The Precarity Project: Qualitative Methods for Critical Reflection in Challenging Times

Introduction
Much of the change in the world relates to globalization, which often obscures change and how we engage it. Education is integral to these processes—it is implicated in how lives are taken up and lived in local spaces shaped by global phenomena. Given the impact of globalization, educational endeavors are increasingly complex and messy, with an ever-rising range of pressures and ever-quickening pace of change, along with compounding challenges layered one on top of another. What makes these times of globalization and precarity different from earlier times, which also involved vast change and difficult challenge, is the layering, rapidity, and destabilizing nature of the forces at play (Standing, 2016).

Goals, Methods, Anticipated Results

Taking up the call to action for a new critical approach to research that works against oppression in a quest for solidarity and resistance in our contentious times (Fine 2018), this ongoing study works with diverse educators in the autoethnographic tradition (Ellis, 2004), to ask them to reflexively study themselves (Ellis & Bochner, 2000) and write about a specific precarious and challenging moment in their practice critical to their identity as educators. Each educator then engages in a revision process focused on providing greater clarity in sensory detail and crafting a short story, or vignette, of this single critical moment.

Conclusion

This study addresses the need to create a bridge between aesthetics and empiricism in educational research (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1983). Modeled, in part, after the collaborations of Geneva Gay (2010) and Gloria Ladson-Billings (1994, 1995, 2006a, 2006b), this ongoing study seeks to gather stories that can help us understand the impact of globalization on educational endeavors and the scope of this precarity as experienced by educators around the world.