International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education

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Researching as a critical secretary: a strategy and

praxis for critical ethnography

Ethan Chang

To cite this article: Ethan Chang (2020) Researching as a critical secretary: a strategy and praxis
for critical ethnography, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 33:10, 1042-1057,
DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2019.1702232

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2019.1702232

Published online: 06 Jan 2020.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION
2020, VOL. 33, NO. 10, 1042–1057
https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2019.1702232

Researching as a critical secretary: a strategy and praxis for

critical ethnography
Ethan Chang
Education, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper proposes a strategy for ethnographically investigating politic- Received 20 August 2018
ally disparate education organizations. I develop the notion of research- Accepted 3 December 2019
ing as a critical secretary: a method of participant-observation conducted
KEYWORDS
alongside those observed to hold the least formal power. Drawing on
Power; organizations;
data from an initial empirical effort to implement this approach, I reflex- critical ethnography;
ively examine how this strategy supported my efforts to problematize secretary; participant
gendered and racialized relations of power encoded in organizational observation
structures, roles, and routines. I conclude by discussing how researching
as a critical secretary animated the aims of critical ethnography and con-
sider how it might function as a broader anti-oppressive scholarly praxis
beyond the temporal and situated contexts of fieldwork.

Critical ethnography and emerging political and organizational challenges

Critical ethnography aims “to free individuals from sources of oppression and repression”
(Anderson, 1989, p. 249) and represents a strategic methodological intervention for education
contexts marked by intensifying racial, immigration, gender, religious, economic, and sexual-
based violence (Anderson, 2017; Byrne-Jimenez & Yoon, 2018). Critical ethnography braids social
theory with the tools of participant-observation and examines how inequalities are constructed,
maintained, and contested (Foley, 2002; Willis, 1981; Willis & Trondman, 2000). It helpfully de-
centers a focus on individuals as a unit of analysis, and through sustained data collection over
time, seeks to reveal the sociocultural forces that constrain but do not determine individual
actions (Baldridge, 2014; Fine, 2016; McDermott, Goldman, & Varenne, 2006). Taken together, crit-
ical ethnography elevates the lived experiences of historically marginalized youth and families
and contributes toward broader political projects of constructing more emancipatory policies,
pedagogies, and practices (Carspecken, 1996; Kincheloe & McLaren, 2000; Paris, 2011).
Two challenges confront critical ethnography in the current historical moment: a political and an
organizational challenge. The political challenge asks how critical ethnographers study groups who
insulate advantages and oppose anti-oppressive organizing efforts (Diamond, 2018), particularly amid
an increasingly polarized society (Hochschild, 2016; Small, 2018). Critical ethnographies of education
have tended to focus on the experiences of long-marginalized and subordinate groups (Lashaw,
2018, Apr. 25; Nader, 1972; Tuck, 2009). Though vital, this approach tends to reify a colonial gaze
and has catalyzed recent calls to study “up”; that is, investigate the social mechanisms through which

CONTACT Ethan Chang eochang@ucsc.edu Education, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA
Education, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA.
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
ß 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION 1043

powerful actors profit on, insulate, and re/make the very structures and policies that constrain minori-
tized young people (Anderson & Scott, 2012). In addition to studying “up,” other scholars have
encouraged inquiries “across” the political spectrum (Dimitriadis, 2011). These scholars write against
tendencies to romanticize grassroots or community-based reform efforts (Joseph, 2002; Lashaw,
2017). Indeed, the enduring role of conservative grassroots organizing in the U.S. warrants further
inquiry concerning how privileged actors hoard educational and social opportunities (McGirr, 2015).
Addressing the political challenge to critical ethnography thus entails studying up and/or across and
making the social processes of educational reproduction evident for critical scrutiny.
Critical ethnography also encounters an organizational challenge, which pertains to analytic
elisions concerning the role of meso level organizations that mediate micro social processes and
macro social forces (Ray, 2019; Wooten & Couloute, 2017). Critical ethnographers of education
helpfully explore the intersection of individual experiences and structural forces of oppression
(Fine, 2016; Smyth & McInerney, 2013). Yet, these approaches tend to minimize attention to
meso level organizational contexts through which individuals express and reconstitute social
structures (Burch, 2007; Ray, 2019; for a recent exception, see Baldridge, 2019). Scholarly inatten-
tion to organizational contexts is particularly urgent given a rise in new organizational forms,
such as intermediary organizations that “broker” material resources, social connections, and infor-
mation between public and private sectors (Chang, 2018; DiMartino & Scott, 2013; Galey, 2015).
These democratically unelected and unaccountable entities remain understudied objects of crit-
ical inquiry (Lubienski, Scott, & DeBray, 2014). The organizational challenge elevates a need for
critical ethnographic tools to analyze the organizational routines, structures, and roles that medi-
ate micro social practices and macro social forces (Burawoy, 2009).
Taken together, the political and organizational challenges raise conceptual and practical
questions for critical ethnographers. What does participation entail when studying across radical
and reactionary education reform organizations? How might distinctive organizational contexts
mandate situationally specific forms of researcher talk and practice? What does humanizing, eth-
ical, and reciprocal relations look like when studying organizations with competing commitments
to minoritized families, youth, and communities?
This paper develops the idea of researching as a critical secretary as one strategic way to con-
ceptualize and conduct critical ethnographic inquiry across politically disparate education organi-
zations. By researching as a critical secretary, I mean a method of participant-observation that
investigates how relations of power are encoded in organizational structures, roles, and routines
and that is conducted alongside those observed to hold the least formal power. Such an
approach tailors critical ethnography to current political and organizational challenges and ani-
mates the fundamental aims of critical ethnography.
I begin by introducing Apple, Ball, and Gandin’s (2010) original notion of researching as a crit-
ical “secretary” (p. 5). I then extend their initial concept by tracing the gendered and racialized
dimensions of secretarial labor and integrating insights from critical and institutional ethnography.
Based on this review, I present a contingent, four-stage model for researching as a critical secre-
tary: (1) Building a critical record of self and field sites, (2) Participating and observing as a critical sec-
retary, (3) Generating dialogical data and seeking contradictions, and (4) Answering to the self, field
sites, and scholarly debates. I then discuss my research positionality and the contexts of a study in
which I enacted this strategy. The remainder of the paper draws on fieldnote and interview data
to illustrate what this strategy enabled and inhibited in terms of my efforts to conduct a critical
ethnographic project. I conclude by exploring how researching as a critical secretary may also
serve as a praxis of anti-oppressive scholarship beyond the spatio-temporal contexts of fieldwork.

Researching as a critical secretary

Apple et al. (2010) proposed several research tasks to guide critical educational studies. Of these
critical sociological tasks—which included, taking seriously the lived experiences and narratives
1044 E. CHANG

of those afflicted by injustice and sustaining radical work amid organized attacks—their notion
of researching as a critical “secretary” offers generative implications for addressing the political
and organizational challenges of the current moment. Apple, Ball, and Gandin describe the role
of critical “secretaries” as one way researchers might support counter-hegemonic movements
and note:
At times, this [supporting counter-movements] requires an expansion of what counts as ‘research.’ Here, we
mean acting as critical ‘secretaries’ to those groups of people and social movements who are now engaged
in challenging existing relations of unequal power or in what elsewhere has been called ‘non-reformist
reforms.’ (Apple, Ball, & Gandin, 2010, p. 5)

Apple, Ball, and Gandin leave the particulars of this strategy unspecified, but cite Gandin’s
(2006) analysis of the Citizen School in Porto Alegre, Brazil and Apple and Beane (2007) analysis
of justice-oriented school practices in Democratic Schools as illustrative examples. In both cases,
researchers accompanied democratic struggles for education justice and utilized “thick
description” (Geertz, 1994) to reveal how power is encoded in social processes.
Although the notion of researching as a critical secretary carries rich conceptual and practical
possibilities, it does not directly address the political and organizational challenges facing critical
ethnography. A focus on groups of people “engaged in challenging existing relations of unequal
power” (my emphasis, Apple et al. 2010, p. 5) sustains a focus on studying “down” rather than
studying “up” or “across.” Moreover, an ethnographic attention to “groups” and “movements”
elides a language of “organizations” and the role of meso level structures that mediate micro
social practices and macro social forces (Ray, 2019). To explore the potential utility of this con-
cept, I turn to the etymology of the term “secretary” to specify what “acting as critical
‘secretaries’” might entail in the contexts of ethnographic fieldwork.

Meanings of ‘secretary’: a gendered and racial history

The term, “secretary” derives from the Latin secretarius or scribe (Oxford-English Dictionary,
2019). The Oxford English Dictionary defines “secretary” as,
One whose office is to write for another; one who is employed to conduct or assist with correspondence, to
keep records, and (usually) to transact various other business, for another person or for a society,
corporation, or public body.

Taking the literal definition of secretary, researching as a critical secretary might entail assist-
ing organizations with correspondence, synthesizing information, and enacting reciprocal rela-
tions “for another.” Institutional ethnographic methodologies complement this secretarial
approach to inquiry but add an important attention to power; namely, how texts function as
technologies of control and mediate work activities (Smith, 2001, 2005). Institutional ethnogra-
phers study of how texts sanction particular kinds of work, while excluding others (DeVault,
2006) and structure organizational relations of power (Smith, 2001). Weaving the etymology of
the term with the conceptual contributions of institutional ethnography specifies concrete practi-
ces of secretarial inquiry and raises critical questions about who ultimately benefits from secre-
tarial labor produced “for another.”
Gendered and racialized meanings associated with the term “secretary” also offer a comple-
mentary, political analysis of secretarial work. Wichroski (1994) argues that the vast majority of
secretarial labor tends to exceed formal job descriptions and reproduces broader social tenden-
cies to devalue “women’s work” (Wichroski, 1994, p. 38). According to Wichroski, secretarial labor
can be distilled into three primary categories: rational labor, including typing contracts, recording
messages, writing correspondences; emotional labor, such as managing impressions, sustaining
inter-organizational relations, and offering socio-emotional support for co-workers; and peripheral
labor including gendered notions of work, such as cleaning, serving coffee, or running personal
errands. Related feminist (Weeks, 2011) and critical race perspectives of secretarial labor
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION 1045

(Bonacich, Alimahomed, & Wilson, 2008) sensitize inquiry toward a study of how power is
encoded in gendered and racialized roles, hierarchies, and patterns of organizational action.
From this perspective, critical ethnographers might analyze how macro social structures, such as
heteropatriarchy and white supremacy, are encoded in meso level organizational routines.
Critical ethnography thus entails an investigation of how organizations maintain and/or interrupt
prevailing relations of power—even as ethnographers’ own actions are (un)ethically bound up
with these very organizational processes.
Engaging in various forms of secretarial labor can also enhance relations of mutual respect
and mutual trust between ethnographers and research participants, particularly in ways that
enliven the second definition of “secretary”: “one who is entrusted with private or secret matters;
a confidant; one privy to a secret” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2019). Through sustained and
ongoing forms of secretarial participation, researchers can engage in critically-oriented, humaniz-
ing forms of inquiry; what Kinloch and San Pedro (2014) might characterize as dialogic research
that constantly attends to “the shifting roles of researcher as listener, learner, advocate, and par-
ticipant” (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014, p. 24). As I later discuss, forging relations of trust can
strengthen the abilities of critical ethnographers to empathically, yet critically investigate the per-
spectives and life worlds of those we may disagree with (Hochschild, 2016; Small, 2018;
Stein, 2010).
Taken together, researching as a critical secretary is critical in its attention to relations of
power (Apple, Ball, & Gandin, 2010; Smith, 2005) and secretarial in its direct engagements with
multiple forms of less visible rational, peripheral, and emotional forms of labor (Wichroski, 1994).
As a research strategy, it encourages researchers to contend explicitly (though not exclusively)
with the gendered and racialized dimensions of organizational roles and work activities. It also
sensitizes analytic inquiry to the distinctive ways that gender and race mediate interactions
between researchers and research participants. Indeed, some researchers’ bodies will be read as
aligning with cultural scripts reflective of “women’s work” (Wichroski, 1994, p. 38; c.f., Yoon,
2019). Given the ways social structures mediate meso organizational routines and engagements
between researchers and research participants, constructing a critical and reflexive account of
one’s intersectional positionality represents an important initial stage for conducting research as
a critical secretary.

Key considerations for researching as a critical secretary

Figure 1 below offers a heuristic for conceptualizing, engaging in, and conducting research as a
critical secretary. Although the model draws on the linear language of “stages,” I use the figure
for conceptual clarity and acknowledge the messy, recursive, non-linear dimensions of ethno-
graphic inquiry (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011). For each stage, I include two branches of ques-
tioning: (a) questions researchers might pose to the self, and (b) questions researchers might use
to consider their actions in relation to research participants, organizations, and broader schol-
arly audiences.
The first stage, Building a critical record of self and field sites, invites researchers to interrogate
their personal and political investments in their object of study. Building a critical record of self
is not a static process but an initial practice of self-critically examining how one’s intersectional
identities shape our interactions with research participants (Collins, 2017; Crenshaw, 1991). This
initial stage also involves explicating the theoretical frameworks that researchers bring to bear
on social realities (Burawoy, 2009). By comparison, building a critical record of field sites entails
collecting publicly available organizational texts to develop a preliminary account of organiza-
tional values and commitments. Given that organizations shape, and are shaped by their social
surroundings (Scott, 1995), attention to the historical, cultural, and social contexts of organiza-
tional action can also illumine how macro social forces shape meso organizational structures.
1046 E. CHANG

(1) Building a Critical Record of Self and Field Sites

1a) How do I understand my intersectional identities? How does this 1b) What histories of place, race, and gender (among others)
understanding of self inform the ways I might mis/interpret, and be mediate my interactions with research participants? What theoretical
mis/interpreted by, social others? lenses inform my understandings of social realties?

(2) Participating and Observing as a Critical Secretary

2a) What cultural activities am I invited to participate in and observe? 2b) How do structures of race and gender (among others) shape
Why these forms of rational, emotional, and/or peripheral labor and organizational roles, routines, and practices? How do organizational
not others? texts mediate these work activities?

(3) Generating Dialogical Data and Seeking Contradictions

3b) Who is it vital that I listen to in search of potential countervailing
3a) How can I actively pursue contradictory evidence in converation
evidence? How do structures of race and gender (among others)
with others?
mediate these interactions?

(4) Answering to the Self, Field Sites and Scholarly Debates

4b) How will I answer to research participants based on the
4a) What new personal, political, and professional understandings of
generosity of time and access they afforded me? How might my
self emerge in the process of researching as a critical secretary?
findings revise and/or renovate existing social theories?

Figure 1. A four-stage model for researching as a critical secretary.

Local histories, prior ethnographic studies situated in the same place-based contexts, and even
popular texts specific to the geo-political region can sensitize researchers to the particular spatial
and temporal contexts of organizational study. Importantly, by situating individual research proj-
ects in social, cultural, and historical contexts, researchers can foreground ethical commitments
to particular people and organizations at the onset of their research process (Tuck & McKenzie,
2015) and revisit these commitments throughout the data collection and data analysis phases
of inquiry.
The second stage, Participating and observing as a critical secretary, focuses on secretarial
forms of participation and observation. Here, researchers might draw on textual analysis con-
ducted during the first stage of inquiry and investigate the “tangled webs of text and
activity” (DeVault, 2006, p. 296); that is, how actors engage in everyday practices in ways
that make, unmake, and/or remake symbolic resources in organizational texts. This second
stage invites researchers to develop an account of organizational life that privileges the
everyday talk, practices, and experiences of participants (Emerson et al., 2011) with an explicit
attention to how gendered and racialized relations of power mediate social practices
(Wichroski, 1994). A processual outcome of this second stage involves forging and/or deepen-
ing relations of trust with research participants (Paris, 2011) by directly engaging in rational,
emotional, and peripheral forms of labor (Wichroski, 1994). Another important goal of this
stage involves reflexively analyzing how research participants make sense of researchers
(Green, 2013; Yoon, 2019). Paying attention to social interpretations of the self is essential for
grasping what data researchers do (not) have access to and what questions
remain unanswered.
The third stage, Generating dialogical data and seeking contradictions, shifts ethnographic
inquiry from field observations toward formal and nonformal interviews (Carspecken, 1996).
Interviews allow researchers to delve deeper into the perspectives and motivations of research
participants (Peshkin, 1988). Researchers might use interviews to seek counterfactual evidence in
ways that challenge and/or corroborate preliminary fieldnote findings (Luker, 2008). Seeking con-
tradictions also involves identifying key organizational actors, who might offer contrasting per-
spectives on organizational routines, roles, and activities.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION 1047

The final stage, Answering to the self, field sites, and scholarly debates, invokes Patel’s (2016)
notion of “answerability” and elevates attention to ethical obligations researchers have to par-
ticular people, places, and knowledge-building projects. First, researchers might critically reflect
on missteps and mistakes that unfolded in the process of conducting ethnographic fieldwork.
They might also solicit feedback from research participants concerning interpretive findings and
as a way to deepen mutually respectful and ethical relations with research participants. These
more participatory and humanizing research practices (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014) trouble nar-
row conceptions of research as confined to scholarly publications and encourage ethnographers
to consider cultural products that organizations might value (Anderson, 2017; Bhattacharya,
2016). During this final stage of analysis, researchers might also explore how empirical findings
contribute to ongoing scholarly debates in ways that might complement and/or renovate exist-
ing social theories and activist struggles for education justice.

Researcher positionality and study contexts

With these key considerations as my guide, I attempted to conduct research as a critical secre-
tary through a comparative ethnographic inquiry of two digital technology reform organizations
in Silicon Valley and Oakland, California. The purpose of the study was to investigate the cultural
politics of “twenty-first century” education reform and discern how digital innovations might
reproduce and/or upend material geographies of educational opportunity. To conduct this study,
I selected two organizations with contrasting orientations toward technology, youth, and educa-
tional progress. I first approached an organization that I interpreted as re-presenting a more neo-
liberal and white normative orientation toward schooling and achievement. Founded in 2014,
“AccelerateEdu” (a pseudonym) aimed to forge connections between public schools and startup
education technology companies to “increase and accelerate student achievement by leveraging
technology at scale.”1 By contrast, I approached a liberatory-oriented organization in Oakland,
which I refer to as, “InnovateEquity” (also a pseudonym). Founded in 2010, InnovateEquity uti-
lized a mobile responsive website to link community voice and democratic decision-making
processes in order to build “just and sustainable communities for all.” These contrasting organi-
zations represented my efforts to decenter an ethnographic focus on subordinate groups and
critically examine the role of organizations across the political spectrum. As meso level social
structures, each organization constrained micro social practices even as it re/shaped macro social
forces and distributions of scarce educational resources.
Between 2016 and 2018, I conducted 11 months of participant-observation at Accelerate-Edu,
and 13 months of participant observation at InnovateEquity. For the purposes of this paper, I
focus primarily on textual analyses, reflexive memos, fieldnote observations, and interview data. I
transcribed and imported fieldnote and interview data into NVivo and used a deductive coding
process to critically examine my efforts to conduct research as a critical secretary. For purposes
of analytic clarity, I organize these reflexive findings using the contingent four stage model of
researching as a critical secretary. In practice, my application of this strategy was less linear and
frequently involved moving across stages in an iterative way. As one example, it was through
efforts to make-meaning of the surprisingly disparate ways I was racialized across organizations
in Silicon Valley and Oakland (stage 2) that I chose to deepen an historical analysis of legacies of
place and race at each field site (stage 1).
My efforts to develop a research praxis in solidarity with struggles for education and racial
justice motivated this inquiry. Concerns about the ways in which my research efforts might
reproduce the very forms of violence I sought to upend (Applebaum, 2018) motivated me to
explore conceptual tools that stressed critical listening and ongoing reflexive action (San Pedro &
Kinloch, 2017). The following section develops a more critical and self-reflexive analysis of my
positionality. For now, it is worth noting that this project represented an initial opportunity for
1048 E. CHANG

me to “dwell” in, rather than attempt to resolve ethical tensions associated with conducting crit-
ical ethnographic inquiry in an inequitable society (Baloy, Sabati, & Glass, 2016).

Findings
Researching as ‘model minority’ and ‘yellow peril’
Building a critical record of self and field sites encouraged me to consider how I misinterpret
and be misinterpreted by research participants. Given the historical significance of race as a cen-
tral meaning-making category (Omi & Winant, 2014), I reflected on the ways I am often racialized
as “Asian” in ways that blurred my Chinese and Japanese ethnicity. I built a critical record of self
by recounting interactions I had with teachers, friends, and social others. These reflexive memos
surfaced cultural myths of Asians as hard-working and self-driven “model minorities” (Wong, Lai,
Nagasawa, & Lin, 1998), such as the many occasions when I have been considered “good at
math,” or my particular pursuit of a research career does not elicit surprise from social others. At
the same time, I reflected on moments when anti-immigrant, othering narratives of Asians as
“yellow peril” emerged in tension with “model minority” myths (Kawai, 2005), such as occasions
when I was asked if I was “off the boat” or questioned about my inter-racial partnership. Critical
analyses of Asian men as non-Western, feminized subjects produced through histories of colo-
niality, patriarchy, and masculinity also helpfully historized present patterns of action and inter-
action in my day-to-day life (Hoang, 2015). Building a critical record of self thus encouraged me
to make explicit the ways in which I was “both a member of multiple dominant groups and a
member of multiple subordinate groups” (original emphasis, Collins, 2017, p. 127). It allowed me
to anticipate the ways in which different contexts might require situationally specific modes of
conducting research as a critical secretary (Cerwonka & Malkki, 2008).
I complemented this critical inventory of self with preliminary analyses of organizational texts
and cultural legacies of place specific to Accelerate-Edu and InnovateEquity. In the case of
Accelerate-Edu, their organizational goals mapped onto cultural narratives of innovation, coun-
ter-culturalism, and individual entrepreneurship largely reflective of Silicon Valley. In one organ-
izational text, the CEO of Accelerate-Edu asserted, “Silicon Valley needs to innovate in education
as it has done in cell phones as it has done in search engines, so that not one child falls through
the cracks.”2 These organizational texts adopted macro cultural narratives of Silicon Valley as a
site of regional innovation and reified a broader education reform discourse that equated innov-
ation with moral goodness (Gianella, 2015). Paternalistic discourses of saving children were also
evident in broader educational narratives of “at risk” youth (c.f., Baldridge, 2019; Brown, 2016).
I wanted to understand how individuals at Accelerate-Edu might adopt or contest these textual
accounts of digital education reform and question, critique, or enact broader cultural legacies of
innovation evident in formal organizational texts.
In the case of InnovateEquity, place-based narratives of collective struggle and thriving
emerged in their mission statement and news coverage of their digital organizing work.
InnovateEquity articulated their work as “people-powered place-making” and sought to build
power within and across long marginalized communities and communities of color. These organ-
izational texts animated what Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self
Defense, articulated as “intercommunalism”: “a way of thinking outside of structures of nations,
and instead, forging solidarities between communities, including the Black people of Oakland
and the Vietnamese” (Murch, 2010, p. 193). Wary of imposing historical narratives onto my field-
note observations, I headed into fieldwork interested in the ways research participants at
InnovateEquity made, unmade, and/or remade Oakland-based legacies of collective struggle.
Taken together, this first stage of inquiry offered a generative reflective space to explicate a
sense of self prior to conducting fieldwork. It also invited me to situate my individual research
project within much broader legacies of place and politics in relation to the ongoing work at
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION 1049

each organization. As I aim to reveal, this historical vantage point anchored how I selectively
chose to conduct research as a critical secretary and allowed me to distill richer, more critically-
reflexive analytic findings.

Developing a critical account of organizational dynamics

With these preliminary questions and curiosities in mind, I drew on the language of secretarial
labor to propose concrete ways I might participate in and reciprocate for a potential opportunity
to study Accelerate-Edu and InnovateEquity. My mixed identifications with dominant and subor-
dinate social structures (Collins, 2017) may have informed how and why my participation in sec-
retarial labor attracted little attention. I quickly discovered that women and women of color at
each organization were the main team members charged with fulfilling secretarial work activities.
At Accelerate-Edu, I worked primarily with Laurel (pseudonym), a Latina staff member. At
InnovateEquity, I worked primarily with Alicia (also a pseudonym) a mixed-race, Puerto Rican
woman. Participating and observing as a critical secretary alongside Laurel and Alicia afforded a
situated vantage point to interpret how macro structural forces shaped patterned organizational
routines and distributions of work activities.
At Accelerate-Edu, researching as a critical secretary afforded access to what Laurel described
as “the weeds of education.” I primarily conducted rational labor, such as note-taking, synthesiz-
ing data on edtech companies, and assisting with public events Accelerate-Edu hosted through-
out Silicon Valley. These forms of labor attracted little attention among organizational leadership,
who staff described as “C-level” personnel (e.g., CEO, COO, and CFO). Participating and observing
as a critical secretary not only afforded access to the substantive texts behind organizational
operations—such as organizational histories, grant proposals, and budget information—but also
revealed otherwise less visible, racialized and gendered organizational hierarchies. As one
example, Laurel translated reports of edtech companies to two Asian project directors, who then
briefed the White COO, who then translated the message “up” to the Asian CEO. “C-level” leader-
ship then sent new directives back “down” to staff in ways that repeatedly resulted in longer
work hours for Laurel. Participating in secretarial labor alongside Laurel afforded one way for me
to ethically engage in the organizational rhythms of life and work at Accelerate-Edu even as I
disagreed with the deficit framings and narrow achievement focus of the organization. Over
time, I documented how Laurel was consistently overworked and undervalued. I participated in
secretarial labor as a way to accompany Laurel even as I attempted to critically discern the
material and political outcomes of Accelerate-Edu’s digital organizing efforts.
My participation and observations alongside Alicia offered a similar, situated vantage point to
grasp the day-to-day organizational rhythms at InnovateEqutity. I engaged in rational labor, such
as recording notes at internal meetings, transcribing post-meeting data, and creating posters
and meeting materials to support public events. I also engaged in multiple forms of peripheral
labor, such as running organizational errands and shopping for snacks and coffee for internal
team meetings. As in my fieldwork with Accelerate-Edu, these forms of participation congealed
into greater forms of access. I was soon looped into email threads, organizational databases, and
digital meeting note archives to fulfill my secretarial tasks.
Participating in secretarial labor alongside Alicia also revealed a more horizontal and demo-
cratic organizational structure at InnovateEquity. I was surprised to note the absence of “C-level”
roles and the shared distribution of work activities at InnovateEquity. As one example, organiza-
tional leads engaged in multiple forms of secretarial labor, such as calling community leaders,
purchasing food for team meetings, and supporting with event setup and cleanup. Conversely,
Alicia frequently assumed organizational leadership roles, such as representing InnovateEquity
during meetings with other organizations. Engaging in and observing these forms of labor
afforded a distinctive and experiential basis for interpreting the organizational politics at
1050 E. CHANG

InnovateEquity and analyzing the relations between organizational rhetoric and every-
day practices.
Taken together, participating and observing as a critical secretary afforded access to a rich
array of texts and a preliminary basis for establishing reciprocal, trusting relations with Laurel
and Alicia, and eventually, the broader organizational teams. Engaging in micro forms of secre-
tarial labor also offered insight into meso level organizational routines that shaped, and were
shaped by broader macro social forces and education reform discourses in Silicon Valley and
Oakland. Leadership at Accelerate-Edu instituted norms of individual innovation, competition,
and entrepreneurship reflective of a Silicon Valley orientation to education reform. The racialized
and gendered distributions of work activities at Accelerate-Edu also reconstituted racialized and
gendered patterns of work and leadership roles reflective of the high tech sector (U.S. Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission, 2016). By contrast, InnovateEquity drew on cultural lega-
cies of collective struggle to organize participatory and democratic organizational roles and work
routines. These work activities explicitly challenged the gendered and racialized devaluation and
subordination of secretarial roles and work activities. As noted, consistently fulfilling secretarial
forms of labor translated into what I interpreted as a deeper sense of trust associated with the
second definition of “secretary”: “a confidant; one privy to a secret” (Oxford English Dictionary,
2019). The following section offers a glimpse into dialogical data interview methods afforded.

Corroborating preliminary findings through dialogue

Generating dialogical data with organizational leaders and team members offered additional
insights into the personal motivations, aspirations, and frustrations individuals brought into their
work at Accelerate-Edu and InnovateEquity (Weiss, 1994). Interview data tended to corroborate
observational fieldnotes, despite my efforts to seek contradictory evidence.
At Accelerate-Edu, interviews with leadership and staff overwhelmingly affirmed preliminary
fieldnote findings concerning the routinized inattention to power within organizational struc-
tures. During an interview with the COO of Accelerate-Edu, he repeatedly mentioned “bodies” he
needed to fulfill organizational needs: “I need two bodies for that job”; “I’ll need at least three
bodies for this job.” His words helped to explain frequent labor turnover I observed within the
organization. Further, the COO’s use of the term “bodies” offered insight into a broader ableist,
as well as race- and gender-evasive organizational climate (Annamma, Jackson, &
Morrison, 2017).
When I asked Laurel about her experiences working at Accelerate-Edu, she explained that the
COO encouraged her to “better demonstrate her value” to the team. But rather than “lean in”
(Sandberg, 2013), Laurel lamented a lack of opportunities and structures to support her existing
skills, which included expertise in visual arts, graphic design, and creative writing. Laurel eventually
quit Accelerate-Edu alongside roughly one-third of staff who also left the organization during my
11 months of inquiry. During an exit interview, I asked Laurel what she would miss about
Accelerate-Edu. She laughed and responded, “A paycheck.” As if speaking directly to COO, Mark,
Laurel added, “You can’t have an organization without people.” The general neglect of Laurel’s tal-
ents—as well as that of other Accelerate-Edu staff members—also led me to grasp a broader
organizational disregard for the knowledge and cultural assets of Black and Brown families,
community members, and young people in neighboring Silicon Valley communities. Frequent labor
turnover also limited the abilities of Accelerate-Edu to sustain meaningful, longterm
inter-organizational relationships with communities and schools; an attention to longterm
sustainability often elided in a fast-paced, future-oriented Silicon Valley culture of innovation.
At InnovateEquity, interview data corroborated fieldnote observations of organizational struc-
tures. When I asked to interview leadership at InnovateEquity, they took ownership of the pro-
cess and scheduled a focus group interview involving all three primary team members, including
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION 1051

Alicia. During the focus group, the founding director described what distinguished
InnovateEquity this way:
What makes us really unique is the organizational culture and our commitment to Ubuntu and ‘I am
because we are’ and this collective African philosophy. I think we’re stronger together than we would be by
ourselves and trying to infuse that throughout the way that we do work.

Alicia seconded him. These statements revealed a collective orientation toward shared labor.
Interview statements also corroborated fieldnote observations in which I jotted leadership
remarking, “The team did an amazing job. Everyone on the team. There’s a lot of invisible work
that happens that isn’t as easily seen.” This collective ethos also informed how InnovateEquity
designed digital tools, events, and programs, which emphasized sustainable and horizontal part-
nerships with other nonprofit organizations and leaders in minoritized and divested
communities.
During a separate, individual interview with Alicia, I asked her to describe her path to working
at InnovateEquity. She recounted her frustrated experiences with “hippy dippy” approaches to
education and sustainable design and her excitement meeting the leaders of InnovateEquity.
Alicia remarked, “People actually in the community have a voice too and have things to say and
it’s important for them to be heard. When I found InnovateEquity, I was like, ‘Whoa, this is crazy.
This is exactly what I want.’” Interviewing Alicia allowed me to discern her personal investments
in fulfilling secretarial forms of labor. It also allowed me to make sense of a broader organiza-
tional commitment to redress inequities within and beyond the organization, such as the organi-
zation’s commitment to using digital tools to “lift up” historically excluded ways of knowing
across Oakland communities and develop community-driven solutions to interrupt legacies of
racial inequality.

Answering to the self, field sites, and scholarly audiences

Upon concluding fieldwork, I wove analytic threads across the first three stages of researching as
a critical secretary, including my reflexive memos, organizational texts, and place-based histories
(Building a critical record of self and field sites), fieldnote data (Participating and observing as a crit-
ical secretary), and interview transcripts (Generating dialogical data and seeking contradictions).
Distilling this milieu of qualitative data informed how I sought to make my work “answerable” to
each organization and scholarly audiences (Patel, 2016).
In terms of answering to the self, researching as a critical secretary afforded new political and
professional self-understandings. I was struck by the array of leadership styles among Asian lead-
ers at Accelerate-Edu, which tended to reproduce racialized and gendered patterns of competi-
tion, meritocracy, and exploitation. By contrast, participating and observing forms of inter-racial
solidarity between InnovateEquity and Black, Brown, and Asian communities in Oakland afforded
alternative subject positions for authoring an Asian identity in solidarity with minoritized com-
munities (Fujino, 2008). These contrasting experiences bolstered my commitments to reject what
Matsuda (1993) describes as a “racial bourgeoisie role” of Asian integration in a white suprema-
cist society (p. 79). Participating in and observing the uneven consequences of leadership action
thus allowed me to develop an emergent anti-racist praxis.
When considering how to make my work answerable to each organization, I consulted with
team members and leadership to guide my thinking. I was surprised to discover that conducting
research as a critical secretary minimized a need for a transactional mode of reciprocity (e.g., pro-
ducing a final report). Laurel explained that having someone to strategize and work with was
helpful, especially amid the sudden departure of her immediate directors near the end of my
fieldwork. She stated, “That month where you were the only other staff member was super help-
ful.” When I invited Laurel’s immediate superiors to an exit-interview lunch, they similarly articu-
lated an appreciation of my contributions throughout the process of conducting fieldwork and
1052 E. CHANG

lamented that I was the only one to ask them about what might have encouraged them to stay
at Accelerate-Edu.
Similar themes of mutual gratitude emerged during my conversations with research
participants at InnovateEquity. When I invited critical feedback regarding my role and ways of
engaging with InnovateEquity, a co-leader responded, “I think in general, the listening and the
note-taking, and the critical sort-of feedback at times … role that you played was actually very,
very, very helpful and filled a critical need on our end.” Alicia added, “I think the things you are
already doing is ideal. Taking notes, listening, learning as well as supporting events, facilitation
and training.” Acknowledging the limitations of interviews as a medium for receiving critical
feedback, these statements offer some insight into how researching as a critical secretary facili-
tated reciprocal relations throughout my data collection process. Kinloch and San Pedro (2014)
might describe researching as a critical secretary as one mode of humanizing inquiry “grounded
in acts of listening that situate us as researchers, advocates, and humans who work with, and
not for, each other and other people” (p. 27). In this sense, researching as a critical secretary
allowed me to study across politically disparate organizations in ways that were ethically respon-
sive and answerable to particular people, especially those who occupied organizational positions
most likely to benefit from researchers’ labor and participation.
Last, answering to scholarly debates offered a way to name critical concepts that might
advance research analyses and advocacy for education justice. As one example, I sought to dis-
till the differential barriers and opportunities that Accelerate-Edu and InnovateEquity encoun-
tered in ways that were associated with how they confronted issues of structural racism
(Chang, 2019a). Answering to scholarly debates thus pushed me to explore what kinds of gen-
eralizable logics might emerge from my analyses, especially in ways that might inform “those
working politically to see what they are up against and where they might want to apply
pressure” (DeVault, 2006, p. 295). Related research projects have sought to problematize osten-
sibly progressive narratives of “twenty-first century” learning and advance a more critical,
power-attentive approach to studying digital technologies in an era of education inequality
(Chang, 2019b; 2018). Taken together, these projects extend the aims of critical ethnography
by revealing and interrupting the root causes of educational inequities (Anderson, 1989;
Carspecken, 1996).

Discussion: toward a critical secretarial praxis

Thus far, I have argued that researching as a critical secretary offered a generative strategy to
study politically disparate organizations and extend the aims of critical ethnography, which seeks
“to free individuals from sources of oppression and repression” (Anderson, 1989, p. 249).
Reflecting on the data I relied on to produce these findings, I am reminded, as Milner (2007) elo-
quently observed, “How education research is conducted may be just as important as what is
actually discovered in a study” (original emphasis, p. 397). To extend Milner’s observation, “what”
I found (how digital reform organizations reproduce and challenge structural racism) was insep-
arable from “how” I went about the work of collecting data (researching as a critical secretary).
Researching as a critical secretary proved integral to my efforts to make sense of the self, engage
in reciprocal and ethical relations with research participants, and advance broader scholarly proj-
ects using critical ethnography.
In this concluding section, I discuss the challenges of studying organizations like Accelerate-
Edu, which advanced political and educational goals I disagreed with (Small, 2018; Stein, 2010).
I critically reflect on the absence of contradictions that emerged in my efforts to generate dia-
logical data and raise broader questions about a complementary need for “critical empathy” as
a research orientation (Stein, 2010). I then conclude by considering researching as a critical
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION 1053

secretary as a broader anti-oppressive praxis beyond the temporal and situated contexts
of fieldwork.

Critical empathy as a complementary strategy

Small (2018) argues that rigorous qualitative research constructs a rich, heterogeneous portrait of
those whose lives and ways of being researchers might oppose. In conducting research as a crit-
ical secretary, I sought contradictions and interpretive insights into the multiple motivations, per-
spectives, fears, and aspirations among research participants. Specifically, I sought to avoid
constructing a reductive, homogeneous account of Accelerate-Edu given my early critiques of
their functionalist, achievement-oriented approach to education reform. Indeed, researching as a
critical secretary troubled tendencies to construct a homogenous organizational account. Yet,
that my interviews tended to corroborate fieldnote data raises questions about my own abilities
and willingness to meaningfully challenge my own assumptions.
Stein’s (2010) notion of “critical empathy” is helpful in this regard (p. 561). Critical empathy
entails commitments to understand the perspectives of those who researchers disagree with and
expresses a commitment to construct multi-dimensional accounts of opposing groups (Small,
2018). Hochschild (2016) similarly insists researchers must cross an “empathy wall”: “an obstacle
to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even
hostile to those who hold different beliefs” (p. 11). In my review of interview transcripts and
post-interview memos, I was reassured to find evidence of what I interpreted as sincere searches
for contradictions, such as probes and invitations for participants to elaborate on their intended
meanings. Still, I may have been unaware of the ways in which I did not enact empathy in my
relations with leadership at Accelerate-Edu, or conversely, did not sufficiently scrutinize local talk
and practices I tended to agree with at InnovateEquity.
These tensions raise epistemological questions about how researchers come to know what
they know. Given that ethnographers are mediums of interpretation in qualitative inquiry, reflex-
ive analyses represents one of the few strategies available for building toward more robust, crit-
ically empathic, and situated truths. Further research might build on current calls for “critical
empathy” and develop related tools and practices to guide critical ethnographic investigations of
politically disparate organizations.

A critical secretarial praxis

Researching as a critical secretary also shaped my ways of being and knowing beyond the par-
ticular contexts of fieldwork. Many ethnographers have troubled misleading notions of ethno-
graphic “exit” and have helpfully elevated attention to the fluid intersections of professional,
personal, and political identities (Hoang, 2015; Ribas, 2015; Stein, 2010). Conducting secretarial
work alongside Laurel and Alicia unexpectedly enfolded into my own tendencies “to move like
they move, talk like they talk, and feel something like they feel” (Desmond, 2016, p. 319). I found
myself more attentive to gendered and racialized privileges associated with how I navigated uni-
versity contexts.3 I also found myself reiterating dignifying statements I heard in the contexts of
InnovateEquity, such as expressions of gratitude and efforts to call attention to less visible forms
of peripheral, emotional, and rational labor that sustained university-based research projects.
These findings speak to the need for continued, ongoing forms of critical self-scrutiny, particu-
larly for researchers who, like myself, carry multiple privileges into university settings.
Researching as a critical secretary may be a particularly useful strategy for researchers committed
to education justice but perhaps less sensitive to the ways structural advantages are encoded in
ostensibly neutral organizational structures, roles, or routines. Racialized and gendered norms
and roles at my university mapped onto the very structural hierarchies evident in my analysis of
1054 E. CHANG

Accelerate-Edu. In this sense, researching as a critical secretary afforded an experiential basis for
me to better grasp how micro social practices sustain organizational and structural hierarchies. In
doing so, it revealed what alternative options for action I might enact in order to interrupt these
normalized patterns of structural advantage and disadvantage.
Taken together, researching as a critical secretary offers a useful research strategy and a
potentially generative anti-oppressive scholarly praxis. Given that researchers are never outside
structural contradictions we study, inhabiting a critical secretarial praxis might support research-
ers to negotiate gray ethical spaces of conducting research with/in the university (Bhattacharya,
2016; Yoon, 2019). Such an approach can foster more humanizing relations with research partici-
pants and extend these social modes of association across the multiple organizational contexts
of life and work researchers negotiate along the way.

Notes
1. All names of organizations and actors included in this study are pseudonyms in compliance with Institutional
Review Board guidelines.
2. Source withheld in compliance with IRB requirements.
3. I do not suggest that experiencing another person’s oppression represents a basis for political solidarity. The
point I intend to make is that my sustained engagements with gendered and racialized secretarial labor
sharpened my own insights into how oppression operates and specified concrete actions I might take to
intervene in taken-for-granted organizational routines.

Acknowledgements
I want to acknowledge Kathryn Herr, Miriam Leshin, Taeyeon Kim and several anonymous reviewers for their
thoughtful and critical feedback on this paper. Your insights substantially improved this piece.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor
Ethan Chang, Ph.D., is a sociologist of education and assistant professor of educational leadership at the University
of Hawai’i at Manoa, 1776 University Avenue, Wist Hall, Honolulu, HI 96822; e-mail: ethanchang@ucsb.edu. He is a
former middle and high school public teacher with prior teaching and research experiences in Hawaii, South Africa,
and Palestine. His research explores the intersections of policy, place, and race in struggles to redress inequities of
educational opportunity.

ORCID
Ethan Chang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8242-3984

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