Getting in Trouble: Feminist Postcritical Policy Ethnography in an Urban School

Abstract

This article addresses how the author uses the notion of “getting in trouble” as a source of methodological energy to hold the researcher accountable to the complexities of conducting ethnographic policy studies. She focuses specifically on how a feminist postcritical methodology might be used to read for the disruptions at work in sociocultural policy research and locate analytic tools for getting through anxieties generated by complicated and competing readings of empirical material. The author (re)presents and analyzes troubling material from her own study regarding how one student’s experience of racialized course enrollment was talked about and justified within the context of a “successful” high school. She offers four incommensurable and therefore complementary analytic reads using anthropological, foucaultian, critical race theory, and feminist postcritical frameworks to bring complicated retellings of school enrollment practices into play in an attempt to foreground the lived experiences of policy negotiations and their effects on students.