Great Cities Faculty Scholar Seminar
Marilyn Ruiz

The next Great Cities Faculty Scholar Seminar will be held on Wednesday, March 12 at 9:00 am in the Great Cities Institute conference room.
Faculty Scholar Janise Hurtig will lead a discussion on the following topic:
Whose knowledge counts, and who counts the knowledge? Thoughts about subjects and subjectivity in a Little Village community writing and research project.
One of the central epistemological claims of feminist and other critical social theories is that social research is based on hierarchies of knowledge, both among research subjects and between researcher and researched. The knowledge and experiences of certain social groups (say, white men) have either counted more than the knowledge of other groups (say, latina women), or have been taken to stand for the knowledge of the entire society. Institutions such as schools operate based on similar assumptions. For instance, parent involvement programs and policies targeting poor, immigrant, and minority communities generally seek to correct presumed deficits of minority and immigrant students and their families, while asking parents to support the existing educational culture, either in the school or at home. Masculinized school knowledge is assumed to have more value and legitimacy than feminized home knowledge. The practices of uncritical social research (its methodologies and its textual production) thus collude in the production of the very social hierarchies it aims to understand.
The parents Write Their Worlds project counters the epistemological assumptions of parent involvement policies by offering parents the opportunity to become recognized contributors to the cultural and intellectual development of their community by exploring through creative writing their shared experiences and knowledge, and publishing their writing in a magazine that is distributed in the school, community and beyond. At Telpochcalli Elementary School, a subgroup of writers have formed the Research and Evaluation Committee, charged with evaluating parent programs at the school and conducting research to promote the efforts of a school-based coalition that aims to build a locally run community arts and education center. Both projects challenge the researcher, parents, and other collaborators to rethink their positions as subjects of knowledge production. In my talk I explore the possibilities and limits of a project that seeks to cultivate both parent school involvement and research relations on premises of dialogue and equality.
Janise Hurtig is an anthropologist and research specialist in the humanities at the Center for Research on Women and Gender at UIC where she is director of the Evaluation and Technical Assistance Program. Her ethnographic research in Venezuela and in Chicago's Latino communities addresses the gendered nature of formal and informal education, literacy, popular art, and social change. As a Great Cities Scholar Dr. Hurtig has begun to integrate a participatory research and evaluation component into the "Parents Write Their Worlds" community writing and publishing workshop she teaches in a Little Village elementary school.
We look forward to seeing you at the seminar......
Marilyn Ruiz (Note: a light breakfast will be served.)