Centering knowledge production: A matter of historical memory

Abstract

By now, my 2016 Council on Anthropology of Education (CAE) presidential address in Minneapolis has become part of our historical memory. Apparently, it has also become infamous. In the pages of this journal, it was called the “big elephant in the room” by Marta Baltodano in the publication of her 2017 presidential address (Baltodano, 2019, 384). Curiously, it has also been characterized pejoratively as a defense of “objective, descriptive research” (Baltodano, 2019, 384), or of research to produce “knowledge for knowledge's sake” (Sánchez, 2019, 402).

With this publication, readers can now decide for themselves if such characterizations are fair. After all, only a relatively small portion of CAE members attended the address, and fewer still were there from start to end. Soon after learning what a negative reaction the talk had produced, I resolved to reconstruct the oral version of the talk as faithfully as possible. I then composed a meta-reflection, interspersed with the rawness of the original talk, which I offer to you here. Indeed, I take up Patricia Sánchez's assertion that it is “important for CAE's ethnographic soul to have at least some documentation on what was said that year and how others interpreted the speech” (Sánchez, 2019, 402).

Granted, my 2016 message was delivered in an untimely and unskillful manner. There was much to cause confusion or offense; my questioning of the CAE mission statement came to overshadow my broader argument, and the moment was especially poor for that. Perhaps I should have just left well enough alone and continued to lick my wounds in silence. But a stubborn inner voice—not to mention numerous CAE colleagues—kept telling me that there was more value in airing this out than relegating it to the rumor mill of oral history. Even now, perhaps especially now amidst our post-2020 racial reckoning, we need to honor the diversity of our modes of knowledge production in the Council. At stake is both the urgency of change and the longer historical memory of our organization. I hope that you will agree.

Since some have wondered why the address was never published in the accustomed fashion, it remains only to give the details of how this current publication came to be. On January 27, 2017, I submitted an earlier version of the following text to then-Editors-in-Chief of Anthropology of Education Quarterly (AEQ), Sally Campbell Galman and Laura Valdiviezo. After their initial encouragement, I continued to revise the piece—with input from at least six CAE colleagues—and submitted a revised version (published here without substantial change) on July 6, 2017. Nearly a year later, on April 2, 2018, I received a rejection letter from the editors. They had been unable to secure a willingness from any CAE colleague to write a response. More importantly, they had asked numerous members of the Editorial Board to consider the piece for publication, and there was apparent unanimity against it, on the grounds that it neither “advances research and knowledge in the field,” nor “constitutes a presidential address” worthy of publication in AEQ (Campbell Galman and Valdiviezo, 2018). Firm and well-reasoned rebuttals were supplied by former AEQ Editor-in-Chief/CAE President Katie Anderson-Levitt and former CAE President Bryan Brayboy, and I very much appreciated their forthright honesty and collegiality. I was given the opportunity to resubmit the piece as a wholesale revision within six weeks, by May 20, 2018. I was neither able nor inclined to do so.

After letting it sit for more than three years, in the summer of 2021 I approached a member of the new CAE leadership team about whether they thought the time might be right for a reconsideration. As I explained in that initial message, I was fully prepared to publish the piece on my own website and send out a message with a link to the CAE community, for those who might care to read it. To my surprise, they gave their blessing for its reconsideration by the new editors of AEQ, who then fast-tracked the piece for publication. Knowing that this publication may stir more polemic, I thank them for their commitment and courage. Here it is, warts and all, for posterity.

Mindful that association with me can still have negative consequences in CAE, and heeding the recommendations of the 2018 AEQ reviewers, I have removed the names of all those who gave me important feedback and suggestions back then. They are deserving of acknowledgement, but they know who they are. Some tried to save me from further displaying my putatively colossal ignorance and insensitivity. Roughly as many of them urged me to drop this fool's errand and spare myself further embarrassment as encouraged me to continue seeking publication. To the former, I plead your indulgence. To the latter, here it is at last.

Scarcely 10 days after the national elections, on the evening of Friday, November 18, 2016, I delivered an address titled “The Talk We Walk: Knowledge, Identity, and Action in the Field of Educational Anthropology.” The address questioned the current wording of the CAE mission statement as a launching point for reflecting on our identities and actions as educational anthropologists. Scheduled as part of CAE's business meeting and new member reception, the talk was well received by some, perhaps even most, present. But I soon learned that a significant number of those present were distressed, hurt, or deeply offended by the address.

Of course, this was very unsettling to me. I had hoped to provoke reflection, even healthy debate, but I was not prepared for the disturbance that my talk produced. Had I offended even one person, that would have been upsetting enough; the fact that I offended a significant number of those attending, and drove a wedge between segments of the CAE membership, drove me to tears. Some of these people were my friends, my dear colleagues, my long-time comrades in work and struggle. How could I have let them down so badly? How could I have sown such division when my aim, ironically, was to promote greater inclusiveness?

Since that evening, I have endeavored to find out more about just what exactly some people found so distressing or offensive. This has been a painful process, as very few have been willing to share their perspectives with me directly. Instead, I have had to learn much through second-hand commentary. I have also read and re-read my written text, and I have cringed at times in recognition of how some of my points could have been construed.

Consonant with CAE tradition, I had planned to refine and expand the oral text into a full-length article, providing more examples and making more complete and nuanced arguments for publication in AEQ. Some have urged me to overhaul the talk in this fashion and retool it more clearly around its central argument for a diversity of modes of knowledge production, dissemination, and action for social justice. However, to overhaul the talk completely feels almost like a cowardly act of whitewashing (yes, the pun is intended). As a result of the strongly polarized reactions to the spoken address, and even with the risk of re-opening old wounds, I have decided to do something a bit different: embrace my vulnerability and create a multi-layered, reflexive text. Leaving intact the text of my address from which I spoke, and trying to reconstruct the address as faithfully as possible,¹ I provide a species of meta-commentary to frame the talk, reflect on some of its problematic formulations, and clarify or expand some points.

I believe this strategy serves an important purpose of transparency and accountability to the organization: all those unable to be present can judge for themselves, and all those who were present can now have a fuller record and reflect on what produced such strong and varied responses.² My hope is that such transparency will foster learning and have a healing effect. Some of this learning is personal, of course, and I trust that readers will not find this reflection too self-indulgent. If this reflection seems too focused on me, well, there's really no way around it: my professional reputation has been damaged, and I am called to both recognize and defend myself. But much of the learning, hopefully, is organizational. The fallout itself can be instructive about the assumptions we make about each others’ scholarship and politics, and about what CAE's central mission should be. Ongoing dialogue should be our guiding principle.

Though I referred to this briefly at the outset of the address itself, I want to start here by providing a fuller context for the scheduling of the address and the decision to move forward with it at a time of such obvious soul-searching and emotional trauma following the election. In part I do this to acquit the CAE Executive Committee (EC) and Mission Committee co-chairs from any blame for the divisive reaction my talk produced.

In one way or another, I had been thinking about delivering such an address for several years. I worked on it sporadically from time to time, typing up notes and ideas. In June 2016, when the EC was deliberating over the proper scheduling of CAE's many special events, they knew that my address would make a case for altering the mission statement and could be potentially controversial. The decision was made to schedule the Mission Committee's town hall after the address, to give proper time for full discussion of the issues raised by my talk and the membership survey conducted earlier in the fall. Some consideration was given to the prospect of scheduling the presidential address as its own independent session, perhaps over the noon hour; but partly to avoid too much overlap of CAE special events, and partly to follow CAE tradition, we decided to keep the address as part of the business meeting. I assured the EC that I was going to avoid explicitly polemic argumentation and that my main goal would be to celebrate the diverse range of work that CAE produced—thus adding to the traditionally celebratory nature of the business meeting.

Most of the talk was written well before the day of the national elections. I confess that in the final weeks of the election cycle I was, like many, way too complacent about Hillary Clinton's prospects for victory. As terrified and disgusted as anyone by Donald Trump's racist and misogynistic campaign, I simply believed too much in the ultimate “wisdom of the American people,” as President Barack Obama often put it. My own electoral energies focused on the Democrats running for office to represent the State of Indiana. Thus, I was shocked and outraged over the course of election night and in the following days. In our final video-conference before the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings, held the day after Tuesday's election, I once again raised the issue with the EC about whether to stick to my planned address or to give this time over to an open discussion about how we might respond as an organization to the current political moment. I expressed a willingness but also some reluctance to do the latter because I had already invested a good deal of time in preparing a talk (and the accompanying slides) that was very specific to CAE and could not be delivered in any other forum. This is when the EC decided to give over a significant portion of our three-hour board meeting to an open discussion with the CAE membership about action strategies. It was also decided that the town hall meeting planned for the Saturday afternoon after the address could be devoted primarily to such strategizing as well. With such commitments in place, I felt that I could “safely” deliver my address as planned.

Hindsight is always sharper than foresight, as they say. I now recognize what poor judgment I used in persisting with the planned address. In the aftermath of the elections, most CAE members came to the meetings looking for succor, solidarity, and insight for the struggle ahead. It was a poor moment to open a big can of worms. In retrospect, too, I erred in some of my word choices and flow of argument. The talk was too raw and had not been sufficiently reviewed by colleagues. All that said, I cannot apologize for the principal questions I raised in the talk or for the discomfort that its central intellectual challenge may have produced. I insist on my central thesis: that our field is defined primarily by the forms of knowledge that we produce, not the problems we try to solve. The two are often inseparable, of course, but we are strongest and most inclusive, organizationally, when we recognize our diversity of knowledge production and honor the many paths that lead to solving (or, perhaps as often, redefining) problems—including, and perhaps especially, problems of social injustice.

And this is where I can let the address begin to speak for itself …

****

Good evening, folks. I can't tell you how much of an honor it is to stand before you tonight. As I look out over the audience, I see so many dear colleagues and friends, and, indeed, many past CAE presidents. It is humbling to participate in this venerable CAE tradition and to join the ranks of such esteemed colleagues.

I have to be honest with you and tell you that I sure didn't expect to be standing here after a Trump electoral victory. In the agony of this post-election context, it's certainly been tempting to just throw out this address and use this time to talk together about what has happened in our national political scene and what we might do. In fact, in the Executive Committee we actively discussed this possibility. If much of what characterizes CAE work is a sense of passion and urgency about correcting injustice, then that passion and urgency is now magnified more than ever, and we have to draw on it to resist the reactionary forces that have managed to capture our political system. As you'll see in a moment, although I'm going to open up a critique of our mission's statement's focus on advancing solutions to educational problems, I have to say that right now we've got a big fucking problem on our hands, and we have to figure out how we can help solve it. That said, because I'm confident that enough other spaces have been opened up for these more forthrightly strategic and political discussions,³ I'm going to stick to my original intent. The timing might not be great, but I'm going to forge ahead anyway. So, grab a drink and strap yourselves in. What I've got to say may have a bit of polemic, may rub some folks the wrong way (hence the “sassy” in the title⁴), but my aim is to generate discussion in a way that will make our organization even stronger, more inclusive, and more effective.

****

OK, so big red flag at the start here. Didn't I tell the EC that I was not going to engage in much polemic? Why did I put my audience on edge from the beginning and admit that I knew the talk might offend some folks? I naively hoped that my audience would clearly see the noble intentions that animated my critique, and thus take it in the spirit of scholarly debate. But even as I spoke these words, I knew that I was setting the wrong tone. I had a gnawing sense of doubt about whether I should proceed.

*****

So … over 10 years ago, a mission statement was drafted and ratified by the CAE membership. I know a little about the circumstances of its creation but not the principal drafters. I don't even recall voting for or against it, or what I thought about it the first time I really noticed it. But over the last several years—especially the three years of my presidential service—I have become intimately familiar with it. And the more familiar I become, the more it chafes against some of the sensibilities that are inseparable from my identity as an anthropologist. So, I want to use the mission statement as a kind of launching point for examining, questioning, and ultimately celebrating what we do as anthropologists of education.

Now, it's not my job to question whether CAE as an organization has aligned itself fully and well with its mission statement. That's the job of the Mission Committee, and they've been doing it quite well, I must say, asking in recent years, “Are We Walking Our Talk?” The question I'd like to ask here instead is: What's the talk we're trying to walk? Is the talk itself—in the form of the mission statement—adequate and inclusive enough for what we all do in our field?

I'm going to try to point to an answer to the first and second sets of questions; I'll leave it to the Mission Committee and the membership more generally to answer the third.

So here is the heart of the current mission statement, what I call the core statement: “The mission of the Council on Anthropology and Education is to advance anti-oppressive, socially equitable, and racially just solutions to educational problems through research using anthropological perspectives, theories, methods, and findings.” This is followed by a more extended statement of “purpose,” along with three substantial clauses on research, collaboration, and advocacy.⁵

Purpose

The mission requires strategic responsibilities and actions in research, collaboration and advocacy, including commitment to racial and social justice inside the organization itself.

1. Research

I want to make a critique of this core statement, especially the way it places the goal of “solving problems” of social and racial justice up front—in fact, when you strip away all the qualifiers and dependent clauses, you can see that in its essence our mission is to “solve educational problems.” Now I know this can sound disingenuous coming from a White man in this society, and I'm keenly aware of the risks I incur in taking such a position. My aim is by no means to offend the statement's drafters and supporters; in fact, I've assiduously avoided digging into the details of how the statement was drafted, because I don't want to personalize this. I went to the so-called Canterbury event in 2004, from whence this mission statement emerged. I had a one-year-old at the time and another on the way, plus ongoing fieldwork in Mexico, so I guess I was missing in action, so to speak. For people who know me well, or anyone who knows my work and both my professional and personal conduct, I don't think my strong commitment to social and racial justice is in doubt (though perhaps it will be after this talk!). So, if I share a commitment to advancing social and racial justice through my work, as the mission statement proclaims, and I do appreciate much of what the extended statement of purpose tries to accomplish, then why does the core statement still bother me so much? It has to do, above all, with the ordering of its clauses, and the centrality of this notion of “problem solving.” Indeed, the use of anthropological theories and methods seems largely an afterthought.

So, let me just show you an alternative formulation that keeps the emphasis on justice but that I would prefer: “The mission of the Council on Anthropology and Education is to produce knowledge about education, everywhere it occurs, through research using anthropological perspectives, theories, and methods; where possible, such knowledge should advance socially equitable and racially just solutions to educational problems.”⁶ Ah, that just feels so much better.

What does it mean that we place the commitment to justice first, in terms of problem-solving, and the “use of anthropological theories, methods, etc.” in a secondary position? What does it mean that we mark racial justice but not other forms of justice? Does it mean that if our commitment to racial justice is not explicit and foregrounded in our work, then we are out of line with CAE's mission? Does it mean that if our work doesn't specifically and immediately aim to solve problems of justice, or even recommend possible solutions, that we have failed in our fundamental duty as educational anthropologists? Indeed, does our mission statement allow for enough inclusivity and diversity in how we conceive of going about our work as educational anthropologists? Ironically, I submit to you that in our zeal to create a more socially and racially just society, we may be creating further divides within our own field. In sum, with regard to our field I'm a “big tent” sort of guy, and the tent seems diminished with this statement.

*****

This entire section is undoubtedly one of the more off-putting and controversial moments of my talk. First, I showed tremendous hubris (and ego) in assuming that most of those present would have known me, or even some of my published work, and thus given me the benefit of the doubt in terms of my intentions. People who know me well are familiar with my penchant for sarcasm and playful provocation, but to think that most people in attendance knew me was foolishly presumptuous, to say the least! Moreover, even knowing my published work in critical anthropology does not give colleagues a view into the commitments and sacrifices I have made for many years in the pursuit of social justice. Again, to assume such familiarity was the height of folly.

I also showed an awareness that what I was going to say was dangerous for a “White man in this society,” but blithely continued on, nonetheless. It could seem as if I was cleverly trying to make excuses, in advance, for what I knew to be a problematic argument. Reading this now makes me understand why one of my colleagues told me the next day that “it seemed like you said, ‘I'm not a racist,’ and then went on to tell a racist joke.” My heart sank when I heard that. I was trying to express a sense of risk-taking, since a White man would not normally dare to question the mission statement's strong articulation of racial justice. More hubris. Clearly, I had little sense of the racial (and gender?) privilege I was wielding at that moment, not to mention the privilege of my presidential office. I ignorantly assumed my Whiteness as a privileged position from which to speak.

The other potential problem is that I proposed an actual change of wording to the core of the mission statement. This seemed high-handed. Instead of allowing such a change to emerge from a more organic process of consultation, I was simply proposing a change unilaterally. Moreover, it was likely viewed as a direct affront to the drafters of the statement, who had undoubtedly spent much time crafting its clauses. In response to that, I would say three things: First, I had assumed it was clear enough that this was just an informal proposal, a little thought experiment to see how the statement might look if it put the production of knowledge front and center but still preserved a statement about justice as an ideal rationale and application for producing such knowledge.

Second, my challenge to the ordering of the statement's clauses was also based on numerous conversations and emails I've exchanged with (sometimes former or potential) CAE members over the years. Some of these folks have quit CAE or stopped coming to our conference as frequently. So, I felt that in making such an argument I was channeling the concerns and frustrations of a good number of CAE members, past and present. We need to accommodate the full diversity of ideologies, methodologies, and action commitments of our fellow educational anthropologists. There's a fine line between striving for unified commitment and enforcing ideological orthodoxy. In our zeal to manifest our commitment to particular causes, or solving particular problems, we run the risk of alienating those who don't put the same problems front and center in their work.

Third, my decision to rhetorically propose a change to the mission statement, even for heuristic purposes, undoubtedly came as an unwelcome surprise to many of those present. It wasn't meant to be the focus of my talk; it was a launching point for questioning, and perhaps reminding ourselves, what it is that we all have in common as educational anthropologists. But in retrospect, it was still an unskillful, arguably disrespectful, move. In retrospect, I should have done my research and reached out to the mission statement's original authors, asking them for an accounting of the reasons behind the statement's current formulation. At the very least, I should have sought them out for dialogue and input so they would not feel struck by what might have seemed like an unanticipated lightning bolt. In this regard, ironically, I violated one of the key anthropological “modes of acting” that I introduced later in my talk: the importance of context and dialogue.

Word has also gotten back to me that my use of the qualifier “so-called” to describe the 2004 CAE meeting held at the Canterbury Hotel in San Francisco sounded overtly disrespectful. It really wasn't meant to be; it was just a convenient shorthand. I was an enthusiastic participant at what came to be called the “Canterbury Convocation” and have the utmost respect for the discussions and presentations that occurred there, even as I may quibble still with the wording of the mission statement.

Finally, I can now see more clearly why my posing of the question of “What does it mean to mark racial justice?” could be seen as rhetorical and thus inherently hostile to the inclusion of such phrasing in our statement. I truly meant to pose it as an open question, to ask whether it was inclusive enough of concerns about gender justice, for instance, or even class justice. But I can also now see, in retrospect, how the very posing of the question could be seen as a direct challenge to the ongoing inclusion of the phrase, and for that I am sorry. No doubt it was especially disconcerting in light of the Trump electoral victory and the deepened assault on civil rights that his administration would pursue. As I comment further on, my concern was about whether the statement adequately represents the intersectionality of manifold forms of oppression. Some have noted for me since that a critical race theory approach is inherently intersectional. But for many scholars less familiar with critical race theory, the current formulation of our statement could be seen to privilege race as the form of oppression most deserving of our attention and action. A case can be made for this: after all, we are a society that lives forever in the shadow of dual genocide (of Indigenous Peoples and African Americans) and deeply entrenched racism; post-2016, we faced a federal administration openly abetting white nationalist aspirations. I am thus more chastened than ever about the need to preserve a specific mention of racial justice in our mission statement. Still, the broader point about assumed intersectionality seems to me worthy of debate rather than definitional fiat.

*****

Now some people would say, “Well, a mission statement doesn't matter much anyway.” And perhaps some of you have not bothered to look at the statement in years, if ever. But I think it does matter and both to internal and external constituencies.

For internal purposes, it very much does matter because there's been a deliberate and self-conscious effort to align our practices with the mission statement throughout our organization—expressed in this notion of “walking our talk.” This means that we even use it in our evaluation rubrics for accepting papers to the program of this meeting and especially when making awards. And frankly I've been mostly biting my tongue for the past three years I've served in CAE leadership, dutifully and diligently carrying out this charge, even when it felt at times like a kind of litmus test that unfairly disadvantaged those who could not or would not articulate their work in terms of directly advancing a social or racial justice agenda. I've waited till this very moment, literally when I am stepping off the Board and am really just becoming a “typical” member of CAE. So clearly the mission statement matters to us internally as an organization—we created it and a series of actions to hold ourselves accountable to our values as an organization. It's actually part of what makes me love this organization so much—because it's so well aligned with my own values. And yet, and yet … I do worry about it approaching a kind of litmus test.

*****

First, my statement about now “becoming a typical member of CAE” is disingenuous, I see now. Having held various leadership positions in the organization, I can hardly shed this achieved status. Also, in reading this now, I worry that some might have taken my clumsy confession here as an argument against a kind of affirmative action that CAE has taken to diversify its membership and express its commitment to social and racial justice through specific organizational processes. Nothing could be further from my intentions—after all, I say I love CAE because of how well it aligns with my values, which includes these kinds of organizational affirmations of justice. The “litmus test” that I refer to here has nothing to do with the racial identity of individual students and scholars. It refers to the centrality of the focus on “problem solving” and on a kind of immediacy of impact that is implied by the mission statement. A litmus test tells us who is “real” or “authentic.” It tells us who really counts. Our current mission statement and its associated practices suggest that if you don't show how your work solves problems of social and racial injustice, then you're not authentic enough to our mission to warrant support and inclusion.

*****

Even internally, in the community of educational anthropologists, we have to ask how inclusive this mission statement is. This is especially so if we aspire to serve as an international organization that represents anthropologists of education outside the US. In the absence of any truly global organization for educational anthropologists, many of us have aspired to make CAE such a space. Yet one of our challenges as an organization is that we are based in the US, and therefore deeply involved in struggles for social justice here. These struggles have a felt immediacy and urgency. So how do we balance that with a broader, more ecumenical view?

Well, I took it upon myself to conduct my own informal survey of senior colleagues in the anthropology of education located outside the US—these colleagues come from Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Denmark. I simply asked them in a rather open-ended way what they thought about our mission statement, and I'd like to share just a small sampling of their responses.⁷ [Here I displayed a slide with a skeletal map of the world, with the US filled in with red and the rest of the world left blank, titled, “Where Are We? Where Do We Work?” The following three slides were titled “Some Perceptions from Outside the US.”]

So, there you have it—and I wish I could provide more examples. I would be remiss if I didn't mention, by the way, that the anthropology of education is hot, and I mean hot, in other parts of the world. More specifically, Argentina and Denmark have dedicated master's degree programs in anthropology and education in their most prestigious universities, and these are drawing in far more students than any comparable program in the US, where our institutional presence is much more diffuse. [Here I was toggling between two screen shots of the main web pages for the Universidad de Buenos Aires's Anthropology of Education Program and Aarhus University's Globalisation and the Anthropology of Education Program, respectively.]. The impressive program in Denmark accepts 30–35 students each year from countries all over the world. Here in the US, by contrast, there has never been more than a small handful of programs that actually go by the name of anthropology of education. Are there any now besides Teachers College and Stanford? Most of us who do this work or call ourselves anthropologists of education have to sort of slink around in other kinds of programs and departments, such as Sociocultural Studies of Education, Literacy and Language Education, Qualitative Methods, Learning Sciences, or as in my own case, Education Policy Studies—where our students are forced to take courses like the Economics of Education or Seminar in Policy Analysis [and here I pointed to a couple of my former students sitting in one of the front rows, made a gagging gesture with my finger in my mouth, and said “Am I right?”]—which may divert time away from their training as anthropologists. Anyway, my point is that we need to think more globally about our field, and here we have a good number of graduates around the world who could become CAE members, but we're not tapping into it.

*****

Clearly this section of the talk rankled some folks as well. I was trying to be a little funny by using the phrase “slinking around” to describe how many of us must justify our work and maintain our identities as educational anthropologists in programs with often manifestly different purposes. This perhaps reflects my own training in anthropology and my later shift into a school of education; more importantly, it reflects the lack of deep institutionalization in the United States for our field. Educational psychologists, curriculum scholars, and methodologists are mostly able to ply their craft in departments or programs with consonant purpose. To train students in educational anthropology, in contrast, often means having to carve out special conditions in programs—like those for Education Policy Studies, or Curriculum and Instruction, or Language and Literacy Studies—and sometimes requires working against the grain of these fields’ conventions.

But the fact that my international colleagues drew attention to the prominence of race in our mission statement, and the consequent neglect of gender or other dimensions of oppression, was construed by some listeners as part of a concerted effort to drive any mention of race out of the mission statement. Once again, this wasn't my intention, although the fact that I selected these quotes from among several others suggested this. I had originally wanted to show a broader range of these quotes but had to cut them back for the sake of time. I realize now that by foregrounding these first two quotes, I deepened the impression that my main concern was over the preponderance of racial justice in the statement, when that is really a distantly secondary concern compared to the absence of knowledge production and the prominence of problem solving. I wanted to give us a view from outside, to provide a perspective from societies where the dimensions of oppression and issues of social justice may take very different forms. I wanted to show how striking it was to those outside the United States that there was no mention of knowledge anywhere in the statement, core or extended. I thought such perspectives would be important to our self-understanding.

The day after this address, one of my senior colleagues who does a lot of work with other international educational anthropologists expressed to me that she thought this part of my talk was misguided—that CAE should reflect US priorities, especially on race, and that there are currently in formation other more globally oriented associations that would be more appropriate for the broader view I was endorsing. Fair enough. Yet, it still seems to me that we ought to have a healthy debate about how much CAE should, in fact, unabashedly reflect its US origins and location versus attending to a broader global constituency. Indeed, how can we recognize the need and desire to internationalize our own social movements, to consider the global dimensions of coloniality, while still honoring the particularities of our US context?

*****

And then there's the question of perception by external constituencies—that is, if anyone ever bothers to take a look.⁸ I rather doubt that the folks at NSF [National Science Foundation] or the Institute of Educational Sciences bother to check the CAE website, and I'm quite sure that any CAE member applying for funding to such agencies would deliberately omit our mission statement. Why? Because the current formulation of the mission statement puts into grave question our legitimacy as a social science. How can we claim to be “rigorous”—which is part of the language of the extended statement—if we claim, at the outset, that our main goal is to solve problems of social and racial injustice? Indeed, what does rigor mean in the context of a statement ordered in this way, and how can we demonstrate it? Here the debate about decolonizing methods and Collaborative or Participatory Action Research (PAR) becomes relevant—and I was really heartened to see and attend the excellent panel about what counts as evidence in PAR organized yesterday by Andrea Dyrness, Jen Sandler, and others. I don't believe, like some of my colleagues in the field of education, that the growing movement to decolonize methods is anti-scientific. Indeed, I believe that it's a better, more inclusive way of doing social science. I consider myself a critical social scientist, and I have no illusions about the so-called interestedness of all research or about the urgent need to orient much of our research around progressive or emancipatory agendas. Clearly, we have come a long way from the racist and colonial legacies with which anthropology was once complicit, and we must continue to guard against such colonizing tendencies from [sic] creeping into our work.

But I don't believe that all of the so-called canons of social science research, including the notion of rigor or of evidence, are inherently colonizing. I worry that we may be tossing out the baby with the bathwater. Even explicitly decolonizing work needs to be rigorous and evidence-based—it's just that these terms need to be renegotiated and resignified. In my view, the best critical social science adheres to criteria of procedural honesty and reflexivity. So, in the research process, for instance, shouldn't we try to bracket our expectations and assumptions, to hold ourselves accountable to the people we study—and to the complex “truth” of the reality that we are researching—before we draw conclusions or “solve problems” in the name of social justice? Shouldn't we seek “strong objectivity” of the sort that Sandra Harding (1992) and Donna Haraway (1988) articulated more than 20 years ago, albeit now broadened out to include not just women's epistemological standpoints but the intersectionality of all oppressed standpoints?

*****

Ok, so here is another somewhat polemic moment in my address, when it may appear that I called out PAR and decolonizing approaches to research for not being rigorous enough. My tone came across as more harping or churlish than I wanted—perhaps unwarrantedly attributing attitudes or assumptions to those who do such work. The reason I singled out these approaches for commentary is that they often purport to make more immediate impact for social justice than other approaches, such as the growing corpus of vertical case studies and multi-sited ethnographic work (e.g., Vavrus and Bartlett, 2022). To be sure, PAR and its intellectual cousins can often demonstrate such impact. Also, these approaches are determinedly localist in focus and outcome. This is not a bad thing, by any means (though it does occupy a particular place amongst the many “dimensions of producing and communicating knowledge” that I elucidate below). In my mind, they constitute powerful new kinds of “critical applied” work—a useful mixing of two terms that were once (speciously) thought antithetical because applied anthropology was seen as merely solving problems using mainstream approaches while critical anthropology was oriented toward deeper social transformation, liberation, or revolution. What I am principally wondering is whether such approaches see their goals best characterized as problem solving. And I want to make it clear how much I admire and support this kind of work. While the field of education writ large continues to privilege all manner of “generalizable” or ostensibly “policy-relevant” research, it ought to be a source of pride that CAE provides strong support for such counterhegemonic inquiry.

Perhaps some of you will think that the question of whether we call ourselves scientists, or what we do as science, is even less important than what a mission statement says about our work! I would beg to differ. What I am arguing is that we should articulate and defend understandings of rigor and evidence that challenge and broaden the traditional scientific canon but that still insist on a kind of disciplined and reflexive engagement with a nominally empirical reality. This is the hallmark of all good interpretive work, and it is made even more complicated and challenging by the forthright inclusion of different voices and epistemologies in collaborative or participatory work. Yet, in my view there is often the temptation to take analytic shortcuts, or to hew too closely to prior, etic notions of what constitutes, say, “critical pedagogy” or “critical consciousness.” It can also be problematic or presumptuous for many of us to try to do this work across national and other symbolic boundaries. I was trying to sound a note of caution and humility.

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So, in the spirit of reflexivity, let's talk about our identity as anthropologists of education and explore where we might have common ground. Because of its grounding in a meta-theoretical understanding of practice, to understand identity I still go to Dorothy Holland et al.'s (1998) text on Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Like them, I view social identity as the way we constantly position and reposition ourselves in relation to the “figured worlds” we both inherit and modify through practice. According to Holland et al., a figured world is a “socially and culturally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others” (52). Now this is going to be necessarily quite simplified but … all of us create, renew, and alter our identities as anthropologists of education in relation to a figured world of characters and actors (colleagues, research participants, potential readers of our work), significant acts (producing knowledge and communicating that knowledge—more on that in a moment), and valued outcomes (advancing or refining or updating knowledge about education, with the purpose of improving the human condition and, yes, often solving problems and creating greater conditions of social justice).

Let's say for the sake of argument that most, if not all, of us want our research to ultimately advance the cause of justice. We may or may not want to put that goal first or conceive of it in applied terms as problem solving, but we want our work to make a difference for progressive social transformation. But let's always keep centrally aware that the heart of our enterprise is the production and communication of knowledge. And I'd like to offer some important dimensions for your consideration—this is obviously going to be greatly telegraphed for reasons of time.⁹

Knowledge is inherently intersubjective, so we are always producing knowledge mutually and reciprocally, most obviously out of the dialogic ethnographic data we collect, but also through dialogue with theories and findings in our field, and also in the way we communicate, which includes teaching, of course. In producing anthropological knowledge, we watch, listen, dialogue, and record; then we write and we speak. That is what we do, finally—we write and we speak (or, I suppose, that some of us, like Sally Galman, also draw or produce electronic visual media). In other words, more encompassingly, we communicate. And when we write and we speak, we do so across different measures of scale, in different time frames, in different linguistic and visual registers, and across multiple potential circuits of knowledge production and reproduction—what we might call the venues for ethnographic knowledge communication and appropriation. Our figured world as educational anthropologists must be one in which all of these dimensions of knowledge production and communication are fully acknowledged and engaged. Even if our desired ultimate outcome is the “solution of problems” of social and racial injustice, or contributing our knowledge to progressive transformations in the various societies where we live and work, the path to that outcome can and must pass through all of these different dimensions. Indeed, we may even limit our development as scholar-activists if we expect social justice work to veer towards a particular type of action.

Now, we may be working in a particular classroom or school or neighborhood, a particular place of informal learning, a particular school district or region, or doing multi-sited work across a whole national or even transnational context. So, the scale of research can vary quite dramatically. We may also be working across periods of time that cover years or even decades—it often takes a long time to develop deep reciprocal commitments, and the temporal unfolding of our research combines in complex ways with the other dimensions. The social circuits into which we insert or project or communicate our knowledge can vary, as do the linguistic or visual registers in which we communicate it. Circuits may range from local groups of students, teachers, and/or community members—as in a school-based action research project—to a broad public audience or social movement, to our colleagues through journals and books, to authorized policymakers at the federal or transnational level. Correspondingly, of course, our communicative registers shift according to the circuit. My point is that depending on the kind of research we undertake, the way that we contribute to social justice work can vary significantly across these dimensions.

Now, in the fuller paper I will eventually write, I use my own work as an example of producing and communicating knowledge across all these dimensions. I try to engage in self-critique, discuss difficult decision points, and so forth. Those of us who don't regularly do applied or action research, where the social justice effects may be immediately apparent, nevertheless have lots of rather invisible stories about how our research knowledge traverses these different dimensions. We may know each other from our books and scholarly articles, but there's often more than meets the eye. In my case, for instance, I have done an applied project, that had a PAR component, on the integration of Latino newcomers in central Indiana, and I've also done a good deal of advocacy work and local dialogue in Mexico. But you'd have to drill way down into my CV to see the few references to pieces of writing or talks that were even worthy of putting on there.

So, what I want to do for the remainder of my time is celebrate other colleagues’ work. I want to briefly introduce some powerful and important work in our field whose authors, I daresay, all care deeply about social justice and wish their work to help create more just societies. Yet as you look at this work, I want you to ask yourselves if it would pass the criteria of our core mission statement as currently framed. Is it immediately evident how this work is “advanc[ing] anti-oppressive, socially equitable, and racially just solutions to educational problems”? If not, is the work at least informed by most of the “modes of acting and valued knowledge outcomes” that I claim constitutes our figured world as educational anthropologists?

We start with Perry Gilmore's (2015) masterful and moving account of how her son Colin made friends with a poor Kenyan worker's son, Sadiki, in the 1970s and together they created a new language, Kisisi. [Here there was much applause as I displayed a slide with an image of the book's front cover, along with a couple of photographs of Perry with Colin and Sadiki at that time. I quipped about how young Perry seemed in the photos: “She looks like she's about 17.”] This is a truly exceptional piece of work, written out of the depths of personal despair, borne on the wings of love, and deeply grounded in the best that linguistic educational anthropology has to offer. In the end, Perry's book is a powerful meditation on the agency of young children to contest racial injustice through the apparently playful but oh-so-political creation of new linguistic forms. But I'm guessing that Perry didn't quite know where this was heading when she started documenting in amazement some 40 years ago the emergent language that she could hear being created right in front of her. I daresay it took many years for her to recognize the political significance of this language creation, for her to make sense of it theoretically, and for her to fully realize its significance for challenging racial injustice.

Elsie Rockwell (1995) and her colleagues in Mexico published a book about 20 years ago whose title is La escuela cotidiana (The Everyday School). Until the mid-1970s, the reign of both radical structuralism and positivism in Latin American educational research obscured a more dynamic view of what actually occurred in schools. Thus, breaking open the black box of schools with ethnography was powerful and radical in itself. The emphasis on the everyday construction of knowledge, memory, and social relations in the school was an attempt to assert the value of interpretive inquiry, and to valorize each social actor's knowledge and agency. Rockwell and her students and colleagues were among the very first in Latin America to appropriate the use of ethnography and history for reconstructing the interactional life of schools. Ultimately, the book demonstrates the power of teachers, especially, to mediate between national educational policies/reforms and local school conceptions. This attention to teachers’ knowledge and multifaceted work leads to a properly historical treatment of the way that state actions and policies make their way into everyday school life. What resulted from this work was an important defense of public education and maintaining important legacies of social justice that were actually embedded in the postrevolutionary Mexican state's educational agenda.

Now of course, there are many more examples that I could have given—just think alone of some of the classic US-based ethnographies in our field that address social injustice in one way or another, going all the way back to Jules Henry's Culture Against Man (1963), to Signithia Fordham's Blacked Out (1996), Doug Foley's Learning Capitalist Culture (2010), Donna Deyhle's Reflections in Place (2009), any of Concha Delgado-Gaitan's several books (e.g., 1990, 2001), Hervé Varenne and Ray McDermott's work on Successful Failure (1999)—and I know that I've focused here on books rather than articles. My point is that there are many different ways of producing and communicating knowledge for a broadly conceived project of social justice, one that is still central to our collective figured world but which, according to different scholars, projects, and communities, may bring certain elements of this figured world to the fore more than others.

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More importantly still, I can also see how this very same recognition of a certain body of work could be seen to delegitimize other forms of work. After all, I chose to highlight books—nothing but books!—when so much of the vital work in our field is being accomplished through exquisitely diverse modes of representation and scholarship. Again, mea culpa for the impression I gave. I have the utmost respect for the full gamut of significant, creative, and courageous work being done throughout CAE, much of it thoughtfully published in our journal. The books I chose were to illustrate a point—that deeply anthropological, justice-oriented work often produces knowledge not easily or immediately translated into problem solving. These works and authors were not necessarily meant to be held above other work as models to be followed or emulated.

*****

Well, now I have just enough time for a quick conclusion. And please excuse the cheesy slide: I'm trying to represent the future generations of CAE with all of these young people [The slide, which I recall producing giggles and snickers, showed a multiracial group of nine college-age youth situated beneath the outline of a big circus tent. Three dialogue bubbles floating above them proclaimed, “We rock this figured world!”; “We all belong to CAE!”; and “What linguistic register shall we use?”] A “big tent” approach to our field, with a focus on the diverse ways we produce and communicate our knowledge, is one that truly defines our mission together, around the world. But it also resonates with the current moment in the US. Even as we keep intact our strong commitment to social justice—indeed, as we resist the current political regime as scholar-activists and citizens—we need to keep knowledge production in focus. For instance, now more than ever, we need to understand, through research, why civic education in schools has so clearly failed and how and why progressive citizenship and multicultural education—in its myriad forms, including critical media literacy and intercultural communication—has failed so miserably to create a greater sense of inclusivity, empathy, and respect for human rights in this country. We need to produce knowledge about why and how so many of our fellow citizens transmuted their economic insecurity into racial and misogynistic blame and hate. All of us have something important to contribute based on our research interests and strengths. And our ability to communicate our research knowledge, through many different circuits and registers, just got a whole lot more important. May we proceed with love in our hearts, vigilance and solidarity for our oppressed brothers and sisters, and renewed hope for a better world.

*****

This final exhortation seemed disingenuous to many in light of the perceived slights of the overall talk. It underscored the awkward timing of my address. In spite of the call I was making to examine the mission statement and remind ourselves about the heart of what we all do (producing ethnographic knowledge about education), I had no doubt after Election Day that our energies should be put elsewhere. A mission statement just doesn't matter all that much in the face of the struggles and sacrifices necessary, again and again, to defend democracy and seek justice. And arguably, the production of new knowledge right now matters less than the urgent, creative dissemination of what we already know and how we know it.

In the end, the message of my talk boiled down to the following: The notion of “advancing … solutions to educational problems” doesn't capture what many of us do, in many moments of our work, so it seems inadequate as the opening clause of a mission statement. Yet beyond the statement's syntax, I am trying to question the deeper archaeology of our field's imaginary. We all produce ethnographically-informed knowledge about education (knowledge that is contextualized, reflexive, etc.), and we all communicate that knowledge in varied forms to varied audiences. We should maintain our strong commitment to social justice in all we do but continually expand our work and identities as educational anthropologists in ecumenical fashion. That is the big tent I was hoping to facilitate in the original address. And it is the organizational learning and growth I am hoping to inspire through this meta-reflection.

Again, I give my deepest apologies for any rifts that I have created or exacerbated. The CAE has always felt like (a big and boisterous) family, and I hope that we might ultimately see this as a squabble amongst siblings. During these times of unprecedented challenge to democracy and progressive ideals, we urgently need action rooted in solidarity. We need as much family as we can get. I'm down for the long run.