Episode 40: Episode 40. Tanja Burkhard Interviews Shena Sanchez

Qualitative Conversations

SPEAKERS

Tanja Burkhard, Shena Sanchez

Tanja Burkhard 00:16

Okay, thank you so much for inviting us to the qualitative conversations podcast. My name is Tanja Burkhard, and I'm really happy to be here with Shena Sanchez to talk about CRT and qualitative research. We'll start by maybe me introducing myself briefly and then I will give it over to Shena. My name is Tanya Burkhard. And I am an assistant professor at Washington State University Vancouver. And I've been a member of the QR SIG for a while and I'm very excited to be on this podcast today. Shena?

Shena Sanchez 00:59

Hi, I'm Shena Sanchez. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and qualitative research. And I'm happy to be here and have this conversation.

Tanja Burkhard 01:13

Okay, and so I know just a little bit about your work from a while ago, and I would love to hear more about what you're currently doing. But before we do that, could you speak a little bit about yourself and your work and how you came to CRT as a methodological or theoretical framework, just kind of your journey to where you are in employing critical race theory?

Shena Sanchez 01:37

Yeah, um, so my work is my work centers, student voice and identity, specifically, girls of color from poor and working class backgrounds, immigrant backgrounds, I also look at educators well being, and my hope is that, you know, we can understand students better into an identity better and as well as our educators to form just better school communities. Right? It's because so much of, you know, the school is about relationship and so. So just finding better ways to care for people who are in schools, students and educators alike. And I came to critical race theory. So it's kind of like a long story. But to make it short, many, many years ago, I was in a master's program at Vanderbilt. And that's when I really just started kind of exploring, just from like an academic standpoint, like inequalities and injustices and that sort of thing. And I was just very dissatisfied with the course offerings, because I didn't really feel like there were courses that helped us understand sort of the the power structures and the hierarchies that existed. So I don't know what I was doing. But I found this class in the course catalog. And it wasn't called critical race theory, it was called something else. And it was taught in the higher ed, I think department, and I took it and that's where I first was introduced to CRT. And I think like many people who come to the theory after just like years of just experience and knowledge that something is up, right, and that we like, for me, I didn't have the words to describe it. And I didn't have that theoretical grounding, and just reading their spells work. Like just from the get go, I was like, this makes so much sense. Like this is it and then bringing in, you know, Kimberly Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, just like just going through all of the, you know, founders of critical race theory. It just, to me, it really opened my eyes gave me the language gave me sort of the framework for understanding, not just my experiences, but how I was observing, you know, the world and society. So that's really where it started. And honestly, that's what made me want to go and get a PhD. That's what really prompted me to want to learn more. And so I looked for a program that really, you know, emphasize critical theory and had scholars and faculty that, you know, we're experts in critical race theory, and that's how I ended up at UCLA. And from there, I just kind of took the, you know, the years in grad school where you have ample time to, to just explore and be curious and learn. A