Some people have asked how to do this. There are many ways. My way is to focus less on collecting data from racialized communities and more on treating historical and contemporary representations of these communities with the academic literature as data. https://twitter.com/nelsonlflores/status/1340683780797947907

To me reading an academic article is no different than reading a research participant interview. It is all data. To treat academic representations as fundamentally different is to reify the idea that academic knowledge is dispassionate and emerges from nowhere.

I don’t do “literature reviews.” I do genealogical studies of the field that situate dominant framings within the sociohistorical context that produced them and critically interrogate the normative subject positions that lie at their core.

While many academics presuppose a research-policy-practice disconnect as the fundamental challenge to social transformation, I use genealogy to show how the normative subject position of the academic literature parallels and co-constructs with those in policy and practice.

It is only after doing this genealogical work that interrogates the construction of normative subject positions that I ever bring in human subject data. If I do it is not to “give voice” but rather to show the impact of these normative subject positions on teachers and students.

What I refuse to do is to use human subject research to try to disprove deficit perspectives produced as a result of these normative subject positions. Trying to disprove racism is a futile endeavor. I am more interested in illustrating its impact in the hope of dismantling it.

Human subject research is sometimes not even necessary. Its fetishization allows academics to position racism and other oppressive ideologies as existing out in the world for us to discover rather than something our fields have produced and remain deeply invested in maintaining.