Curriculum Vitae

Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre Professor and Graduate Coordinator Department of Language and Literacy Education 125 Aderhold Hall University of Georgia Athens, GA 30602-7123 Office Phone: (706) 542-4526 Affilliated Faculty Member, Qualitative Research Program Affiliated Faculty Member, Women’s Studies Institute

Scholarly Interests

Research interests bring critical, feminist, and poststructural theories to bear on a range of overlapping interests: the construction of subjectivity; qualitative research methodology; the reading/writing/language theories of secondary English education; the reading practices of adult expert readers; and literacy practices in alternative sites, especially adult women’s book clubs.

Courses Taught

I am an Affiliated Faculty Member in the Qualitative Research Program and in the Women’s Studies Institute and work with both programs in addition to the Language and Literacy Education Department. In addition to teaching formal courses, I frequently organize reading/study groups around particular books and authors so that graduate students and faculty can come together over difficult texts to help each other think.

LLED 7070 Research Methods in Language Education

LLED 7420 Writing and Literacies in English Education

LLED 7430 Language and Learning in English Education

QUAL 8400 Qualitative Research Traditions

* LLED/QUAL 8550 Representing Qualitative Research

DESCRIPION: (NOTE: This course can count toward the Qualitative Research Certificate)

This doctoral seminar focuses on the final stage of the qualitative research process, representation, or what is often called "writing it up." Intended for students who have data in hand and are ready to begin writing (either for a dissertation or some other project), the seminar provides a site from which to wrestle with issues of interpretation and representation. How we choose to transform "data" into "writing" makes a difference theoretically, practically, and ethically; and in this seminar we will explore issues such as the following: how do we inscribe lives in our texts, how do we contribute to hegemonies by maintaining marginality/dominance in our texts, and how do our academic practices affect how and what we write? here will be a special focus on the politics of interpretation, drawing on feminist, neo-Marxist, and poststructuralist challenges to and reformulations of empirical inquiry in the human sciences. The work of Clifford Geertz, George Marcus and Michael Fischer, Kamala Visweswaran, Laurel Richardson, Patti Lather, Trinh Minh-Ha, John Van Maanen, and Harry Wolcott, among others, will help us not only to think about writing but also to write. In addition, we will experiment with the development of writing communities, peer support, and self-authorization. There will be opportunities to prepare drafts of dissertation chapters or other research reports and to seek support and guidance for the resolution of the very complex issues informing representation.

* LLED/QUAL 8560 Theoretical Frameworks for Doctoral Studies in Education

DESCRIPTION: (NOTE: This course can count toward the Qualitative Research Certificate. This course can count as a "related" course for the Women’s Studies Certificate) Donna Haraway wrote that there is no view from nowhere -- that we are all situated somewhere as we try to make sense of the world. This doctoral seminar will survey some of the major theoretical discourses of Western thought -- some that are considered humanist projects and others that trouble those projects. The course may be taken at any time during a student’s doctoral program will assist doctoral students in situating their own work among those theories for their doctoral studies and their dissertation research.

Students will read and discuss theories of knowledge such as rationalism (Descartes), empiricism (Locke), positivism (Compte), constructivism (Berger & Luckmann, Dewey, Kuhn), structuralism (Althusser, Lévi-Strauss, Piaget), poststructuralism (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault), postcolonialism (Bhabha, Fanon, Said, Spivak, Trinh), psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva), critical theory (Horkeimer, Habermas), hermeneutics (Gadamer), feminism (Harding, Barbara Smith, Cixous, Butler, Grosz), Marxism (Marx, Althusser), gay and lesbian studies (de Lauretis, Hall, Rubin, Watney, Wittig), queer theory (Braidotti, Britzman, Sedgewick), race-based theories (Bell, Collins, Crenshaw, Gotanda), etc.

Students will also become familiar with analyses that emerge from these conceptual frameworks such as genealogy, affirmative deconstruction, power/knowledge readings, Black feminist analyses, queer analyses, rhizoanalysis, etc.

These lists may seem daunting, but one of our tasks will be to think about the "work of reading" and the "work of language" as we read across these texts, paying attention to "how we read" as well as "what we read" and to how language is used to "word the world."

At the end of the course, students should (1) have confidence that they can read through a complex body of scholarly literature, (2) be more aware of the array of theories they might use to investigate their dissertation topics, (3) be better able to "talk the talk" of theory, (4) be able to articulate their current theoretical attachments, and (5) be aware of how theory works with methodology as scholars design research studies.

* LLED/QUAL 8570 The Postmodern Turn: Theories and Methods

DESCRIPTION: (NOTE: This course can count for the Qualitative Research Certificate)

In 1979 Jean-Francois Lyotard described postmodernism as an "incredulity toward metanarratives," particularly the master narratives of the liberation of humanity and the unity of knowledge. Postmodernism emerged in the middle of the 20th century in the Western arts, popular culture, and the academy after the crises of legitimation and representation and in response to the ethical failures of "humanity" in World War II. Much of the theoretical work associated with postmodernism, which is sometimes called poststructuralism, appeared in France in the work of scholars such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze, among others. Postmodernism has been a strong force in American culture and academic circles for the last 50 years and is creating quite a stir in education as scholars and researchers take up and put to work its provocative critiques of all those things we take for granted.

The purpose of this doctoral seminar is to provide an entrée into this literature for those who find it intriguing, to read some classic texts, to read texts written by educators who use poststructuralism, to study the diverse and contradictory theories in this body of knowledge, to study the methods (e.g., archaeology, genealogy, power/knowledge reading, rhizoanalysis, deconstruction) postmodernism and poststructuralism offer to make sense of whatever topic one is investigating, and to reflect on how postmodernism can be useful for students’ doctoral research.

* LLED/QUAL 8580 Postmodern Qualitative Research

DESCRIPTION: (NOTE: This course can substitute for QUAL 8420 for those students doing postmodern research, and it can count for the Qualitative Research Certificate)

Qualitative inquiry is inscribed differently in different theoretical frameworks. For example, conventional qualitative inquiry often retains elements of positivism even as it moves toward interpretivism. Critical qualitative inquiry uses a different set of theories and methodologies that often include an analysis of power relations related to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth. Postmodern qualitative research attempts to deconstruct any structure, including the structure of qualitative inquiry itself, to learn both the limits and possibilities of that structure and to reinscribe it in another way so that something different might emerge.

The purpose of this doctoral seminar is to consider the nature of postmodern qualitative inquiry, to study how poststructural analyses can be used in fieldwork and theorizing, and to provide support to those students who intend to do/are doing postmodern research. To accomplish this work, we will study the structure, process, and categories of conventional qualitative inquiry (e.g., fieldwork, data, data analysis, representation, participants, researcher) in order to reinscribe them differently to think about how such reinscription allows us to produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently. We will focus, in particular, on the nature of data analysis after the postmodern turn.

Students should have taken at least QUAL 8400 and should have some knowledge of postmodern theories prior to taking this course.

* LLED 8045 Foucault and Education

DESCRIPTION: This course examines the relationship between the thought of Michel Foucault and educational theory, research, practice, and policy. Whether Foucault is read as historian or philosopher, stucturalist or post-structuralist, critical or post-critical theorist, his analysis of how power works through practices of surveillance, classification, exclusion, regulation, and normalization has great implications for educational inquiry. How is the modern subject of knowledge produced by our very efforts to know it? How does a focus on the microphysics of power change our understanding of social practices? Of what use is Foucault’s theory of governmentality? What happens to the "queer Foucault" in such matters? These and other questions will be addressed through readings in a seminar format where students will be expected to both co-lead class discussions and explore the implications of such questions in their emerging sense of their research projects.

* LLED 8045 Derrida, Deconstruction, and Education

DESCRIPTION: This advanced doctoral seminar will look at the relationship between the thought of Jacques Derrida and educational theory, research, policy, and practice. Derrida’s work is most familiar to philosophers and literary critics, but his analytic, deconstruction, has also been taken up by educators and put to use in the everyday problems we encounter in our work. Derrida says that deconstruction is simply a way of reading, and Gayatri Spivak, one of his translators, says that "deconstruction has always been about the limits of epistemology." We’ll discuss deconstruction as a way of reading, as an intervention, and as a politics. In this course, we will read some of Derrida’s pivotal work from texts such as Of Grammatology, Positions, Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, Specters of Marx, Limited, Inc., and Writing and Difference and discuss their usefulness to our work in education.

* LLED 8045 Feminist Research Methodology

DESCRIPTION: (NOTE: This course can count toward the Qualitative Research Certificate and the Women’s Studies Certificate.)

In this seminar we will study how feminists within different feminist traditions have taken up and transformed conventional research methods and how they have thus produced different knowledge and produced knowledge differently. Some of the questions with which we will grapple are the following: Who gets to be a feminist? Is there such a thing as a feminist research method? If so, what makes a research method a feminist method? When/where is feminist research? What does it look like? What does it get you that other research doesn’t? Does it stay the same in various epistemologies?

To begin to explore these questions we will read scholars/researchers who write about feminist research as well as feminists who write up their research including Sandra Harding, Patti Lather, Joyce Nielsen, Shulamit Reinharz, Ann Oakley, Dale Spender, Nancy Hartsock, Judith Cook & Mary Margaret Fonow, Susan Bordo, Patricia Hill Collins, Bronwyn Davies, Michelle Fine, bell hooks, Zora Neal Hurston, Ruth Behar, Dorinne Kondo, and others.

* LLED 8045 Scientifically Based Research in Education

DESCRIPTION: (NOTE: This course can count toward the Qualitative Research Certificate)

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, now up for reauthorization, contains a description of "scientifically based research" (SBR) that has produced a considerable debate in educational research, policy, and practice. In effect, the law mandates that a particular kind of research, causal research using experimental design, counts as "scientific." NCLB also created the Institute of Education Sciences in the Department of Education, which privileges and funds causal research, which it assumes can tell us "what works" in schools. There has, of course, been a vigorous response to what some call the "scientism’ of SBR. In this course we will study that debate, reading NCLB, reports of the National Research Council, special issues of journals that both support and critique SBR, and other literature. We will also look at the impact of SBR on classrooms, policy, and educational research in general. This course will be very useful for teachers who want to understand the current climate of schooling in this country.

* LLED 8045 Strategies for Improving Academic Writing

DESCRIPTION: If you’re not a happy writer of academic texts, this may be the course for you! First, note that this is NOT a writing workshop course, but a new course designed to help doctoral students learn strategies and skills for successful academic writing. We will take a broad look at academic writing and study some of the typical genres that scholars use, i.e., the research report (including the PhD dissertation), the conceptual/theoretical paper, the methodological paper, the literature review, the book review, the conference paper, the policy brief, and so on. Students will find exemplars of these genres in their own disciplines. We will discuss strategies for getting published, how to get a paper ready to send to a journal editor, the peer review process including how to write a review of a manuscript submitted for publication, APA conventions, and the writing process and the importance of revision and editing in that process. And because writers need readers, students will form writing groups in which each will work on some piece of writing throughout the session.

* Courses developed by St. Pierre

Publications

St.Pierre, E.A. (2008). Decentering voice in qualitative inquiry. International Review of Qualitative Research, 1(3), 319-336.

St.Pierre, E.A. (2008). Home as a site of theory. International Review of Qualitative Research, 1(2), 119-124.

Freeman, M., deMarrais, K., Preissle, J, Roulston, K. & St.Pierre, E. A. (2007). Standards of evidence in qualitative research: An incitement to discourse. Educational Researcher, 36(1), 25-32.

St.Pierre, E.A. & Roulston, K. (2006). The state of qualitative inquiry: A contested science. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19(6), 673-684.

St.Pierre, E.A. (2006). Scientifically based research in education: Epistemology and ethics. Adult Education Quarterly, 56(4), 239-266.

St.Pierre, E.A. (2006). Defining good science. College of Education Magazine, Athens: University of Georgia, 10-11.

Richardson, L. & St. Pierre, E.A. (2005). Writing: A Method of Inquiry. In N.K. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.). Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.).(pp. 959-978). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

St. Pierre, E.A. (2004). Deleuzian concepts for education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(3), 283-296.

St. Pierre, E.A. (2004). Refusing alternatives: A science of contestation. Qualitative Inquiry, 10(1), 130-139.

St. Pierre, E.A. (2004). Care of the self: The subject and freedom. In Bernadette Baker & Katharina E. Heyning (Eds.), Dangerous coagulations?: The uses of Foucault in the study of education (pp. 325-358). New York: Peter Lang.

St. Pierre, E.A. (2002). "Science rejects postmodernism." Educational Researcher, 31(8), pp. 25-27.

St. Pierre, E. A. (2001). Coming to theory: Finding Foucault and Deleuze. In Kathleen Weiler (Ed.). Feminist engagements: Reading, resisting, and revisioning male theorists in education and cultural studies. New York: Routledge.

St. Pierre, E. A. & Pillow, W. S. (Eds.). (2000). Working the ruins: Feminist poststructural theory and methods in education. New York: Routledge.

St. Pierre, E.A. (2000). The call for intelligibility in postmodern educational research. Educational Researcher, 29(5), 25-28.

St. Pierre, E.A. (2000). Poststructural feminism in education: An overview. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(5), 477-515

St. Pierre, E. A. (1999). The work of response in ethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 28 (3), 266-287.

St. Pierre, E. A. (1999). Historical perspective on gender. English Journal 8(3), 29-34.

St. Pierre, E. A. (1997). Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 10(2).

St. Pierre, E. A. (1997). Nomadic inquiry in the smooth spaces of the field: A preface. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(3).

St. Pierre, E. A. (1997). An introduction to figurations: A poststructural practice of inquiry. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(3).

St. Pierre, E. A. (1997). Circling the text: Nomadic writing practices. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(4), 403-417.

St. Pierre, E. A. (1996). The responsibilities of readers: Toward an ethics of response. Qualitative Sociology, 19(4), 533-538. 

Academic History

Ph.D. The Ohio State University (English Education
M.S.L.S. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Library Science)
B.A. East Carolina University (English)