Session Information
15 SES 06 A, Research on partnerships in education
Paper Session
Contribution
Recent scholarship has examined the difficulties research-practice partnerships (RPPs) grapple with, such as their implication in sexist and racist projects (Tanksley & Estrada, 2022) and their potential to suppress onto-epistemological difference (Gamez-Djokic, 2024), pointing to an uncertain present and future for RPPs despite deep attachments to ideas of improvement, inclusion, and empowerment. In this paper, I extend this scholarship to think about the “partnership” in RPP as an assemblage of complex affective attachments, in excess of coordinated practices and interactions across organizational boundaries (Penuel et al., 2015.). I draw on Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism as a “relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility” (Berlant, 2011, p.24) that exists “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (p.1). I use this framework to understand how actors might approach partnerships as a mode of “endurance” in an object of desire.
This paper asks: (1) what attachments do RPP actors bring to their work?, (2) how are these attachments mediated by RPP norms and practices, and (3) how do these attachments impact the work. Through an examination of three cases, I identify how the partnership was mobilized by attachments to ideas of improvement, (em)power(ment), and civic/civil inclusion, which ultimately served as obstacles to the actors’ and partnership’s “flourishing”.
In the first case, I examine how teacher participants’ metaphorical usage of workforce language, such as “employer” and “boss”, and “employee” and “worker” to describe their and their students’ roles in the partnership exemplify an attachment to an experience of power rooted in capitalistic notions of ownership and control. Although the partnership is organized around creating opportunities of civic inclusion and empowerment, the teachers approached this design as an approximation to a particular kind of dominative power that promised status and feelings of professionalism and (em)power(ment) they felt they lacked. This eroded the possibility of civic and civil inclusion for racial, economic, and gender minorities.
In the second case, I examine Dr. Angello’s[1] critiques of and rationalization of he and his students’ exploitative interactions with partnerships. Dr. Angello openly critiqued the tendency of partnerships like the RPP to exploit, or “pimp”, Black teachers and students as markers of their benevolence and as a successful funding tactic, though he rationalized this as a necessary exchange in order for his students to gain access to various forms of capital. Dr. Angello’s critical consciousness of fraught partnership politics at once attenuates wholesale participation in the “scene of fantasy” of empowerment and civic/civil inclusion at the same time that it “endures” in a form of civic participation that ultimately reifies he and his students’ civil abjection (Wilderson, 2010; Mills, 2014).
In the last case, I examine momentary breaks in the neoliberal “impasse” (Berlant, 2011) invoked by students’ remarks about the “ghostliness” and purpose of turning a former charter school, now-abandoned building, into a mixed-income housing community, and by their calls to “fuck shit up” during Black Lives Matter protests. I argue that these remarks demand an attention to lingering in the ruins of indeterminate urban and education reforms. Ruins and ruination (Navaro-Yashin, 2009) are antithetical to improvement and compel a disarticulation with contemporary modes and genres of living and interaction. In this particular instance, I argue that calls to “let it [the building] be” and “fuck shit up” reject attachments to normative modes of empowerment and civic/civil inclusion and pose a threat to the affective investments in improvement that are both the form and content of the partnership (in this case, a partnership between a university, a high school class, and a non-profit organization focused on affordable housing).
[1] All names are pseudonyms.
Method
This paper draws on interview and participant observation data from an ethnographic case study of a research-practice partnership called Community Change and Youth Empowerment. Conducted between 2019-2021, the study sought to better understand how teachers understand and enact their roles in the partnership, and whether and how this comes to bear on the partnership’s desired outcomes and impact. 15 teachers and 5 civic partners were interviewed at least three times, and observed multiple times a week for two or more hours while civic-action research projects were implemented, which was typically over the course of an academic semester. Drawing from this data, this paper constructs three “cases” through which to examine how individual actors’ affective attachments are mediated and shaped by RPPs. Case study attends to both the particularistic characteristics of a case as well as to the broader social-cultural contexts that shape the case; this foregrounds the specific implications of the case while illuminating its empirical and conceptual relevance for other comparable cases (Yin, 2002). I borrow from case study analysis to construct “cases” from existing data in order to attend to the multiple levels of attachment as individual, collective and atmospheric (spatially and temporally configured). According to Merriam (1998), a case is “a thing, a single entity, a unit around which there are boundaries” (p. 27) which can be a person, a program, a group, a specific policy and so on. In this paper, each case is delimited by level (individual, group, relation between group and context) and by type of attachment, or object of desire. Finally, the case study approach offers a structural resonance wherein particular elements are read in relation to a broader social-ecological context, and likewise, where multiple cases are read in relation to each other. This analytical approach allowed me to examine how various levels and types of attachment are reflective of each other and are dialectically moored, which illuminates the ways in which various forms of attachment coagulate as “partnership,” or as a “cluster of promises magnetized by a thing that appears as an object but is really a scene in the psychoanalytic sense” (Berlant, 2011, p.16).
Expected Outcomes
This paper conceives of “partnership” in RPP as a complex array of attachments. Through an examination of three levels and types of attachment, I demonstrate that “partnership as attachment” enables an analysis of both the form (the coordinated set of practices, objects and interactions – and importantly, the affective content (the site and relation of endurance and sustenance in the object of desire) of RPPs. This analysis suggests that alongside serving as a collaborative and practical approach to investigating and intervening in enduring problems of practice, RPPs also function as a mode of endurance, a measure of approximation to clusters of promises of civic/civil inclusion, of access to power, of educational and urban improvement. These attachments both enable important research-practice advancements and collaborations at the same time that they contribute to a sense of attrition, articulated by young people’s desire for ruins and ruination. My analysis also demonstrates that RPPs can catalyze disattachments, or momentary breaks with contemporary impasses. In order not to misrecognize or overlook these breaks, RPP actors must develop a reflexive awareness of how attachments are implicated in the work and when breaking with these might require dissolving or drastically reconfiguring what it means to “partner” across multiple levels and contexts. While the study this paper is based on occurred in the United States, it has important implications for RPPs internationally, particularly as concerns understanding “partnerships” as collaborations across organizational boundaries that surpass cultural and professional difference and attend to partnership as boundless affinities, or collective affects, such as “cruel optimism”. This builds on international work examining RPPs and the politics of boundaries in partnerships (Sjolund & Lindvall, 2023; Vedder-Weiss et al., 2020; Fischer-Schoneborn & Ehmke, 2023).
References
Berlant, L. (2020). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press. Fischer-Schöneborn, S., & Ehmke, T. (2023). Evaluating boundary-crossing collaboration in research-practice partnerships in teacher education: Empirical insights on co-construction, motivation, satisfaction, trust, and competence enhancement. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 79, 101305. Gamez-Djokic, B. (2024). Of boundaries and borders: A micro-interactional examination of consensus and knowledge construction in a research-practice partnership. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 45. Merriam, S. B. (1998). Qualitative research and case study applications in education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Mills, C. W. (2014). The racial contract. Cornell University Press. Navaro‐Yashin, Y. (2009). Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15(1), 1-18. Penuel, W. R., Allen, A. R., Coburn, C. E., & Farrell, C. (2015). Conceptualizing research–practice partnerships as joint work at boundaries. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR), 20(1-2), 182-197. Sjölund, S., Lindvall, J., Larsson, M., & Ryve, A. (2023). Mapping roles in research-practice partnerships–a systematic literature review. Educational Review, 75(7), 1490-1518. Tanksley, T., & Estrada, C. (2022). Toward a critical race RPP: How race, power and positionality inform research practice partnerships. International journal of research & method in education, 45(4), 397-409. Vedder-Weiss, D., Lefstein, A., Segal, A., & Pollak, I. (2020). Dilemmas of leadership and capacity building in a research–practice partnership. Teachers College Record, 122(9), 1-30. Wilderson III, F. B. (2010). Red, white & black: Cinema and the structure of US antagonisms. Duke University Press. Yin, R. K. (2002). Case study research: Design and methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
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