Intermixing Social Justice and Race-Neutral Leadership Approaches: A Critical Content Analysis of Doctoral Students’ Literature Reviews

Researchers acknowledge the challenge educational doctoral programs face to prepare their candidates for social justice leadership in our increasingly racially diverse society and schools. The problem is that students are often exposed to competing, race-neutral leadership approaches and discourse, professional bureaucratic and colorblind managerialism, that undermine social justice goals. Through critical content analysis, the purpose of this study was to map patterns of social justice discourse as evidenced across two cohorts of doctoral students’ dissertation literature reviews (N=19) by examining the degree to which they challenge inequity, embrace social justice, or uphold the status quo. The doctoral students unintentionally intermixed bureaucratic, colorblind, and liberal discourses with social justice. We believe this is a reflection of their racial/ethnic background, their uncritical consumption of the literature, as well as their choice of framework. Limited research exists at the cross-section of how doctoral students’ scholarship and their social justice leadership identity emerge within the context of their dissertation development. The mixing terminology finding is symbolic of the process of writing the literature review itself as students begin to develop their identities as social justice scholars before researchers.