This is Your Father’s Paradigm: Government Intrusion and the Case of Qualitative Research in Education

Abstract

This talk was the Egon Guba Invited Lecture at the American Educational Research Association annual conference, April, 2003, Chicago. This article mobilizes three counterdiscourses to critique the federal government’s incursion into legislating scientific method in the realm of educational research via the “evidence-based” movement of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Foucauldian policy analysis, feminism via Luce Irigaray, and postcolonialism via Stuart Hall are used to situate such scientism as a racialized masculinist backlash against the proliferation of research approaches that characterize the past 20 years of social inquiry. Congressional disdain for educational research is addressed within a context of the Science Wars and the needs of neoliberal states, including conservative restoration.