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Qualitative InquiryXX(X) 112

The Author(s) 2010Reprints and permission: http://www.

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1077800409358878http://qix.sagepub.com

Inquiry asAnswerability:Toward a Methodology ofDiscomfortin Researching Critical Public Pedagogies

Jake Burdick1 andJenniferA.Sandlin1

Abstract

In this article, the authors argue that inquiry into critical public pedagogies, public sites of counterhegemonic educational

activity, requires that researchers epistemological, representational, and ethical obligations extend to examine how their

practices might undermine the political possibil ities of these sites, diminish the transformative potential that public pedago-

gies hold, and ultimately reinscribe normative, limiting notions of educational possibility. Interweaving a framework frompostcolonial thought, poststructural feminist and performative methodologies, and the literary contributions of Mikhail

Bakhtin, the authors posit that critical public pedagogies offer us glimpses of the pedagogical Otherforms and practices of

education that exist independently of, even in opposition to, the commonsense of education. Without this careful approachto researching sites of learning outside of the known, researchers risk adopting an institutionalized, colonial gaze, applyingreductive logics to or even failing completely to experience phenomena that are not easily resolved in existing cultural

meanings ofteachingand learning.

Keywords

critical public pedagogies, research ethics, postcolonial critique, poststructural feminist analysis, Bakhtinian analysis

1Arizona State University

Corresponding Author:

Jake Burdick, Doctoral Student, Curriculum Studies, Arizona State University,

782 E. Elgin St., Chandler, AZ 85225

E-mail: [email protected]

Yes, of course, Dr. Sandlin. As the most beloved

Critical Public Pedagogist in the tri-county areayes

you have permission to use the photo Fred sent.

PS. Why dont you professors stop burrowing farther

and farther into your private world? Does that

unshareable language make you feel more specific?

Or updated? I literally dont understand the upside

of creating these walls around a subculture?

On the other hand, if Im not mistaken Savitri and

I make our living by being invited into colleges and

universities by professors who essentially ask us to

translate their essays into common gesture, vernacu-

lar talk and popular music. So maybe I should just

shut up.

Change-a-lujah!

Revstraight from the den of Critical Public

Pedagogy!

(Reverend Billy, anticonsumption activist,

personal e-mail message)

We are constantly being taught, and we constantly learn

(OMalley, Burdick, & Sandlin, in press; Sandlin, Schultz,

& Burdick, 2010). Education is a circumstance of culturethat both maintains dominant practices and offers spaces

for their critique and reimagination. Although many edu-

cators and educational researchers are primarily concerned

with what happens inside the walls of formal educational

institutions, such as schools and universities, a wealth of

other spaces and practices possess strongly educative

capacities, despite having little or nothing to do with the

process of schooling. These public pedagogiesspaces,

sites, and languages of education and learning that exist

outside schoolsare just as crucial, if not more so, to our

understanding of the formation of identities and social

structures as the teaching that goes on within formal class-

rooms. Schubert (2010) listed some of these spaces and

placesincluding home, family, culture, community,

language, television, movies and other video, music, other

Qualitative Inquiry OnlineFirst, published on February 24, 2010 as doi:10.1177/1077800409358878


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2 Qualitative Inquiry XX(X)

arts, books and magazines, videogames, the Internet, peer

groups, non-school organizations (scouts, sports, dance,

theater, gangs, church, chat groups, music and art

groups), work, and hobbiesnot simply for the exercise

of creating such a list but to encourage educational

researchers, teachers, and learners to inquire more fully

into the life-scapes of one another (p. 14).Educational researchers and theorists have long under-

stood that the world outside of an educational institutions

walls plays a critical role in the development of the people

who work and study on the inside. Following the introduc-

tion of cultural studies and critical pedagogy into educa-

tional inquiry, researchers and practitioners have become

increasingly interested in how external forces, such as the

media (e.g., Burdick, 2009; Dalton, 2004, 2006; Macedo &

Steinberg, 2007; McCarthy, 1998; Sandlin & McLaren,

2009; Trier, 2001), the social and material conditions of

students lives (e.g., Willis, 1981), and the transformation of

schools based on shifts in public policy or perception (e.g.,

Roseboro, OMalley, & Hunt, 2006), work to influence, sup-

port, augment, debilitate, and delimit schools and their abil-

ity to serve as sites of democratic production. Drawing from

these studies, as well as the theoretical contributions of criti-

cal theory and cultural studies, the concept ofpublic peda-

gogy emerged most cogently in educational literature in the

early 1990s (OMalley et al., in press; Sandlin, OMalley,

Milam, & Burdick, 2008; Sandlin et al., 2010) as a theoreti-

cal frame for researchers interested in the educational phe-

nomena that occur outside of schools. From the perspective

of public pedagogy, educational researchers and theorists

no longer need to locate the school as the epicenter of edu-

cational activity; rather, they view informal and everydayspaces and discourses themselves as innately and perva-

sively pedagogical.

The notion of a public pedagogy can be found in the

literature as early as 1894 (DAvert), albeit with a drastically

different meaning than we employ in this article. This very

early work conceptualized public schools as sites where citi-

zens were created and educated for the good of a democratic

public (OMalley et al., in press; Sandlin et al., 2008;

Sandlin et al., 2010). Early writing that is more in line with

how we conceptualize public pedagogy, that is, that learn-

ing located outside of institutional spaces, clearly emerged

in Illichs (1971, 1973) work on deschooling and convivi-

ality, Cremins (1976) notion of an ecological view of

education, and Schuberts (1981, 1997) conceptualization of

the big curriculum and the outside curriculum, to

name a few (OMalley et al., in press; Sandlin et al., 2008;

Sandlin et al., 2010). However, beginning with Lukes

(1996) foundational collection of articles focused on femi-

nist public pedagogies of popular culture and everyday life

and Girouxs (2000, 2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c) extensive

body of work, educational and cultural researchers and

theorists converged upon a more specific, yet still con-

tested, understanding of public pedagogy as the collection

of educational activities, practices, and structures that

exist in cultural spaces outside of institutions of schooling.

Research in this vein has taken up interests, approaches,

and sites as diverse as film, television, and other forms of

popular culture (e.g., Giroux, 2002; Wright, 2010); digitalspaces (Freishtat, 2010; Hayes & Gee, 2010); advertising

(Hoechsmann, 2007); sites of consumption such as Dis-

neyland (Giroux, 1999), McDonalds (Kincheloe, 2009),

and grocery stores (Stearns, Sandlin, & Burdick, 2009);

public artwork (e.g., Irwin et al., 2009); spaces of social

activism (Crowther, 2006; Holst, 2002; Jaramillo, 2010;

Kilgore, 1999; Sandlin, 2008; Sandlin & Milam, 2008);

museums and parks (e.g., Kridel, 2010; Lee, 2010) and

architecture (e.g., Ellsworth, 2005); and pervasive, under-

girding neoliberal ideologies (e.g., Giroux, 2004b; Preston,

2010), among many othersall exploring how the curricula

and pedagogy available therein either close out the notion

of democratic publics or make these publics possible

despite the overwhelming forces against them.

Even with the now-burgeoning proliferation of public

pedagogy literature and its underlying commitments to a

broader vision of educational discourse, there has been little

discussion of the problematic role of the researcherwho

is likely affiliated with the educational institutionand

the tools, means, and languages she uses to research, query,

analyze, rewrite, and re-create these public spaces. Educa-

tional research, like any other genre of inquiry, is tied to its

specific context and historicity, to the species of education

associated with schools and schooling, and to the stan-

dards that produce the boundaries of acceptability withinthe field (Smith, 1999). Literary theorist V. M. Volosinov

(1976), in discussing the coherence of language systems,

argued, Every utterance in the business of life is an objec-

tive social enthymeme. [The utterance] is something like a

password known only to those who belong to the same

social purview (p. 101). Volosinovs concept of utter-

ances-as-passwords is easily applied to the limits of what

is considered acceptable educational research, as imposed

by colleges of education, the review process for scholarly

publications and presentations, and the greater political

context that encompasses our work. However, these criteria

and their potentially rigid definitions reduce educational

practice and theory to the confining space of existing cul-

tural models and vocabulary of teaching, learning, and cur-

riculum. That is, they offer a bounded possibility of what

counts as education, most often metonymically collapsing

the very concept ofeducation into the practice ofschooling.

The resulting schema for educational research may be both

useful and appropriate for inquiries into schools or other

formal sites of learning; however, the limited discursive

space posed by an already known construct of how


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Burdick and Sandlin 3

education looks and feels offers a problematic space to/

for researchers interested in the curricula and pedagogies

that exist beyond and between institutional boundaries.

We posit that the shift in context from analyzing the insti-

tutionalized, knowable space of educational institutions to

studies of pedagogical activity occurring outside of the materi-

ally and ideologically defined boundaries of those institutionsrequires a careful examination of ones inquiry purpose and

practices. Furthermore, we maintain that this examination is

especially important when researching critical, resistant

public pedagogiesthose noninstitutional educational dis-

courses and practices committed to cultural critique and

activism. There are many iterations of critical public peda-

gogies, which, despite their various forms, are aligned in that

they all represent spaces of counterhegemonic practice (Jara-

millo, 2010; OMalley et al., 2010; Sandlin et al., 2010; Scat-

amburlo-DAnnibale, 2010). Some critical public

pedagogies are enacted by activists who view culture not

simply as a hegemonic force but as a terrain of contestation

and who thus practice cultural resistance as a means to create

radical social change. For example, Sandlin and colleagues

(Sandlin, 2008; Sandlin & Milam, 2008, 2010) have

explored the resistance tactic of culture jamming used by

social activist groups (e.g., Adbusters and Reverend Billy and

the Church of Stop Shopping) as a form of critical public

pedagogy. Similarly, Walter (2007) examined environmen-

tal activists such as Mr. Floatie and Save our Surf, who use

symbolic tactics similar to culture jamming in order to raise

public awareness about corporate ideological hegemony (p.

613), particularly with regard to ecological issues. Moving

outside an explicit focus on popular culture and cultural resis-

tance, other critical public pedagogies are grounded in morematerialist, Marxist perspectives. These activists, for exam-

ple, the Piqueteros of Argentinaa group of female factory

workers who use strikes, sit-ins, and factory takeovers to

communicate collective resistance to the oppressive produc-

tive processes that are so tied to consumer capitalism

enact pedagogies of defiance that tie the symbolic or

cultural performances to politics and action in order to

change, to unlearn domination, and to transform social rela-

tions (Jaramillo, 2010; see also Scatamburlo-DAnnibale,

2010). Critical public pedagogues are also sometimes envi-

sioned as both high-profile and grass roots public intellec-

tuals and can include teachers, community activists,

journalists, architects, artists, actors, public health employees,

critics, social movement activists, and so forth (Mayo, 2002, p.

196). To Brady (2006), critical public pedagogy is enacted by

educators as well as a wide range of activists and commu-

nity groups; takes place in spaces such as grassroots orga-

nizations, neighborhood projects, art collectives, and town

meetingsspaces that provide a site for compassion, out-

rage, humor, and action; and consists of critical public

engagement grounded in ethical commitments to democratic

principles while challenging existing social practices and

hegemonic forms of discrimination (p. 58).

In this article we argue that, when focusing on such criti-

cal public pedagogies, educational researchers ethical obli-

gations extend beyond the basal, legalistic understandings

of beneficence and harm to a deeper relation of how ones

very research practices might undermine the political possi-bilities of these sites, diminish the transformative potential

that public pedagogies hold for educational research and

practice, and ultimately reinscribe normative, limiting notions

of pedagogy, effectively transmuting any productive pos-

sibility to the realm of the already known. Interweaving a

framework from postcolonial thought (Bhabha, 1992, 2004;

Said, 1984, 1993, 1994; Willinsky, 1999), poststructural

feminist and performative methodological writings (Den-

zin, 2003, 2008; Pillow, 2003), and the literary contribu-

tions of Bakhtin and Volosinov (Bakhtin, 1990; Volosinov,

1973), we argue that many of the basic assumptions and

premises of inquiry must be (re)considered when research-

ing sites of critical public pedagogy. We propose this link-

age of theoretical perspectives as each takes on a specific

ethical positioning to the notion of alterity, collectively

calling for attentiveness to the irreducibility of Otherness

(Silverman, 1996) as a crucial component of developing

any semblance of resistant, counterhegemonic conscious-

ness. Aligning with these perspectives, we posit that critical

public pedagogies and pedagogues offer us glimpses of the

pedagogical Otherforms and practices of pedagogy that

exist independently of, even in opposition to, the knowledge

within the commonsense research imagination (Kenway &

Fahey, 2009) found in the general body of scholarly dis-

course on education. Without this careful approach toresearching sites of learning outside formal institutions, we

argue that researchers risk taking on an institutionalized

form of the colonial gaze, applying reductive logics to or

even completely failing to witness phenomena that are not

easily resolved in dominant cultural meanings and images

of teaching and learning.

PostcolonialTheoryand the Pedagogical Other

One of the problems inherent in locating critical pedago-

gies in popular and public culture is that our framework

for understanding what pedagogy is and looks and feels

like extends from our own cultural constructs of what is

defined as teachingand learningin institutional settings

constructs that reify traditional forms of intellectual activity

as the only possible mode of critical intervention. Beyond

simply attending to the content of their work, researchers

seeking to understand public pedagogy must take careful

measure of the processes and underlying assumptions of

their work, mindful that


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Western research draws from an archive of knowl-

edge and systems, rules and values. . . . Scientific and

academic debate in the West takes place within the

boundaries of these rules, bearing the unmistakable

imprint of Western ways of looking and categorizing

the world. (Viruru & Cannella, 2006, pp. 182-183)

This imperialist legacy is evident in current educational

research practice: Despite the fields historic openness to

new ideas and insistence on the inclusion of marginalized

perspectives, these structures continue to reflect mostly

Euro Western perspectives: define, categorize, and develop

guidelines for how it should be done (Viruru & Cannella,

2006, p. 182). Examples of these colonized and colonizing

logics include assumptions regarding teacher and student

roles and hierarchies, the nature of pedagogical interactions

as solely conscious activities, and pedagogy as necessarily

inclusive of a specialized form of content-based, cognitive

transmission. In this latter case, which is our explicit focus

in this article, knowledges that are considered educational

typically are categorized as such due to their transfer of cer-

tain, largely predetermined configurations of information.

This potentially reductive understanding of education greatly

reifies the colonialist dichotomies of learned and ignorant,

and civilized and savage, as evaluated by the amount and

kind of knowledge an individual or group has accumulated.

In American educational history, the colonialist approach to

schooling has resulted in a litany of curricular innovations,

including E. D. Hirshs (1987; see also Macedo, 1994)

cultural literacy approach, the ongoing policy-level infatua-

tion with quantitatively measurable and discrete standards

(c.f. Berliner & Biddle, 1995), and the current moment ofhigh-stakes testing as a governing structure for schooling

(c.f. Nichols & Berliner, 2007). In contrast, critical public

pedagogy is often concerned with unlearningproblematic

cultural scriptsexemplified by the work of culture jam-

mers, like Reverend Billy (Bill Talen, whose quote we used

to open this essay), a New York City-based anticonsumption

activist whose work provides a voice against the continu-

ous, recombinant barrage of capitalist laden messages fed

through the mass media (Handelman, 1999, p. 399). Thus,

under the weight of dominant definitions, the aims of these

sites of critical public pedagogy might more closely resem-

ble therapeutic ends rather than commonsensically educa-

tional ones, requiring researchers to challenge their own

preconceptions of educational practices and purpose.

Following Willinskys (1999) analysis of the effects of

colonialism on the practice of education, educational

research into critical public pedagogies thus has the pros-

pect of reconstituting these spaces under the institutions

control, effectively (re)inscribing the privilege of the etic

over the emic and the false distinction between what can

and cannot be considered education. Willinsky writes,

Imperialism afforded lessons in how to divide the

world. It taught people to read the exotic, primitive,

and timeless identity of the order, whether in skin

color, hair texture, or the inflections of taste and

tongue. Its themes of conquering, civilizing, convert-

ing, collecting, and classifying inspired education

metaphors equally concerned with taking possessionof the worldmetaphors that we now have to give an

account of, beginning with our own education. (p. 13)

With these contributions in mind, there is a need for edu-

cational researchers to move toward the development of an

approach that, in Barones (2001) terms, seeks to enhance

the possibility of multiple meanings rather than affix public

pedagogies to coordinates within an a priori analyticaland,

likely, institutionalgrid. Accordingly, educational research-

ers working with/in these spaces need to embody an ethical

disposition that regards the potentially radical Otherness of

public pedagogy without reducing it to a mere technology

for asserting the superiority of commonsensical educational

practice (Willinsky, 1999). Echoing the myopia that charac-

terized the imperial Wests constant need to reaffirm itself as

the center of knowledge (Smith, 1999), Ellsworth (2005)

noted, Pedagogical anomalies . . . are difficult to see as ped-

agogy only when we view them from the center of domi-

nant educational discourses and practicesa position that

takes knowledge to be a thing already made and learning to

be an experience already known (p. 5, italics in original).

Ellsworth challenges us to look past taken-for-granted

notions of education and look for anomalous places of

learning (p. 5), such as the theatrical performances, provoc-

ative interactive encounters, architectural spaces, and medi-ated cityscapes created by architects, artists, performers,

media producers, and designers of content-based experi-

ences, museum exhibitions, and public spaces (p. 6) wherein

individuals engage in divergent readings of the common-

sensical world and do so via educational practices that can-

not be described as rational. These places of learning work

best as provocative, critical education when they empha-

size somatic, felt, noncognitive, nonrepresentational pro-

cesses and events such as movement, sensation, intensity,

rhythm, passage (p. 6) and other experiences that are not

typically emphasized in traditional sites of education.

Public pedagogy as a polyvocal and polymodal discourse

especially in terms of critical and counterhegemonic ped-

agogies and pedagoguesis often performative and tentative,

rather than fixed temporally and spatially. For example, in

his pedagogy, Reverend Billy enacts what we refer to

as political poetics (Sandlin, 2008). Convinced that tra-

ditional forms of protest and social movement activism no

longer are effective, Reverend Billy uses less predictable

tactics than the social movements of ages past; this new

activism involves the appropriation, creation, and enactment


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of culture, along with large doses of humor and appeals to

the psychic spaces that undergird the consumptive drive of

modern American lives. Reverend Billy preaches in retail

stores and supermalls, sings songs in public spaces with his

gospel choir, stops traffic on Broadway to preach, engages

his audiences in consumerism recovery therapy, exorcises

cash registers, and performs invisible theater in retailspaces such as Victorias Secret, Starbucks, and the Disney

Store. In this performative mode, Reverend Billys peda-

gogical role cannot (and should not) be associated with the

forms of the kinds of educational interventions found in

schoolsthere is no content to be taught, but rather a deeply

rooted cultural resistance to certain knowledges (in Rever-

end Billys case, our cultural resistance to conscious knowl-

edge of the deleterious effects of hyperconsumerism) to be

unlearned via a ludic, yet critical, inversion of expectations.

The improvisational quality of critical public pedagogy

requires researchers to reconceptualize these educational

practices in ways that trouble commonsensical understand-

ings of educational phenomena. Specifically, critical public

pedagogy research should attend closely to what has been

broadly termed the politics of representation in qualitative

inquiry. Denzins (2003, 2008) work on anticolonial research

practices, although explicitly focused on race and the trou-

bling space between indigenous participants and nonindig-

enous (and potentially culturally colonizing) researchers,

speaks to the problematic relationship of formally trained

educational researchers and informal sites of educational

discourse and practice. As Denzin (2008) argued, Agents

of colonial power, Western scientists discovered, extracted,

appropriated, commodified, and disturbed knowledge about

the indigenous other (p. 438). In Bhabhas terms, publicpedagogies can exist in a caesural space for educational

researchers, a space in which they remain unnamed and

unclassified within the fields taxonomyunknown, and

potentially unknowable, within the vocabulary of common-

sensical educational discourse (Sandlin, 2008). However,

once these sites and practices are brought under the gaze of

educational inquiry and namedwithin the constellation of

the known, they are relegated to the extant doxa of know-

able educational discourse, explained into stasis via the

enunciative present (Bhabha, 2004, p. 347) of the aca-

demic gaze and fixed within the moments available disci-

plinary discourse (Foucault, 1970). Considering our

historically privileged role as academics has required us to

resist our own urges to name, classify, and relegate indi-

viduals like Reverend Billy to the signifier teacheror to

understand the efficacy of public contestation via some

form of analytical rubric based on the educational com-

monsense. Obviously, in this very piece, we have still suc-

cumbed to this urge by labeling Reverend Billy a public

pedagogue; however, our goal in doing so is to problema-

tize the urge to name, illuminating it as an arbitrary and

potentially harmful legacy within our training and episte-

mological bases. Further troubling our commitments to the

academy and its specialized forms of legitimacy and dis-

course, we recognize that the issue of naming truly has no

easy resolution; instead, it requires us, as researchers, to

take up a disquieting, discomforting space of uncertainty in

our inquiry and writing practices.

Troubling PowerandAuthority:Toward a Methodology ofDiscomfort

To address the problematic tendency to return to the known

disciplinary rules (Smith, 1999) of research, we advocate a

methodology of discomfort in critical public pedagogy

inquiry, following Wanda Pillows notion of reflexivities of

discomfort (p. 187). Pillow discusses how feminist, criti-

cal, and postcolonial researchers, since the crisis of repre-

sentation in cultural anthropology and qualitative research

in general, now almost instinctively draw upon practices of

reflexivity to address a variety of ethical and power-related

issues surrounding representation and legitimization within

qualitative research. Reflexivity, often in the form of divulg-

ing or examining ones own positionality or subjectivity

and reflecting on how this has shaped or affected research

design, data collection, and data analysis, has become so

commonplace that it is usedyet rarely explicitly defined

or problematizedby almost every qualitative researcher

interested in exploring, addressing, or somehow minimizing

the typically unequal power relationships between research-

ers and participants of research. Researchers engage in reflex-

ive practices to reveal and make more explicit how knowledge

is conducted within the research process; to come to morecomplex, nuanced interpretations of data; to practice research

in ways that seek to minimize researcher authority; and to

negotiate power and representation more readily with par-

ticipants (Pillow, 2003).

Pillow (2003) asserted that the most widely accepted

and practiced forms of reflexivity operate in a confes-

sional mode, wherein the researcher makes explicit her

positionality and how she reflected upon and attempted to

address issues of power throughout the research process.

Through this confession, she experiences a kind of cathar-

sis of self-awareness that provides a cure (p. 181) and

helps her feel as if she has dealt with issues of representa-

tion and thus can move on in peace. Researchers often use

reflexivity as a way to render the unfamiliarresearch top-

ics, participants, contextsfamiliar, or more approachable

or understandable, to themselves and their audiences.

Through confessional, familiar-izing practices of reflexiv-

ity, a researcher attempts to understand herself so that, in

turn, she can better know or comprehend her partici-

pants, a stance that assumes a modernist subject that is

fixed and knowable. Pillow argues the familiar-izing


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tendencies of reflexivity as typically practiced, along with

the notion that somehow recognizing and confessing ones

positionality can somehow lead to better truths, work

against reflexivitys critical possibilities, and, ultimately,

cause qualitative researchers to rely on and to have their

worked judged bycolonized by, we could arguetraditional

conceptualizations of validity and reliability. She cautionsagainst writing toward familiarity and, instead, urges

researchers to embrace methods and practices that allow

the researcher to acknowledge and inhabit unease, tenta-

tiveness, and uncertaintycollectively, what she identifies

as reflexivities of discomfort.

A reflexivity of discomfort seeks to leave what is unfamil-

iar, unfamiliar (Pillow, 2003, p. 177), a task Pillow admits

is both difficult and disconcerting. Pillow draws upon the

work of Lubna Chaudry (2000), Kamala Visweswaran (1994),

Elizabeth St. Pierre (1997), and Sofia Villenas (2000) to

illustrate how these reflexivities might be practiced, argu-

ing that these writers interrupt reflexivityand in doing

so, render the knowing of their selves or their subjects as

uncomfortable and uncontainable (Pillow, 2003, p. 188).

A reflexivity of discomfort seeks to know while at the same

time situates this knowing as tenuous (p. 188). The authors

discussed by Pillow as examples problematize dominant

discourses of acceptable practices of research while also

urging researchers to challenge how critical, compassionate

researchers may be perpetuating those discourses through

the very ways in which they engage in reflexivity. Within

reflexivities of discomfort, reflexivity is not used as a source

of power to know the other in a more complete, bounded

fashion, thus rendering the other more understandable.

Rather, reflexivity becomes a way to block, challenge, orinterrupt the practice of gathering data as truths into exist-

ing folds of the known to practices which interrogate the

truthfulness of the tale and provide multiple answers (Trinh,

1991, p. 12) (p. 192). Pillow suggests that a reflexivity of

discomfort leads to tellings that are unfamiliarand likely

uncomfortable (p. 192). Researchers seeking to practice

reflexivities of discomfort do not dismiss the importance of

examining issues of power and ethics but recognize that

reflexivity is inextricably linked to power and privilege that

cannot be easily or comfortably erased.

Drawing upon this notion of reflexivity of discomfort,

we propose a methodology of discomfortthat pushes toward

an unfamiliar, towards the uncomfortable (Pillow, 2003,

p. 192). By both expanding and inhabiting this uncomfort-

able space, researchers with/in critical public pedagogy work

in a mode of consciousness that Said (1984, 1993, 1994)

termed exilic, a space that transgresses the inherited script

of dominant narratives. Said reflected on critical inquiry as

the interstitial place ofexile, and in his own critical work,

he saw the potential for a public intellectualism and peda-

gogy that could inhabit the gaps between competing, yet

static, ideologies. According to Said (1994),

The pattern that sets the course for the intellectual as

outsider is best exemplified by the condition of exile, the

state of never being fully adjusted, always feeling out-

side the chatty, familiar world inhabited by natives. . . .

Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is

restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled,

and unsettling others. You cannot go back to someearlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at

home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one

in your new home or situation. (p. 39)

Thus, through these feelings of discomfort, the notion of

exile takes on an embodied and reflexive epistemology, one

that resists the colonized rationale of imperialist research

practices via the unerring desire for an understandingthat

has been denied. In an exilic consciousness, the researcher/

writer is in a constant state of recursion, but not of flux. As

Said (1993) noted, Liberation as an intellectual mission,

born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements

and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the set-

tled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to

its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies (p. 332). The

discomfort, then, is the homelessness of the exile, and the

state of crisis and trauma is not an intervention into a pacific

narrative, but a continual sense of emergence and energy,

the ever-present need to leave the nameless unnamed and

thus politically viable. A methodology of discomfort thus

decouples authorial power from research and opens chan-

nels for democratic dialogue and social imagination by

abstracting the researcher herself from the safe space of the

known and the accepted.

The ethical obligation of researchers of (critical) publicpedagogy, then, is to practice a form of inquiry as circum-

scription, drawing the uncertain contours of what we do

notknow without filling in those spaces with the litany of

things that we do. We must seek to develop ways of explor-

ing public pedagogies for the ways they are unknowable

and practiceas well as bring attention tothe silences

they reveal in our understandings of curriculum and peda-

gogy. This methodology would be driven by an ethical

practice that, after Denzin and Giardina (2007), refuses to

turn social activism into a mere objectof inquiry. Instead,

research in this vein seeks to move away from the neocolo-

nialist impulse to grasp, to understand, to classifya move

that calls for working toward what Denzin calls interpretive

sufficiency, which means taking seriously lives that are

loaded with multiple interpretations and grounded in cultural

complexity (Denzin, 1989, pp. 77, 81, cited in Christians,

2007, p. 57). Megan Boler, herself working through a ped-

agogy of discomfort, calls this witnessing: A pedagogy

of discomfort emphasizes collective witnessing as opposed to

individualized self-reflection. I distinguish witnessing from

spectating as one entre into a collectivized engagement in

learning to see differently (p. 176). Witnessing, we contend,


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implores researchers to attend to educational phenomenon

in a dialogic process, one that inverts the epistemic power

at play in the research scene and makes fluid the boundaries

and authority of researcher and researched.

In a recent project, Ellsworth and Kruse explored the crit-

ical public pedagogy practiced by the Center for Land Use

Interpretation (CLUI), an organization that helps educate thegeneral public about how land in the United States is appor-

tioned, utilized, and perceived (CLUI, 2009) through edu-

cational methodologies, such as public bus tours through

areas destroyed by overproduction and overconsumption.

For example, one of CLUIs bus tours, through Cincinnati,

takes passengers through the Proctor & Gamble plant,

dumps and scrapyards, and a former uranium plant. In

describing their engagement with the CLUI, Ellsworth and

Kruse state that their ideas about public pedagogy and land

use were being shaped and inspired (p. 270), calling them

to take up Rancieres stance of the emancipated spectator

(cited in Ellsworth & Kruse, in press, p. 272) wherein visi-

tors work out the specifics of their own learnings on their

own, and spectators are active as interpreters (p. 271).

They use this stance to witness both CLUIs public peda-

gogy and their own experiences on a Department of Energy

(DOE) tour of the Nevada Test Site. Rather than defini-

tively naming, categorizing, explaining, and theorizing for

the reader what either the CLUI or the DOE were doing, this

stance called for them to enact a discourse that would be

readable only for those who would make their own transla-

tion from the point of view of their own adventure (Ran-

ciere, 2007, cited in Ellsworth & Kruse, in press, p. 273).

Thus, they offer their own stories of their bodies/sensa-

tions/ emotions/inklings into and through the [DOE] offi-cial tours route of reading (p. 272). These are presented

in the form of previously unthought or unfelt meshworks

of words, images, sensations (p. 273). In their embodied

experience of witnessing the CLUI, Ellsworth and Kruse

illustrate that critical public pedagogies frequently do their

work without reified, illocutionary forms of teaching and

learning. CLUI presents an invitation, not a directive, to

learn and, by operating in this mode, provokes us to question

the content of our understanding as well as the ways in which

that understanding came into being. In representing sites like

the CLUI ethically, researchers must be willing to place them-

selves into the difficult role of the witnessthe uncertain,

decentered participant in the pedagogical momentrather

than that of the detached educational critic.

Sharing the Unshareable Languages

Perhaps the primary question for educational researchers

working with/in sites of critical public pedagogy becomes

one of the tensions between beneficence and harm. How-

ever, reaching well beyond the legal meanings those terms

have taken on via institutional review boards, public peda-

gogy researchers must consider the ways in which their

work might actually disrupt or render ineffective or power-

less the projects they explore, thus reducing the possibility

of critical public space to yet another institutional discourse.

As researchers interested in critical public (pedagogical and

educational) sites, we have often felt the tension of trying tohonor the transgressive projects we study while still writing

and addressing a distinctly institutional audience. The quote

we used to open this essay comes from an e-mail communi-

cation Jenny received from Reverend Billy. While agreeing

to participate in Jennys study, Billy, in a fashion befitting

our understanding of critical inquiry, questions her inten-

tions openlywondering why his work and his performa-

tive self-hood is so readily reduced to the private, specialized,

and exclusionary discourse of the academy. He performs

this serious questioning while simultaneously ironically

embracing and rendering ridiculous the position in which

Jenny has placed himstraight from the den of Critical

Public Pedagogy! He further complicates his own critique

as he positions himself as a sort of mediator or translator of

the obscure language of academia and as thus in some ways

dependent on the very unshareable language and catego-

rization he critiques:

On the other hand, if Im not mistaken, Savitri and

I make our living by being invited into colleges and

universities by professors who essentially ask us to

translate their essays into common gesture, vernacu-

lar talk, and popular music. So maybe I should just

shut up.

Through this recursive process of critique and self-

critique, Reverend Billy seeks to transgress the ways in

which his work has been framed by the academy while still

acknowledging the role the academy has played in his sus-

taining that work. This slipperyness and resistance to being

labeled and defined has become a trademark of Reverend

Billys activist identity, and it is in some ways what makes

him so compelling and effective as a critical public educa-

tor because it pushes audiences members into the uncom-

fortable spaces of confusion where critical learning can

take place (Sandlin, 2008; Sandlin & Milam, 2008,

2010). This refusal to be labeled is what Lane (2002) called

Reverend Billys theatrical and political equivalent to neg-

ative dialectics (p. 80). She argues that Reverend Billys

power as a social change agent would be lost if he were

effectively labeled and bound:

If dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity,

then Talen cant afford a positive identity: the minute

he offers a reconciliation, of any kind, of the social con-

tradictions he seeks to reveal, the dialectical potential


8/12


opened by his work disappears. That negativitynever

really being any one thingbecomes a means to an

end he cannot name. . . . This negativity is the Rever-

ends most genuine, and perhaps most spiritual act. It is

an everyday, renewable sacrifice: he commits himself

to an endless negativity in order to make possible new

configurations, new revelations, new ways of imagin-ing being in public, being a public. (Lane, 2002, p. 80)

These descriptions of Reverend Billys pedagogical effi-

cacy, as well as the e-mail communication with which we

opened this article, act as a cautionary tale of how defining

and capturing critical public pedagogies through the lens of

traditional educational research has the potential to arrest

the potency of such activism. When we tried to name the

public, the public spoke back to us, as Billys pedagogy took

on our work as its target. Billy has continued his critique

throughout our relationship, naming us professors of pub-

lic pedagogy and stating that he was impressed by the

history I feel in your names (personal communication)

always maintaining recognition of the very colonial forms

of power inherent in the researcherresearched relationship

and vigilantly eluding our ability to exert this power com-

pletely over his project. These moments are evidence of the

intent and effectiveness of critical public pedagogical forms

that resist classification and refuse to acquiesce to domi-

nant educational hierarchies. The genesis of this article is a

testament to the power of this unknown pedagogy, as our

ability to be comfortable with our own work on critical pub-

lic pedagogies was called into question. For us, Reverend

Billys questions linger: Why dont you professors stop

burrowing farther and farther into your private world? Doesthat unshareable language make you feel more specific? Or

updated? I literally dont understand the upside of creating

these walls around a subculture?We ask ourselves, and we

ask other critical researchers: Do we have the right to reduce

these public, critical discourses to simply serve the needs of

the private institution, and perhaps worse, our private careers?

To answer these questions in an ethical manner, we turn

to Bakhtins (1990) discussion of ethics as they relate to

alterity and to the human obligation of answerability.

Bakhtin views the Otherin our case, both in terms of an

individual and the possibilities of pedagogyas a crucial

function of understanding and existing as a Self, a position

into which we are obligated, ethically, to enter dialogically.

Bakhtin notes, This ever-present excess of my seeing, know-

ing, and possessing in relation to any other human being is

founded in the uniqueness and irreplaceability of my place

in the world. For only Ithe one-and-only Ioccupy in a

given set of circumstances this particular place at this par-

ticular time; all other human beings are situated outside

me (p. 23). For Bakhtin, thus, every human occupies a

divergent subject position that is at once wholly unique and

wholly limited. This concept of a locational self is the hinge

to which much of Bakhtins work on dialogism is affixed,

as in the dialogic moment, either as an act of agreement or

disagreement, the divergences of unique selves intersect to

produce new meanings, ones that could not be achieved

within the horizons of the self. This production of meaning

via discourse, the dialogical extension to the Other andreturn to the Self, for Bakhtin, amounts to an ethical act,

one that allows us to vivify and give form to (p. 32) our-

selves as a Self-hood and as an Other. As such, for Bakhtin,

our highest ethical obligation is that of answerabilityof

listening to and, most crucially, responding to the Other,

collectively the dialogic process of being human.

Relating these issues to the concept of critical public

pedagogy, we argue that educational researchers must see

their work as an answer, a response to the pedagogical

utterances of the critical public pedagogue or pedagogy: the

Other to our understanding of pedagogy, learning, and edu-

cation in the broadest sense. Our process of beginning to

answer Reverend Billys playful critique is partially enacted

in this article, not as a direct address to Billy, but as call for

ethical critical public pedagogy work made to researchers

working in this genre. It is our hope that this element of our

answer might preserve the project of critical public peda-

gogues who do not possess the access, authority, or savvy

Reverend Billy exhibits. Furthermore, we feel it might

enable researchers to make more meaningful, critical contri-

butions to our collective understanding of education, learn-

ing, and pedagogy. As such, to address the difficulty of this

proposition and to keep sharp focus on the institutions

problematic, colonial history, we forward the ideas of reflex-

ivity and discomfort as means of reconsidering, inflecting,and fundamentally changing the very timbre and intent of

our answer. As Bakhtin (1990) cautioned, The [researcher]

puts his [sic] own ideas directly into the mouth of the

[researched] from the standpoint of their theoretical or ethi-

cal (political, social) validity, in order to convince us of their

truth and propagandize them (p. 10). To enter into Bakhtin-

ian, ethical dialogue with critical educators and educations

in public spaces, researchers must work through the histori-

cal and hierarchical epistemological author/ity offered to

individuals within the institution, reframing their answers

as tentative, open, and in the voice of the amateur (Said,

1994). Taking up the ethical call to answer, then, implores

researchers to look beyond the unerring quest for certainty

in much of academic research and instead to conduct aca-

demic inquiry that voices itself as decentered, humble, and

even celebratory of the pedagogies that exist beyond our

institutional knowing. Extending this point, we argue that

in dialogue with the contribution of noninstitutional, unex-

pected, critical public pedagogies, we must be willing to

eject the academic mandates of reduction, dissection, and

evaluation, embodying instead a disposition of conscious,


9/12


critical celebration of the prospects of an Other pedagogy

and ways of understanding teaching and learning that upend

and unearth our own comfortable, stable notions of educa-

tional practice and meaning. Critical public pedagogy

inquirymuch like ethnographyhas the differential pur-

pose of revealing the forms of power that undergird our

own perceptions, epistemologies, and knowings of education.That is, by witnessing (Boler, 1999)learning from these

critical educators rather imposing a prior constructs on

themthe alterity of other pedagogies, other curricula, and

other educations, we effectively illuminate the constructed,

arbitrary, and power-laden nature of our own inquiry, teach-

ing, and understanding of educational practice.

Conclusions:An Ethics ofAlterityin Critical Public Pedagogy Inquiry

In her attempt to construct a theory oflove, Kaja Silverman

(1995) posited that, to love, an individual must first make

conscious and reject idiopathic (self-centric) identity-

forming dispositions, which reduce another person (the

Other) to the knowable thresholds of the Self. Conversely,

in truly loving relationships, Silverman suggests that we

enter into heteropathic (Other-centric) dispositions toward

an Other, undergoing a clearing of the narcissistic mist

which generally prevents the subject from accepting that

he or she desires outof an irreducible void (p. 71, italics

added). Here, Silverman takes up the psychoanalytic con-

struct of the subject, one that describes an individuals frag-

mented, incomplete nature (the irreducible void) as well

as the illusory sense of unitary self-hood that works to con-

stantly obscure this fragmentation (narcissism). An act oflove is a decentering of the Self as a complete and final-

ized locus of identity and meaning making, as well as an

opening to the Other (and the unknown he or she heralds) as

incommensurablea site of possibility and difference

beyond the reductionistic space of the ego. In short, from a

psychoanalytical position, love is always an ethical act.

Adapting Silvermans intersubjective thesis to our argu-

ment, we suggest that by attending to the theoretical (post-

colonial, poststructural/feminist) lenses we have offered in

this article, researchers exploring spaces and practices of

critical public pedagogy can enter the same sort ofloving

dispositionone in which researchers do not seek to possess

and consume their object of inquiry but rather offer up

their epistemologies and very professional identities to be

eclipsed by the researched. Such a relationship asks more

from researchers than givingvoice or promotingempower-

ment: as we inquire into critical public pedagogical spaces

and the lives of critical public pedagogues themselves, the

questions involved in conducting ethical qualitative research

take on additional meaning and import. Such questions

involve deeper considerations of our audience(s), as well as

the responses we hope to elicit in doing this sort of work. For

whom is this work created? Do we want activist communities

to learn from our work? If not, is what we are doing problem-

atic? Without reflexive attention to these questions, and the

sense of discomfort that we have both described in this article

and inhabited in our own research practices, researchers

actually jeopardize the nature of the work their subjects pro-duce. Resolving antiinstitutional discourse into the language

of the institution recasts the colonial project as described by

Willinsky (1999) and Bhabha (1992, 2004) and reduces the

possibility of the unknown, the new, and the Other/wise to

rigid, static categories. A final point, perhaps the most crucial

element of Bhabhas caesural space, is its transgressive poli-

tics, its ability, as in ethnographic work, to reposition famil-

iarity as alterity. In his discussion of the entre of newness

into the world, Bhabha uses Jamesons (1991) ideals of pro-

ductive ambiguity as a structure of ambivalence, a moment

in the ongoing narratives of dominance in which their tenta-

tive, arbitrary nature is revealed. By entering the uncomfort-

able, caesural space produced by resistant, unknowable public

pedagogies, researchers are able to provide a forum by which

these pedagogies can speak back to the existing imaginary of

educational practice: transforming, rather than simply inform-

ing. Without this ethical disposition, researchers, we con-

tend, threaten the liberatory potential of the projects they

study, effectively eradicating the very difference that vivifies

them (Baudrillard & Guillame, 2008). Perhaps worse yet, we

ignore the partial, fragmentary nature of our own deeply

embedded understandings of educationand by doing so,

may be doomed to the stasis of the known.

Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe authors declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect

to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research and/or

authorship of this article.

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Bios

Jake Burdick is a doctoral student in curriculum studies at Arizona

State University, where his research focuses largely on public andpopular sites of pedagogy and curriculum. Jake has published his

writing in The Mississippi Review (creative nonfiction), and The

Sophists Bane, and he is a coeditor ofComplicated Conversations

and Confirmed Commitments: Revitalizing Education for Democ-

racy (2009, Educators International Press) and the forthcoming

Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond

Schooling(2010, Routledge).

Jennifer A. Sandlin is an assistant professor in the Division of

Advanced Studies in Education Policy, Leadership, and Curric-

ulum at Arizona State University in Tempe. Her recent work

investigates sites of public pedagogy and popular culture-based,

informal, and social movement activism centered on unlearning

consumerism. Jennifer has been published in Journal of Curric-

ulum and Pedagogy, Adult Education Quarterly, Curriculum

Inquiry, and Teachers College Record. She recently edited, with

Peter McLaren, Critical Pedagogies of Consumption (2009,

Routledge), and with Brian Schultz and Jake Burdick, Handbook

of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling

(2010, Routledge).

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