‘How do you solve a problem like maria?’ Troubling the psy-gaze in the qualitative analysis and representation of educational subjects

Abstract

My Ph.D. thesis aims to trouble hegemonic understandings of academic ‘underachievement’ by considering the complexity of the discourses that constitute primary school students’ academic subjectivities. It was apparent from a conversation with my thesis supervisors about the initial draft of an analysis chapter of an interview with one of my research participants, ‘Maria’, that despite my articulation of the poststructuralist underpinnings of the thesis, I had unreflexively defaulted to psychologising discourses in the analysis. This included engaging in the production of Maria’s biography as a singularly situated real story about her, through ‘triangulating’ her own, her teacher’s and her mother’s stories about her. Moreover, my own positionality in terms of how I engaged with Maria, the power relations between myself and her, and my motivation for conducting the interview, remained invisible and unchallenged. In this paper, I wrestle with the question of how we can know our research participants, and map the journey of ‘representing’ ‘Maria’ and the pitfalls that were encountered along the way.