A promiscuous (feminist) look at grant-science: how colliding imaginaries shape the practice of NSF policy

Abstract

There is nothing new about a federal focus on investing in science in US higher education (often through contracts and grants), but there is a new intimacy between grants and science. Increasingly, what happens and is valued in the name of research and knowledge production in universities is grant-science. In this article, I provide insight into grant-science by analyzing aspects of the proposal writing process on one of my own National Science Foundation (NSF) grants. This article provides a context-specific look at how broader impacts criteria (BIC) and ethics are re/produced through relations of power and consequently mis/interpreted and mitigated in the proposal writing process. Grant work may not seem explicitly feminist, but as a woman of color who is part of a generation of research/ers trained in feminist methodology by second- and third-wave feminist research/ers, I approach research with a feminist of color imaginary. I take up promiscuous feminism through the theoretical perspectives of Spivak to discuss how my feminist of color imaginary shapes my take on research and grant work. This analytical lens helps make visible how my interpretation and practice of NSF policies of BIC and ethics collide with the more technical ways that some other investigators on the grant projects interpret them.

Keywords:

• feminist methodology
• grants
• policy
• social justice
• Spivak

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank her reviewers, as well as Sara Childers, Jeong-eun Rhee, Fran Huckaby, and Doug Foley, for their helpful feedback on drafts of this article. Special appreciation goes to the NSF, her grant colleagues, and participants.

Notes

1. Colonization is the self-establishment of an outside ruler (e.g. nation-state; ideology) and/or rule that impresses its own agenda (e.g. laws and systems of education; truths) and rearranges “the mode of production for its own … benefit” – often in ways that are taken-for-granted and supported internally (Spivak, 2008). According to Spivak (2008), “using the colonizer-colonized model creatively” can provide an interesting model for analysis; and “‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ can be fairly elastic if you define scrupulously.” Thus, colonization is violence resulting from colonizer–colonized relations of power. It implies a nearly inescapable (mis)appropriation – forced, coerced, and in part voluntary – of bodies, minds, ideas, and places (Daza, 2006; see also Puiggrós, 1999, p. 176). Colonization infringes on what it means to be free, self-determined, and sovereign. One of Spivak’s primary contributions to understanding these power dynamics is to show that resistance to power – forms of what becomes sanctioned as liberation – can also be colonizing (e.g. a violent infringement inseparable from the production of subjects), and thus determine, as well as limit, agency (Spivak, 1985, 2008, 2012). An example in the field of education is Ellsworth’s (1994/1989) problematizing of the limits of critical pedagogy and the “reaction-formations” that followed (Spivak, 2012; see also Lather, 1991).

2. “(Ab)-use” is a term employed by Spivak (1999, p. 142, note 43) that roughly translates “to use from below” but not be outside of; it is meant to convey more than simply “abuse” and to be distinct from other attempts to use the Enlightenment critically. According to Spivak (2012, pp. 3–4), “the Latin prefix ‘ab’ says much more than ‘below.’ Indicating both ‘motion away’ and ‘agency, point of origin,’ ‘supporting,’ as well as ‘the duties of slaves,’ [the (ab)-use of European Enlightenment] nicely captures the double bind of the postcolonial and the metropolitan migrant...the public sphere gains and the private sphere constraints of the Enlightenment.”

3. At the same time, the evaluation must fulfill NSF’s requirement of reporting the results of the grant project’s effectiveness both qualitatively and quantitatively. As Guba and Lincoln have made clear (1989, p. 18), methods of gathering data are often confused with methodologies; methodology is the overall paradigm – the theoretical strategy or framework of analysis – that governs the research process. Methodological differences are matters of ontology and are much bigger than those between quantitative and qualitative methods in empirical research (Erickson, 2009, in Moss et al., 2009). Thus, methods (tools and techniques), while perhaps associated with certain methodologies, do not define methodology alone; and quantitative or qualitative methods might be used within different methodological frameworks.

4. The “wave metaphor” is widely used to describe the shifts and trajectory of feminism over time with the current period of feminism often known as the “third wave;” recently, in trying to imagine futures of feminism – born from, but not bound by, feminisms of previous waves – some feminists, who themselves emerged from these waves, are problematizing and questioning feminism and a generational account of it (Gillis, Howie, Munford, & Spencer, 2004). Thus, some (feminist) researchers and activists of this generation are not dismissing the “legacy of feminism,” but rather taking it seriously by using it and pushing its boundaries, despite reaction-formations (see note 1) and strategies of containment (Bhabha, 1994, p. 31; see also Spivak, 1994). According to Spivak (1999), the imagination is always already contaminated and contained by what is already understood, including feminisms; likewise, desires, understanding, thinking, and doing – and research – are always already complicit and constrained by past and present contaminations (see Daza, forthcoming). So, everything being exceeded comes into being through existing logics and available discourses – everything becomes what it is, and what can be, through what is already contaminated, understood, and contained. Here, an ab-use of feminisms is to take seriously the trace of feminisms – to honor feminisms’ legacy from below (see also note 2). This means that “what is becoming (the future) and the present cannot exist except through the past – what is already understood through relations of power (e.g. ‘colonized by feminisms’). Yet, what happens and is continuously happening in deconstruction is that the present is always already being exceeded, which is what Spivak (1999) means by ‘a history of the vanishing present.’ The future, in becoming present, is at once not just the future or even the present, but emerging from pasts – through worlding” (Daza, forthcoming). For more about what is meant by “colonized by feminism,” see notes 1 and 2.

5. See also note 4.

6. According to Spivak (2012), there is an important difference between needs, as articulated by others invested in center–margin binaries, and desires that come from below. In line with Spivak (2012), decolonizing needs-driven policies, practices, and grants rests on the rearrangement, and displacement, of desires that ultimately keep center–margin binaries salient.

7. Sputnik refers to a small orbiting radio satellite that was launched into space by the Soviet Union, 4 October 1957. The launch, often cited as the beginning of the Space Race, had an impact on the US national approach to science and technology and eventually led to an overhaul of science and math instruction in the USA.

8. See note 6.

9. Data in this article will be shared obscurely to keep identities anonymous, as well as to deter to the extent possible connections among characters, roles, and institutions, even though more details about the roles and statuses of the characters involved in a narrative might produce more specific levels of meaning (Erickson, 1985).