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Ethnography

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DOI: 10.1177/1466138112463803

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Tales from the Field

How progressive cultureresists critique: Theimpasse of NGO Studies

Amanda LashawUniversity of California, Berkeley, USA

Abstract

Ethnographies of NGO and nonprofit practices are increasingly focused on the social

lives of middle-class liberals who significantly shape how societies recognize social

suffering and its redress. At the same time, the boundaries between academic and

NGO worlds are blurring ever more as ethnographers prioritize engaged projects

and as more doctoral students enter graduate school with NGO experience. This

article addresses the distinctive dilemmas that arise from this lack of distance between

ethnographers and research subjects and particularly the difficulty of critically examining

the moral sentiments of progressive actors. I tell the story of a first fieldwork project in

which I struggled to objectify the social power of professional education reformers who

already analyzed themselves and whose efforts to combat race and class inequalities

seemed to be beyond reproach. The narrative explores how the particularity of their

norms and ideals continually threatened to disappear in the contexts of university life, of

critical ethnographic literature, and of the fieldwork itself. I argue that a direct focus on

the production of morality is crucial to grasping the meaning of progress as a product

of struggle.

Keywords

NGOs, critique, liberal progressives, morality, US education reform

Before we end the meeting I was wondering if, Amanda do you have any insightsfor us? I was caught o guard by K.s question and reeling from two solid hours offast-paced note-taking in the windowless conference room of the Center forEducational Equity (CEE),1 a mid-sized nonprot organization in the progressivehamlet of Oakland, California. Though I had only recently begun observing

Corresponding author:

Amanda Lashaw, Visiting Scholar, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Center for the Study of Social

Change, 2420 Bowditch Street, University of California, Berkeley, CA 947205670, USA.

Email: [email protected]

at b-on: 00900 Universidade Nova de Lisboa on June 15, 2015eth.sagepub.comDownloaded from

meetings in their downtown oce as part of my dissertation eldwork, the veprogram directors at the table knew I understood the concerns animating the longmeeting. I had worked as an education reform insider and had logged many hourslaboring over the design of workshops for public school teachers andadministrators.

But K.s question was not directed to my experience as a workshop planner.I had left such meeting tables a few years back, and my silent jotting during the twohours a most unnatural presence reminded us all that I was there as aresearcher. As the group turned to hear my response, I worked quickly to translatethe request and come up with an acceptable oering. What sort of insight was shehoping for? Surely she was not asking how the meeting had informed my researchquestions about the production of political culture. The average person on sta wasfar too busy and uninterested to have read my plan for ethnographic inquiry. EvenK., an Associate Director, had only the vague sense of my interests that I was ableto present in hallway-talk shorthand at the time. But maybe, I wondered, she istesting me to reveal more of what I am up to. I did not have to be told that from theorganizations standpoint research, never mind critique, was not considered essen-tial to the cause of transforming the local schools. Maximizing CEEs capacity torealize its planned outcomes was the only justication for expending precious laborpower on research. I had not expected to have to negotiate the epistemic and ethicalchasm in public so early on. I stalled and ipped through my notes as I searched forsomething useful to say about a curriculum on coaching for educational equity.

What had struck me during the meeting was how quickly the group inventedcoded language and elaborate charts. There were lengthy discussions, for example,about the nuanced dierence between a theory of action, a theory of praxis, andan action plan; substantial time was spent debating the best way to visuallyorganize documents introducing the four disciplines, the three domains, andthe ve core principles of coaching. This practice of writing code (as I dubbedit in my notes) led me to a string of thoughts about the hierarchical structure ofprofessional knowledge that always requires expert deciphering. In my moment onthe hot seat, I managed to bend my observation toward their ends. Youre verygood at schematizing and labeling your experiential knowledge about coaching, Isaid, giving my mental note a more neutral spin. Its possible that you sometimescomplicate your task by introducing a lot of lingo that has to be explained. If itwas a test, I passed. There was a murmur of agreement that they tended to getcarried away with giving every idea a name and a place. Though I had not regis-tered as a new asset to the meeting process, I was fairly honest and I got myself othe hook. For the time being.

Awkward moments like these lurk in the air of eldwork focused on progressivediscourses and practices. They threaten to reveal the distance between activist andethnographic interests in addressing human suering. In the context of a movementfor educational equity, my disinterest in transforming schools could only register astaboo. My attempt to do ethnography that not only eschewed responsibility forsolution-building but also aspired to critique the seemingly sacred ground of the

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movement was doubly fraught. Such unwieldy ethnographic engagements arebecoming more common as interest in critical studies of NGOs and nonprotsgrows. In this article, I draw on my experience as a rst-time ethnographer todescribe the diculty of turning progressive phenomena into objects of criticalanalysis. I tease apart the ethical and methodological challenges that arise froma vexing intersection of conditions: studying a milieu that is too familiar to theresearcher, among NGO professionals who already analyze themselves, and in aeld of advocacy that is morally prized. The story follows my transition fromeducation reform worker to ethnographer of a nonprot education reform organ-ization, and it highlights a disorientation often felt by students trying to reconcileactivist and scholarly modes of critique. My hope is to conjure the perplexingexperience of attempting to grasp processes that are subtly excluded from therealm of the knowable.

Neither the value nor the hazards of studying liberals who do good work is wellarticulated in the broad eld of NGO studies. Until recently, critical ethnographiesof development, humanitarianism, environmentalism, and other elds of socialadvocacy did not meditate on the experiences of middle-class actors. A currentturn toward the subjectivity of such reformers promises to break new ground. Thusfar, theoretical concerns and eldwork reections have most often framed nonpro-t workers as professional knowledge-producers (Hilhorst, 2003; Lewis and Mosse,2006; Mosse, 2011; Riles, 2001) or mediators of capitalist governance (Merry, 2006;Richard, 2009; Schuller, 2009; Tsing, 2004) or movement builders (Feher et al.,2007; Sangtin Writers, 2006; Vanthuyne, 2009). Given the centrality of morality inthe world of NGOs, it is somewhat surprising that relatively few ethnographieshave anchored the subjectivity of workers in their dreams and norms for a morehumane world (Allahyari, 2000; Bornstein, 2005; Englund, 2006). I would like myreections to contribute to this burgeoning line of scholarship by clarifying thechallenge of examining NGO workers as producers of moral identity and socialconscience.

In the discussion that follows, I use the somewhat inadequate terms liberal,NGO, middle-class, and reformers to clear a space for talking about a pat-terned enactment of social-change work and an associated moral orientation. I aminterested in those forms of social interventionism that are championed by peoplewho are compelled to do something to improve the lives of others whether acrossnations or neighborhoods but whose own well-being is relatively secure. My focusis further dened by a specic tradition of social interventionism whose adherentscherish equality of opportunity, upward mobility, multiculturalism, human rights,and promotion of a protectionist role for the state. Liberal thus refers to itscolloquial American variant, reform denotes progressive and not conservativeagendas, and middle-class signals the political identity of actors who are unlikelyto count themselves (or be counted) as the principal victims or perpetrators ofsocial injustice. In the present context, I use NGO not as an acronym but asthe moral and political signier it has become. It distinguishes a form of collectiveaction that promises to improve human lives and is imagined by its participants to

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work beyond self-interest, greed and political corruption.2 Framed as such, thesensibilities of liberal reformers represent an excellent window onto the intersectionof politics and ethics. They express and signicantly shape the way societies appre-hend the good.

It will become clear that I labored to see education reform work in Oakland interms of its moral eects. Between 2003 and 2004, I spent the better part of 18months trying to gure out why movement leaders and supporters in Oaklandwere optimistic about plans to interrupt the reproduction of race and classinequalities by redesigning schools. When I began, I viewed the disjuncturebetween the movements promises and its tactics as a means to critique reformistpolitical strategy. Like many US cities in the early 2000s, Oaklands publicschools had dismal academic outcomes, they were woefully under-funded, andthey were almost completely divested of white cultural and economic capital.Against this depressing backdrop, the diverse, professional sta of CEEworked tirelessly in the name of closing the racial achievement gap. Theyhelped lead an initiative that included decentralizing district governance anddesigning schools that were more personalized, autonomous, and attuned tostudents social backgrounds. Coaches developed an elaborate school-designworkshop series and they trained school leaders to face the dicult reality ofrace-based achievement patterns, using techniques of self-analysis and data ana-lysis to identify root causes. I followed the collective condence of the move-ment through ordinary activities in CEEs downtown oce, through publicworkshops and meetings, and through spaces in between. I tried to understandhow relatively bounded tactics of systemic restructuring were imagined to havethe power to transcend social reproduction.

In order to shift from thinking about the political ecacy of the movement toasking about its moral status, I had to overcome several barriers that often impedecritique of progressive actors and their sentiments. Three central themes runthrough my account of these diculties. One traces the problem of studying cul-tural worlds already organized by positivist and instrumentalist paradigms. Noviceresearchers working in elds with hefty applied research wings are especially bur-dened by attempting to clarify an intellectual agenda while fending o normativediscourses of program evaluation and policy-building. A second thread followstensions between the intimacy of eldwork and a commitment to critique underspecial conditions, namely when the lived experience that forms the basis of critiqueis in some sense shared by researchers and study participants. What are the pos-sibilities for ethnographic authority under such conditions? What ethics shouldguide relationships between subjects and an insider-cum-outsider? A third themeaddresses the problem of gaining analytic distance from the morally charged self-representations of informants whose values unite them with many of the socialscientists who are the audience of such research.

I close with a brief description of moves I made to objectify a liberal ethos thatasserted itself as the only legitimate way to think, feel, and talk about racial andeconomic justice in Oakland. My improvised strategy involved a comparative

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analysis of liberal and leftist activists that allowed me to unsettle the taken-for-granted good of working on the racial achievement gap. It also spurred an ongoingreexivity about my own changing moral position. In the end, such tactics tunedme into the multiplicity of progressive moralities that vie for the status of commonsense.

Plural worlds of critique

My nal full-time job at an education reform organization ended with an exitinterview. I was quitting, nine months after joining a project designed to studyand improve promising schools in poor neighborhoods. I had never heard of anexit interview, and the unduly formal name for the ritual was symptomatic of thedistressing organizational culture that was pushing me out the door. That said, Iwas eager for the chance talk about common features of nonprot life that hadbeen subtly assaulting me, for years really, as a worker in multiple US cities. Iknew that the two managers who would interview me were sincere in wanting tounderstand why I was so compelled to leave, given that I had no other job linedup and despite my apparent commitment to the cause of educational equity thatdrove the project.

To my surprise, when the moment came I had a lot of trouble articulating mycritique. It was easy to oer examples of practices that bothered me. For instance, Idecried the very name of the project High Performance Learning Communities as being distastefully corporate. I complained that the model of ying expertreform facilitators from the San Francisco Bay Area to locales all overCalifornia and Oregon seemed wasteful. Unlike my co-workers, I did not relishthe free trips and dinners. I also revisited the unpleasant experience of being calledinto a managers oce, a few months into the job, to be told that the directors hadno problems with my work, but your co-workers dont always know if they cancount on you. This, I quickly gured out, was code for V. thinks you go home tooearly. I told my interviewers that I did not know which had hung more heavilyaround my neck: the feeling of being monitored by my closest co-worker or the factthat all of my hard work did not register as enough.

Though I was happy with the examples, I could not seem to string them into asystematic or principled explanation for my departure. It was hard to argue thatthe urgency of ghting race and class inequities in education did not justify theheaviest of workloads. And so what of the vaguely corporate culture if no one wasbeing exploited to make someone else rich? I could not put a nger on what waswrong with this way of trying to change the world. Like many graduate studentswho come from the world of NGOs, frustration with the process and results of myactivism propelled me into academia. The desire to reect critically on what I hadexperienced, but could not name, directly shaped my ethnographic researchagenda.

Despite the increasing commonality of this trajectory, the last decades copiousliterature on collaborative, politically engaged, and publicly-relevant ethnography

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has had little to say about the particular problems of transition often faced byrefugees from NGO work. Paramount among these is negotiating the manymeanings of engaged and relevant that new students nd in practice amongscholars in the social sciences. Low and Merry (2010) capture a dizzying array oftactics in a broad overview of the history and practice of engaged anthropologyin the US. They catalogue six common forms of academic practice that aspire toimpact the world beyond academia: sharing and support, teaching and publiceducation, social critique, collaboration, advocacy, and activism. They alsosketch common barriers, such as university norms of disinterested research,and dilemmas, like the danger of enacting a neocolonial impulse to changeother ways of life. Speaking from the perspective of seasoned professors, thearticle acknowledges that disciplinary hierarchies shape possibilities for academicactivism and that strategies for addressing public issues do not merely showup on a menu of choices. Yet, like much of the conversation about engagedscholarship, its discourse is organized by a for-or-against debate rather than ananalysis of ethics and epistemes in practice

Michael Burawoy (2005) begins this work in his widely debated conception of afourfold division of sociological labor. He provides an (admittedly) abstractschema that nevertheless captures the complexity of the terrain that activist-oriented students must navigate. By way of comparison, he teases apart theforms of legitimacy and accountability underwriting four types of knowledge:public, professional, policy, and critical sociology. For example, he argues thatboth policy and public sociology explicitly address themselves to audiences andproblems beyond the university. Whereas the former exists to solve problems pre-sented by a client (a class-action lawsuit, the Defense Department), the vocation ofthe latter is to build dialogic relationships between sociologists and various publics.Policy sociology is valuable and truthful to the extent that knowledge is useful toclients; public sociology is legitimate because it expands democratic dialogue. Thismore situated promotion of engaged scholarship challenges the marginalization ofpublic sociology by arguing that the four types of knowledge are all necessary andbound by relationships of antagonistic interdependence.

As an entering doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, Iwould have greatly appreciated Burawoys road signs, if only because theyconvey how much work is required to nd ones footing as a scholar with politicalobligations. However, his formulation misses a good deal of the disorientationexperienced by new, politically-engaged students, because it underestimates theextent to which most forms of social science assert their relevance to the publicgood.3 As I searched for collaborators in critiquing nonprot work, I saw myselfand my classmates struggle to translate our political commitments into researchprojects amid the pushes and pulls of at least four dierent sets of actors whoclaimed to do what Burawoy reserves for public sociology: to defend the interestsof humanity.

First, I studied with a network of geographers, anthropologists, and sociologistswho subscribed to Marxs famous credo that the whole point of philosophy is not

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to interpret the world but to change it. These professors privileged ethnographicmethodology and guided students to produce new knowledge about how ordinarypeople make and change unjust social arrangements. Their interdisciplinaryseminars oered recovering social-change workers a systematic approach to ana-lyzing hidden power relationships.

They were, as one might expect of Berkeley professors, consumed with publish-ing demands, and they enrolled us in a discourse that was politicized but primarilyshared by other academics. The progressive virtue of doing critical ethnographywas expressed most clearly in the value professors ascribed to detailed descriptionsthat showed both the weight and contingency of given power formations. Some ofmy left-leaning classmates were alienated by the theory-heavy discussions that theyfound intriguing but hard to follow. Others attended the seminars precisely becausethey craved critical concepts but were wary of ethnographic methodology, whichthey accused of relying on a high-minded positivism.

Second, my interdisciplinary home program was based in a school of education the dominion of applied research where the whole point was also to change theworld, except that change, here, referred to fashioning solutions to the pressingproblems of low-income students of color in urban schools. The dominant cultureof the School of Education recalls Burawoys description of policy sociology in thatit lauded instrumental knowledge aimed at solving problems dened by institutionalactors. In the hallways, though, this disposition came across as much through claimsof moral high ground as through claims of scientic-scholarly objectivity. Like manyof my classmates in environmental studies, public health, urban planning, and infor-mation studies, I was ill-prepared to contend with the judgmental interrogations ofprofessors who only saw value in research that led to new policies or institutionalinterventions. In this moralizing milieu, students in my program constantly had todefend the right to study schooling and learning in the context of social reproduc-tion. In addition to pursuing our degrees, we fought incessantly for discursive spacein seminars, for support in fellowship competitions, and for equity in faculty hiringand retention.

Many students around me were attracted to a third sense of public relevance, inwhich scholarship must be tied to action, as above, but researchers are accountableto subaltern groups rather than institutional clients. They sought out the few pro-fessors who supported participatory research projects that built collaborationsbetween academics and nonprot organizations or community groups intent ondening their own issues. This style of engagement is akin to Burawoys concept ofpublic sociology, except that its practitioners narrated the value of the work morein terms of empowering non-academics than as a collaborative process of posingproblems. Indeed, these professors and students proered a critique of academiaselitism and pushed for widely accessible discourses of social analysis. This postureoften left new students with the confusing task of operating in multiple economiesof legitimacy. Many people who tried to make themselves relevant to other aca-demics as well as to community groups were literally forced to choose in order toassemble functional dissertation committees.

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In turn, small networks of professors and students who aspired to produce moreinsurgent forms of knowledge seemed to look down on both the action-researchand critical-ethnographic versions of engaged scholarship. They valued some of themost theoretically abstract representations of power-in-action that academia has tooer, while also most often participating in major political actions on campus.Through such actions, they identied themselves with the anti-capitalist andThird World liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s and expressed a senseof accountability to the contemporary guardians of those movements. New stu-dents attracted to these social critiques often struggled to design research that atonce contributed to conversation about revolution and built on their practicalknowledge of trauma, toxins, or teaching.

These subtle contests for the mantel of politically worthwhile scholarship cre-ated the rst context in which my embryonic project disappeared. The educationreformers who interested me appeared merely as one set of progressives among thescholars around me, as peers or analogs of engaged academics who were concernedwith problematizing social patterns. The myriad naturalized notions of relevancein play did not register the subjects of progressive reform as compelling researchobjects. Rather, the sorts of projects that inspired excitement were ones aimed atgiving voice to the marginalized, or improving minority student test scores, orweakening neoliberalism, or abolishing the prison industrial complex. In thispost-9/11 environment, scholars at Berkeley were busy being progressives, andliberal, nonprot organizations did not show up as a major global menace. Thefact of having a critical social analysis seemed to protect reformers from wide-spread curiosity.

A rush to judgment

At the time, of course, I could not productively decode these ideologies of pol-itical relevance, I just experienced the haze of mystication. I gured that anadequate mode of critique would reveal itself in the right bodies of literature.Jean-Kim and Riles (2005) suggest that scholars who study activist-oriented prac-tices have tended to adopt two (often overlapping) modes of engagement duringthe last two decades. In the rst mode, co-construction, researchers set out toexpress moral and analytical empathy with subaltern subjects in the researcheld. In a mode of denunciation, they condemn the technocratic regimes ofaid institutions that fail to administer the justice they promise. This dichotomyreects the fact ethnographers of social improvement have made the power oflarge institutions the central object of their criticism and outrage. It also suggeststhat scholars have treated smaller, street-level NGOs as extensions of subalternsociality and sites of collaboration rather than as objects of scrutiny. Though thepattern is changing somewhat, the preponderance of NGO studies probablybegins in a context of ethnographic opportunism: researchers choose sites bybuilding on existing acquaintances and aliate with people they like who dowork they admire (Markowitz, 2001).

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My own eort to gure out a strategy of critique was marked by a commonproblem of the will-to-denunciation. I conated an activists mission to expose acondition of oppression with an intellectuals process of critique. My projectbegan not as an endeavor to learn about complex manifestations of power inthe world of an NGO, but as an eort to nd fault with progressive schoolreform writ large. Like most apprentice researchers bent on saying somethingnew about familiar worlds, I felt I already had years of participant observationunder my belt. What I lacked, it seemed, was a precise vocabulary of condem-nation. Somehow I thought I could develop a suciently clear account of thedamage education reform organizations do that I could return to the scene ofthat exit interview and single-handedly detach my former colleagues from theirviewpoints. I felt that my status as an insider authorized me to throw rocks at myown house, and I did not worry about my position in the research. Nor did Ithink about the distinction between developing a research project and revising myapproach to activism.

Confusion quickly set in as I tried to nd a suitable model of critique amongbooks I was reading. I wrestled with ill-tting epistemological categories organizingethnographic scholarship on urban life, expertise, and racial politics. I tried tolocate the work of school reformers in theories of governmentality and neocolo-nialism and repeatedly generated aha moments followed by dissatisfaction.

For example, after discovering striking parallels between institutions of inter-national development and those of US education reform, I nally had words forthe experience of working in an anti-politics machine (Ferguson, 1990). Myhead still ached from all the mysteriously disempowering talk of communityleadership and school redesign. Yes, of course, I could say to myself for awhile, this is really all about depoliticizing racial conict and reproducing hier-archies of knowledge. These organizations facilitate the reorganization of capit-alist governance. At times, I considered aligning myself with the project ofoutlaw ethnography (Pierce, 1995) and imagined using eldwork to exposeprogressives spreading economic rationalities across school systems. Given mypenchant for judgment, I could have treated reformers as hostile witnesses andtaken an oppositional stance while studying behind enemy lines (Theim andRobertson, 2007).

Still, I could never ignore the fact that the middle-class liberals whom I imaginedas the central subjects of my research were unlike dons of development or aidexperts in important ways. Many were critical of capitalism, and unlike the chal-lenge of studying a World Bank, the relative transparency of nonprots dedicatedto educational equity meant that something other than mere daily access would berequired to generate new perspectives. Nor were reformers reducible to their pro-fessional identities or their knowledge products. They were, equally, advocates andallies of working-class parents and students attempting to redress institutionalizedracism. During these years, progressive school reformers engaged increasingly inorganizing grassroots demand and attempting to inuence elected ocials andphilanthropists. The diverse stas of the organizations where I had worked

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included people who came from daunting economic and educational environmentsand those who continued to live as subjects of racial subjugation. They deeddesignation as elites or imposing outsiders.

I was tempted, therefore, by another pregured set of arguments. Around thistime, rst-generation studies of NGOization had begun describing the globalproliferation of NGOs and nonprots as a professionalization of activism(Alvarez, 1999; Lang, 1997; INCITE!, 2007). This line of critique seriously chal-lenged two decades of scholarship on New Social Movements that had conatedsocial movements and NGOs, a tendency that allowed much of the emancipatoryrhetoric surrounding the former to be harnessed to the latter (Morris-Suzuki,2000). The professionalization thesis invited me to see the work of making schoolsequitable as a species of social movement, and it aorded a way to take the passionand noble intentions of reformers seriously. I periodically imagined creating a moresympathetic portrait of anti-racist activists who do their best in circumstances theydo not choose.

The idea that progressive reformers both enable and resist the very inequalitiesthey hope to combat parallels the stories they tell about ghting for a sense ofecacy in the face of disappointing outcomes and unintended consequences. Itwould not have been dicult to follow their terms and highlight the solidarity ofNGO professionals with urban parents demanding better public schools. Such anemphasis promised not only to make my eldwork experience less stressful, butalso to satisfy unwritten expectations that ethnographic scholarship on subalternsuering include a celebratory dimension (Bourgois, 2002; Wacquant, 2002).

In some early seminar papers I toyed with the idea that reformers are caught upin an education reform industry that has straitjacketed demands for equality in thepost-civil rights era. When traced from the racial desegregation legal cases of the1950s to the era of the racial test-score gap, the shifting political economy ofeducational-equity work matches, in many ways, the NGOization narrativeabout grassroots organizing being co-opted or distorted by the demands and cul-ture of funding agencies. Another ephemeral sense of breakthrough.

Again, the details of actual progressive school reform refused to t the theor-etical categories showing up in related research. The history of movements tomake US schools into the great equalizer stretches back to the mid-19th centuryestablishment of the public institution (Mann, 1891). It called out for a dierentconception of social movement than the prevailing idea of bottom-up,mass mobilization. More often than not, school system administrators,legislators, education professors, and middle-class volunteers (and only occasion-ally teachers and parents) have been the protagonists of school reform. Theseoften zealous and altruistic agitators for change are activists in some sense, butthey are something other than dissidents. At the same time, while reform move-ment leaders typically ally themselves with business or political leaders, they doso not as political subordinates; it is often the former and not the latter whoauthor the goals, visions, and policies of local, state, or national agendas forschool change.

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To wit, as I settled on CEE as a primary site for my eldwork, the organizationbecame the conceptual leader of a small-schools initiative that served as a modelfor the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As the so-called expertise wing of areform coalition, they crafted policy and intervention strategies aimed at redressingovercrowding and low test scores disproportionately aecting Oaklands dispos-sessed atlands neighborhoods. The movement enjoyed historic levels of capitalinvestment, unanimous legal approval, the widespread participation of teachers indesigning new schools, and unprecedented community organizing by the black andLatino working-class families whose children would attend the new schools. Theinitiative was hailed for its alliances across race and class divides and for combiningpublic- and private-sector support. It was nationally recognized as a vanguard ofurban education reform.

All this is to say that it was hard to situate school reformers as actors in anunjust world. The critical ethnographic texts around me did not resolve the prob-lem I had encountered in Berkeleys worlds of critical practice. None of the avail-able moral compasses registered the ambiguous political ontology of thephenomenon at hand. Reformers move eortlessly between discourses of socialjustice, economic eciency, and professional development. They creatively com-bine activist and governmentalist resources, strategies, and identities. They arepopular with working-class parents and teachers as well as with elected ocialsand billionaire philanthropists. The medium of their authority is as much moral asit is technical. In the end, it made no sense to point out that these social-changeworkers were aiding the reproduction of capitalism, nor that they were unwittingagents of depoliticization, nor professionals legitimizing their own privileges, normiddle-class activists using their capital to stem the tide of racialized dispossession.None of these descriptions seemed to capture the distinctive relationship betweennonprot-based progressive school reform work and human suering.

In my rush to judgment, I assumed that a framework for evaluating reformpractices was out there waiting for me in one body of literature or another. Onlyhindsight has revealed that when translated from activism to academia, the ideas Ihad wanted to express in the exit interview were not concluding judgments butpoints of departure: how can progressive reformers oer such a detailed critique ofschooling and so little analysis of society? What makes the sta of each new projectso convinced that this intervention will succeed where others have failed? Given thehistorical record, why do school reformers labor with such intensity? And whatkeeps the whole enterprise going if projects so often failed to achieve their owngoals?

It took time before I realized that the diculty of framing reformers was aprecious clue to the project I was hatching. In the midst of my confusion, I wasreluctant to undertake an ethnographic project. My hesitance to use ethnographyfor a mission of denunciation was of course rooted in ethical and methodologicalissues that I will detail shortly. But it was also visceral and personal. The last thingI wanted was to return to spend long days in an air I had already decided I did notwant to breathe.

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Intimacy issues

Given my reluctance, I was squeamish about having to convince a group of edu-cation reformers to let me use their work and their world as a central site ofresearch. I could not yet describe a clear agenda, but I knew that I wanted tointerrogate two sacred objects: discourses of educational equity and the problem-atic of the achievement gap. Bringing such interests into the oces of a busy, no-nonsense, mission-driven organization could only prove tricky and ethically dicey.What would I ask permission to do? How could I explain my nascent project toreformers in a way that both respected them as individuals letting me into theirlives and left me room to explore the dangers of the political formation theybrought to life? I knew they would judge me for pursuing impractical knowledge.I occasionally sought an exit strategy: would not critique at arms length be morehonorable?

My interest in the optimism that surrounds school reform movements made itimpossible to circumvent the embodied experiences of reforms most ardent advo-cates. As I rened my reactions to literature on NGOs, which rarely focused on thesocial lives of justice workers, I was compelled to examine the characteristic aect-ive intensities with which education reformers inhabit their missions. The degree towhich they believe in their plans seemed critical to the weight that their interven-tions carry in the world. I had to learn about the materiality of the zeal, and I couldnot do so from a distance.

I approached CEE for two reasons. First, I deemed the organization to be thebest of its kind in terms of sincerity, skill, and central focus on race and classinequalities. Its location in the vibrant progressive stronghold of Oakland,California meant that its politics of equal opportunity and multiracialism hadplenty of room to breathe. Second, I knew a handful of people who worked atCEE. I had worked there on contract for a few months following my exit from theHigh Performance Learning Communities project, and I had ties to a few peoplethrough collaborations on local school improvement projects. The sta had chan-ged substantially by the time I sought permission to include them in my study, but Iknew the executive director fairly well, and I was seen as someone who had ahistory with the organization.

The ambiguity surrounding my insideroutsider status created both confusionand possibilities in navigating the ethics of my research position. I had no real hopeof convincing sta members, who saw themselves as social justice warriors, to valuea critical analysis of their aspirations. As such, I never beneted from their collab-oration in exploring the possible eects of our encounter. I hasten to add thatworking through the ethics of a research relationship is not the same as negotiatingaccess, even in an institution endowed with its own research unit, as was the case atCEE. Neither the university human subjects protocol that I oered them nor theagreement we wrote as a supplement addressed unique questions raised by whatwas arguably the dening feature of my position that is, my transformed rela-tionship to progressive school reform.



Unlike colleagues and activists who become ethnographers via continuous par-ticipation and gradually negotiate a transition, I went away and came back withinterests that my informants did not share. To what extent was I obliged to explainthis shift as a condition of their informed consent? What now was the status of mylived experience as a reformer? Had I relinquished my right to defy cultural normsand highlight problems that could bring the work to a halt? Was it better to keepmy critical spirit to myself, do the research in order to dialogue with other audi-ences, and stay out of the way of their work? Or was my candor essential? Didethics require that I risk being thrown out and engage sta members with viewsthat could only cause conict?

For better and worse, our formal agreements eectively saved me from facingthese issues openly. CEEs research director drafted a two-page document thataddressed matters such as the demands I might place on their time, the sort ofaccess they could have to my data, and how I might contribute labor in exchangefor their hospitality. The organizations directors debated whether to ask me to usea pseudonym in my writing. They were torn between wanting the organization toget credit for its work and recognizing the potential for an unattering represen-tation. They ultimately landed on the latter stance.

The idea of critical friendship, central to the groups repertoire for coachingschools, organized a deeper sense of values guiding our contract. In work on schoolimprovement, a critical friend is a fellow professional educator who knows a schooland its sta well and is thereby authorized to oer observations that may includedicult feedback. CEEs executive director referenced that concept in describing tome his rationale for approving my request. He said he assumed that my perspectiveas a former insider would yield important reections. He also thought it wasimportant to have the dramatic events of the small-schools movement documented.

At the time, I could not yet articulate the dierence between their use of the termcritical and my own evolving stance. I had provided the research sta with adescription of my plans that included a fairly candid but rather abstract statementof my take on critical reection. I characterized it thus:

a means to step back and analyze relationships between current ways of thinking

about progressive social change and the very social structures we hope to change.

The assumption is that our ideas for change are produced, in part, by the unjust

society we live in now.

Had there been the will on either side, we could have hashed through the impli-cation in my proposal that there was something troubling about our ideas forchange. Instead, we let the slippery meaning of critique operate as a unifyingidentity rather than as an incitement to argument. We proceeded with a trustthat we shared an underlying political commitment to the well-being ofOaklands youth. I was left to gure out the intimacy issues on my own.

The often uncomfortable intimacy of eldwork is an old theme. The relativelyrecent turn toward subjectivity in studies of activism and aid work is engendering

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new stories and strategies attuned to new forms of these issues. For example, DavidMosse (2005) emerged scathed from walking the line between colleague and eth-nographer in order to produce his pioneering description of international develop-ment experts laboring to maintaining their professional identities. He writes abouthis informants protracted rejection of his analysis on the grounds that it damagedtheir professional reputations (Mosse, 2006). They not only advanced formal com-plaints (to Mosses university, publisher, and professional association) andattempted to interrupt publication, but also, perhaps more painfully, tried tore-enroll the author into the moral relations of professional collegiality and therebyde-legitimize the anthropological account as unethical (Mosse, 2011). As inMosses case, many of the ethical dilemmas faced by those studying middle-classaid and social justice workers arise from a dual commitment to intellectual auton-omy and developing critiques that will somehow register in the discussions ofinformants (see Fassin, 2011). Contentious moments often erupt in relation tothe products rather than processes of eldwork.

For me, day-to-day tension festered around the fact that my changed relation-ship to the practice went under the radar. Those at CEE who knew me knew that Iwas always something of a skeptic, yet no one imagined that between my exit andmy return our purposes had crossed. I wanted to open up debate on the ideal ofequal opportunity and ask whether the United States should stop doing educationreform. My critique wherever it might lead would not address improvementsthat CEE could make to its own functioning. In ordinary interactions, I was con-stantly aware of the assumption that I shared native norms and premises asunquestioned goods. For example, as an ex-insider, I was expected to react prop-erly to the examination of dismal test score data (depressed and then red-up). Iwas expected to denigrate oppositional members of the teachers union (for beingself-interested and unproductive) and laud the comments of subaltern parents(whatever their content). As a result, my daily presence in meetings, car rides,and hallway talk required endless choices about how much of myself to reveal.Microscopic bodily movements or noticeable silences could make the dierencebetween blending in and being found out.

In perhaps my most messy encounter, the research director asked me to helpwrite a review of the literature on critical theory in education for a series of casestudies the organization was preparing. At rst I saw it as a precious opportunity tolearn about CEEs political identity by watching how the director framed theorganization through her selections. But I soon realized that she did not knowwhere to begin, and she expected me to articulate the meanings of critical shapingtheir work. This was the very creative process that I was trying to observe, but Icould not gure out how to say so to her without revealing how distant my ownposition had become. Nor could I nd a graceful way to wiggle out of it, so I spentseveral meetings trying to collect suggestions from various sta members andessentially dragged my feet until the research director gave up on me.

The practice of establishing an exchange of labor for access is common in eld-work, especially with informants who are professionals. What goes unnoted is that



quid pro quo often serves as the default ethics guiding research relationships ininstitutional settings. In my case, helping out with interviews for CEE case studies,writing meeting notes, and performing sundry logistical tasks almost never seemedneeded, but such performances conferred a moral value on my presence, if onlybecause they gave my eldwork an appearance of working for the cause. Theorganizational benets clause of my research agreement with CEE thus createda narrative of reciprocity that drew attention away from my actual interests and thetensions they might have caused. The idea that CEE was guaranteed to gain valuefrom my research stood in for my accountability to the moral order of their work.It also let me worry less that they would nd my analysis useless.

A condition of overexposure

Another way in which school reform eluded critical analysis was that it was alreadyoverexposed. The liberal-progressive academics who would become my audience and I were already too familiar with the subject of my research, and we sharedwith reformers a common sense about how to describe their social relations anddaily practices. This is a serious condition aecting the possibilities for ethno-graphic critique of NGOs, middle-class liberals, professionals, experts, and otherphenomena that substantially overlap with academic institutions and cultures.

On one level, the lack of distance between the subjects, researcher, and audi-ence of my project presented me with an epistemological problem, what Miyazakiand Riles (2005) call an ethnographic failure. In her now seminal exploration ofthe problem, Riles (2001) addresses the challenge of making an overexposed setof practices ethnographically visible through her study of transnational network-ing activities leading to the UNs Fourth World Conference on Women. Shesearches for a point of analytic access from which to say something new aboutseemingly ubiquitous information-age practices. She observes that her NGOinformants represent themselves in terms resembling those in use by scholarsdescribing transnational institutions. Without a built-in dierence between sub-jects under study and the social scientic readers of a study, one has no readyoutside perspective from which to produce fresh insight. Put dierently, a readerwho is concerned with learning something new about NGOs or school reform inthe US will nd material documenting an impassioned movement for equityachingly familiar (Riles, 2001: 6). It does not register as strange or new.

The collapse of distinctions between academic researchers and ethnographicsubjects is most extreme in elds of applied research. As I suggested earlier, schol-arship produced in schools of education is dominated by the same instrumentalistquestion that animates the enterprise of education reform itself: what will improvethe school system? A shared mission has always tied the two institutions, despite along history of gendered hierarchical conict (Lagemann, 2000; Popkewitz, 1991)and all manner of disagreement over the focus of problems and solutions. While nosingular agenda unites a progressive faction cutting across these institutions, it is

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fair to say that education liberals worry centrally about racial and ethnic disparities(in test scores, in discipline), about an experiential disconnect between the nationsmostly white teaching force and its mostly non-white failing students, and aboutthe dearth of public resources available for the most dispossessed schools.

In addition to a general mirroring of concerns between progressive educationreformers and scholars, literal movement of individuals ties the two worlds. Whilek12 teachers are spatially conned, professors, nonprot professionals, and dis-trict ocials often circulate through meeting spaces that link their respectiveplaces of work. Most nonprot school reform organizations collaborate withprofessors on district or classroom improvement programs. Many have professorson their advisory boards. Some organizations are actually based in universities.At the time of my research, the majority of CEEs non-clerical sta held Mastersdegrees, a few had PhDs, and their ties extended to state colleges as well as toelite universities. They lled the oce with a bewildering blend of academicvocabularies. As my dissertation would later trace, they powerfully combineddiscourses of social reproduction, teacher autonomy, internalized oppression,and results-based budgeting.

All this added to my uncertainty about the story I was really after. Many ofthe everyday practices that would ostensibly comprise the subject of my study the conduct of meetings, the production of documents, the planning of peda-gogical events were indigenous not only to the cultural traditions of educationreformers but also to the social scientists who would become my audience. Icould not see how recording the details of daily activity would lead to anythingother than describing a nonprot organization in its own, native terms. Thispoint of confusion is in some ways generic to being a rst-time ethnographer.Finding the terms of analysis is perhaps the process left most mystical in discus-sions of critical ethnographic methodology. The problem is amplied when thephenomena under study resist interpretation precisely because they seem to bealready analyzed and already evaluated. In other words, daily practices at CEEwere arranged by questions that preceded whatever ink I would spill on thesubject. They corralled thought toward racialized test scores, studentteacherinteractions, and systems of governance.

On another level, my methodological problem of overexposure had a politicaldimension. The world of progressive reform not only eludes ethnographic object-ication, it specically resists critical analysis because it is morally prized and moralcharged. Like humanitarianism, development projects, and human rights work,progressive school reform involves posing problems of social suering. It oers asystematic critique of a societys eort to care for its population, and it proposesspecic, actionable remedies. In The Moral Untouchability of Humanitarianism,Didier Fassin (2011) writes about the diculty of criticizing NGOs and their work-ers because they form a moral core in liberal societies. He locates humanitarian-isms resistance to critical analysis in widespread sentiments about what it means tohelp people dealing with painful situations as well as in the self-representations ofNGO actors. The identication of humanitarian work as an absolute social good



leaves little room for ethnographic scrutiny. Fassin asks how, under such circum-stances, one can perform any independent analysis:

What autonomy is left for using a moral anthropology to apprehend a social world

that presents itself as imbued with a sort of moral supremacy a world therefore that

claims it need not submit to external oversight? (Fassin, 2011: 38)

He argues that this resistance makes criticism critical and he describes the ethno-graphic task as one of unsettling a compassion consensus (2011: 36).

Ethnographers of development and reform are additionally challenged(or blinded) by what might be called a social-change consensus. Unlike humani-tarianism, the halo surrounding projects of development and reform emanatesfrom their promise to address the root causes of poverty and inequality. Theseimagined and practiced trajectories of social change (reformist modes of trying toimprove living standards or maximize human ourishing) are inscribed with avirtue that hides their particularity. In the context of US school reform, onends reform leaders actively representing themselves and their work as progressive,in terms both of instrumental eectiveness and righteousness. They tell stories ofgrassroots triumph and individual sacrice. They call favorable attention to whitehumility and black or brown leadership. They rigorously measure the results oftheir actions and display indicators of movement toward planned outcomes. Theyalso promote their agenda in websites, brochures, training curricula, funding pro-posals, and newsletters. Their representations are, further, plugged into nationaldiscourses about making schools accountable for failing students of color andabout changing systems of teacher accountability. The federal No Child LeftBehind Act, which requires all schools to track test scores of socially vulnerablesubgroups, eectively anointed the achievement gap problematic as the proper wayfor liberals and conservatives alike to conceptualize the cause of and solution toracial inequality in America. The self-representations and promises of a group ofprofessional reformers dedicated to educational equity thus have unusual reach.

To be sure, the sacred status of CEEs relentless ght to give every poor black andLatino student an open future pushed back on my desire to deconstruct their behav-iors and assumptions. I feared that any attempt to question the virtue of actualactors struggling to relieve actually-suering city kids could only be perceived asthe cynical indulgence of a white middle-class intellectual. Who could be againstclosing the achievement gap? As the moral code goes: critique equals pessimismwhich equals paralysis. You are either for reform or you are for the racist status quo.

Improvising ethnographic strategy

We live in a time when a wide variety of actors is engaged in some form of pro-gressive social critique. That is the crux of what made my project so dicult, and itis, I am proposing, a central challenge to critical NGO studies. The proliferation ofcritiquing practices across nonprot and academic institutions not only challenges

Lashaw 17


ethnographers to gure out what we can distinctively say about social suering. Italso confounds the task of studying people who work on social suering.

As my reections indicate, one seeking to examine tensions in the practice ofactors who problematize inequality and deprivation must rst locate herself andher informants in an ideological landscape that is hard to see. The multiplicity ofprogressive positions is in part obscured by the way that liberal reformers in non-prots and universities assert the universality of their ideals and eectively protectthemselves from interrogation. They do so not only in the register of technicalexpertise, but also through quotidian moral self-representations and appeals.Critical scholarship on NGOs has by and large helped eclipse the centrality ofmorality-making in progressive political practice by framing NGO activity eitheras governance or social movement (or a dialectical combination of the two). It isperhaps unsurprising that where themes of morality have become accessible tosecular social scientists, it is through research on an exotic Other religiousNGOs (Bornstein, 2005).

My eldwork experience evinces that it is not easy for progressive academics tomake the lives of progressive change-agents into an object of sustained observation.Hanging around worlds with heavy moral investment requires either endorsingnative norms or adopting a discomforting, possibly duplicitous position. Deninglines of inquiry requires a leap of faith that middle-class liberal agency has somethingnew and specic to teach about power. Producing new knowledge requires the stom-ach to denaturalize compelling movements for social and economic justice. As thesegeneral dilemmas unfolded in the concrete context of my project, I improvised anumber of ways to make the moral dimensions of school reform ever more visible.

First, I solved a number of problems by redening the eld of my study. As Ibegan my research, a massive budget shortfall and state takeover hit the OaklandSchool District. The crisis ushered in an era of punitive structural adjustment aswell as organized resistance. A broad coalition of oppositional volunteer activistsdecried the ensuing austerity regime and the loss of democratic decision-making.Participating groups used teach-ins, rallies, and community conferences to critiquestate budget priorities, the criminalization of students, and the labor conditions ofteachers, janitors, and cafeteria workers. Despite the ostensible overlap with areform movement for educational equity, the activist coalition operated in amostly separate world with distinct norms, economies, and philosophies.

Comparing the two worlds allowed me to decenter CEEs liberal sensibilitiesand recast progressivism as a eld of struggle in which the meaning of progressitself is open for contest. Whereas the reformers made a virtue of stabilizing thedistrict, partnering with the new administrator, and protecting the small-schoolsagenda at all costs, the leftists (as I dubbed them) denigrated the upward mobilityof select schools and workers while others suered. I began examining the refor-mers from the perspective of the leftists and thereby charted a path outsideliberal morality. Though the reformers instincts about how best to ght forjustice had failed to surprise me, from the standpoint of leftist sensibilities,they required explanation.



Second, but simultaneously, I tuned into the substantial work reformers must doto recognize their strategies and themselves in ethical terms. At the start, I recordedmundane expressions of moral identity without knowing how to gure out theirsignicance. They were everywhere. Organizational belonging at CEE is establishedby enacting an idealized form of political engagement called being a leader forequity. In daily oce life it involves formal practices, like rigorously adhering tomeeting procedures and observing a particular racial etiquette, as well as informalexpressions of ethics, such as criticizing middle-class parents who send their kids toprivate school. In work with schools, these personal and organizational practicesare presented as models of moving toward equity. All this morality work onlybecame instructive when I saw it emerge in contexts of challenge or crisis. I wasstruck, for instance, by how much energy reformers dedicated to discrediting theirleftist counterparts. And I was intrigued to watch coaches and teachers help eachother displace despair by sharing anecdotes about feeling a sense of ecacy whenfaced with the persistence of racialized schooling. The frequency and vigor withwhich they worked on their moral authority showed that mastering the progressiveeld, as it were, was neither inevitable nor automatic.

Finally, by attending to aective patterns, I found another way to escape theterms in which reformers represent themselves. Although CEE coaches cultivate anintense style of participation, they do not talk extensively about their energies andemotions. That left me plenty of room to ponder the signicance of the intensity.Midway through the eldwork, I came to see that the optimism of reformers wasnot so much the fuel of the movement as a valued end in itself. In my dissertation, Iwould eventually frame their resilient faith as a puzzle against the backdrop ofperpetual education reform in the US and in light of the small-schools movementsunfavorable outcomes. Using indicators of aective intensity that I recorded in myeld notes, I contrasted zealous performances of faith with much more modestgoals articulated in rational communications, such as training documents. Iargued that the zeal embodies condence in the coming end of social reproductionand thereby gives concrete form to abstract ideals. Reformers give themselves notmerely time and labor, but neurons and muscles to dramatize and defend the verypossibility of interrupting social reproduction (Lashaw 2010). By including refor-mers as subjects of their own promises, I tried to put a nger on something of thedistinctive cultural labor of liberal, middle-class, NGO-based reformers: they raiseundue expectations for social transformation and their passion lends credence tootherwise implausible claims.

The mode of intimate critique through which I learned to say all of this neverquite ceased being uncomfortable. I did my best to cultivate solidarity when Icould. I found it easiest to talk to sta members about my interests in interviews.Needless to say, the 35 people on sta at the time had various critical reections oftheir own. Where I sensed openness, I tried to create a protected zone of mutualexploratory dissent. I did so not only to see what I could learn, but also to escapethe inauthenticity of my circumstances. I was trying to nd a way to be in the air ofschool reform and be myself. I insisted on thinking of myself as a subject of the

Lashaw 19


research who knows about the situated practice of school reform via ethnographicobjectication and common sense. I suppose I persisted with a faith that I had alegitimate claim to the details of daily life in a progressive school reform organ-ization, even if my own had played out in dierent times and places.

Notes

1. This is a pseudonym.2. As an institutional category, the term non-governmental organization covers a notori-

ously heterogeneous array of practices and economies. Questioning the coherence ofNGOs as an object of analysis is a central theme of discussion among ethnographerswho grapple with their significance. I take the position that fear of essentialism has likely

stifled exploration of widely circulating cultural forms. See Lewis (2009) for a brief his-tory of NGO studies and exemplary cautions against the confusing slippage betweennongovernmental organization, voluntary organization, non-profit organization,

and community-based organization.3. These assertions come through more clearly in the voices of Burawoys critics as presented

in his analysis of the controversy provoked by his initial proposal (Burawoy, 2009).

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Amanda Lashaw is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issuesat the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include progressivepolitical culture, NGO workers, moral sensibilities, the politics of optimism, andeducation reform movements.



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Documents

ngo experience

us education reformbefore

s question

meeting tables

education reform insider

study of socialchange

graduate school

fieldwork project