Date of Award

2021

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

School of Education

Abstract

This dissertation explores new possibilities for researching and representing community-engaged curriculum and pedagogical practices among faculty and their doctoral students. Community-engagement is (re)imagined within nonfiction-fiction writing to provide a line of inquiry that integrates data and theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2017). I probe, question, and disrupt stable notions of engaged teaching-learning and research. Foucauldian concept of power/knowledge is used to interrogate faculty/doctoral students’ shifting subjectivities and discursive construction of community-engagement. Post qualitative inquiry provides a methodological lens to (re)consider new ways of framing community-engagement and acknowledges the crisis of representing research as it is always partial and incomplete. Through the application of poststructuralist ideas and post qualitative inquiry, I create new spaces to examine the norms and sociopolitical and historical contexts of discourse among faculty and doctoral students.

Guided by St. Pierre’s (1997a) methodology, I suggest rethinking community-engaged discourse and shifting subjectivities among faculty and doctoral students. Data from interviews, artifacts, and poststructuralist theories are (re)interpreted and entangled inventing four characters, Julie, a doctoral student, and her three faculty members. Julie engages in discourse with her faculty members in various contexts, such as an online class, community partner site, and research team meeting. Within the discourse of these imaginary figures and spaces, power/knowledge is used to interrogate power operations among faculty and doctoral students. Shifting subjectivities are also analyzed in the pursuit of mutually beneficial and reciprocal forms of community-engagement. I utilize the imaginary figures as a way to examine how we are produced within multiple directions of power circulations and how our own experiences are partial, changing, and incomplete. This new framing contributes to (re)imagining community-engagement within doctoral education. Community-engagement is still in process, ever shifting, and partial in its pursuit of the "not yet."

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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