Abstract
Rooted in feminist philosophy, critical race theory, and participatory action research (PAR), I partnered with four faculty and four students at an elite, private, college preparatory day school for boys in order to examine bullying. In this article I closely examine the role of language and discourse when conducting counter hegemonic research with people who are predominantly privileged and within institutions designed to reproduce those privileges. I briefly describe the co-construction of our theory and instrument to illustrate that our close attention to language in regards to bullying both helped us understand our work and changed how we went about conducting the study. I describe how our strategic use of language to broadly define bullying helped us capture interesting data and interrupt power. And finally, I discuss our political use of language to others and suggest that while it paved a safer space for us to conduct our work it also may have restricted our work from having the power to resist co-optation and promote sustainable, systemic change.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the Center for the Study of Boys’ & Girls’ Lives. I would like to give special thanks to the student and faculty researchers at Rockport for their incredible work conducting this research. I would like to express appreciation to Michelle Fine for her enormously helpful suggestions on previous drafts. I would also like to thank Suzanne Ouellette and Peter Kuriloff for their extremely valuable feedback. And finally, I would like to acknowledge some colleagues at the PAR Collective for their important contributions to my work: Jennifer Ayala, Monique Guishard, Yasser Payne, Maria Elena Torre, & Eve Tuck.
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Stoudt, B.G. The Role of Language & Discourse in the Investigation of Privilege: Using Participatory Action Research to Discuss Theory, Develop Methodology, & Interrupt Power. Urban Rev 41, 7–28 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-008-0093-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-008-0093-y