Ahmed used qualitative empirical research methods, such as structured interviews and textual analysis of institutional artifacts (i.e. policies) to better understand diversity practices.  Her overall ethnographic research design employed a black feminist theory towards analyzing systems of power, prestige, and privilege impacting higher education diversity efforts at research and institutional levels.  Ahmed’s positionality to higher education and diversity efforts required that she re-adjust herself  to  look “at” university diversity efforts instead of “from” points of view.

There’s a direct pathway towards applying similar methods in order to better understand CUNY’s military-veteran related institutional practices.  As a staff member looking at CUNY’s policies, I would use my insider knowledge to speak to faculty and staff that directly or indirectly interact with military-veteran specific policies.  This would assist in the triangulation of overall efforts pertaining to the support of its 3,000 veterans and military connected student population.  Inductive reasoning leads one to believe that following paper around campus would span across both academic and non-academic related departments. Thus leading to interviews specifically with University Director of Veterans’ Affairs and campus program directors.  A snowball sampling method would assist in the identification of additional interviews due the lack of organizational uniformity across the CUNY campuses. Applying a critical ethnographic approach would address the status quo and hegemony of student veteran research practices.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.