Beyond Research on Cultural Minorities: Challenges and Implications of Research As Situated Cultural Practice (Report‪)‬

Researchers have conducted studies on cultural minorities as a means to produce knowledge that can be used to serve the educational and psychological needs of our increasingly multicultural society. Although this is an important strategy to produce research knowledge that is responsive to heterogeneous populations, it falls short on several key theoretical grounds. Thus, this article examines theoretically the cultural nature of research. We pursue this goal by developing two arguments; namely, we highlight the theoretical and methodological limits of the traditional practice of research on cultural minority groups and outline the idea of research as situated cultural practice. Instead of devoting efforts to do research on certain minority groups as special cases, we assume humans are cultural beings. The term "minority" is not used to reflect numerical representation. Instead, we use Gibson's (1991) definition of minority to describe groups that occupy a "subordinate position in a multiethnic society, suffering from the disabilities of prejudice and discrimination, and maintaining a separate group identity. Even though individual members of the group may improve their social status, the group itself remains in a subordinate position in terms of its power to shape the dominant value system of the society or to share fully in its rewards" (p. 358). The notion of research as situated cultural practice proposes that what drives research, its purposes and uses, how meaning is made during the implementation of research practices, and the knowledge and representations that are produced are culturally and socially mediated and negotiated processes. The idea of research as situated cultural practice requires that the analytic spotlight be widened from an exclusive focus on certain groups to shed light on two additional aspects. These are the sociocultural location of the researcher as an individual and a member of a scientific field, and the cultural presuppositions in the habitual practices of a field (e.g., theoretical categories, data collection and analysis tools; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Goodwin, 2002; Latour, 1999; Rosaldo, 1993). We define practices as "actions that are repeated, shared with others in a social group, and invested with normative expectations and with meanings or significances that go beyond the immediate goals of the action" (Miller & Goodnow, 1995, p. 7).