A response to Bradley Levinson

I appreciate the opportunity to engage in a written scholarly dialogue with an article based on the remarks that were part of Bradley Levinson's presidential address in November 2016. My engagement here is not only with the submitted article; it also includes a few other data points. These include my in-person attendance at the address in 2016 as well as additional correspondence between the years 2017 and 2018 with the author. That correspondence was mediated by the editorial team at Anthropology & Education Quarterly (AEQ). Below, I will do my best to note where I had correspondence that was—to the best of my knowledge—shared with Professor Levinson.

I attended Professor Levison's original talk; I was there for its commencement, and I stayed through its conclusion. Later, at the request of AEQ's editors (Sally Galman and Laura Valdiviezo), I read a version of the original talk, and I gave explicit and direct feedback on the original manuscript where I suggested revisions. Out of respect for Professor Levinson and the enormity of publishing presidential remarks, I signed my review. A few years later (in 2021), I read an early version of the article that appears in this issue of AEQ. As is his prerogative, Professor Levinson did not significantly revise his original talk (despite my recommendations to do so). I read another iteration of this talk with the opening vignette and its concomitant commentary—the version now published in this issue. To his credit, Professor Levison recommended me to the previous AEQ editors (Lesley Bartlett and Stacey Lee) as a potential respondent. He also references my early engagement with his talk.

I have been the president of the Council on Anthropology and Education (CAE), and I have given a presidential talk. It is not easy; it carries its own set of anxieties. I can imagine giving such an address in the shadows of former President Donald Trump's controversial and contested election, which shook many people, added a layer of difficulty. I have a real sense of empathy for anyone having to offer a scholarly address to the council.

In exploring Professor Levinson's presidential address, I will draw on multiple reviews of it as well as my curiosity about its implications. Except where necessary, I will not engage in a point-by-point analysis. Instead, I will comment on points of agreement, while raising questions for us, as a council, to consider.

We should, as a council, hold up, turn over, examine, and interrogate the mission statement and its role in the CAE. There are—in my mind—significant possibilities for deep engagement about the role of the mission. The mission should not, in my opinion, serve as a litmus test for membership in the council. Nor do I believe that the mission should solely be used to assess the quality or meaningfulness of anyone's scholarship. I believe that the mission is aspirational, like many other mission statements or charter documents. It is in these different understandings that I think there must be a space to engage one another. I support Professor Levinson's idea that we must have a “big tent” in our council. I hope we can find and create the space to do so.

In that spirit, I turn now to a few essential questions sparked by my reading of Professor Levinson's presidential address.

In the past few years—particularly following the social upheaval spurred by the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and others—there has been serious engagement around the term inclusion. Throughout his presidential address, Professor Levinson calls for a mission that is more inclusive for individuals who may not be doing work rooted in social justice. The term social justice is used in myriad ways with different sets of meanings attached to it. How, I wonder, does Professor Levinson mean it? We do not know; he does not define it in his address. It does appear that he is making—and potentially confounding—two points: 1) There is some anthropology of education work that is not about race but is about gender, class, or other social markers that may lead to exclusion and/or marginalization; and 2) Not all research in our field should be critical and engaged with the intention of solving social problems. This argument, it seems, is directly tied to the question of whether the mission serves as a litmus test. Levinson's (and the mission committee's) lack of definition of social justice and Levinson's lack of definition of inclusion create the conditions for confusion. Statements about a mission or charter can be illuminating and offer guideposts for movement; they can also be taken up and interpreted as something entirely different.

While I was working on this most recent response to Professor Levinson's address, the noted Black philosopher and public intellectual bell hooks passed away. hooks has been an important part of my intellectual journey. I thought about some of her writings and what I learned from her, and I became re-acquainted with a particularly poignant part of her acknowledgements in her 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. She recounts how other Black women philosophers attack her and her work, and she ends thusly: “Unfortunately it is often easier to ignore, dismiss, reject, and even hurt one another rather than engage in constructive confrontation” (1984, viii). I want to encourage us to think about how we, as a council, can engage in constructive confrontation, rather than resorting to either leaving the council or creating different conditions for what it means to be included.

I think it is crucial to explore what we mean by rigor. It was a central point in Professor Levinson's presidential address. Frankly, rigor is not a word I often use, because it has been—and continues to be—used as a cudgel against many (myself included) who think about things differently or have the audacity to assert new approaches and question the way of the discipline. I have written (Brayboy, 2005) about a former professor of mine who, after a day filled with “rigorous interrogation” of the theories of Max Weber, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and other social science theorists, told me—with sympathy—that I was a good storyteller but I would never be a good theorist. When I published that story as part of an article, a senior colleague told me, referring to the article, “I hope you have this out of your system so that you can now do some real anthropological work.” Being a “good storyteller” supposedly lacked the rigor of “being a good theorist.” Similarly, in a 2002 anonymous review of an article I submitted to Anthropology & Education Quarterly, a senior member of the field wrote, “This work lacks rigor and the consistency needed. You must do better or decide if this is the kind of work you should be doing.” In fairness, this reviewer went on to tell me that I “[have] a bright future if [I] would be rigorous and do the work.” It took me two years to submit revisions because, in part, I wondered if I was capable enough. Twenty years later, that review and those words sit with me. The argument about the lack of rigor was aimed at my storytelling and my theorization of culture. It offended the reviewer's anthropological sensibilities. My point here is that rigor or rigorous, or any other forms of the word, are not ones that I use. But I think about them a lot. And Professor Levinson references rigor throughout his address.

This leads me to ask: How do we make sense of rigor? How do we make sense of the version of the talk published in this issue—a version the author refused to “overhaul” because doing so, he wrote, “completely feels. . . like a cowardly act of whitewashing (yes, the pun is intended)” (Levinson, 2023, 209)? And what do we do with the fact that Professor Levinson would later write, about the address, “The talk was too raw, and had not been sufficiently reviewed by colleagues” (Levinson, 2023, 210, my emphasis)? Rigor necessarily includes revision. Revision—and rigor—means receiving critiques of scholarly texts and ideas, engaging those critiques, and deciding how to revise based on those critiques. Refusal to revise—because it would seem cowardly and because there is a need to “both recognize and defend myself,” as Professor Levinson argues in his address—lacks rigor.

Rigor is also rooted in a sense of curiosity. We might be guided by asking: How did this policy or mission come to be? How do I understand it? How do others understand it? How can I triangulate data to get a clearer sense of this phenomenon or question? Professor Levinson writes, “I want to make a critique of this core statement” (Levinson, 2023, 212). Later, in that same paragraph he writes, “I've assiduously avoided digging into the details of how this 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” (Levinson, 2023, 212, emphasis in the original).

How, I wonder, can we critique something so strongly without asking: How and why did it come to be? How—and why—did those who helped create it decide to do so? Importantly, in the latter part of the address, Professor Levinson described how he asked some of his colleagues outside of the United States how they understood the mission statement. But he has avoided offering specifics about colleagues in the United States. I am left wondering why, and to what ends, are the opinions of international scholars worth exploring but not those of scholars in the United States?

As I have noted, I was at the live, in-person address. I have read the address at least a dozen times. My concerns about the address arose not because the mission was called into question or certain books were listed as exemplars, as Professor Levinson suggests. On the contrary, we need debate. The council needs a serious and sustained engagement with the mission, which includes the historical context and subsequent iterations of the mission.

Interestingly, I have been influenced by the rigor of Bradley Levinson's scholarship for twenty-five years. He need not defend his brilliance or his influence. I cite his work because it is smart and serious. I find meaning in it. One of my earliest memories as a scholar is seeing this young, energetic person, then a Spencer postdoctoral fellow, at the Spencer Foundation's annual party at the American Educational Research Association meetings (in the late 1990s) reaching into what seemed to me a sophisticated canvas satchel and pulling out a thick paper that he was working on, handing copies out to senior scholars, and asking for feedback. I was a Spencer dissertation fellow, trying to figure out if I belonged in the academy and as a Spencer dissertation fellow. I remember asking someone, with wonder, “Who is that guy?” I was told that he (Levinson) was one of the brightest minds in the anthropology of education. His work was important then. It is important now.

That he feels a need to defend himself is troubling. We should defend our scholarship but not our person. My critique here is of the address; it is not of Professor Levinson. I regret that Professor Levinson has used this opportunity to defend himself rather than as an opportunity to advance what I think is a significant question (Can we debate the role of the mission in the council?) The power of his argument is obfuscated by his defense. It is a lost opportunity.

Did this conversation begin with the mission committee and the statement it created? Or, is this the pushback of the discipline of anthropology against the field of anthropology of education—more succinctly, is this an argument of applied work (an anthropology of education) versus pure inquiry (anthropology)?

Driven by this question of rigor, I think it is important to understand the context and history of the council as it relates to questions of our mission. Professor Levinson notes that he is bothered by the mission because, he says, “it chafes against some of the sensibilities that are inseparable from my identity as an anthropologist” (Levinson, 2023, 211). Fair enough.

His commentary, however, led me to wonder: What is the origin of these calls for doing work to address the lives of others? Is it rooted in the discipline of anthropology (supposed pure inquiry), or is it something that results from the field of anthropology of education (which is applied work)? I do not mean to suggest that the practitioners of a field or a discipline all believe the same thing. And I most certainly do not mean to suggest that Professor Levinson's identity as an anthropologist is for me to judge. I am, however, interested in some of the ways that these calls for relevance to the world in which we live emerged and their potential starting point.

When I wrote my presidential address (Brayboy, 2013), I spent a few months reading the previously published talks to make sense of the issues that had emerged in the past and whether there were lessons in them for me. After initially reading Professor Levinson's response, I returned to the notes from my exploration. Having done so, I can state with confidence that the notion of anti-oppressive, socially just work emerged well before the Canterbury meetings. The mission emerged from those meetings; the calls for action have been part of the council since its early days.

My point here is basic: Many in CAE have called for social justice to frame our work. If his objection is to making this a requirement to “join the club” and be part of the council, I think Professor Levinson should be more direct about this objection. Now is the time to engage in constructive confrontation. I would stand next to him in making the argument that we need a big tent and more expansive ideas of what kinds of work “count.” If this is his argument, I think he is right.

Simultaneously, it is important to note that almost 40 years before Professor Levinson's original talk, one of the field's giants called for us to do something about the lives of the people we study (Erickson, 1979). Fred was not suggesting that we are only real educational anthropologists if we do this. He was suggesting that we can be part of a transformative moment if we do. He was right then. He's still right.