Reckoning With Race and Gender in Public Administration and Public Policy: A Substantive Social Equity Turn

Abstract

Promoting race-aware and gender-aware scholarship is essential for giving substance to social equity research. This review and introduction provides an account of one such initiative to promote race and gender scholarship through collaboration between Public Administration Review (PAR), and the Consortium of Race and Gender Scholars (CORGES), and introduces the PAR Race and Gender Symposium. CORGES is an informal group of scholars motivated by the pressing need to address issues of racial justice and gender justice in public administration and public policy scholarship. This PAR symposium is based on the CORGES inaugural conference, held virtually in September 2020. Conference organizers, with the help of Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Hall, devised and oversaw a thoughtful and detailed plan to provide developmental feedback before papers were submitted to PAR's standard peer review process. The symposium is comprised of 14 research articles and 2 viewpoint contributions. In addition to describing symposium contributions, this review provides an account of CORGES origins and its ongoing intellectual and normative commitments on furthering inquiry on racializing and gendering, while also elaborating on the idea of everydayness of scholarly activism. CORGES, with a recently expanded board of advisors committed to centering public administration scholarship on race and gender, as well its intersection with other markers of oppression, continues to support academic research and public outreach on race and gender scholarship.

What can postcolonial theory contribute to the study of social equity?

“…I will build on Stivers's (2002) argument by adding that the field of Public Administration has been dominated by (White) men and that women and minorities are struggling to be heard and seen within the bureaucracy and call for the development and implementation of more fair and equitable policies. At the same time, Pandey, Newcomer, et al (2022) advocate for "openly acknowledge greater burden faced by women as a group, and recognize the dynamic nature of gender inequity, which has an adverse impact on men who do not fit the hegemonic masculinity mold as well " (n.d.).…”

“…To be clear, I am not proposing one type of epistemology (quantitative versus qualitative) to understand marginal communities' experience in Public Administration scholarship. However, I am echoing Pandey, Newcomer, et al (2022) call for a strong theoretical framework to understand race relations and its intersection with gender, class, skin-tone, ethnicity, and sexual orientation and postcolonial theory is a good starting point.…”

Epistemic decolonization of public policy pedagogy and scholarship

“…It is not as if such theorizing is absent. Sociologists and legal scholars, whose work as a community of scholars is not elevated by an award like the Sveriges Riksbank Prize, have long advanced powerful ideas about racial hierarchy that can be helpful (for overviews, see Pandey, Bearfield, & Hall, 2022; Pandey, Newcomer, et al, 2022). 11…”

In Search of Social Equity in Public Administration: Race, Gender, and Some “Class”‐ey New Ideas

“…In this issue, Pandey, Newcomer, et al (2022) lay out this body of research with great clarity and purpose, and I need not elaborate on their comments. I will, however, admit we still have a great deal of work remaining.…”

“…I applaud the efforts of the guest editors—Sanjay Pandey, Leisha DeHart Davis, Jasmine Johnson, Kathryn Newcomer, and Norma Riccucci. Sanjay and his colleagues have been dedicated and unrelenting in their support for broader social equity research agenda in public administration and public policy, a matter discussed in more detail in their review and introduction in this issue (Pandey, Newcomer, et al 2022). Their commitment and passion for this topic are commendable.…”