realism in an investigation of knowledge production. Building on the ontological and epistemological assumptions of this theoretical position, I have generated a methodological toolkit made up of four components: the phenomenon under investigation, the context of investigation, the regularities of the occurrence of the phenomenon and the causal mechanisms underpinning the regularities. This toolkit has been useful in two main ways. First, it has enabled a view of knowledge production in HE as a stratified social reality, in the sense that it is both constructed by and announced to scholars on different – empirical, actual and real – levels. The importance of this view is that it has prevented data analysis from reducing the structural to the agential through overemphasising the discursivity of reality. Second, it has enabled retroductivism, through which causal mechanisms have been posited and explained to make visible the full spectrum of challenges confronting corporeal knowing in G&E research. The importance of this logic of inquiry is that it has stretched data analysis and interpretation in such a manner as to enable the kind of comprehensive and holistic treatment that a research area as big as G&E research demanded.
8.5. Recommendations and directions for future scholarship and research In addition to these contributions, the RCiE project makes the following recommendations for future research on knowledge production: Themes to explore: There is a need for more forensic exploration of G&E research. For instance, in terms of constructing histories of knowledges and/or
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knowers, scholars may want to investigate the role of international networks of actors, including public intellectuals, organisations, research centres, think- tanks and religious denominations and political parties, in shaping social and cultural politics and knowledge claims about gender identity formation. Moreover, in terms of specific aspects of knowledge production, scholars may want to further investigate issues regarding the underfunding of qualitative research. For instance, if funding has become indispensable for both the ontological security of knowers and the epistemological security of knowing, should social scientists start accommodating arguments for a hierarchical order of knowledge, such as Young and Muller’s (2013) argument that qualitative knowledge, although able to “contribute in some cases to a society’s conversations about itself” (p. 245), is ultimately “less powerful” than mathematical or physical knowledge because it is incapable of exerting the same level of control over the material environment? Would such type of know-your-place compromise politics promise more stable and sustainable funding? Or is the issue really located somewhere else, not in the clash of ideas between scientific communities, but in the explicitly anti-all-science apocalyptic ideologies of religion-military-industry complexes today? Indeed, one wonders how G&E scholars will fare in the coming decades. Can they reasonably be expected to fulfil their ethical and epistemological responsibility toward research subjects at a time when funding for research on arguably much weightier issues, such as climate change and human waste, to cite just two examples, is being systematically cut (see Ledford et al., 2019, Nogrady, 2018 and Nossel, 2017 on the current crisis in science funding in Australia and the US)? Alternative theoretical approaches: In the RCiE project, the conceptualisation of knowing as human action has led to the choice of thinking tools based on Margaret Archer and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of social reality and practice. There are other ways, however, to conceptualise knowing. These include: knowing as language (Bernstein, 2000), as biopower (Foucault, 1990), as interplay between signifiers and signifieds (Derrida, 1976), as interpellation by repressive state apparatuses (Althusser, 1971), as network-building (Latour, 2005), as a polyphonic, multi-voiced world (Bakhtin, 1984), as viva activa 215
(Arendt, 1958) or even as human-nonhuman assemblage (Barad, 2007). Bernstein (2000), for instance, speaks of “languages of description” and the strong or weak “grammar” of a discipline, that is, its overall proficiency in constructing robust theoretical-empirical relations. Using these two concepts as thinking tools, one may ask whether the predominance of agency as a way of knowing in G&E research is not so much underpinned by the shift to social theory, as has been posited in the RCiE project, but rather by a weak, highly circular “grammar,” whereby the empirical confirms the theoretical and the theoretical justifies the empirical. Moreover, choices of theory have consequences. If you choose to work with Bourdieu, as I have done, you have to deal with what is seen as, in the words of one of my respondents, a “pessimistic” sociology that can explain how political power (re)produces and controls social and cultural fields, but not how or what, apart from socioanalysis, can actually be done to destabilise it. Alternatively, if you choose to work with Bernstein, as suggested above, his conceptualisation of knowing as “grammar” might lead you to underestimate the importance of knowers’ subjective views and career and life histories. In any case, theory should always be viewed as crucial, for if not theory, one would be tempted to rely on ideological thinking to explain phenomena, thus doing research as propaganda, not as social science. Finally, I want to leap out of my comfort zone to envisage a research project of a significantly larger scope and focus. My ideas below should be seen as tentative, but hopefully tenable, general directions for future scholarship and research regarding sociological knowing as a public, and not just academic, issue. To understand more holistically the predicament of corporeal-based and other such types of reflective sociological knowing, one needs to look beyond HE, at the “Knowledgeable Polity” (Gunter, 2016, p. 21, emphasis in original), that is, the constellation of all knowing social subjects and entities involved in the drawing and redrawing of knowledge boundaries. There are mainly two reasons as to why this is important. First, the onset of what is commonly known as the “fourth industrial revolution” has ushered in a vast array of information and communication technologies that intensified the proliferation of knowledge, with the result that the right to produce, own and defend knowledge is today one of the most powerful shapers of human life and 216
labour at the civilisational level21. Second, there has been an ongoing democratisation of knowing on two levels: inclusive, whereby the knowledges and ways of knowing of vulnerable social groups (e.g. the indigenous populations of Australia and the Americas) have been recognised and given due attention in social science research (Blackmore, 2003); and equalising, whereby the equality of all knowledges, ways of knowing and knowers is seen as necessary and desirable in a market-led economy. My argument is that while the former development, proliferation, should be accepted and dealt with as an in-built condition of contemporary social existence and reality, the latter development, namely the equalising democratisation of knowing, should be of deep concern to all academic experts32. If neoliberalism, as shown through the example of G&E research in this thesis, declares all knowing and knowers equal, it is not to support them all equally so that the highest possible benefit to research subjects is ensured. Rather, it is to pit knowing against knowing in a seemingly perpetual (and certainly not fair) competition to determine which data can best justify existing political, social, economic and educational arrangements. Because the competition is presented by the state as unbiased, what results from it is misrecognised as “natural,” and not what it really is: a desired outcome. When, for instance, Michael Gove, UK Secretary of State for Education (2010-2014), decried all experts in the country’s 2016 EU referendum by saying, “people in this country have had enough of experts” (Mance, 2016)43, he surely
21 I maintain a distinction between the political and the civilisational. By the latter, I mean the supra- political level at which the people of a polity or plurality of polities engage in debates and clashes over who they were, who they are and who they ought to be (or what national, regional and world roles they ought to play) in the future.
32 I should clarify that I do not reject inclusive democratisation. Although I agree that certain liberalist (e.g. post-colonial) critiques of scientific knowledge production have slipped into epistemological relativism, whereby anything goes, even fact-denying claims, I still think that accounting for subjective knowing, views and experiences is crucial. Had it not been for this fundamental understanding that social subjects have something valuable to say about the bodies and worlds they inhabit, social science would not have developed into the vast, theoretically and empirically diverse landscape it is today.
43 In this interview with Sky News, Gove goes on to clarify that he was alluding to experts who work in organisations with acronyms and “say that they know what is best, [while] getting it consistently wrong.” However, regardless of who or what Gove had in mind, I want to remind that the assault on expertise is not an exclusively new-Right phenomenon. As Young and Muller (2010) argue, it is important not to downplay the contribution of leftist scholarship in the academy, particularly of the postmodernist and poststructuralist variety, to the ongoing political denigration of scientific knowledge, even if it is maintained that their philosophical and sociological critiques of knowledge are aimed at ends different from those of politicians like Gove.
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was not referring to the expert economists at the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies (two prominent Right-wing think-tanks) whose research he and other Eurosceptic politicians frequently quote in interviews with the media. Rather, the way I see it is that he was engaging in deliberate equalisation (here, apparently, expressed in the negative) to convey a message regarding the disposability of those particular groups of experts whose knowledge is oppositional, too complex and critical to overlook the populist libertarianism and restorationist projects of contemporary education policymaking (Gunter, 2019) – it is noteworthy that, back in 2013, he described 100 professors of education who opposed his new national curriculum as “the enemies of promise,” a “blob” of “Marxists” who practise “bad academia” (Shepherd, 2013). Having said that, I want now to briefly present the four trends of equalising democratisation that have been identified through revisiting chapter two of this thesis to think more deeply about the chances of survival of sociological knowing in today’s world. Below, the definition of each trend is followed by one or more sources which may help further illuminate its nature and implications: Anti-intellectualism: Whereas sociological knowing rejects common sense as a basis for social theorising, the democratisation of knowing legitimises it. This contributes toward what Moscovici (1982) describes as the “the laicisation of society” (p. 201) by the globalisation media – e.g. see Robinson (2018) for a critique of how Jordan Peterson54 uses psychology to repackage common sense notions about society, culture and the so-called decline of morality in Western civilisation. Privatism: Whereas sociological knowing tends to be concerned with the public good, however this may be defined, the democratisation of knowing is
54 Jordan Peterson was once an obscure professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada. In 2016, he became incredibly famous/infamous (depending on whether you agree with his views or not) after facing criticism for his staunch opposition to the Canadian “Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code,” known as Bill C-16. The Bill recognises the right to gender expression and adds it as an “aggravating factor” to the Criminal Code, meaning that individuals who commit crimes motivated by bias, prejudice or hate with regard to gender expression will be subject to increased sentences. Peterson, a transgender sceptic himself, attacked the Bill, calling instead for a return to sex-role theory and the inevitability of clash between the sexes on the basis of irreconcilable biological difference. Extremely controversial, he is hailed as an enlightened scholar, an “expert” and “perhaps the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now” (D. Brooks, 2018, “The Jordan Peterson Moment”). On 8 November 2018, he appeared on “BBC Question Time” to contribute his “expert opinion” on masculinity and knife crime in the city of London.
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predicated on individualism and personalisation. Fielding (2007) argues that the neoliberal “mantra of ‘personalisation’” is not about “good life,” self-fulfilling relationships or individual liberties, but rather “is linked to an economically driven set of imperatives that presume a particular set of ideas about ‘the person’” (p. 57). Perhaps the most powerful among these ideas is that individuals are instinctively competitive – e.g. see Gunter (2018) for an analysis of the threat posed by privatisation (and the idea of the “private”) to public education provision in Western-style democracies. Particularism: Whereas sociological knowing, particularly in the reflective- interpretivist tradition, recognises the multi-dimensional – structural, social and corporeal – constitution of social reality and, by implication, the need to account for parts (agencies, objects and bodies) as well as wholes (contexts, discourses and structures), the democratisation of knowing enables reductionist approaches to the study of society – e.g. see O’Neil (2016) for an analysis of how algorithms, which are increasingly dominating all fields of human activity (including education, health, the job market and national elections), render social reality complexity-free and alarmingly predictable. The empowerment illusion: Whereas sociological knowing tends to be power- conscious, the democratisation of knowing creates illusions of self- empowerment that, in effect, serve to preclude the problematisation of power. For instance, the social media (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) enable subjects to pseudo-embody the dispositions of powerful elites, namely through the authority to “like,” “dislike,” “love,” “delete,” “remove” or “report” knowledges, ways of knowing and knowers (i.e. people, pages, ads, photos, quotes, memes and organisations). The problem, however, does not lie so much in the diffusion of power itself as in the possibility that the power to know freely and equally may easily deteriorate into a power to dis-know (denialism) or even a power to decide not to want to know at all (wilful ignorance) – e.g. see DeNicola (2017) for an analysis of wilful ignorance as a complex, media-fuelled ideological position. In the light of these trends, what fate awaits sociological knowing in the “Knowledgeable Polity”? Because it is not within the remit of the RCiE project to provide an answer to this
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question, what is needed is a larger investigation that looks into the location, relevance and contribution of sociological knowing to contemporary world affairs. Over the last few decades, there have been dramatic changes in the relationship between individual, society, state, economy and academia, accompanied by a myriad of interpretations regarding what is happening and why (e.g. Right versus Left, liberalism versus illiberalism, neoliberal capitalism versus new forms of neoliberal protectionism or even feminism versus a subtle politics of patriarchal recuperation). It is important, however, to remember how it all started. Fukuyama (1992) puts it this way: business leaders, once largely “kept out of politics and the military” because of their concern with profit-making, are now given free reign to manage social institutions, with the result that “their restlessness would lead them to propose innovations at home or adventures abroad with potentially disastrous consequences for the polity” (p. 316, emphasis added). Surely, this free reign may seem on the surface to be irreversible, but not if it is treated for what it really is: a system of abstracted economic categories and relations (imaginings of how things and beings should be and act) that can be contested, reconfigured and/or replaced. Many hopes hang on this recognition that alternatives are possible (and doable), not least the hope of better social and educational lives for children.
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Appendix 1: A map of based at departments, research institutes or research groups in universities Scholars knowledge production in Who does it? research on boys and Research who do research in primary councils (e.g. and secondary schools; who masculinities Governments Economic are professional intellectuals; OR and Social who are HE practitioners Research Who funds it? Council, UK) Other HE funding OR sources Charities (e.g. councils (e.g. (e.g. Education Higher Education industry Endowment G&E research on boys and Funding Council Organisations and the Foundation, masculinities (in the UK, for England) (e.g. British European UK) Australia and North OR Academy) Union) America) OR OR
British Journal of Sociology of Non-education journals (e.g. Who publishes it? Education (field-specific Men and Masculinities) journal) OR Other education journals (e.g. Discourse: Cultural Studies in Gender and Education (field- Education) specific journal) OR OR
Education-related (e.g. Where is it exchanged? Conferences Gender and Education Association, UK) Other venues (e.g. journals; OR research groups; personal communications) Non-education related (e.g. British Sociological Association) Appendix 2: Mappings of the intellectual history of gender research1 in education
Type of Definition Forms of Example(s) mapping dissemination Reviews Scholars review the state of the subfield in terms Book chapters; journal Weaver-Hightower’s (2003) review of the “boy turn” in of what has been said and done and what articles; conference G&E research; Bailey and Graves’s (2016) review of research agenda might be needed to say and do papers G&E research more, and about what, and how and why. Topics Scholars scope the subfield and highlight issues Books; book chapters; The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Gender and Education and challenges through focusing on topics, such as journal articles; (Arnot & Mac an Ghaill, 2006); Gender Education and women and girls in education, masculinity and conference papers Equality in a Global Context: Conceptual Frameworks education, gender and science education and and Policy Perspectives (Fennel & Arnot, 2008); gender, sexuality and education. Masculinity and Education (Coffey & James, 2014) Experiences Scholars reflect on their lives, goals, choices, Books; book chapters; Leaders in Gender and Education: Intellectual Self- career trajectories, research practice and conference papers Portraits (Weaver-Hightower & Skelton, 2013) professional identities, foregrounding in their accounts the ways in which the dispositional and the structural interplay. Statements Scholars present their views on what the subfield Books; book chapters; Francis and Paechter (2015) want research to “avoid should focus on, what issues need to be attended journal articles; essentialism and reification of gender distinction” (p. to, what types of inquiry need to be developed conference papers 776); Tinkler and Jackson (2014) want research to and how the subfield can advance its positioning. develop “historical sensibility” (p. 70); Haywood (2008) claims that dependence on identity categories limits the possibilities of new knowledge.
1 Referred to in this appendix as a “subfield”
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Contexts Scholars investigate the development of the Books; book chapters; Haywood and Mac an Ghaill (2001) chart the subfield, locating gender analysis within particular journal articles; relationship between “de-feminising” education in political, economic, social and/or cultural conference papers neoliberal times and masculinities in the school; Stahl contexts. et al. (2017) investigate how boys’ gender identity work is affected by neoliberal discourses around aspiration. Debates Scholars examine knowledge claims in the Journal articles Rasmussen (2009), Paechter (2009) and Dillabough subfield, engaging in debates about theory, (2009) have debated contemporary theorising about practice and policies in relation to gender identity gender identity. and gender equality and equity in the school. Boundaries and Scholars explore the organisation of knowledge Book chapters; journal “Thoughtful gatherings: Gendering Conferences as networks production and research practice in HE, including articles; conference Spaces of Learning, Knowledge Production and forms of collaboration between knowledge papers Community” (2017), a special issue of Gender and producers and the relationships between Education; Delamont (2000) and Abraham (2001) education and other disciplines, disciplines and explore relationships of tension, rejection and fear fields and fields and subfields. between sociology and the SoE. Essentials Scholars create chronologies and accounts of Dictionaries; Gender and Education: An Encyclopaedia (Bank, 2007); events, developments and changes that are encyclopaedias; The Sage Handbook of Gender and Education (Skelton tailored to teaching about the subfield in HE. handbooks et al., 2007)
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Appendix 3: Deploying generative causation to investigate knowledge production
Mechanisms (posited through examining issues regarding theorising about and doing empirical research on, with and/or for research subjects)
Context (research literature)
Output 1 Output 2 Output 3 Output 4
Regularities (way of knowing and potential limitation to knowing) Generative causation (Regularity = Mechanism + Context) in phase one (the documents)
Mechanisms (posited through examining issues regarding engagement in knowledge production both as personal commitment and through research practice in HE)
Context (interview data about oral
career and life
histories)
Oral history 1 Oral history 2 Oral history 3 Oral history 4
Regularities (potential limitations to knowing) Generative causation (Regularity = Mechanism + Context) in phase two (the interviews)
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Appendix 4: Mapping research on boys and masculinities against site of publication
Education journal (number of articles)
(N = 97 articles)
Australian Journal of Education (1) Australian Journal of Teacher Education (1) British Journal of Sociology of Education (11) British Educational Research Journal (3) Canadian Journal of Education (3) Curriculum Inquiry (1) Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (9) Education+Training (1) Educational Review (5) Gender and Education (33) International Journal of Inclusive Education (3) International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (1) International Studies in Sociology of Education (1) Journal of Curriculum Studies (1) Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (3) Journal of Education Policy (1) Journal of Learning Sciences (1) Journal of Research in Science Teaching (1) McGill Journal of Education (1) Oxford Review of Education (2) Research Papers in Education (1) Sex Education (2) Sport, Education and Society (8) Teachers’ College Record (2) The High School Journal (1)
Non-education journal (number of articles)
(N = 40 articles)
American Behavioural Scientist (1) Australian Feminist Studies (1) Australian Psychologist (1) Confero (1) Culture, Society and Masculinities (1) Gender & Society (2) International Review for the Sociology of Sport (1) Journal of Gender Studies (1) Journal of Social Issues (2) 259
Journal of Sociology (1) Management in Education (1) Men and Masculinities (6) Outskirts: Feminists along the Edge (1) Quest (1) Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport (1) Social Science & Medicine (1) Sociological Perspectives (1) Sociological Research Online (1) Sociology Compass (1) Sociology (1) Taboo (1) The British Journal of Sociology (1) The Journal of Men’s Studies (3) The Psychologist (1) The Sociological Review (1) The Urban Review (1) THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies (2) Visual Studies (1) Youth Studies Australia (1) Youth & Society (1)
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Appendix 5: A sample of the literature on boys and masculinities in education
N = 68 articles
Archer, L., Dawson, E., Seakins, A., DeWitt, J., Godec, S., & Whitby, C. (2016). “I’m being a man here”: Urban boys’ performances of masculinity and engagement with science during a science museum visit. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 25(3), 438-485. Arnot, M., Arizpe, E., & Gubb, J. (1998). Broadening adolescent masculinity. Management in Education, 12(1), 16-18. Bartholomaeus, C. (2012). “I’m not allowed wrestling stuff”: Hegemonic masculinity and primary school boys. Journal of Sociology, 48(3), 227-247. Bartholomaeus, C. (2013). Colluding with or challenging hegemonic masculinity? Examining primary school boys' plural gender practices. Australian Feminist Studies, 28(77), 279-293. Burns, J., & Kehler, M. (2014). Boys, bodies and negotiated school spaces: When boys fail the litmus test. Culture, Society & Masculinities, 6(1), 3-18. Campbell, D., Gray, S., Kelly, J., & MacIsaac, S. (2016). Inclusive and exclusive masculinities in physical education: A Scottish case study. Sport, Education and Society, 23, 1-13. Connell, R. (1989). Cool guys, swots and wimps: The interplay of masculinity and education. Oxford Review of Education, 15(3), 291-203. Dalley-Trim, L. (2009). The call to critique 'common sense' understandings about boys and masculinity(ies). Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 34(1), 54-68. Davison, K. G. (2000). Boys' bodies in school: Physical education. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 8(2), 255-266. Drummond, M. J. (2003). The meaning of boys' bodies in physical education. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 11(2), 131-143. Epstein, D., Kehily, M., Mac an Ghaill, M., & Redman, P. (2001). Boys and girls come out to play: Making masculinities and femininities in school playgrounds. Men and Masculinities, 4(2), 158-172. Farrell, F. (2016). ‘Learning to listen’: Boys’ gender narratives–implications for theory and practice. Education+Training, 58(3), 283-297. Francis, B. (2009). The role of The Boffin as abject Other in gendered performances of school achievement. The Sociological Review, 57(4), 645-669. Francis, B. (2010). Re/theorising gender: Female masculinity and male femininity in the classroom? Gender and Education, 22(5), 477-490. Heinrich, J. (2013). The making of masculinities: Fighting the forces of hierarchy and hegemony in the high school setting. The High School Journal, 96(2), 101- 115. Hickey, C. (2008). Physical education, sport and hyper-masculinity in schools. Sport, Education and Society, 13(2), 147-161. Hill, J. (2015). ‘If you miss the ball, you look like a total muppet!’ Boys investing in their bodies in physical education and sport. Sport, Education and Society, 20(6), 762-779.
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Jackson, C. (2003). Motives for “laddishness” at school: Fear of failure and fear of the “feminine.” British Educational Research Journal, 29(4), 583-598. Keddie, A. (2003). Little boys: Tomorrow's macho lads. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 24(3), 289-306. Keddie, A. (2007). Games of subversion and sabotage: Issues of power, masculinity, class, rurality and schooling. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 28(2), 181- 194. Kehily, M., & Nayak, A. (1997). 'Lads and laughter': Humour and the production of heterosexual hierarchies. Gender and Education, 9(1), 69-88. Kehily, M. (2001). Bodies in school: Young men, embodiment, and heterosexual masculinities. Men and Masculinities, 4(2), 173-185. Kehler, M. (2004). Masculinities and resistance: High school boys (un)doing boy. Taboo, 8(1), 97-113. Kehler, M., Davison, K., & Frank, B. (2005). Contradictions and tensions of the practice of masculinities in school: interrogating embodiment and 'good buddy talk.' Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 21(4), 59-72. Kehler, M. (2007). Hallway fears and high school friendships: The complications of young men (re) negotiating heterosexualized identities. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 28(2), 259-277. Kehler, M., & Martino, W. (2007). Questioning masculinities: Interrogating boys' capacities for self-problematization in schools. Canadian Journal of Education, 30(1),, 90-112. Kenway, J. (1995). Masculinities in schools: Under siege, on the defensive and under reconstruction? Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 16(1), 59-79. Lingard, B., Mills, M., & Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2012). Interrogating recuperative masculinity politics in schooling. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 16(4), 407-421. Mac an Ghaill, M. (1991). Schooling, sexuality and male power: Towards an emancipatory curriculum. Gender and Education, 3(3), 291-309. Mac an Ghaill, M. (2000). Rethinking (male) gendered sexualities: What about the British heteros? The Journal of Men’s Studies, 8(2), 195-212. Mac an Ghaill, M., & Haywood, C. (2012). Understanding boys’: Thinking through boys, masculinity and suicide. Social Science & Medicine, 74(4), 482-489. Marsh, L. T. S., & Noguera, P. A. (2017). Beyond stigma and stereotypes: An ethnographic study on the effects of school-imposed labeling on black males in an urban charter school. The Urban Review, 1-31. Martino, W. (1999). “Cool Boys,” “Party Animals,” “Squid” and “Poofters”: Interrogating the dynamics and politics of adolescent masculinities in school. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 20(2), 239-263. Martino, W., & Frank, B. (2006). The tyranny of surveillance: Male teachers and the policing of masculinities in a single sex school. Gender and Education, 18(1), 17-33. McCormack, M., & Anderson, E. (2010). ‘It’s just not acceptable any more’: The erosion of homophobia and the softening of masculinity at an English sixth form. Sociology, 44(5), 843-859. McCormack, M. (2011). Hierarchy without hegemony: Locating boys in an inclusive school setting. Sociological Perspectives, 54(1), 83-101.
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McCormack, M. (2014). The intersection of youth masculinities, decreasing homophobia and class: An ethnography. The British Journal of Sociology, 65(1), 130-149. Mora, R. (2012). ‘Do it for all your pubic hairs!’: Latino boys, masculinity, and puberty. Gender & Society, 26(3), 433-460. Parker, A. (1996). The construction of masculinity within boys’ physical education [1]. Gender and Education, 8(2), 141-158. Phoenix, A., & Frosh, S. (2001). Positioned by “hegemonic” masculinities: A study of London boys' narratives of identity. Australian Psychologist, 36(1), 27-35. Phoenix, A., Frosh, S., & Pattman, R. (2003). Producing contradictory masculine subject positions: Narratives of threat, homophobia and bullying in 11–14 year old boys. Journal of Social Issues, 59(1), 179-195. Phoenix, A., Pattman, R., Croghan, R., & Griffin, C. (2013). Mediating gendered performances: Young people negotiating embodiment in research discussions. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(4), 414-433. Reay, D. (1990). Working with boys. Gender and Education, 2(3), 269-282. Reay, D. (2002). Shaun's story: Troubling discourses of white working-class masculinities. Gender and Education, 14(3), 221-234. Redman, P. (1996). Curtis loves Ranjit: Heterosexual masculinities, schooling and pupils’ sexual cultures. Educational Review, 48(2), 175-182. Redman, P., Epstein, D., Kehily, M. J., & Mac an Ghaill, M. (2002). Boys bonding: Same-sex friendship, the unconscious and heterosexual discourse. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 23(2), 179-191. Renold, E. (2000). 'Coming out': Gender,(hetero) sexuality and the primary school. Gender and Education, 12(3), 309-326. Renold, E. (2001). Learning the 'hard' way: Boys, hegemonic masculinity and the negotiation of learner identities in the primary school. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22(3), 369-385. Renold, E. (2003). 'If you don't kiss me, you're dumped': Boys, boyfriends and heterosexualised masculinities in the primary school. Educational Review, 55(2), 179-194. Renold, E. (2004). “Other” boys: Negotiating non-hegemonic masculinities in the primary school. Gender and Education, 16(2), 247-265. Ringrose, J., & Rawlings, V. (2015). Posthuman performativity, gender and ‘school bullying’: Exploring the material-discursive intra-actions of skirts, hair, sluts and poofs. Confero: Essays on Education, Philosophy and Politics, 3(2), 80- 119. Robinson, K. H. (2005). Reinforcing hegemonic masculinities through sexual harassment: Issues of identity, power and popularity in secondary schools. Gender and Education, 17(1), 19-37. Skeggs, B. (1991). Challenging masculinity and using sexuality. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 12(2), 127-139. Skelton, A. (1993). On becoming a male physical education teacher: The informal culture of students and the construction of hegemonic masculinity. Gender and Education, 5(3), 289-303. Skelton, C. (1996). Learning to be 'tough': The fostering of maleness in one primary school. Gender and Education, 8(2), 185-198. Skelton, C. (1997). Primary boys and hegemonic masculinities. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 18(3), 349-369. 263
Skelton, C., & Francis, B. (2011). Successful boys and literacy: Are ‘literate boys’ challenging or repackaging hegemonic masculinity? Curriculum Inquiry, 41(4), 456-479. Smith, J. (2007). “Ye've got to ‘ave balls to play this game sir!” Boys, peers and fears: The negative influence of school‐based ‘cultural accomplices’ in constructing hegemonic masculinities. Gender and Education, 19(2), 179-198. Stoudt, B. G. (2006). “You're Either In or You're Out”: School Violence, peer discipline, and the (re) production of hegemonic masculinity. Men and Masculinities, 8(3), 273-287. Swain, J. (2000). 'The money's good, the fame's good, the girls are good': The role of playground football in the construction of young boys' masculinity in a junior school. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 21(1), 95-109. Swain, J. (2002). The resources and strategies boys use to establish status in a junior school without competitive sport. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 23(1), 91-107. Swain, J. (2003). How young schoolboys become somebody: The role of the body in the construction of masculinity. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 24(3), 299-314. Tischler, A., & McCaughtry, N. (2011). PE is not for me: When boys' masculinities are threatened. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 82(1), 37-48. Walker, J. C. (1988). The way men act: Dominant and subordinate male cultures in an inner‐city school. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 9(1), 3-18. Ward, M. R. (2014). ‘I'm a Geek I am’: Academic achievement and the performance of a studious working-class masculinity. Gender and Education, 26(7), 709-725. Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2010). Oatmeal facials and sock wrestling: The perils and promises of extra-curricular strategies for ‘fixing’ boys' education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 31(5), 683-697. Youdell, D. (2004). Wounds and reinscriptions: Schools, sexualities and performative subjects. Discourse, 25(4), 477-493.
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Appendix 6: Assessing trustworthiness in document analysis
The following is a detailed list of the criteria used to assess the empirical documents in the sample of G&E research literature on boys and masculinities in the RCiE project:
Authenticity: Following Forster (1994)1, I asked questions such as, “are the data genuine? … Are they actually what they appear to be? … Are they accurate records of the events or processes described? Are the authors of the documents believable?” (p. 155).
Credibility: Following J. Scott (1990)2, I assessed whether or not the data analysis and interpretation can be trusted by using information available in the public domain (e.g. personal websites and online staff profiles) regarding authors’ educational credentials, academic and professional qualifications, research activity and autobiographies, including shared experiences of doing research and perspectives on social, cultural and political issues in education. This information, J. Scott (1990) suggests, is important to humanise the empirical treatment of documents and situate them within the wider context of their institutional production and dissemination. Still, however, there was no clear way in which I could define, let alone judge, the “correctness” or “reliability” of the analyses and interpretations blended together in the overall picture drawn by the authors. As Shipman (1981)3 argues, “there [is] no way of assessing whether this overall picture was valid or whether individual items contributing to it had been interpreted in the way the original author intended” (p. 125).
Representativeness: Following May (2011)4, I took into account considerations of “typicality” and “untypicality” in assessing documents. This has entailed distinguishing between a typical output which reflects adherence to predominant trends in the field regarding social theorising, conceptualising and approaching the empirical study of boys and masculinities (e.g. authors adopting hegemonic masculinity approaches, theories of gender as performance and poststructuralist notions of social power and discourse) and an untypical output which breaks away from these trends (e.g. authors adopting inclusive masculinity approaches or, more recently, theories of post-humanism and new-materialist approaches to the study of gender).
Meaning: Following J. Scott (1990), I assessed meaning by asking, “what is [the document], and what does it tell us?” (p. 8). More specifically, three levels of meaning have been examined: the meaning intended by the author of the output
1 Forster, N. (1994). The analysis of company documentation. In C. Cassell & G. Symon (Eds.), Qualitative Methods in Organisational Research (pp. 147-166). London: Sage.
2 Scott, J. (1990). A matter of record: Documentary sources in social research. Cambridge: Polity Press.
3 Shipman, M. (1981). The limitations of social research. London: Longman.
4 May, T. (2011). Social research: Issues, methods and process. Buckingham: Open University Press.
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and inferable through their insights, arguments or explanations; the meaning constructed by the author’s audience and inferable through critiques, comments or rejoinders written in response to their output; and the meaning internal to the output’s logic of inquiry or reasoning and inferable through my own reception of the output and examination of its theoretical, conceptual and methodological orientations in line with the aim of investigating knowing and knowledge.
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Appendix 7: Document analysis excerpts1
Article Theory/ies and Method(s) Research focus, main arguments and Key statements (to infer themes and (author, year) concept(s) location of phenomenon examine knowing) Schooling, Grounded theory Ethnographic Constructivist The author is concerned with structural sexuality and male observation; issues in regard to “the material and power: Towards an interviews; group This article concerns the experiences of social structure of differentiated emancipatory discussion subordinated sexual minority high school masculinities and femininities and the framework (Mac activities students in the UK. The author identifies and power relations contained within an Ghaill, 1991) discusses issues relevant to understanding them” (p. 292). how hegemonic heterosexual masculinity (and its antitheses) is constructed in the The author sets up his study against school and the wider society. One issue, for the backdrop of structural instance, is sex education, whose state-led developments in England, such as the ideological frameworks are complicit in repercussions of introducing the 1988 reifying ignorance about sex and sexuality, Clause 28. reinforcing commitment to heterosexuality and its attendant identifiers (e.g. procreation, The author follows a methodological family life and the sex-based division of design that emphasises collaboration, labour) and excluding important aspects of reciprocity and reflexivity in boys’ schooling experiences (e.g. desires and researcher-researched relationships.
1 These three excerpts are taken from the technical record of data in phase one (chapters four and five). The sample of empirical research documents from G&E research on boys and masculinities comprised sixty-eight journal articles. For each article, I listed the theory/ies, concept(s) and method(s) deployed by the author(s) to investigate gender identity formation in the school. In addition, I provided a summary of the research focus, findings and main arguments, located the phenomenon (or the sociological focus on corporeality – i.e. constructivist, phenomenological or materialist) and, finally, identified key statements through which to examine knowing about research subjects and gender identity formation.
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emotions). Other issues include the wider process of adolescent development, defined The author believes that research by “fluidity, experiments, displacements and should go beyond social interactionism confusions” (p. 297), the political significance (e.g. Walker, 1988) to capture how of the act of targeting the homosexual male’s “the process of sexual oppression, body for constructing and maintaining the which is gender, class, ‘race,’ and age borders of heterosexuality, the complicity of specific, involves concrete practices, the curriculum and its deliverers in framing linked to socio-historical material homosexuality (and the “effeminate” conditions, belief systems and masculinities it projects) as undesirable, the practices both within the schooling channelling of “compulsory heterosexuality” system and the wider society” (p. 294). (p. 301), which demands the devaluation of what is perceived as feminine and, finally, the The author draws attention to use of language to reproduce social and methodological difficulties such as the sexual hierarchies. appropriateness of discussing homosexuality (especially in the wake of Clause 28) and the issue of men researching men, which involves “the potential dangers of male collusion in the construction and representation of male practices” (p. 294).
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Masculinities and Hegemonic Ethnographic Constructivist The author salutes the shift in G&E research resistance: High masculinity – observation; toward a reconceptualisation of gender as school boys Butler’s (1999) interviews This article is about how four high school “permeable and [a] social construct held (un)doing boy notion of the boys counter heteronormative constructions together through the elements of discourse” (Kehler, 2004) stylisation of the of masculinity through bodily practices. The (p. 98). Moreover, the author sees it body four men provide possibilities for “re- important to acknowledge “human agency envisioning high school men as agents for and the competing choices connected to social change” (97). The author identifies a various understandings about what it means set of bodily practices through which to be a man in addition to how that gets masculinity is constructed in the informal publicly demonstrated” (p. 98). This male peer group setting. These include emphasis on agency can be seen as equating masculinity with an inability to problematic, and it is important to examine express feelings and emotions, fashioning the the undertaking of boys’ agency as part of masculine body both physically (e.g. looking at ways of knowing in G&E research muscularity) and through bodily on boys and masculinities. performances, gestures and actions that conform with “social and cultural regimes of The author speaks of masculinity as “shifting, normative heterosexual masculinity” (p. 101), contingent and uncertain” (p. 99). Gender operationalising “competitive power … identities, he contends, can only be seen as purposefully and intentionally to fractured and “partial constructions” (p. 99). demonstrate degrees of manliness” (p. 103), Also, the author emphasises the significance forming relationships with girls to confirm of the subversive, resistive and unsettling one’s masculine identity, looking and acting agential actions/performance (mainly bodily tough to distance oneself from the feminine, practices) of his respondents. creating “a façade of impenetrability” (p. 105) through policing/questioning sexualities In terms of methodology, the author explains (and thus masculinities), affirming that his study “centred on an emancipatory 269
heterosexuality in particular by conspicuously research methodology and relied heavily on avoiding displays of male-male intimacy, such the participant’s accounts of events as a as “gentle touching or supportive caressing window for understanding schooling and the on the back” (p. 107)and, finally, deploying ways that masculinities were negotiated” (p. homophobic discourses and verbal abuse as 100). There are issues here regarding hierarchising/positioning strategies within methodological approaches to the study of the peer group. Moreover, the author boys and masculinities in the school. The discusses possibilities of resisting approach chosen by the author is conducive heteronormative discourses of masculinity. to the production of thick description, and He argues that his respondents’ repeated not illuminative explanations. transgression of traditional codes of engagement in masculine conduct suggests The author states that he undertook the role that “while a dominant discourse of of an “active participant,” shadowing the masculinity still operates … there is room for four boys and working to gain their reconfiguring certain social practices among confidence in order to become a “friend,” men” (p. 102). For instance, two of the boys rather than a “stranger.” This enabled him to in his study find it unproblematic to hug each collect personal knowledge about them. other. There are issues here regarding the prioritisation of student voice and strategies of nativisation in research.
There is reason to believe that the author’s optimism about boys being agents for social change may be unwarranted. On what basis is he being optimistic? Is the image of two heterosexual hegemonic boys approaching or hugging each other briefly in the hallways 270
enough evidence to support the fluidity hypothesis, let alone the political aim of enabling the co-existence of different versions of masculinity in the school and the wider society?
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The intersection of Inclusive Ethnographic Constructivist The author cites some historical influences youth masculinity observation; that may still have an effect on starting masculinities, theory interviews This article focuses on the inclusive gendered conversations and conducting research decreasing (Anderson, 2009) behaviours and masculinities of a group of about sexualities in the school setting. These homophobia and – Bourdieu’s Sixth Form working-class boys. In relation to include prevalent discourses of “childhood class: An (1984; 1993) social class, the author’s main argument is innocence … the ostensibly adult nature of ethnography notion of that inclusive masculinity theory applies both sexuality and the supposed radicalism of the (McCormack, symbolic capital to middle-class and working-class boys. His ‘gay agenda’” (p. 131). This issue regards 2014) contribution here aims to extend the potential limitations to knowing in G&E investigation of the intersection of class, research. masculinity and the declining significance of homophobia into working-class boys in The author relies on official statistics to schools. Moreover, the author discusses a set buttress his argument regarding the of ethnographic observations that testify, as declining significance of homophobia in he claims, to masculine inclusivity in the social (including educational) settings in the gender identity formation of working-class UK. He argues that “attitudes are closely boys. These include “the near-total erasure linked to behaviours and lived experience” of homophobic language … [where] boys (p. 133). What is potentially problematic never used anti-gay words or phrases” (p. here is that statistics based on surveying 137, emphasis in original), the decrease in attitudes, which are ostensibly agential (and homophobic views and growth of support for thus subjective), are taken to be legitimate equal rights for gay people and the increase indicators of a decline in homophobic in physical tactility and various forms of discourse, and thus of emergent social emotional intimacy between the boys, change/justice. Moreover, the arguments in especially in relation to “openly valuing support of a so-called decline in homophobia friendships” (p. 141). Moreover, based on are made by a group of researchers and empirical observations concerning the modes scholars, including the author, who are what 272
of socialisation of his working-class Ball (2008) would refer to as an “epistemic participants (e.g. two boys who do not minority.” In short, inclusive masculinity socialise in metropolitan areas), the author theory does not enjoy much currency, and suggests that those boys who still displayed the fact that it is limited to the practice of a homophobic practice are not “engaged in the minority of researchers who are striving to dominant discourse of the wider British make the case for it is indicative of research culture” (142). Drawing on Bourdieuian practice politics premised on the pursuit of concepts, the author explains that the distinction through unique academic classed and gendered positions of some boys positioning. This issue concerns knowers does not equip them with the type of social more than ways of or potential limitations to and cultural capital needed to engage in knowing. broader (national) discourses that “esteem softer masculinities and more positive attitudes toward homosexuality” (p. 144). Importantly, British social and cultural discourse is dominated by middle-class values, and so it could be that it operates as “symbolic parameters of privilege that limit the ability of these working-class youth to engage with changes in contemporary society” (p. 145, emphasis in original).
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Appendix 8: Information power model to assess sample size
Using the information power model by Malterud et al. (2016)1, I determined that small sample size would be an appropriate choice in the RCiE project. The characteristics of small N (i.e. total number of respondents) are: narrow aim, dense specificity, use of theory, strong dialogue and in-depth analysis. In the following, each of these characteristics is defined and explained in relation to the aims of the investigation and the interviews in phase two.
Narrow aim: The interviews are designed to solicit the subjective voices and experiences of G&E scholars who are particularly located within the field of education and whose oral career and life histories are important to generate data that may help answer the research questions regarding how engagement in knowledge production both as personal commitment and through research practice in higher education affects knowing about research subjects. The aim is to find out “what things ‘exist’” in oral histories, potentially partaking of shaping knowledge, “rather than [to] determine how many such things there are” (Walker, 1985, cited in Crouch & Mckenzie, 2006, p. 78)2.
Dense specificity: The potential respondents share highly specific characteristics. They are intellectually advanced individuals, high-achieving academic professionals and competent in articulating knowing and knowledge. At the time of planning for the interviews, they had been engaged in research practice for a substantially long time, some for over twenty-five years, had been professors at their respective institutions, had had experience in teaching and management (e.g. as department heads and committee chairs) and had taken on or been part of both government and non-government funded research projects on gender issues in education. Also, importantly, the respondents are interconnected in that some of them had been colleagues at the same university or had collaborated on projects and co-authored publications. Taking these characteristics into account will ensure that the sample is “homogeneous” enough to generate strong, defensible interview data.
Use of theory: Themes and interpretations in this phase will be theory-driven. Two sets of conceptual and thinking tools will be used in the thematic analysis of interview data. The first is derived from Archer’s (2000) critical realist conceptualisation of individual or personal identity formation in the social order of reality. The second is adopted from Bourdieu’s (1990a) theory of practice. The rationale behind using theory is that the subjectivity of voices and experiences does not mean that the potential respondents’ personal and professional identities, relations and engagements in research practice are not preconditioned
1 Malterud, K., Siersma, V. D., & Guassora, A.D. (2016). Sample size in qualitative interview studies: Guided by information power. Qualitative Health Research, 26(13), 1753-1760.
2 Crouch, M., & McKenzie, H. (2006).The logic of small samples in interview-based qualitative research. Social Science Information, 45(4), 483-499.
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or shaped by the structures that organise and reify arrangements in the academic field. Without theory, data analysis would consist of a simplistic mapping of similarities and differences between respondents’ statements.
Strong dialogue: The potential respondents are well-spoken and well-written scholars, and so it is safe to presume that their sufficient level of articulateness will yield a strong and clear communication between the researcher and the researched subject. Moreover, to ensure the success of the interview process and sound empirical and analytical quality of the data generated, I will work on enhancing my interviewer skills. First, before the interview, I will refine the interview schedule, update my familiarity with the respondent’s research work in general and with specific regard to boys and masculinities and read widely in the literature on academic professionalism and structural reform in higher education. Second, during the interview, I will focus on three main performance-boosting skills: (a) spontaneity in responding to cues; (b) resourcefulness in responding to unexpected utterances or turns in dialogue; and (c) a general sense of sensitivity to social and cultural meaning. Also, Crouch and Mckenzie (2006) argue that a social science researcher should be confident that they have been “appropriately schooled” (pp. 486-487). Keeping this in mind is important to handle the interview setting with competence, ensuring good rapport and a steady flow of conversation.
In-depth analysis: The generation, analysis and interpretation of data in phase two of the project will be an intellectually demanding and labour-intensive process that involves creating interview accounts that encompass the oral career and life histories of the respondents, comparing and contrasting between voices and experiences, constructing subthemes and themes, identifying regularities or salient features in the data and then engaging with political issues such as neoliberal structural reform in higher education to reveal and explain the causes of potential limitations to corporeal knowing. It is a process that will substantially rely on the use of theoretical concepts as thinking tools, and it is important that each interview account be treated discretely in order to ensure that the generated themes speak to the uniqueness and particularity of each and every oral history. Platt (1992)3 argues that the intensity of theoretical explanation in qualitative inquiry overrides the consideration of quantity regarding the number of analysed cases; when social theorising is involved, it is even possible that one, and only one, case may generate valuable insights. Moreover, the requirement for in-depth analysis can be largely attributed to the sociological nature of the RCiE project. Examining subjectivities, structures and the various ways in which they interrelate in the academic field is not a straightforward task. Patience, complex understanding, reiterative reading and a self-reflexive stance are only a few of the necessary ingredients needed to produce a trustworthy sociological analysis.
3 Platt, J. (1992). Cases of cases … of cases. In C. C. Ragin, & H. S. Becker (Eds.), What is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry (pp. 21-52). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Appendix 9: Interview sheets and letters
This appendix contains the following forms:
1. Copy of interview invitation letter (for respondents in the UK)
2. Copy of interview invitation letter (for respondents abroad)
3. Copy of participant information sheet (for respondents in the UK)
4. Copy of participant information sheet (for respondents abroad)
5. Copy of consent form
6. Copy of thank-you letter
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Interview invitation letter (for scholars in the UK)
Dear [name of the respondent], Greetings. This is Omar Kaissi. I am a PhD student at The University of Manchester (UoM). I am writing to you in the hope that you would give me the opportunity to interview you for my research project. The project is under the supervision of Professor Helen Gunter and Dr. Steven Courtney from the Manchester Institute of Education (MIE) at the School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED). The working title is Male corporeality at the school: Investigating scholarly knowledge production on boys, masculinity and masculinity construction. The project is divided into two phases. In phase one, I construct an evidence base of knowledge claims regarding boys and masculinity in education. In phase two, I interview key scholars to discuss their intellectual, social and cultural backgrounds, research journey, career and identity development, as well as their distinctive contributions to the field and how their points of view have evolved over time. Data analysis will transform interview transcripts into narrative accounts of the professional biographies and experiences of researchers whose role, just like yours, is essential to understanding how the literature on gender and education in general and boys in education in particular has come to assume its current form. I have taken time to go over and read a number of your research outputs, and I can tell that interviewing you will prove a valuable asset indeed. If you agree to see me, the interview will be no longer than 90 minutes. If it suits you, it is possible for me to come to your University office, as I would rather conduct a traditional, face to face interview. However, I am open to alternative arrangements. Though I prefer a date between the 28th of August and the 31st of December 2017, I want you to know that I am on a flexible schedule, and so I am available on other dates during the first half of year 2018. Please specify the date and time most convenient for you. Needless to say, my conduct will be responsible and ethical. I will do my utmost to respect your entitlement to privacy and to accord you your rights to confidentiality and anonymity. Ethical considerations will also guide later stages of the project, particularly regarding quoting the data for analysis. As your participation will be fully voluntary, you may feel free to withdraw from the interview process at any time, without detriment or attempts to convince you otherwise on my part. Copies of the interview transcript and other relevant documents will be provided to you to review and submit your feedback. For your convenience, I have reproduced the information above in a participant information sheet attached to this email. Please take time to read the sheet carefully. It would be greatly appreciated. Once again, I do hope you are able to spare some time for an interview. Please reply by email to: [email protected] I look forward for your reply. Thank you. Best wishes, Omar Kaissi
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Interview invitation letter (for scholars abroad)
Dear [name of the respondent],
Greetings. This is Omar Kaissi. I am a PhD student at The University of Manchester (UoM), England, the UK. I am writing to you in the hope that you would give me the opportunity to interview you for my research project. The project is under the supervision of Professor Helen Gunter and Dr. Steven Courtney from the Manchester Institute of Education (MIE) at the School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED). The working title is Male corporeality at the school: Investigating scholarly knowledge production on boys, masculinity and masculinity construction.
The project is divided into two phases. In phase one, I construct an evidence base of knowledge claims regarding boys and masculinity in education. In phase two, I interview key scholars to discuss their intellectual, social and cultural backgrounds, research journey, career and identity development, as well as their distinctive contributions to the field and how their points of view have evolved over time.
Data analysis will transform interview transcripts into narrative accounts of the professional biographies and experiences of researchers whose role, just like yours, is essential to understanding how the literature on gender and education in general and boys in education in particular has come to assume its current form. I have taken time to go over and read a number of your research outputs, and I can tell that interviewing you will prove a valuable asset indeed. If you agree to participate, the interview will be no longer than 90 minutes. If it suits you, I suggest conducting it through Skype. Though I prefer a date between the 28th of August and the 31st of December 2017, I want you to know that I am on flexible schedule, and so I am available on other dates during the first half of year 2018. Please specify the date and time most convenient for you. Needless to say, my conduct will be responsible and ethical. I will do my utmost to respect your entitlement to privacy and to accord you your rights to confidentiality and anonymity. Ethical considerations will also guide later stages of the project, particularly regarding quoting the data for analysis. As your participation will be fully voluntary, you may feel free to withdraw from the interview process at any time, without detriment or attempts to convince you otherwise on my part. Copies of the interview transcript and other relevant documents will be provided to you to review and submit your feedback. For your convenience, I have reproduced the information above in a participant information sheet attached to this email. Please take time to read the sheet carefully. It would be greatly appreciated. Once again, I do hope you are able to spare some time for an interview. Please reply by email to: [email protected] I look forward for your reply. Thank you. Best wishes, Omar Kaissi
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Participant information sheet (for scholars in the UK)
RESEARCH PROJECT: Male corporeality at the school4: Investigating scholarly knowledge production on boys, masculinity and masculinity construction
You are being invited to take part in a PhD Education research project. The aim of the project is to investigate scholarly knowledge production on boys, masculinity and masculinity construction in the school. It is important for you to understand why the research is being done and what it involves. Please take time to read the following information carefully and discuss it with others if you wish. Please ask if there is anything that is not clear or if you would like more information. Take time to decide whether or not you wish to take part. Thank you.
Who will conduct the research? Omar Kaissi; PhD student The Manchester Institute of Education University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL
Title of the Research Male corporeality at the school: Investigating scholarly knowledge production on boys, masculinity and masculinity construction
What is the aim of the research? The interview is to fulfil the aim of phase two of the project. In this phase, having constructed an evidence base of knowledge claims regarding boys and masculinity in education, I interview key scholars to discuss their intellectual, social and cultural backgrounds, research journey, career and identity development, as well as their distinctive contributions to the field and how their points of view have evolved over time.
Why have I been chosen? As a prominent scholar, your role in the field is essential in understanding how the literature on gender and education in general and boys in education in particular has developed over time.
What would I be asked to do if I took part?
4 The original working title of the RCiE project
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You will be asked to participate in a semi-structured interview. In the interview process, if you experience distress or discomfort for any reason, you may feel free to withdraw. There will be no attempts to convince you otherwise.
What happens to the data collected? The interview data will be analysed in order to create a narrative account5 of your professional biography and career experience.
How is confidentiality maintained? The interview will be conducted responsibly and ethically. I will do my utmost to respect your entitlement to privacy and to accord you your rights to confidentiality and anonymity. You will be provided with copies of the interview transcript and other relevant documents to review and submit your feedback. Your input will be fully taken into consideration. I will also let you know which quotes I want to use in data analysis. The interview audio data will be transformed into digital form. It will be stored and kept secure in the research data repository operated by The University of Manchester. The data will be destroyed only after the project is completed and the thesis is submitted. This will be in September of year 2019. The research data repository will be used to destroy the data.
What happens if I do not want to take part or if I change my mind? It is up to you to decide whether or not to take part. If you decide to take part, you will be given this information sheet to keep and be asked to sign a consent form. However, you are still free to withdraw at any time without giving a reason and without detriment to yourself.
What is the duration of the research? The duration of the interview is forty-five to ninety minutes.
Where will the research be conducted? If it suits you, it is possible for me to come to your University office. However, I am open to any alternative arrangements you suggest.
Will the outcomes of the research be published? The project will be submitted in the form of a journal-format thesis. Research findings, including findings from the interview data, will be reported on in journal articles. I will make sure to obtain your consent to be identified in any future publication. I will also correspond with you throughout the research process to keep you updated and to provide you with relevant documents, including the publication itself.
Who has reviewed the research project?
5 Initial choice of data analysis method for the interviews
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The project has been reviewed by an internal committee in the School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED) at The University of Manchester.
Contact for further information For further information, please make use of the following contact details.
My contact details:
Omar Kaissi; PhD candidate The Manchester Institute of Education University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL Email: [email protected]
My PhD supervisor’s contact details:
Professor Helen Gunter; DSA (Belmas); FAcSS The Manchester Institute of Education University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL Email: [email protected] Telephone (office): 0161 275 3449
What if something goes wrong? If you want to make a formal complaint about the conduct of the research, please contact the Head of the Research Office, Christie Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL.
Email: [email protected] Telephone: 0161 275 7583 or 275 8093
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Participant information sheet (for scholars abroad)
RESEARCH PROJECT: Male corporeality at the school: Investigating scholarly knowledge production on boys, masculinity and masculinity construction
You are being invited to take part in a PhD Education research project. The aim of the project is to investigate scholarly knowledge production on boys, masculinity and masculinity construction in the school. It is important for you to understand why the research is being done and what it involves. Please take time to read the following information carefully and discuss it with others if you wish. Please ask if there is anything that is not clear or if you would like more information. Take time to decide whether or not you wish to take part. Thank you.
Who will conduct the research? Omar Kaissi; PhD student The Manchester Institute of Education University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL
Title of the Research Male corporeality at the school: Investigating scholarly knowledge production on boys, masculinity and masculinity construction
What is the aim of the research? The interview is to fulfil the aim of phase two of the project. In this phase, having constructed an evidence base of knowledge claims regarding boys and masculinity in education, I interview key scholars to discuss their intellectual, social and cultural backgrounds, research journey, career and identity development, as well as their distinctive contributions to the field and how their points of view have evolved over time.
Why have I been chosen? As a prominent sociologist of education, your role in the field is essential in understanding how the literature on gender and education in general and boys in education in particular has developed over time.
What would I be asked to do if I took part?
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You will be asked to participate in a semi-structured interview. In the interview process, if you experience distress or discomfort for any reason, you may feel free to withdraw. There will be no attempts to convince you otherwise.
What happens to the data collected? The interview data will be analysed in order to create a narrative account of your professional biography and career experience.
How is confidentiality maintained? The interview will be conducted responsibly and ethically. I will do my utmost to respect your entitlement to privacy and to accord you your rights to confidentiality and anonymity. You will be provided with copies of the interview transcript and other relevant documents to review and submit your feedback. Your input will be fully taken into consideration. I will also let you know which quotes I want to use in data analysis. The interview audio data will be transformed into digital form. It will be stored and kept secure in the research data repository operated by The University of Manchester. The data will be destroyed only after the project is completed and the thesis is submitted. This will be in September of year 2019. The research data repository will be used to destroy the data.
What happens if I do not want to take part or if I change my mind? It is up to you to decide whether or not to take part. If you decide to take part, you will be given this information sheet to keep and be asked to sign a consent form. However, you are still free to withdraw at any time without giving a reason and without detriment to yourself.
What is the duration of the research? The duration of the interview is forty-five to ninety minutes.
Where will the research be conducted? If it suits you, I suggest conducting the interview via Skype.
Will the outcomes of the research be published? The project will be submitted in the form of a journal-format thesis. Research findings, including findings from the interview data, will be reported on in journal articles. I will make sure to obtain your consent to be identified in any future publication. I will also correspond with you throughout the research process to keep you updated and to provide you with relevant documents, including the publication itself.
Who has reviewed the research project? The project has been reviewed by an internal committee in the School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED) at The University of Manchester.
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Contact for further information For further information, please make use of the following contact details.
My contact details:
Omar Kaissi; PhD candidate The Manchester Institute of Education University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL Email: [email protected]
My PhD supervisor’s contact details:
Professor Helen Gunter; DSA (Belmas); FAcSS The Manchester Institute of Education University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL Email: [email protected] Telephone (office): 0161 275 3449
What if something goes wrong? If you want to make a formal complaint about the conduct of the research, please contact the Head of the Research Office, Christie Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL.
Email: [email protected] Telephone: 0161 275 7583 or 275 8093
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Consent form
Male corporeality at the school: Investigating scholarly knowledge production on boys, masculinity and masculinity construction
If you are happy to participate, please initial the boxes and sign below:
1. I confirm that I have read the attached information sheet on the above project and have had the opportunity to consider the information and ask questions and had these answered satisfactorily.
2. I understand that my participation in the study is voluntary and that I am free to withdraw at any time without giving a reason and without detriment to any treatment/service.
3. I understand that the interview will be audio-recorded.
4. I agree to the use of anonymous quotes.
5. I agree to take part in the above project
Name of Date Signature participant
Name of Date Signature person
taking consent
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Thank- you letter
Dear [name of respondent,]
Greetings. It was such a delight to speak with you today! I thoroughly enjoyed the interview, and I want to thank you for being generous with your time. I learnt a lot from your personal and professional history, as well as from your intellectual insights. I hope that we stay in touch in the future.
As I previously said, I will send through the interview transcript and other relevant documents as soon as they are ready. Your feedback and comments would be most appreciated.
Thank you again.
Best wishes,
Omar Kaissi
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Appendix 10: Interview schedule
Domain one: Career
1. Can you briefly describe your career path? 1.1. How have you gained entry to higher education? 1.2. Have you had any practitioner experience? 1.2.1. How did it contribute to your entry to higher education? 1.2.2. Can you say more about this?
2. How have your professional goals, choices and actions evolved over the years? 2.1. Were they influenced by your own ideas, significant others, past experiences and/or historical events? 2.1.1. Can you give examples?
3. How have you managed to stay creative, connected and up to date in your career? 3.1. What type of academic activities (e.g. networks; groups; journal editorial boards) did you organise or participate in? 3.2. Have you been a member of any organisations or institutions other than the university? 3.2.1. If yes, in what ways did it affect your higher education career? 3.3. Have you participated in some form of activism? 3.3.1. If yes, in what ways did it affect your higher education career?
Domain two: Research work, research funding and research impact
4. Can you describe your theoretical work in research projects on boys in education? 4.1. Have you reconsidered or abandoned ways of thinking (i.e. theories; models) that you previously endorsed? 4.1.1. If yes, what ways, and why have you reconsidered or abandoned them?
5. What can you tell me about the funding for these projects? 5.1. What were the main benefits and challenges involved?
6. What can you tell me about research funding more broadly? 6.1. How does working in a system where being funded is important to meet performance requirements affect you, your professional self and your research work? 6.1.1. Can you say more about this? Can you give examples? 6.2. How do you respond to undesirable effects? 6.3. Do funders nowadays view gender and education research as a strategic area? 6.3.1. If not, why do you think so? What are the main setbacks involved?
7. What impact has your research made? 287
7.1. What is your most significant impact or contribution to knowledge? 7.2. What do you think it takes nowadays for a piece of gender/sexuality and education research to make an impact or contribute to knowledge?
8. What do you think distinguishes you as a researcher? 8.1. Can you describe a personal or professional experience which reflects who you are as a researcher?
Domain three: The field
9. How would you characterise the current state of the field? 9.1. Is the field static or evolving? 9.1.1. If static, can you say more? 9.1.2. If evolving, in what ways? Intellectually, theoretically, epistemologically and/or methodologically? Toward what interests, priorities or concerns? 9.2. Can you predict what the next “turn” in the field will be? 9.3. How would you describe the relationship between your own research area and other areas in the field (e.g. educational leadership; policy studies in education)? 9.3.1. Are there any conflicts, tensions or contradictions? 9.3.2. Can you say more about this?
Domain four: Novice researchers
10. What would you tell novice researchers interested in joining the field? 10.1. What would you advise them? 10.2. What would you caution them against?
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Appendix 11: Thematic analysis excerpts
Excerpt A1
Code units (Respondent-Code) Subtheme Theme (personal emergent power) (concern with self-worth) R1-C1: Need to earn money Pragmatic Personal struggle R3-C1: Wanting to be a philosopher R8-C1: Need to get a job R4-C4: Being raised by a single parent Reflective R5-C1: Coming from an anti-Apartheid family R6-C1: Only family member to go to university R7-C8: Growing up as a little girl who lacks confidence R1-C3: Schooling experience in terms of gender and sexuality Different R4-C13: Being gay in academia R6-C2: Childhood and coming to terms with social class and sexuality R6-C3: Joining university to avoid dealing with sexuality R6-C4: Growing up in a racist and homophobic society R6-C5: Struggling with sexuality R6-C9: Trying to understand research subjects as a gay researcher R6-C14: Being or identifying as gay in academia R4-C8: Being independent Independent R8-C5: Self-motivated and independent as a PhD student
1 This excerpt is taken from the data analysis for chapter six. First, I applied open coding to generate initial codes. Second, using thinking tools, I grouped the codes into subthemes that represent personal emergent powers. Finally, I arranged the subthemes into broad conceptual themes which denote predominant concerns with self-worth in the social order of reality (Archer, 2000).
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Excerpt B2
Examples of code units (Respondent-Code) Subtheme Theme (dispositions of the (concerns in research habitus) practice) R1-C23: Looking at the contextual drivers of the “boy turn” as the biggest impact Gender justice Understanding, R1-C24: Interest in the politics and policies on boys’ education (as opposed to practical stuff) explaining and R1-C27: The assumption in the field that boys in education are white, middle-class boys assessing R2-C3: Understanding masculinities and femininities in parallel R3-C1: The field dealing with gender identity R3-C2: The issue of the intersex activist movement R4-C24: Thinking more broadly about where the issues are regarding masculinities in education R4-C25: Pluralities versus conservatisms as the next turn for the field R6-C10: Ongoing debates on “which boys” R7-C7: Research work as more about gender justice in general than merely about boys’ education R2-C1: Creating knowledge relevant to social justice Social justice R2-C26: Developing knowledge that contributes to people’s needs R5-C3: Thinking about the structures the necessitate women’s oppression, or men’s dominance R5-C19: Interest in relations of power as essential R6-C31: Need to engage with Global South knowledge R8-C14: Maintaining an interest in the policy-academia nexus R8-C15: The push to engage with the Global South and postcolonial theories in the field R1-C1: Taking up Goffman and social interactionism Poststructuralist R1-C2: The influence of Bourdieu theorising R2-C5: Hegemonic masculinity as an important concept R3-C7: Still reading Foucault
2 This excerpt is taken from the data analysis for chapter seven. First, I applied open coding to generate initial codes. Second, using thinking tools, I grouped the codes into subthemes that represent unique dispositions (Bourdieu, 1990a). Finally, I arranged the dispositions into broad conceptual themes that denote predominant concerns in research practice in HE.
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R4-C1: Using Butler’s work on construction R4-C2: Going back consistently to Connell’s work R5-C1: Reading Foucault and thinking about power R5-C4: Finding Hall’s work useful to think about identity R6-C5: Interest in trans scholarship from a phenomenological perspective R6-C6: Graduate students interested in lived experiences and genealogical work R2-C23: Trying to make sense of a mess of materials and data in the field Feminist sensibilities R2-C25: Taking a stance toward existing knowledge in the field R3-C24: Thinking differently as what makes research impactful R3-C25: Transgender identity changing the field R4-C3: Research really centring on feminisms R4-C21: Investing in ethnographic research and student voice as impact R7-C1: Working with a massive theoretical toolkit R7-C4: Acquiring and maintaining feminist sensibilities R8-C1: Feminisms as really important R1-C4: Preferring Goffman’s more empirical work to Butler’s Epistemological R2-C27: Bourdieu’s deeply pessimistic position vigilance R2-C28: Foucault discouraging links between research and social activism R3-C4: Accepting thinking of gender in a more fluid way R3-C5: Butler unfit for children R3-C8: Not enamored with New Materialisms R5-C20: Field in a mess because of the New Materialisms R6-C1: Intense debates on transgender issues and trans-scholarship R6-C7: Extending and critiquing feminist and queer positions in the field R8-C16: The inutility of New Materialisms R2-C30: Research becoming predominantly small-scale ethnography Solid knowledge R5-C18: Going back to materialisms )in the Marxist sense) as important for impact R5-C21: Preferring not to work with mainstream psychology (because it has no notion of the social) R6-C30: Need to engage with intersectionality R6-C32: Need to engage with neuroscience
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Appendix 12: Copy of data management plan1
Researching Corporeality in Education: An Investigation of Knowledge and Knowledge Production in Gender and Education Research on Boys
Manchester Data Management Outline
1. Is this project already funded?
No
Will you be applying for funding from any of the following sources? If your funder isn't listed, please enter in the free text box provided.
Arts and Humanities Research Council
The project is not externally funded.
3. Is The University of Manchester the lead institution for this project?
Yes - only institution involved
4. What data will you use in this project (please select all that apply)?
Acquire new data
Generate textual supporting information only
The project uses the integrative literature review as a data generation method to construct an evidence base of primary research outputs. The resulting documentary data are analysed using document analysis. In addition, the project uses the semi-structued interview to generate life and career oral histories in gender and education research in the field of education. The resulting interview data are analysed using thematic analysis.
5. Where will the data be stored and backed-up during the project lifetime?
Other storage system (please list below)
University of Manchester Research Data Storage Service (Isilon)
In addition to the university storage service, the data will be saved in safe locations on my personal laptop.
6. If you will be using Research Data Storage, how much storage will you require?
< 1 TB
7. If you have a contractual agreement with a 3rd party data provider will any of the data associated with this project be sourced from, processed or stored outside of the institutions and groups stated on your agreement?
1 This copy was electronically generated and included here without adjustment. Not applicable
8. How long do you intend to keep your data for after the end of your project (in years)?
< 5 years
Questions about personal information Personal information or personal data, the two terms are often used interchangeably, relates to identifiable living individuals. Special category personal data is more sensitive information such as medical records, ethnic background, religious beliefs, political opinions, sexual orientation and criminal convictions or offences information. If you are not using personal data then you can skip the rest of this section. Please note that in line with data protection law (the General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018), personal information should only be stored in an identifiable form for as long as is necessary for the project; it should be pseudonymised (partially de-identified) and/or anonymised (completely de—identified) as soon as practically possible. You must obtain the appropriate ethical approval in order to use identifiable personal data.
Personal information
Pseudonymised personal data
Anonymised personal data
Audio and/or video recordings
10. Please provide details of how you plan to store, protect and ensure confidentiality of the participants' information as stated in the question above.
The interview data contain personal details regarding the interviewee's life and career history. These will be stored in safe locations, using both the university system and my own personal laptop. For the purposes of publication, all references to interviewees in cited data will be pseudonymised. The interviewees have been granted rights to confidentiality and anonymity.
11. If you are storing personal information will you need to keep it beyond the end of the project?
Yes – Other (explain below)
The interview transcripts will be needed to generate new data that can be used to produce new journal articles/book chapters. The data, thus, are valuable to the progress of both the current PhD project and potentially future projects/publication plans.
12. Sharing person identifiable information can present risks to participants’ privacy, researchers and the institution. Will the participants’ information (personal and/or sensitive) be shared with or accessed by anyone outside of the University of Manchester? This includes using 3rd party service providers such as cloud storage providers or survey platforms.
No
13. If you will be sharing personal information outside of the University of Manchester will the individual or organisation you are sharing with be outside the EEA?
Not applicable
14. Are you planning to use the personal information for future purposes such as research? 293
Yes
This has been explicitly addressed both in the participant information sheet disseminated to potential interviewees and in the consent form. All respondents signed and returned the consent form, and so their agreement to the use of data for future purposes, namely research publications, has been guaranteed. The respondents have also been notified that they may withdraw their consent at any time during or after the duration of the research project.
15. Who will act as the data custodian or information asset owner for this study?
Myself.
16. Please provide the date on which this plan was last reviewed (dd/mm/yyyy).
29 March 2019
Project details
What is the purpose of your research project?
The project is a study of knowledge production in gender and education research on boys and masculinities in the school in the UK, primarily, Australia and North America, within the field of education in higher education. The project uses both documentary and interview data and is principally concerned with the sociological focus of corporeality and the current and future conditions for engagement in extra-rational, corporeal knowing in sociologcially informed research in the field. The project is important and timely in that it raises sensitive issues and questions regarding the place of sociological knowing in an era of ongoing economic neoliberalisation of education. The investigation is guided by the following research questions: 1. How is knowledge in G&E research on boys and masculinities produced, and with what implications for corporeal knowing? 2. What are the challenges for G&E scholars engaged in knowledge production as personal commitment, and with what implications for corporeal knowing? 3. What are the challenges for G&E scholars engaged in knowing and knowledge production through research practice in HE, and with what implications for corporeal knowing? What policies and guidelines on data management, data sharing, and data security are relevant to your research project?
The project is not funded, and so there are no funder policies to be applied in obtaining and securing the project data. Apart from saving and protecting the documentary and interview data using the university storage service and my own personal laptop, there are no currently applied formal procedues or standards for data management. As personal investigator, I have a duty to ensure that data will continue to be safeguaded should I leave the university or be unable, for personal or professional reasons, to use the university storage service to dispose off the data myself. For this purpose, I intend to follow the univesity guidelines with regard to staying in contact and collaborating with the responsible team or officers at my department (The Manchester Institute of Education).
Responsibilities and Resources
Who will be responsible for data management?
I will be responsible for data management in my capacity as principal investigator. There are no other investigators on the project. What resources will you require to deliver your plan?
The second phase of the project is interview-based, and so fieldwork support has been requested to provide travel and living expenses across several locations in the UK. The total budget of 800 pounds was requested. A detailed report has been submitted to the PGR Office in 2018 to account for expenditure.
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Data Collection
What data will you collect or create?
Documentary and interview data. How will the data be collected or created?
The documentary data have been generated using the integrative literature review approach. This approach in non-systematic in nature, and it is suitable because it enables the researcher to choose a particular focus in the process of collecting and reviewing documents. The focus in my project is research on, with and for boys and masculinities in the school, and so primary research outputs in the form of journal articles on boys in education have been collected. Document analysis has been used to generate and organise new data in tehcnical records. The interview data have been generated through semi-structured interviews with eight gender and education scholars in the UK, Australia and North America. Transcripts have been produced, and oral histories have been created and analysed using a systematic model of thematic analysis. Purposive sampling has been used to create a population list of 33 interviewees, and then select eight in total. The following inclusive/exclusion criteria have been applied: (1) definition, in relation to the interviewee’s academic status and discipline within higher education, (2) research interests, in relation to the focus and aims of his/her previously undertaken research projects, (3) research cultural context, in relation to issues concerning the object of analysis (i.e. boys in education) in these projects and (4) location, in relation to the higher education institution where he/she is currently based.
Documentation and Metadata
What documentation and metadata will accompany the data?
All data are saved and stored in Word Document format. Future users will need to be meet the following essential criteria in order to access and exploit the data: 1. A good understanding of critical realism as a philosophy, theory of social science and sociological approach to the study of society. Also, a good understanding of how critical realism can be methologically applied in empirical studies - e.g. through using tools such as phenomenon, context, regularity and causal mechanism - is desirable. 2. An advanced understanding of paradigms in social science (e.g. positivism and interpretivism) and of social theories in sociology, education and other fields of study (e.g. poststructuralism, social interactionism and new materialisms). 3. An advanced understanding of key concepts in gender/queer theory (e.g. hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, the heterosexual matric, gender performativity). 4. An advanced and critical understanding of the uses of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies and methods (e.g. interviews, ethnographic observation, Randomised Controlled Trials) in the field of education and the social sciences more broadly. 5. A good understanding of the policies and practices governing knowledge production in higher education institutions (e.g. knowledge of the Research Excellence Framework in the UK). 6. An advanced ability to appreciate and appropriately handle interview data with sensitive personal information (on goals, career plans, life achievements and future courses of action), in-depth commentary on current conditions in the academic workplace in higher education and implications for knowledge production in the field of educatuon and beyond.
Ethics and Legal Compliance
How will you manage any ethical issues?
There are three main ethical issues that need to be taken into consideration: (1) In my project, investigating knowledge production is important for developing rigorous explanations of how conceptual and empirical knowledge claims regarding boys and masculinity in education are produced. Ethically, however, there is the risk of leading the investigation in ways that make it seem more about academic competence than disposition. To avoid falling into this trap, I will make sure to include a section about ethical integrity in the research design chapter of my thesis that further elaborates on the aim of the investigation by clarifying that what I am primarily interested in is how scholars may fail to recognise that what and how they think about their objects of analysis, regardless of whether or not they are competent 295
intellectuals, is to a great extent an effect of field structures biasing sociological inquiry in certain (un)problematic directions. (2) In the interview process, respondents may have reason to experience distress or discomfort. I will do my utmost to avoid causing them any emotional or other harm, including disclosing at the outset the study’s nature, purposes, procedures and likely outcomes. I will also do my utmost to ensure that their entitlement to privacy is protected and that they are duly accorded their rights to confidentiality and anonymity. (3) There are issues concerning data analysis, such as the risk of misquoting respondents. To avoid misconduct, I shall correspond with the respondents as frequently as necessary, providing them with the interview transcript to elicit their feedback and revise my work accordingly. Also, I shall let them know which quotes in particular will be used in analysis. How will you manage copyright and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) issues?
I will own the copyright and IPR of all existing and future data. Th project is not internally or externally funded, and there are no other investigators involved.
Storage and backup
How will the data be stored and backed up?
The documentary and interview data will be saved and protected using the university storage service, as well as on my personal laptop. I recognise that the latter option is very risky, and so I have taken precautions such as the use of encryption. How will you manage access and security?
The data contain personal information and details about the interviewees, and so they are confidential and require security measures to be protected. The risks to data security concern potential unauthorised access that would lead to personal information and details being used for purposes other than academic research or being abused to cause emotional and other harm to the interviewees. This is very imporant, as the interviewees continue to be leading scholars in their field of study. Thus far, my main and only data security method has been encyption on folders on both my personal laptop and my university student account. I am confident in reporting that this method has been efficient. I have not encountered any problems.
Selection and Preservation
Which data should be retained, shared, and/or preserved?
The interview data should be retained, shared and preserved. The uses of these data include validating my research findings, completing currently ongoing work on outputs from the PhD PROJECT, brainstroming for new research projects/publications, providing an excellent interview dataset for researchers interested in, among other things, research on professionals and professionalism in research practice in higher education and, finally, teaching on both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. These uses are not required by any other party but myself. What is the long-term preservation plan for the dataset?
The long-term plan will focus on constructing an archive for the project. The digital archive will be organised into different sections pertaining to each type of data (documentary and interview), and it will feature both general information regarding the history of the generation, analysis and interpretation of the data and more specific guidelines and suggestiongs regarding how they can be used to provide a theoretical, conceptual, methodological and/or empirical basis for work on other projects in the field of education and beyond.
Data Sharing
How will you share the data?
The data should be made available for use by university research staff. Moreover, although I recognise that data should be made publicly available, I will be handling data requests myself, due to the complexity and sensitivity of the interview data in this project. 296
Are any restrictions on data sharing required?
Yes. The user will have to anonymise and pseudonymise the data, and they are required to contact the interviewees to ask for permission for re-use. For instance, the interviewees may not find agreeable the focus, aims of investigation and/or approach of the research project in which the data are intended to be reused.
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Appendix 13: Authorisation to submit a Journal Format Thesis
School of Environment, Education and Development The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL
www.seed.manchester.ac.uk
Omar Kaissi
Student ID: 9119037
Sent by email to: [email protected] 08
February 2018
Dear Omar, Application: Journal Format
I am writing to you regarding your recent application to change your mode of study. The Director of Postgraduate Research, Dr Steve Jones, acting as the Chair of the Postgraduate Research Committee of the School of Environment, Education & Development has considered your case and has Approved your request to submit a thesis in Journal Format.
Please note that before you can submit your thesis you must give Notice of Submission at least 6 weeks before the submission date. The Notice of Submission form is available online via eProg, which you can access with your normal University username and password at: https://app.manchester.ac.uk/eprog
If you have any questions regarding any of the above, please contact your divisional administrator. Yours sincerely
Debbie Kubiena
Senior Doctoral Programmes Officer
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