Equality in a Time of Crisis
University College Dublin
6-7th May 2010
Participative, Emancipatory, Feminist and Transformative
Ways of Doing Research
Professor Mary Darmanin
University of Malta
Crisis and universities
• supposed ‘knowledge societies’
• global asymmetries of knowledge
• expertocracy
• mediocracy
• corpocracy
• technocracy
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Responses outside PEFT
• praxis and political theory – Dallmayer
• the research imagination and the ‘right to
research’ – Appadurai
• from maldistribution and misrecognition to
representation-reframing disputes about
justice- Fraser
• cosmopolitanism - Appiah
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Methodology
Sandra Harding’s (1987) distinction between
• method- techniques for gathering empirical
research
• methodology – the theory of knowledge
and the interpretative framework that
guides a particular project
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an ontology, or theory of life
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world as socially determined
that can be described
rejecting binaries of self-and society
power and its capacity to hide its hand (s)
identity-neither fixed nor singular
inscribed in discourses (social relations)
embodied
intersectional
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Intersectionality
We regard the concept of
‘intersectionality’ as signifying the
complex, irreducible, varied, and
variable effects which ensue when
multiple axis of differentiationeconomic, political, cultural, psychic,
subjective and experiential-intersect
in historically specific contexts.
Brah, A. and A. Phoenix (2004)
religion
dis/able-bodiedness
age
‘race’
citizenship
and so on …….
sexual orientation
language
gender
social class
additive or constitutive?
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Interconnectedness of human life –
an ontological sociality
• multiplicity of social relations
• across all spatial scales
• spatial inequality
• spatial identities-places,
regions, nations
• not naturally given
• historically changing
‘overlapping communities of fate’ & ‘global covenant’ (Held,
2004)
‘cosmopolitanism- responsibilities’ Appiah, 2006
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Volcanic ash cost Malta €10m and 90,000 bed
nights
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D. Smith (1987)
The everyday world as problematic
Directs us to
• ‘embodied’ subject located in particular local historical
setting
• ‘everyday life’ constituted as our problematic
• preserves presence of subjects as knowers and actors,
from where they stand
• in determinate relations with those whose relations we
intend to express
• but not rely on them for understanding of social relations
that shape and determine the everyday, by being
restricted to the descriptive- move to interpretative and
analytic
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Who speaks with whom?
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‘Who speaks for whom?’ about power
The shift in social balance of power begins from a
position of differential power
Social research political- how we use our privilege for
social ends
A politics of involvement- who speaks with whom?
Representation as a political act- not essentialised or
naturalised but from
history as members of marginalised group
not to lead to hierarchies of oppression
create solidarity not barriers of difference
COMMONALITY more than DIFFERENCE
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Study power across levels of
analysis
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Unit of analysis systemic, even if unit of data collection
is particular slice, group, person, event or part of
whole.
Including persons who benefit from social
arrangements or merely ‘watch’.
Task to theorize across levels, interrogate movement
of power across levels, social relations .
‘no unit too small to
see fingerprint of the
world’
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Dialogue and Imagination
Dialogical practice
• which transforms situated
experience into situated
knowledge
Imagination
• To produce other types of knowledge that are
valuable
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Theory of knowledge/epistemology
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Everyday world as problematic
Standpoint theory/ positionality
Ethical
Does not erase Other
Reveals social relations – not a perspectivalism
Includes practical engagement -praxis
Normative issues
Leading to change
‘an ontological epistemology of participation’
A. K. Giri, 2006
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Methods
• That methods, including of analysis,
should ‘reflect the forms of social life’
• Multi-method - where qualitative and
quantitative intellectually and politically
compatible.
• But ‘overcoming expediency’
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Where to start ?
• Unbearable oppression
• A tomato
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• amplifies demands and critiques from the ‘margins’
• elaborates alternate possibilities for justice
• signifies a fundamental right to ask, investigate, dissent and
demand what could be
• shatters ‘lying world of consistency’
• makes public ‘private ‘ troubles
• reveals common social roots of these ‘private’ troubles
• demonstrates differentiated consequences of social
oppression distributed unevenly
• privileges perspectives ‘that age on the bottom of social
arrangements’
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Fine and Torre, 2006
illustrative cases
1. Opportunity Gap Research Projecturban and suburban youths’ experiences
of racial & class justice & injustice in their
New York City schools (Fine et al, 2005)
2. College-in-prison programme for women
in a maximum security prison, New York
(Fine and Torre, 2006)
3. Youth-focused initiatives in Dadaab
Refugee Camps of NE Province, Kenya (
Cooper, 2005)
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Methods and processes
Opportunity Gap Project
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2 day research camps- method and critical race theory
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prepared survey on school community & trust & civic engagement
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transcripts of all seniors tracked in AP/honours course
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feedback to 8 school sites
College in Prison•
‘methods’ camp, local history of struggle, social, feminist, critical race theory & methodology
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craft research questions
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9-11 am sessions community of learners/community of researchers
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multi-method, multi-site, multi-generational
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focus group with current students and drop-outs; 20 interviews those outside
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survey Faculty and administrators
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archival research
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focus group with children of prisoners
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36 month long recidivism data stratified by those in College and those not.
Dadaab Refugees•
2 day methods’ workshop for 11 youth researchers
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meetings, focus group discussions on interview guide
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each prepared analysis summary
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they interviewed 140 others, chosen by themselves
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report; practice presentation for NGOs, went to Nairobi to present
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email of report to other organisations
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• Full compositional analysis
• First fracturing analysis
• Contrastive/counter analysis
• Local excavation
• Policy in practice analysis
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On the tomato trail
• Freirean generative themes
• Existential experiences of the everyday
• Complex structural conditions
of globalisation
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SHOWeD ‘freewrite’ acronym
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What do you See here?
What’s really Happening here?
How does this relate to Our lives?
Why does this problem (or asset) exist?
What can we Do about it?
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The power of the visual
• condenses at once the everyday, the monumental and spectacular
• immediate-fugitive moments of life, fugitive testimony, sensation of
living presence, ‘salvage ethnography’
• aesthetically engaging (not just analysis)
• potential for interrogation to release secrets (can be ‘read’ )
• irreducibility of objects/materiality of culture (not texts about things
only)
• in the absence of more personal contact- visual, a way in
• vantage points from which bodies see objects and vice versa
• a ‘truth of the meaning of the object or image’ –realism
/verisimilitude ? (but also interpretation)
• focus on unnoticed, unrecalled, invisible presence- power relations
that structure life including space, commodities etc.
• spatial practices and representational spaces, as well as
representation of space
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hyperlink cinema as a model for
PEFT research?
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works through narratives
works through juxtaposition/contrast
works through oblique but justifiable global links
is about interconnection/responsibility
gives embodied account of non-unitary subjects
simultaneously, if not knowingly, connected
explores social, economic, political, sexual etc power relationships
shows how power/love shift – multiple discursive sites
uses mise en scene, flash-back and forward to fracture myth of
linearity (to question chronological regimes of path dependency)
 space for agency/salvation
 visual and aesthetic (music) to heighten response
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Conclusion
1. Recognise that academy is one of few
remaining places in which dissent is possible
2. Injustice is not just a cognitive problem
(Fine et al 2006)
“To deny someone’s claim that she is in pain is not
an intellectual failure, it is a spiritual failure.
The future between us is at stake.”
Veena Das, 2000
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