The devil’s armpit and other tales from the rural rustbelt: Interrogating the practice and process of Un/masking in a postcritical ethnography about place

Abstract

Resistance to simple narratives in education research comes from the stance that they render findings useless for the political work of understanding contexts of education as they exist today. This paper interrogates three stories of masking choices from a four year postcritical ethnographic study in the rural rustbelt Midwestern United States. These stories make visible how masking operates as both process and product within and part of white supremacist and colonizing systems. The author calls critical qualitative and postcritical researchers to interrogate the role of protection, answerability, and specificity in their work towards justice in terms of masking.

Keywords:

• Postcritical
• ethnography
• masking
• anonymization
• rural
• rustbelt

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Stewart County’s unemployment rate has fluctuated from 5–15% from 2007 to 2020, though its highest annual unemployment rate peaked at 15.2% in 2009 not long after the closing of its largest manufacturing employer. 21% of the total population was at or below poverty in 2018, while another 24% struggled to remain between 100–200% of the poverty line from 2019–2018. Residents of Stewartsville city, the county seat, experienced even higher levels of poverty with 23.5% of the population living under the poverty line and 33% of children living in poverty during this time. These statistics are reflected in the makeup of Morningside Elementary, where 71% of students qualify for the federal free and reduced price lunch program. These numbers remain very similar as of this publication.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexandra Panos

Dr. Panos is an Assistant Professor of Literacy Studies and an Affiliate Faculty member of Measurement and Research in the College of Education at the University of South Florida. Her scholarship offers conceptual and empirical explorations of literacy, spatiality, and climate change in educational research.