Researching as a critical secretary: a strategy and praxis for critical ethnography

Abstract

This paper proposes a strategy for ethnographically investigating politically disparate education organizations. I develop the notion of researching as a critical secretary: a method of participant-observation conducted alongside those observed to hold the least formal power. Drawing on data from an initial empirical effort to implement this approach, I reflexively examine how this strategy supported my efforts to problematize gendered and racialized relations of power encoded in organizational structures, roles, and routines. I conclude by discussing how researching as a critical secretary animated the aims of critical ethnography and consider how it might function as a broader anti-oppressive scholarly praxis beyond the temporal and situated contexts of fieldwork.

Keywords:

• Power
• organizations
• critical ethnography
• secretary
• participant observation

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

Acknowledgements

I want to acknowledge Kathryn Herr, Miriam Leshin, Taeyeon Kim and several anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and critical feedback on this paper. Your insights substantially improved this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 All names of organizations and actors included in this study are pseudonyms in compliance with Institutional Review Board guidelines.

2 Source withheld in compliance with IRB requirements.

3 I do not suggest that experiencing another person’s oppression represents a basis for political solidarity. The point I intend to make is that my sustained engagements with gendered and racialized secretarial labor sharpened my own insights into how oppression operates and specified concrete actions I might take to intervene in taken-for-granted organizational routines.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ethan Chang

Ethan Chang, Ph.D., is a sociologist of education and assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, 1776 University Avenue, Wist Hall, Honolulu, HI 96822; e-mail: [email protected]. He is a former middle and high school public teacher with prior teaching and research experiences in Hawaii, South Africa, and Palestine. His research explores the intersections of policy, place, and race in struggles to redress inequities of educational opportunity.