“The Future is Latina”: Feminist Borderlands and Latina Legislators

Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Examining the Influence of Changing Voices and Bodies on Legislative Spaces

“…My critical research on state legislators has focused on Nevada, which offers a “real-time” and “witness in action” examination of how new policy actors engage in the work of agenda-setting, creating coalitions, and legitimizing new knowledge-generating practices in policymaking spaces (Martinez, 2022a). Since 2016, I collected individual interviews from state legislators, attended multiple legislative meetings, followed legislators’ social media accounts, collected news stories about legislators, and interacted with many of them in formal and informal settings.…”

“…It encourages the use of qualitative research for social justice purposes, including making such research accessible for public education, social policy making, and community transformation. (p. 6) In my critical qualitative research, I am interested in how new policy actors are transforming policymaking spaces and creating spaces of praxis, how they were negotiating their insider/outsider status in policymaking, and how their policy ways of knowing shape policy priorities and agendas (Martinez, 2022a(Martinez, , 2022b. Critical qualitative methodologies provide a lens by which to understand policymaking, actors, and policy through a social justice paradigm.…”

“…Using qualitative methodologies, education policy researchers illustrate how mainstream policy discourse is used to maintain status quo power and further disadvantage communities of color and children (Apple, 2013;Gillborn, 2005;Martinez, 2021aMartinez, , 2022aMartinez, , 2022b. These policy forces of conservative modernization threaten to further dismantle public education across the globe (Apple, 2013).…”

“…In my critical policymaking research, I have employed intersectionality, Black feminist theory (Martinez, 2022b), Chicana feminism (Martinez, 2022a), feminist borderland theory (Martinez, 2022a), and critical race theory (Martinez, 2020a(Martinez, , 2020b, which have expanded our epistemological knowledge on how new policy entrants exercise their agency to transform politics and shape agendas that advance both their communities and policy priorities. Notably, using critical qualitative methodologies, I illustrate the ways that new policy entrants create spaces of praxis in historically excluded policymaking governing bodies and spaces, navigate insider/outsider spaces, and embody their policy ways of knowing.…”

“…For instance, in a study about Chicana and Latina legislators (Martinez, 2022a), I used feminist borderland theory to understand the ways that Latina legislators voiced their agency through their policy work and agenda-setting. They embodied their ways of being and knowing that simultaneously served as their compass as they traversed political and policymaking spaces.…”