DAVID TRAUTMAN
Researcher Positionality
Positionality is inherently relational. That is, one can only identify their social location in reference to others. That said, in this essay, my hope is to articulate some of the key identities I hold - as well as the experiences that have shaped them - as they relate to the lens through which I view my research.
I should start by saying that I identify as a cis-gender, straight, white male. I inarguably occupy multiple spaces of privilege. Nothing I write or show here is in any way going to challenge this. Instead, my hope is to express some of the individual-level variations that, perhaps, add some texture and contour to this identity. If anything, these details shape and reveal how I see the world in relationship to my research and practice.
Of course, no matter how I choose to construct my internal sense of self, I recognize that my external presentation - the semiotic power of my body - shapes the ways in which others experience me. That is, though I have my own individual-level variations, to others - particularly in the communities in which I have worked - I physically represent a fairly epitomized construction of Whiteness. This image creates an unavoidable disconnect between how I may want to be seen and how I am actually seen. That disconnect is a function both of the privileges I experience and the violent, racist, and sexist social and historical processes that continue to advance patriarchal white supremacist culture in our country.
As a case in point, children’s portraits somewhat invariably display me with bright, coiffed blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Charming as these drawings may be, I find them interestingly inaccurate, particularly because my eyes are decidedly brown. Yes, you may be thinking, this is a small detail. What is important is that it highlights how the remembered image of me is often one that relies at least as much on a perception of Whiteness as it does my actual individual features.
Now, why this matters in both research and practice is that this construction carries meaning and power. It not only shapes how others see me, but also my own internalized and socialized worldview. That is, there is a complex dialectic between my individual meaning-making and my social environment. How might my Whiteness, or masculinity, be perceived by others? What does it communicate to them, particularly given their own social positionalities? In what ways am I inadvertently leveraging my privilege to (re)produce historical oppressions?
In order to fully engage with these questions, I need to have a strong understanding not just of the external constructions of me, but my own internal ones, as well. These have largely been illuminated to me through my personal experiences navigating between physical and cultural spaces. My hope in sharing them is to engage in a process of critical reflection, not to excuse or justify my past actions or inactions in any way.
For most of my childhood, I grew up on East 97th Street in New York City. Above, you see an image of the intersection of 97th Street and Park Avenue, which marks a fairly distinct boundary between the Upper East Side and Spanish Harlem. What I find striking about this particular place is that evidence of the historical, cultural, and economic differences between the two neighborhoods is so clearly manifested in physical ways, notably by the shift from underground subway tracks covered by verdant islands on the Upper East Side to the large, obtrusive exposed train tracks as we head towards Harlem.
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Now, as a child I was not able to fully comprehend the symbolic power of this boundary, but I did spend a considerable amount of time crossing it. Every other weekend, my siblings and I would hop on the city bus and head up to my father’s apartment in Washington Heights. There, he and my stepmother, who grew up outside of Lagos, Nigeria, would care for us. These weekend trips not only gave us meaningful time to connect as a family, but also gave my mother some respite from the fairly incessant arguing between my brother and myself.
The back and forth between households was also one of the most powerful opportunities for me to understand, from an early age, my Whiteness as a cultural artifact. My stepmother’s Yoruba culture was a fixture in one home, whereas my mother’s White, midwestern one was a staple in the other. I have distinct memories of attending Nigerian church services characterized by physical expressions of worship, such as gesticulations and prostrations, and conducted entirely in a language I did not understand, only to, the following weekend, don a tie and my itchiest clothes and passively sit through a significantly less emphatic, more reserved Presbyterian sermon. Though navigating between these cultural territories was uncomfortable, at times, it pushed me to critically reflect on the relationship between race, culture, identity, and comfort. It also highlighted to me the privilege I have in the ability to feel welcome in most spaces, regardless of the cultural context. I recognize that this socialization is a product, in part, of the colonial legacy my Whiteness is built on.
Despite an early racialized understanding of my identity, I did - and still often do! - fall into fairly stereotypical traps of blithely ignorant White, male privilege. Through most of my childhood, for example, I desperately wanted to be Indiana Jones, so much so that I went to college to become an archaeologist. My naive, romanticized vision of digging for lost treasures did not have space for questions of cultural extraction, exploitation, and appropriation. Of course, after I began my academic studies, I quickly learned that the reality of the archaeological process was not uncomplicated.
That said, it was only once I found myself working on an excavation in northern, rural Guatemala alongside indigenous Q’echi Mayan workers that I realized I wanted to engage actively in social justice work. I was uncomfortable with the feeling that this type of research disproportionately benefited me, as a Western academic, more than it benefitted the indigenous workers who labored alongside me. I did not want to engage passively in research that had little to no material impact on the lived experiences of communities. I found myself troubled that these men, who had experienced firsthand the violence and genocide of the Guatemalan civil war, were still effectively excluded from the political process in their country because of language barriers.
I began to think more critically about the mechanisms to create a more just and safe democracy. Increasingly, I came to believe in the potential of schools to function as spaces of empowerment. I also started to see the ways they could actively undermine this and reinforce traditional oppressions. And so, I (not-so-unproblematically) joined Teach For America.
TFA is a program that I have developed increasing appreciation for over the years. I am incredibly thankful for the ways in which it channeled my passion into meaningful work. At the moment I joined it, however, it had not yet developed the responsive, community-oriented, racially aware organizational identity it now strives to achieve.
Wrestling with the implications of being a White male of privilege working in marginalized communities of color is a project that I am committed to continually investigating. It is not a relationship I can easily explain - or explain away. While I wholeheartedly support dismantling racism and oppression, I recognize that I quite easily fall into counterproductive behaviors associated with White saviorism. While I do my best to be aware of the ways in which my assumptions and biases show up in this work, I know that I often fall short.
Nevertheless, my identity as a practitioner is particularly important as I orient myself to my research. Working as a teacher, consultant, and administrator in public schools for over a decade, I have a deep appreciation for the tremendous physical, mental, and emotional commitment educators in the field make on a daily basis. The four years I served as a school leader is the professional identity I hold most closely, as well as the one that has most profoundly shaped my understanding of school systems. I believe strongly in research that both advances equity and recognizes the complexities of the lived realities of educators.
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My practitioner lens and equity orientation is largely shaped by my own experiences as a special education student in a highly restrictive residential program during my first two years of high school. The feelings of rejection and othering engendered in students by exclusionary programs is a trauma that still presents itself in my life today. I continue to struggle with the ways in which the well-meaning educators of my youth communicated such profoundly deficit-based views about my peers and myself. At the same time, I am cognizant that even in a space of deep emotional trauma, I benefited from the many privileges afforded me by my race, class, and gender, in ways that many of my classmates did not.
My personal experiences with the capacity words have to convey and transfer beliefs onto students - in ways that often exert harm upon marginalized populations - cannot be easily bracketed for analytic purposes. In both my research and practice, I have deep appreciation for language and communication. I carry no pretense that this does not shape the way that I approach qualitative research and sense-making. As an administrator, I was known for being articulate and thoughtful in my speech. As a researcher, I am deeply attuned to the ways in which words communicate underlying belief structures. While some may say that this is overly subjective, I believe that it is precisely when ideas emerge and become salient in spite of the various social contexts in which they are produced that they transcend from isolated realities to generalizable notions.
Because of the many negative memories I have from my own schooling experience, I tend to be very focused on the ways that educators use language and practices to create inclusive, caring, supportive environments for children regardless of their perceived differences. I believe that equity-oriented research should advance schools as places where children find belonging, not rejection, regardless of their individual-level intersections.
My research interests, however, do not focus on micro-level interactions. Instead, I am interested in the systems that (re)produce school culture and climate. I believe that it is vitally important to understand the conditions that enable leaders to ethically manifest their responsibility to shape school environments. Indeed, in my own experiences as a principal, I found myself engaging in some of the same harmful practices that I became an educator to combat. This is not because I lacked an individual understanding of the harm I may have been causing, but rather because I operated in a system that has traditionally reinforced behaviors antithetical to empowerment and change. I believe that only when we balance individual agency with collective structural change will we see meaningful shifts in the outcomes produced by our educational system. I see school leadership as a key mechanism through which we can drive transformational change in schools.
About six months ago, my two young foster children reunified with their biological parents. My relationship with their family has led me to approach my work with a different understanding of the stakes. The imperative to improve schools strikes me viscerally - to be fair, perhaps I should have always felt so deeply about this (another manifestation of the tremendous privilege I have in our society). In any case, I am relying on school to be a place to provide the children I love, but no longer care for, with a level of stability, connection, and support that they may not experience otherwise. I am keenly aware that the resources which support my research could be directed towards other causes; this fact weighs heavily on my heart and motivates me to produce knowledge that is meaningful, relevant, and impactful in school communities.
Ultimately, I will never fully understand what it is like to experience marginalization on the basis of race, sex, sexuality, gender, or a myriad of other axes upon which oppression operates. The intersection of my identities with my financial and academic background also privileges me in ways that further distance me from the lived realities of the vast majority of our nation. While I appreciate the experiences that have shaped me, particularly through my personal struggles with disability, I recognize the limitation that they only allow me a fragile glimpse of the pain and violence inflicted upon those who are characterized as others in white, supremacist, heteronormative patriarchy. In fact, my lens is perhaps most significantly shaped by the absence of oppression; being able to walk through the world in this way has allowed me to believe in fictitious constructions of normalcy into which I often fit.
I had - and will continue to have - access to places, spaces, and employment based on the various ways in which I (re)present Whiteness and masculinity. While I want to leverage my identity and my research lens to support equity, I need to lean into the discomfort that I will often fail. My positionality is a moving target. As I acquire new experiences and relationships, encounter different framing and viewpoints, and inadvertently continue to leverage my privilege in ways that (re)produce oppression, I aspire to become increasingly aware of the impact of my social location on both my research and practice. It’s always present, and yet another one of my many privileges is to have the choice to ignore it. I am committed to continually investigating the ways it shapes my assumptions, bias, and thinking, as well as the ways that I engage with others and they with me.