Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change 9781447324645

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METHODOLOGIES FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

Edited by Andrew J. Jolivette

RESEARCH JUSTICE Methodologies for social change Edited by Andrew J. Jolivétte in collaboration with DataCenter: Research for Justice

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Policy Press North America office: University of Bristol Policy Press 1-9 Old Park Hill c/o The University of Chicago Press Bristol 1427 East 60th Street BS2 8BB Chicago, IL 60637, USA UK t: +1 773 702 7700 +44 (0)117 954 5940 f: +1 773 702 9756 [email protected] [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk www.press.uchicago.edu © Policy Press 2015 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN 978 1 44732 463 8 paperback ISBN 978 1 44732 462 1 hardcover The right of Andrew J. Jolivétte to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the editor and contributors and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Policy Press Front cover image kindly supplied by Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Rebelde Printed and bound in Great Britain by CMP, Poole Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

In loving memory of my mother Annetta Donan Foster-Jolivétte (January 16, 1944—September 5, 2012) To all our ancestor spirits who have fought, and who continue to fight, for justice

Contents Notes on contributors vii Acknowledgments xv Foreword by Miho Kim Lee xvii Part One: Research Justice: Strategies for knowledge construction and self-determination one Research Justice: Radical love as a strategy for social transformation Andrew J. Jolivétte two Imagining justice: Politics, pedagogy, and dissent Antonia Darder three Blurred lines: Creating and crossing boundaries between interviewer and subject Amanda Freeman four Ethnography as a Research Justice strategy Liam Martin five Queered by the archive: No More Potlucks and the activist potential of archival theory Andrea Zeffiro and Mél Hogan six More than me Nicole Blalock

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Part Two: Research Justice: Strategies for community mobilization 63 seven The socio-psychological stress of ‘justice denied’: 69 Alan Crotzer’s story Akeem T. Ray and Phyllis A.Gray eight Formerly incarcerated women: Returning home to family and 81 community Marta López-Garza nine Disaster justice: Mobilizing grassroots knowledge against 95 disaster nationalism in Japan Haruki Eda ten A health justice journey: Documenting our stories and speaking for 109 ourselves Alma Leyva, Imelda S. Plascencia, and Mayra Yoana Jaimes Pena eleven By us, not for us: Black women researching pregnancy and 117 childbirth Julia Chinyere Oparah, Fatimah Salahuddin, Ronnesha Cato, Linda Jones, Talita Oseguera, and Shanelle Matthews twelve Actos del corazón: Las sabias—bridging the digital divide, and 139 redefining historical preservation Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson with the Corazones del Westside v

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Part Three: Research Justice: Strategies for social transformation and 151 policy reform thirteen Everyday justice: Tactics for navigating micro, macro, and structural 157 discriminations from the intersection of Jim Crow and Hurricane Katrina Sandra E. Weissinger fourteen The revolutionary, non-violent action of Danilo Dolci and his 171 maieutic approach Domenica Maviglia fifteen Telling to reclaim, not to sell: Resistance narratives and the 185 marketing of justice Amrah Salomón J. sixteen Decolonizing knowledge: Toward a critical Research Justice praxis 199 in the urban sphere Michelle Fine seventeen Decolonizing knowledge: Toward a critical indigenous Research 205 Justice praxis Linda Tuhiwai Smith Index

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Notes on contributors Nicole Blalock is a mixed-heritage activist scholar and artist whose work applies Native American Studies to the examination of education, schooling, and the development of culturally sustaining pedagogies. Dr. Blalock is currently serving as a Fulton Postdoctoral Fellow for educational equity in diverse schools with the Mary Lou Fulton Teacher’s College at Arizona State University. Her research is largely interdisciplinary and incorporates her interests in contemporary society and how its policies and practices influence learning and achievement. She is also interested in issues of representation, identity, and sovereignty as related to the tensions of tribal memberships, nation-to-nation politics, and decolonization. Although distinct activities, Dr. Blalock’s research and art run a parallel course, developing and enriching her understanding of critical issues in society. Both are the result of archiving experience and thought and draw from her own rich academic, professional, and personal history. www.nicole-renee.com Ronnesha Cato is an African American woman, community doula, mother, and activist who lives in East Oakland, California. She is currently a student majoring in history, with aspirations of becoming a history teacher in addition to a midwife. Ronnesha’s interest in birthing justice stems from her own experiences with childbirth. In 2010, while pregnant, she studied the different techniques and procedures associated with birth, but grew increasingly dissatisfied with western scientific medicine. This led her to look deeper into women’s holistic health and educating women on their rights to control their birth experiences. Ronnesha believes that, if more women of color approached the mainstream medical system with the perspective that women should have support, encouragement, and birth education, the infant mortality and high C-section rate in African American women would drop. Antonia Darder holds the Leavey Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Leadership at Loyola Marymount University and Professor Emerita of Education Policy Studies at University of Illinois. She has authored numerous books and publications, including Culture and power in the classroom; A dissident voice; and Freire and education. Haruki Eda is a member of Eclipse Rising, a U.S.-based Zainichi Korean community organization working for social justice and peaceful unification of Korea. He is also a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. His research focuses on diaspora, queer theory, and social movements, with an emphasis on Asia/Pacific. An earlier version of his chapter received the Phillips G. Davies Graduate Student Paper Award by the National Association for Ethnic Studies. He holds a BA in sociology from San Francisco State University, an MSc in gender, development vii

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and globalisation from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an MA in sociology from Rutgers University. He has received a fellowship from the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University for a graduate seminar on archipelagic studies in 2015-16. His doctoral dissertation explores how diasporic Korean community organizers envision unification from a feminist, queer, antiimperialist, and decolonial perspective. Michelle Fine is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Urban Education at the City University of New York. She is a founding faculty member of the Public Science Project, which produces critical scholarship for use in social policy debates and organizing movements for educational equity and human rights. Fine is a recipient of honorary degrees from Bank Street College and Lewis and Clark University, and is a much sought-after commencement speaker. A sampling of her most cited books and policy monographs includes: The changing landscape of public education (2013), with Michael Fabricant; Charter schools and the corporate makeover of public education (2012), with Michael Fabricant; Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion (2008), with Julio Cammarota; Muslim-American youth (2008), with Selcuk Sirin; and her classic Framing dropouts: Notes on the politics of an urban high school (1991). Fine has received the 2013 American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy, the 2012 Henry Murray Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology of the APA, the 2010 Social Justice and Higher Education Award from the College and Community Fellowship for her work in prison, and the 2011 Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award for her mentoring legacy over the past 25 years. Amanda Freeman is a writer, professor and researcher based in Connecticut. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Central Connecticut State University, working to complete her PhD in sociology at Boston College. Amanda writes about the challenges facing low-income families in America. She wrote a six-part series of news articles about women and poverty for the Women in the World Foundation and the Ford Foundation, which appeared on the Newsweek Women in the World website. In 2013, she received the Dentler Award from the public sociology section of the American Sociological Association in recognition of “exceptional research and writing on the challenges facing low-income single mother-headed families and communication of research and its policy implications to a broader audience.” Phyllis A. Gray is Professor of Sociology/Social Psychology and Criminology at Florida A&M University. She has published in national and international journals, and is the recipient of many honors and awards including induction into the prestigious Sigma Xi National Scientific Research Society. Her research has been funded by The National Science Foundation, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the viii

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Mississippi Department of Mental Health, the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, and the U.S. Department of Education. She is the author of two books: From imagining to understanding the African American experience and The disparate treatment of black youth in the juvenile justice system. She received her BSc degree in psychology from South Carolina State University, and the MSc degree and PhD in sociology from Iowa State University. Mél Hogan is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Illinois Institute of Technology. Her research is at the intersection of media, archives, and the environment. Her most recent publications revolve around media and their ecological impacts, data storage centers, and server farms. As a practitioner, aspects of these same issues are addressed through media arts interventions and research design projects. Hogan is also a co-curator of online and p.o.d. journal of arts and politics, nomorepotlucks.org and a design consultant for mat3rial.org. [email protected] • www.nomorepotlucks.org • @nomorepotlucks Amrah Salomón J. is a PhD candidate in ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her community work is focused on environmental justice, gender, sexuality, youth organizing, migrant rights, indigenous struggles, workerowned cooperatives, and the creation of economic and environmental autonomy as an alternative to displacement and globalization. Her master’s thesis examines the Partido Liberal Mexicano as a transnational and internationalist movement that organized on both sides of the border to further the Mexican revolution. In her doctoral research she explores decolonial theory and epistemology, as well as engaging with cultural and gender studies to develop a more nuanced theoretical framework for analyzing grassroots counter-hegemonic projects and transformative cross-border organizing. Andrew J. Jolivétte, chair of the American Indian Studies Department at San Francisco State University, is an accomplished educator, writer, speaker, and sociocultural critic. He is the author of three books: Cultural representation in Native America (AltaMira Press, 2006); Louisiana Creoles: Cultural recovery and mixed-race Native American identity (Lexington Books, 2007); and Obama and the biracial factor: The battle for a new American majority (Policy Press, 2012). He is currently completing work on his fifth book, Indian blood: Two-spirit return, mixedrace identity and HIV (University of Washington Press, 2016). Jolivétte’s writing has been featured in the American Indian Cultural and Research Journal, the Ethnic Studies Review Journal, The Yellow Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, as well as several anthologies. He is the former Vice-Chair of DataCenter: Research for Justice board of directors. He currently serves as a new board member with the African American Art and Culture Complex in San Francisco, and is the book series editor of Critical Indigenous and American Indian Studies at Peter Lang Publishing in New York. Professor Jolivétte recently served as scholar in residence in Native Sexualities and Public Health at the ix

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University of California, Santa Cruz in fall 2013. He was the Indigenous Peoples’ Representative at the United Nations Forum on HIV and the Law in 2011 during his two-year fellowship as an IHART (Indigenous HIV/AIDS Research Training Program) Fellow at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle. As a national speaker he has spoken to thousands of college students, educators, government employees, and privatesector organizations over the past decade across the United States and Australia. Linda Jones is a birth and postpartum doula and mother of two who lives in Oakland, CA. She founded and owned Waddle and Swaddle Baby Boutique and Resource Center in Berkeley, CA, and has been a part of the natural birth advocacy community in the Bay Area for more than two decades. She belongs to Sistahs of the Good Birth, a group of black doulas who work with low-income mothers. She was one of the founders of a volunteer doula group that provided services for low-income, uninsured, and teen mothers who birthed at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley. Alma Leyva is a Project Coordinator at the Dream Resource Center of the UCLA Labor Center. As a queer and undocumented woman, Alma has dedicated her work to advancing the rights and protections of undocumented communities and the identities that intersect them. Alma’s work is centered on developing leaders at the intersection of immigrant rights and healthcare access as a project coordinator of the Dream Resource Center. Alma is a lead researcher and author of the report Undocumented and Uninsured: Immigrant Youth and the Struggle to Access Health Care in California, the first statewide study by and about immigrant youth in California. Marta López-Garza holds a joint position in Gender & Women’s Studies and Chicana/o Studies Departments at California State University, Northridge. Her current research is on formerly incarcerated women, the subject of her documentary, When will the punishment end?, which can be viewed at www. whenwillpunishmentend.net/. Recent publications include Betita Martinez: Compañera y Mentora in Social Justice. Liam Martin is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at Boston College. His work draws on a range of approaches for engaging with the people and communities most affected by the prison system. Liam’s doctoral research, funded by the National Science Foundation, has involved nine months living in a halfway house for men leaving prison and jail—spread over three separate stays—and life history interviews with a network of former prisoners established while living at the house. Using this ethnographic approach, he examines how the prison experience follows people after they leave, the forces and processes that push people back toward prison, and the strategies of former prisoners rebuilding their lives while facing often extreme forms of social exclusion. Liam also teaches x

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college courses inside Framingham and Norfolk state prisons through the Boston University prison education program. Shanelle Matthews is a journalist, blogger, and all-round digital enthusiast. She is the communications strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, where she is tasked with creating visibility for the legal and programmatic work happening on the ground. A former journalist, she leads the communications and digital strategy for the ACLU-NC’s reproductive justice and LGBT rights work. She writes on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and has been published in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including Women’s eNews, The root, Feministing, RH reality check, and The frisky. Shanelle is a Progressive Women’s Voices alumnae from the Women’s Media Center, a Core Align Generative Fellow, and was recently awarded the Ida B. Wells Award for her commitment to communications by Black Women for Wellness. She studied new and online media at the Manship School of Mass Communications and is on the board of directors of the National Network of Abortion Funds. Domenica Maviglia is Doctor of Philosophy in intercultural pedagogy at the Department of Cognitive Science, Education, and Cultural Studies, University of Messina (Italy). Her work focuses mainly on critical pedagogy and the theoretical and historical research in the field of pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of education, the history of pedagogy, and the history of education. In her career, she has worked with different educational and training institutions, taking part in educational research projects carried out in several schools. Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Mexican American Studies Program at the University of Texas-Pan American, and a former recipient of the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. She co-edited, with Bill Mullen, Crossing the world color line: W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings on Asia (University Press of Mississippi, 2005), has authored chapters in The un/making of Latino citizenship: Culture, politics, and aesthetics (Palgrave, 2014), and has published in ACME—An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies. Her current book project, tentatively entitled Coloniality, the mission city, and queer Tejan@ sensibilities, examines the role of affect and embodied epistemologies in queer Tejan@ cultural production. She has also co-curated with B.V. Olguín a dossier focused on the Latin@ speculative arts in the journal Aztlán (forthcoming, fall 2015). Julia Chinyere Oparah is an activist scholar, social justice educator, and experienced community organizer, who is dedicated to producing critical scholarship in the service of progressive social movements. Oparah is an African diaspora specialist, whose interests span a number of different social concerns, including activism by women of color, violence against women, women and the prison-industrial complex, restorative justice, queer and transgender liberation,

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race and adoption, Research Justice and birth activism. Oparah is Professor and Department Chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She is author of Other kinds of dreams: Black women’s organizations and the politics of organization, the only comprehensive history of the black women’s movement in Britain. She is editor of Global lockdown: Race, gender and the prison-industrial complex, a seminal work that mapped the connections between globalization, gender, and mass incarceration. She is also co-editor of three books: Activist scholarship: Antiracism, feminism and social change; Color of Violence: The incite! anthology; and Outsiders within: Writing on transracial adoption. She is currently working with the grassroots community organization Black Women Birthing Justice on a participatory action research project about black women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, and editing an anthology on black women in the birth justice movement. Talita Oseguera is a twentysomething black woman whose passion is to increase access to healthcare. She works as Program Director of a non-profit adult day healthcare program with persons living with Alzheimer’s disease and other related dementias, in Berkeley, California. She is in the process of applying for a master’s degree in nursing programs and pursuing a career as a nurse practitioner. Talita has a three-year-old daughter. Her husband is away for six to nine months at a time pursuing his dream as a professional baseball player, and her life is parallel to that of a single mother. She feels incredibly blessed to have people, mostly women, around her who support her emotionally and physically, and believes that there is true power in women supporting women. Talita attended a Black Women Birthing Justice sharing circle, and found it a powerful experience to hear the stories of other women around the circle and liberating to share her own story. Mayra Yoana Jaimes Pena is a Research/Project Coordinator at the Dream Resource Center (DRC) of the UCLA Labor Center. She has over seven years in organizing in Queer/Undocumented and student organizing. Her years of working with various communities has developed in her a strong passion for an intersectional approach to social justice. Her passion for justice has led her to work with the CIRCLE Project of the DRC to intentionally address intersectional immigrant issues through a health and restorative justice framework. Mayra Yoana is a lead researcher and co-author of the report Undocumented and Uninsured: Immigrant Youth and the Struggle to Access Health Care in California, the first statewide study in California by and about immigrant youth. Imelda S. Plascencia is the Project Manager of Health Initiatives at the Dream Resource Center of the UCLA Labor Center, addressing the lack of access and healthcare for undocumented Californians. For the past 12 years, Imelda has organized with the immigrant rights movement as a Queer Undocumented activist. Her work centers on health justice and health access for immigrant communities, and intersectional organizing for LGBTQ immigrants.

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Akeem T. Ray received his Bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in communications from Florida State University. He has conducted research on youth-related issues and wrongful convictions. He is the co-author of Black Youth and the Juvenile Justice System, published in The disparate treatment of black youth in the juvenile justice system. His plans are to attend graduate school and further his interest in psychology. His goal is to become a college professor and a researcher. Fatimah Salahuddin is a first-generation African American undergraduate student at Mills College, majoring in ethnic studies and education, and she has a long history of social justice activism and equity advocacy within her community. During her first semester at Mills College she was one of three students nominated for the Harry S. Truman Scholarship for students who possess a commitment to a career in public service. In addition, she became the first (and only) Half the Sky Movement Campus Ambassador for the PBS documentary series Half the Sky: Turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide, where she organized and hosted more than six screenings of the documentary throughout the Bay Area while spreading awareness of women’s rights. She has also been accepted into the accelerated dual-degree, Bachelors-to-Masters Program in Education with an Emphasis in Teaching, at Mills. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou) has a professional background in Māori and indigenous education. She currently serves as Pro Vice-Chancellor Māori at the University of Waikato. Her research interests are wide ranging and collaborative, and include Marsden-funded research on the Native Schools system and on New Zealand youth. She is known internationally for her work on research methodology, and Māori and indigenous education. Her book, Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples, has been translated into various languages and is highly regarded as a research text in indigenous and other research and educational institutes around the world. Many of her publications are credited with having helped to create the academic field of Māori and indigenous education. Sandra E. Weissinger is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Her research focuses on resistance and resiliency strategies engaged in by groups facing a range of inequalities. She does this through qualitative, often ethnographic, research studies. Weissinger is the author of A Sociology of black clergy in the state of Illinois: Activism and acquiescence in the post-civil rights generation. Recent selections of her work can also be found in Race, class & gender: An anthology (8th edn.) and Beginning a career in academia: A guide for graduate students of color. Andrea Zeffiro is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University (Canada). Her research intersects the cultural politics of emerging technologies, contemporary xiii

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media histories, art activism and social justice, with a particular focus on the practices and processes of experimental digital media production. Zeffiro is co-curator of No More Potlucks, the Canadian journal of arts and politics. [email protected] • www.nomorepotlucks.org • @nomorepotlucks

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Acknowledgments Research Justice calls upon all community experts and witnesses to violence, legal violations, education and health disparities, and other social inequities to be active participants in processes for change and policy reform at local, regional, national, and global levels. The contributors to this volume are anchored with community organizations and non-profits, as well as with academic institutions. What the authors have in common is an understanding of the power associated with the knowledge production process as an outcome of research. I am deeply grateful to Miho Kim, former Executive Director of DataCenter: Research for Justice, for coining the phrase in 2006 and for envisioning the framework for the type of work that this group of university and community scholars are producing to make this book a reality. Kim’s voice and articulation of the concept of Research Justice call upon all marginalized population groups to place themselves at the center of their own healing in research as an act of ceremonial recovery. DataCenter: Research for Justice continues to be represented by a powerful team of dedicated staff members who contribute enormously to the ongoing work of articulating a Research Justice methodological framework: Celia Davis, Jay Donahue, and Bill Hogan. DataCenter: Research for Justice is also fortunate to be represented by amazing group of board members who lead with great vision and reciprocity in ensuring the success of the organizational mission. Many thanks to Marla, Aspen, Carolyn, Margaret, Aspen, Jill, Sujata, Miloney, Neil, and Max. I also offer my thanks to Haruki Eda, who has been instrumental in thinking through some of the complexities of crafting a book of this nature. We have done our best to construct a project that includes the voices and methodologies of those living on the margins, as well as those who come from communities facing sociocultural and economic disparities. Andrew Millspaugh was extremely generous with his time in volunteering to provide crucial transcriptions of remarks delivered by prominent practitioners of Research Justice, Dr. Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Dr. Michelle Fine. The inclusion of these leading scholars in the manuscript is possible only because of Andrew’s fine work. I am also indebted to the Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at San Francisco State University, Dr. Su Rosser. The SFSU Office of Academic Affairs granted a sabbatical leave during the fall of 2013, which allowed me to compete the writing and editing for this first ever anthology on the foundations and possibilities for Research Justice as a new socially engaged form of methodological inquiry and action. My department colleagues in American Indian Studies—Joanne Barker, Robert Keith Collins, Melissa Nelson, John-Carlos Perea, Gabriela Segovia-McGahan, Amy Lonetree, Clayton Dumont, Jacob Perea, Esther Lucero, Sara Sutler-Cohen, Phil Klasky, Kathy Wallace, Amy Casselman, Jessica Hope LePak, and Eddie Madril—have also been a wonderful resource for many years and I am very appreciative of their encouragement of my work for the past 13 years. I am, above all, most thankful to my family. They have seen me through so many difficult life xv

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challenges over the years. My siblings continue to inspire me with their love of life. They, along with their children, are a constant source of joy. In particular, I want to offer my love and appreciation to my uncle Charlie, my brothers Eric, Derick, Kevin, Nathan, and Charles, and my sister Makeba. I have also found in Melissa Attia, Justin Bernard, Ruben Moreno, and Nassima new family members who shine a light of joy so bright that I have a renewed commitment to social justice, to human rights, and to liberation as a daily practice of radical love and responsibility to leave the world in a better place for the seven generations that will follow us. My heart is always with you my Creole Bandits. Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza of Dignidad Rebelde truly personify Research Justice in their daily work, and commitment to arts activism and community experts as research leaders. Much love and appreciation to Melanie and Jesus for allowing us the rights to use the image they created for the 42nd annual National Association for Ethnic Studies Conference, ‘Research as ceremony: Decolonizing ethnic studies,’ for the cover of this book. To my dear friends and warriors in the movement for justice and light in all of our communities, Corrina Gould and Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu thank you for your compassion, your courage, and friendship. I love you both dearly. Puleiaava Basil Thomsen your spirit and love has brought abundant joy and light that will forever change the way I view the world and my purpose in it. You are my most beautiful friend, partner, and the brightest gift creator could have ever bestowed upon me. May our journey continue to bring us profound happiness and a magical, honest love. My parents have always demonstrated through their actions how deeply they love me, and how much they want me to succeed and contribute something meaningful. Even in death, my mother taught me to keep fighting and working to be the best person I can be. And, since her recent death in 2012, my father has taught me how to hold on to faith and to those you love. My parents were my first teachers when it came to Research Justice, for they knew that education coupled with love and an active commitment to equality would not only make my life better but would also add to the circle of individuals from marginalized communities who are working to transform the social order of power relations for the betterment of our world. Annetta and Kenneth Jolivétte, you are my hope and my inspiration for this work.

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Foreword Miho Kim Lee, former Executive Director, DataCenter: Research for Justice Approaching its 30th anniversary, in 2006, we at DataCenter began to ask ourselves how we could strengthen the impact of community-led campaigns and organizing by actively putting strategic information in the hands of communities leading change. As an organization with a long-standing mission of supporting the social justice movement through research, we observed that very few communities had the capacity to craft the ‘right’ research question, let alone harness the power of information to take calculated, purposeful action. In fact, organizing approaches that integrated research were few and far between. Community leaders who were neither social scientists nor policy makers possessed unique insights into genuine solutions to issues they addressed, from experiencing those issues firsthand. But theirs was a ‘talkstory,’ then there was ‘real’ research, done by ‘smart people’ in the Sciences, the currency at the policy-making table. Many of our efforts to shift policies impacting disenfranchised populations have led to key victories. Yet, there was a palpable trepidation in embracing research among grassroots organizations and their constituents. The statement by Dr. Linda Tuhiwai-Smith that ‘research’ is “one of the dirtiest words” rang true for us and our own communities here in the United States, having been scrutinized and de-legitimized through outsider-led ‘research.’ And so, we began to feel the need for a powerful strategy to reverse the role of the passive ‘research subject’ we’ve been conditioned to assume as oppressed peoples, and to proactively redefine ‘research’ as nothing short of an emancipatory concept on our journey towards making change. Here we were, at DataCenter and the Environmental Justice movement I served as researcher, claiming that “people who experience injustices firsthand are the experts.” The irony was not lost on us. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples by Dr. Linda TuhiwaiSmith ignited an irreversible momentum towards our Research Justice mission by helping us find our voice in our critique of research as we knew it. We launched a two-year movement assessment on Research Oppression in an attempt to unpack the hidden barriers to grassroots ownership of research. During this process, I articulated what I had observed as ways in which inequity prevailed in research, perpetrating a sense of exclusion and disempowerment in marginalized populations: 1. lack of access to (accurate) data about themselves and their experiences in mainstream sources (for example, census, and so on); 2. mis/underrepresentation of those communities in the mainstream data sources; xvii

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3. assault(s) on/violation of individual political and collective cultural rights, justified by data-backed allegation of criminality and immorality; 4. lack of community control over production, documentation, possession, and use of their own data; 5. lack of mainstream political legitimacy as valid, credible producers of data. The systemic change agenda underlying these challenges is the very fact that western science dominates the world of ‘valid’ knowledge production in policy making. This assumption implies that communities that did not practice western science historically lack a legitimate means of knowledge production worthy of recognition in decision making that impacts their own lives. In other words, Research Justice acknowledges that traditional western science operates from a paternalistic position of assumed superiority that has been unsuccessful in producing meaningful reforms and social justice for indigenous nations and communities of color. We knew that the social sciences nor other investigative research methods DataCenter employed in and of themselves would not deliver the long-term solutions necessary to obtain the political empowerment and cultural sovereignty of peoples and nations most impacted by Research Oppression. The framework of Research Justice situated community-driven research as a vehicle for the community to reclaim, own and wield all forms of knowledge and information as political ammunition in their own hands, in ways that are consistent with the community’s unique cultural and spiritual identity, and values and traditions. All methods of producing the building blocks of our own worldview and realities must be recognized as equally valuable and relevant, if not critical, on a par with those validated and accepted in dominant institutions. In order for this to become reality, I argued, communities must achieve: • access to information (not just misinformation and outside expert research but what they truly seek and deserve) that impacts their lives; • ability to define what is valid ‘knowledge,’ as well as methods to produce this • capacity to produce their own knowledge; • capacity to use all forms of knowledge; and • control over all stages of the ‘knowledge lifecycle’—from producing, analyzing, interpreting, packaging and deploying knowledge—on an equal footing with all other institutions in society. Although Research Justice did not become DataCenter’s explicit mission until 2010, by 2007, DataCenter had begun to argue publicly that Research Justice is in itself a part of a racial, economic, and social justice agenda that insists on the right of communities for their independent and autonomous capacity to not only effect policies that impact their lives, but to transform the notion of who has the right to determine research questions, designs, and methodologies on their own terms. We began to shape processes of community-led inquiry based on xviii

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whether they centered indigenous and community of color knowledge systems as legitimate, truth-telling experts who have the power, agency, and their ability to shape the research process from the beginning and completion of the research process, and the outcomes of deploying their own research. By 2013, DataCenter’s programs were restructured under these three complementary frameworks: (1) Community’s Right to recognized and authoritative community expertise, (2) Community’s ‘Right to Know,’ and (3) Community’s ‘Right to be Heard.’ The staff and board teamed up to build the field of Research Justice, to galvanize the support and solidarity of allies across sectors, issues, discipline, and geography, because Research Oppression impacted everyone. The first time DataCenter formally introduced ‘Research Justice’ publicly was in October 2007, when we convened a community forum, hosted by our long-time funder, San Francisco Foundation, with much thanks going to Ron Rowell, Program Officer of the then Social Justice Program. Much to our pleasant surprise, more than 50 people packed the room, representing county departments, foundations, community-based organizations, intermediaries, organizers, and journalists. Everyone came to discuss: how is research going to help us build a sustainable movement? What is the right model and approach of ‘research’ to pursue this goal, if different from existing academic or journalistic investigative models, if at all? And how should it be used in the context of grassroots organizing? And, ultimately, for those of us identifying as research allies for communities, what does all this mean for how we do our research? Among some popular needs expressed were “best practices, so organizations have a guide on how to do this type of participatory research as an active reference to help implement projects step by step;” “multi-disciplinary approach that brings policy advocates, academics, and communities; not just one or the other;” and “case studies” .1 Armed with a brand new Research Justice mission, DataCenter’s 2010-14 strategic priorities plan provided a clear trajectory, based on the mandate from our allies in the social justice movement and convenings such as this, as well as our Board of Directors, for our programs to tackle all of these needs. Board members including Max Weintraub and Neil Tangri strongly advocated for publishing Research Justice, and helped successfully recruit Dr. Andrew Jolivétte to join the board as a key leadership figure to make this happen. It is in this context that this publication project was given life. In 2012, Dr. Rachel Pfeffer, long-time DataCenter advisor, introduced us to Dr. Michelle Fine, founder of the Public Science Project at CUNY, who in turn introduced us to her “good friend,” Dr. Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, and together, we all envisioned a gathering of kindred spirits from near and far, to which Dr. Fine referred as a “bi-coastal sauna” in conjunction with the east coast celebration

1

Miho Kim, ‘Research Justice initiative: How it began,’ DataCenter website, 2012, www. datacenter.org/wp-content/uploads/Research_Justice.pdf xix

Research Justice

of the 15th anniversary of ‘Decolonizing methodologies’ she was organizing at CUNY. The result was DataCenter’s 35th anniversary event in Oakland, CA, the following year, titled ‘Decolonizing Knowledge: Towards a Research Justice Praxis,’ in partnership with the American Educational Research Association in time for its annual meeting, transcripts of which are included in this book. As DataCenter’s five-year plan draws to a close, we are proud to have published groundbreaking Research Justice resource guides for grassroots communities ready to strengthen their organizing through their own research (www.datacenter. org/research-tools/research/). Complementing these works, The Research Justice Handbook: Strategies for Sacred Methodologies opens up the intellectual ‘sauna’ about the importance and power of transforming research methodologies and practices from the margin to the center, to ensure that all voices, especially those most impacted by social science research, are not only counted and heard, but also repositioned from subjects to genuine, recognized experts. Genuine multiculturalism in research methods is the vision DataCenter seeks to advance as a Research Justice organization. If this were achieved, community members would be recognized by default to be the ‘real experts’ in the issues they face every day, not only among their families and sympathizers, but also the policy makers and other institutions participating in decision making at the table. Research Justice praxis continues to thrive. It is our hope that this book project help advance this important work, towards our collective vision of a beautiful paradigm shift.

xx

Part One Research Justice: Strategies for knowledge construction and self-determination Chapter One examines the history and genealogy of Research Justice as both a theory and a method developed by the DataCenter: Research for Justice organization in Oakland, California. In this chapter, I explore the importance of Research Justice as a methodological intervention strategy to produce policy reform at local, regional and national levels. A comparative analysis of different types of knowledge (experiential, cultural/spiritual, and mainstream) and their forms of utilization demonstrate the power of centering community members as experts in the research process. The chapter also introduces two new innovative terms, radical love and Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness to frame the transformational approaches being taken on by each of the contributors to the volume. Building upon Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR), Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness (CCRR) in a Research Justice model contains three fundamental aspects: (1) it defines research processes as a collective endeavor and a shared knowledge creation process between academic and community researchers; (2) it creates, maintains, and engages with the knowledge that is produced by community experts, traditional knowledge keepers, as well as cultural leaders in ways that envision research as a ceremonial act of mutual respect and co-sharing; and (3) only research that is responsive to the social, legal, economic, cultural, and political policy needs as identified by community experts should be conducted. The Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness model takes Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Participatory Action Research (PAR) models a step further by shifting more dramatically the distribution of power in the research process by seeking to build ceremonial relationships and by yielding to the specific needs of community experts and community researchers. Chapter Two by Antonia Darder builds on Chapter One by offering a much needed contextual discussion regarding the political and pedagogical significance of dissent in the process of producing various forms of knowledge and self-determination within a democratic society. Important here in this work is the author’s ability to highlight the struggle to move away from the hegemonic domestication of traditional schooling within the context of neoliberal reforms and toward a critical pedagogy of imagination, grounded in a humanizing and emancipatory ethics of everyday life. Darder’s essay is a call to other education researchers to shift the pedagogical narratives that miss the importance of building relationships with all participants in education reform from the student and parent to the teacher and administrator. Ultimately, her essay is about mutual respect and understanding within the context 1

Research Justice

of a multicultural, democratic society where majority-minority relationships must be deconstructed and replaced with transformative acts of justice in the policy agendas of education officials at all levels of education in the United States. Her contribution, like the others in this section, attempts to link sacred methodologies with critical pedagogy and political dissent as tools of Research Justice in the contestation of hegemonic models of schooling that too often marginalizes students of color and indigenous peoples. Building on the notion of a pedagogy of dissent, Chapter Three examines the importance of single mothers as agents of change within political systems that often render women invisible. Like Darder, Freeman argues that it is crucial that researchers, policy makers, and community stakeholders build relationships that involve as many people as possible in the process of understanding contemporary social problems. Amanda Freeman’s chapter, similar to the other chapters in Part One, asserts that knowledge construction and self-determination in a Research Justice framework can be accomplished by building relationships based on solidarity, transformative justice, and radical love. Freeman acknowledges both the gains and pitfalls of sharing an identity with the research participants in her study on poor single mothers. Rather than place these women into a deficit pathology model, the author asserts that, by encouraging the women to tell their own stories and to define their own forms of knowledge, they are achieving a certain level of selfdetermination and transformative justice. This chapter, as with the others in this section, calls upon researchers to consider the sacred obligations and responsibilities of scholars and activists to create a space for mutual respect in defining research goals and questions. Ultimately Freeman’s scholarship is a call to other academics to understand their own subject position, and how it impacts their level of vulnerability in developing a relationship of solidarity and justice, without assuming that justice is the same thing as equality. Indeed, her chapter is a reflection on the power of Research Justice and sacred methodologies to build community knowledge and self-determination through an active engagement with participants as ‘family members,’ not simply as ‘human subjects.’ The prison industrial complex as a social and political system of oppression has existed for generations. Liam Martin explores the intricacies of positioning the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated at the center of research dealing with prison reform. In Chapter Four Liam Martin suggests a new, sacred methodology for conducting ethnographic research within the context of the Prison Industrial Complex. His deep connection and intention is to build a co-researcher relationship with Joe Badillo (a formerly incarcerated prisoner and co-investigator with Martin). Martin’s discussion reveals a high-level of commitment to the principles of Research Justice as a tool for shifting the power of academics as the sole researchers to one that places participants at the center of their own lives and research questions. By forging a relationship based on solidarity, mutual respect, 2

Part One

and transformative justice, Martin connects indigenous methodological practices with western methodologies to demonstrate the importance of knowledge construction and self-determination among incarcerated and formerly incarcerated peoples seeking justice and policy reform. This chapter, together with the others in this section, asserts that old research paradigms based on unequal relationships and outsider knowledge construction are no longer sufficient for working with populations that have traditionally been oppressed. Traditionally oppressed populations are often marginalized to such a degree that members of these populations often become invisible. Over the past decade there has been a growing amount of attention globally on the rights of LGBT individuals, particularly related to same-sex marriage. Not unlike the prison reform movement, the Gay rights movement is often anchored in local and regional activist organizations that fight to bring greater attention to the disparities in the law that prevent queer people and the incarcerated from gaining greater social mobility. Mél Hogan and Andrea Zeffiro (Chapter Five) posit that archival work within the context of queer movements and social science research has the potential to create new sacred methodological frameworks for creating community knowledge and self-determination among activist LGBTQI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersexed) organizations and individuals. Building on the work in previous chapters in Part One, Hogan and Zeffiro offer innovative strategies to respond to the needs of traditionally marginalized queer populations vis-à-vis arts activism in Canada and beyond. Their work complements the other chapters in this volume by demonstrating the ways that communities that share marginal identities can come together to articulate, document, and disseminate important archival records that have the potential to shift traditional western approaches to conducting research where the knowledge of outsiders is often valued as more objective than that of the insiders who belong to the communities that are the subject of scientific study. By claiming a space for queer organizers, artists, and activists, the co-authors are laying important groundwork for future studies within queer communities that seek to prioritize the sacred knowledge of research participants and community advocates who seek changes in public policies that have a tremendous impact on people who identify as LGBTQI. Moving the voices of queer people from the position of observer to participant provides crucial new strategies for bridging the divides between academia and the community as a space where sacred methodologies can produce social change at local, regional, and national levels. Academics who come from communities of color or from other marginalized populations often feel torn when working within academia as a result of possibly having an activist and/or political organizing background. Making a commitment to academia that does not compromise one’s commitment to issues of social justice for the sake of tenure and promotion at the university level is a difficult act to balance, especially when it comes to maintaining researcher ethics and responsibilities to the communities where many of us have our origins. 3

Research Justice

According to Nicole Blalock, author of Chapter Six, ‘Committing oneself to the career path of an academic requires spending a lot of time thinking about “me.”’ She continues, ‘Decisions on performance, promotion, and tenure are based on what each of us can prove we accomplished, particularly on measures valued in academe—publishing in highly ranked journals, securing large grants, positive teaching reviews—and decisions inevitably include at least a little bit of politics. Sometimes, it can feel like the things that draw us to research in the first place are lost in the milieu.’ Written from the perspective a mixed-heritage scholar, her chapter, ‘More than me,’ is a reflective essay about maintaining the complex purposes and goals of choosing a career in educational research. In writing this, Blalock uses her own historicities (as she personally understands them) to ‘develop the narrative; in a voice that exists at the intersections of memory, narrative, and academic prose.’ It explores personal influences on the decision to engage in research meant to strengthen communities through their active involvement. By examining the role of self-development and scholar identity exploration during her graduate school experience, readers are shown the impact of interactions with faculty and peers during these formative years. Part story, part analysis, this chapter calls attention to the struggle to persist in community-centric research, where self-definition/determination and academic expectations often clash. While embedded in her own experiences, this chapter highlights a historical way of knowing, understanding, and being in this world as elements impacting the practices of self as not just human, but as researcher as well. According Blalock, ‘It is a manifestation of my own radical love—vulnerable in its revealing of the many ways which colonization has broken down the manifest Indigeneity of myself and my family, but also hopeful that my contribution to the conversation of identity and reclamation prompts further exploration for how to build strategic alliances among all Indigenous Peoples for our collective push towards self-determination.’ Her chapter speaks to the profound ways by which academics are bridging the divide between indigenous methodologies that concern themselves with the sacred as a relationship of mutual respect, self-determination, and communitybased knowledge construction. In many ways, Blalock’s chapter personifies that tenets of radical love by exposing the author’s own vulnerabilities and struggles with auto-ethnography, oral history, and Research Justice in her work as an indigenous researcher and activist.

4

ONE

Research Justice: Radical love as a strategy for social transformation Andrew J. Jolivétte Research Justice: Methodologies for social change builds upon the methodological frameworks developed by the national non-profit organization, DataCenter: Research for Justice (DCRJ). Research Justice is a strategic framework and methodological intervention that seeks to transform structural inequities in research. Research Justice centralizes community voices and leadership in an effort to facilitate genuine, lasting social change, and seeks to foster critical engagement with communities of color, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups to use research as an empowering intervention and active disruption of colonial policies and institutional practices that contribute to the (re)production of social inequalities in research and public policy. DataCenter believes that Research Justice is achieved when marginalized communities are recognized as experts, and reclaim, own and wield all forms of knowledge and information. With strategic support, the knowledge and information generated by these communities can be used as political leverage to advance their own agendas for change. (DCRJ website, 2014) Research Justice calls upon all community experts and witnesses to violence, legal violations, education and health disparities, and other social inequities to be active participants in processes for change and policy reform at local, regional, national, and global levels. Research Justice1 examines the relationships and intersections between research, knowledge construction, and political power/legitimacy in society. Research Justice as an intervention centers community experts as vital partners in contributing to the emergence of Research Justice as a powerful, transdisciplinary set of methodologies that envision the coexistence of three forms of knowledge production (experiential, cultural/spiritual, and mainstream; see Figure 1.1).

1

When italicized Research Justice refers to contents of this volume, while Research Justice in regular font refers to the concept. 5

Research Justice

Figure 1.1: Knowledge production Knowledge in the world Today

Our vision

Political power

More

Less

Mainstream knowledge

Experiential knowledge

Experiental, cultural and spiritual knowledge

Cultural and spiritual knowledge

Mainstream knowledge

Equal political power and legitimacy

Source: Data Center: Research for Justice © 2010

Research Justice examines how the coexistence of these various form of knowledge can lead to greater equality in public policies and laws that rely on data and research to produce social change. Building on the tools and visions articulated by DCRJ, the contributors to this historic collection write from three fundamental perspectives of Research Justice as a movement-building strategy: (1) strategies for knowledge construction and self-determination; (2) strategies for community mobilization; and (3) strategies for social transformation and policy reform. Accordingly, each chapter is divided into one of the three foundational perspectives of Research Justice as articulated by the DCRJ organization, which is based in Oakland, California. Each of these chapters, along with community/university research intervention models, provides students at undergraduate and graduate levels, faculty, and community researchers with new and unique sets of tools to produce social transformation and justice in the research processes they will undertake throughout their lives. The production of knowledge in the world today is typically constructed, transmitted, and maintained by those with the most power and privilege in society. The poor, indigenous peoples, and people of color, along with women, those with physical and mental disabilities, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized groups are seldom in a position to produce or control nor own the system of mainstream knowledge production that is generally used to create policies that impact these often under-served populations (DCRJ website, 2014). In the DCRJ model above (Figure 1.1), Research Justice as both a theory and a method envisions equal political power and legitimacy for different forms of knowledge including the cultural/spiritual and experiential. By centering knowledge production and research projects based on cultural, spiritual, and experiential frameworks, we as academics attempt to share power and in many cases surrender our own power ‘over’ research subjects. Research Justice also attempts to put indigenous theory in conversation with the Research Justice movement as crafted by DCRJ and 6

Radical love as a strategy for social transformation

explicated by each of the book’s contributors. By turning to notions of sacred methodologies we do not necessarily imply a religious meaning, but rather a reciprocal relationship between researcher, participant, and community. It is our hope that, by pushing the boundaries of how we define justice to include the sacred, we might radically transform not only the ways that researchers are defined, but how the research process is practiced within the social and behavioral sciences. When we redefine methodologies within the context of the sacred we shift the fundamental relationship of the research process from one based upon unequal power relationships to one based upon mutual respect and reverence for all those impacted by the focus of our studies, documentation, and efforts to reform public policy. Furthermore the sacred pushes us to reconsider justice as more than simple equality. Equality suggests sameness, without regard to fairness. Simply having the same things does not necessarily mean that justice has been achieved. Sacred methodologies include at least three important components: radical love, transformative justice, and collective action. I contend that radical love as a fundamental aspect of a sacred Research Justice agenda requires that we see research participants as members of our family and not as a group of study participants or as sets of data to study and simply write about for our own career advancement. We have to invest in what I call Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness (CCRR). CCRR responds to both the need for transformative justice and collective action as outlined by a sacred responsibility to take our role as researchers as seriously as possible when we work with individuals and communities to produce social change. CCRR in a Research Justice model contains three fundamental aspects: (1) it defines research processes as a collective endeavor and a shared knowledge creation process between academic and community researchers; (2) it creates, maintains, and engages with the knowledge that is produced by community experts, traditional knowledge keepers, as well as cultural leaders in ways that envision research as a ceremonial act of mutual respect and co-sharing; and (3) only research that is responsive to the social, legal, economic, cultural, and political policy needs as identified by community experts should be conducted. The Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness model takes CommunityBased Participatory Research (CBPR) and Participatory Action Research (PAR) models a step further by shifting more dramatically the distribution of power in the research process by seeking to build ceremonial relationships and by yielding to the specific needs of community experts and community researchers. An example of CCRR in action would entail the creation of cultural protocols and IRB (Institutional Review Board) procedures controlled not by universities alone, but in a separate review process controlled by community groups. This Research Justice anthology also acknowledges and documents the many ways in which Research Justice functions as a daily ceremonial process of resistance, revitalization, and cultural autonomy that supports the knowledge production, design, dissemination, and stewardship of critical research practices by and from the communities most impacted by the negative consequences of globalization 7

Research Justice

and capitalism. The anthology recognizes the positive and innumerable ways that people on the margins utilize research to transform their communities with the ultimate goal of liberation, self-determination, and self-actualized freedom. The most fundamental goal of Research Justice is the development of global citizens who actively work to transform the structures of power and privilege to engage everyday people as research leaders, change agents, and visionary leaders equipped with the necessary tools to build community infrastructures that will support the healthy development of self-sustaining, grassroots, and CCRR approaches that will support the advancement of human rights in all fields, disciplines, and social sectors where research/knowledge is produced. This project also centers a concept that I have worked on for the past four years: radical love. Radical love, as I discuss above, is an important aspect of conducting sacred methodologies. I argue that, as we re-center community members, tribal experts, and marginalized populations as leaders in research, we must also center radical love as a primary and foundational component of our research agendas both within and outside of academia. Radical love may be defined as ‘the activation of a deeply embedded and reciprocal devotion to holistic and ethnic specific self and community care through a balance of human feelings, emotions, and practices that reduce egocentrism while centering a symbiotic relationship between the physical and spiritual as co-constitutive factors of health promotion among indigenous peoples and communities of color.’ When it is defined in this way, radical love in sacred research is also about speaking individual and collective truths, no matter how painful. Radical love in these collective essays requires that each author ask important questions about who will benefit from their research and how we learn from past mistakes to ensure that we are building respectful research relationships today. In some of my previous writing, I define radical love within the context of vulnerability: Radical love is about being vulnerable. It is about being unafraid to speak out about issues that may not have a direct impact on us on a daily basis. Radical love is about caring enough to admit when we are wrong and to admit to mistakes. Radical love should ask how the work in which we are engaged helps to build respectful relationships between ourselves and others involved in social justice movements. Radical love asks if we are each being responsible in fulfilling our individual roles and obligations to the other participants in the struggle for social justice and human rights. Finally, radical love in critical mixed race studies, means asking ourselves if what we are contributing is giving back to the community and if it is strengthening the relationship of all of those involved in the process. Is what is being shared adding to the growth of the community and is this sharing reciprocal? Is what we are working toward leading to a more peaceful and equitable society? (Jolivétte, 2012)

8

Radical love as a strategy for social transformation

As researchers both in academia and in the community we must be willing to constantly ask ourselves if we are being ‘responsible in fulfilling our individual roles and obligations to the other participants in the struggle for social justice and human rights’ (Jolivétte, 2012). Each of the contributors to this volume was asked to address this precise question. Chapters Two through Seven begin by examining how Research Justice can be used as a strategy for knowledge construction and self-determination. In Chapter Two Antonia Darder examines the uses of critical pedagogy in education research and reform within the context of international and neo-liberal articulations of terrorism and fear that lead to a silencing of those most marginalized within educational institutions. In a compelling manner Darder asserts that critical pedagogy as an act of dissent must ‘forge a socially just pedagogy that supports political dissent in the face of persistent inequalities [that] requires educators to remain thoughtful about the manner in which neoconservative values and neoliberal policies can easily conflate to protect profits and a hegemonic stronghold on the economy,’ while leaving those most marginalized in a state of social, cultural, political, and economic disadvantage. In Chapter Three Amanda Freeman’s provocative essay addresses her experiences as both an insider and an outsider in a research project dealing with single mothers from low-income backgrounds, an essay in which she examines the blurred lines between being a researcher who is unexpectedly impacted by the same issues facing her research participants. Similar to Darder’s chapter, Freeman’s claims that, ultimately, it is the voices of the marginalized—in this case poor, single women—that become central to understanding issues of gender inequality, economic disparities, and mothering because of their own efforts in starting a support group to chronicle their experiences and empower one another through their daily challenges in a society that treats the women like second-class citizens. Darder and Freeman both articulate a framework for using Research Justice as a strategy for knowledge construction and self-determination. Students and single mothers know better than anyone else the challenges they face and what types of information, knowledge systems, and practices will best support access to services while reducing social stigmas in education, health, and employment. In Chapter Four, ‘Ethnography as a Research Justice strategy,’ Liam Martin is even more specific in his discussion of ethnography as a Research Justice methodological tactic for defining and documenting the knowledge and acts of self-determination utilized by both the incarcerated and the formerly incarcerated. Martin’s chapter deals with his strong commitment to centering the subject as researcher. In this case, Joe—who resides in a halfway house—is also a co-researcher and a participant in Martin’s ethnographic study. By moving Joe’s voice to the center of the research, as an expert, Martin underscores DCRJ’s first principle of Research Justice: research as a strategy for knowledge construction and self-determination. What better method of transformation than to center the formerly incarcerated as the experts when it comes to understanding life in prison as well as life after prison? Similar to Freeman’s chapter on centering single mothers as experts 9

Research Justice

who produce useful knowledge in thinking through difficult questions of policy reform, Martin’s project also removes the stigma of ‘research subject,’ or ‘victim’ to be ‘saved,’ to a role that gives those most impacted by research a mechanism to contribute to their own empowerment and self-determination. Chapter Five, by Andrea Zeffiro and Mél Hogan, documents how NMP (No More Potlucks) supports marginalized voices and modes of knowledge production and dissemination, which facilitate acts of self-determination and cultural autonomy among queer writers, artists, and activists in Canada. These collective writings are put together in a journal to document the possibilities of new media publishing venues and a sense of urgency around the dissemination of underspoken voices and underappreciated perspectives. Zeffiro and Hogan offer practical methods for understanding the importance of archives in documenting often invisible histories. Using archival and oral history approaches, the authors unveil a uniquely postmodern method of Research Justice that supplies communities with their own knowledge systems that will support greater self-determination and international visibility. The first five chapters of this reader, along with the final contribution to the first section of the book, are in many ways not just statements about the role of researchers and subjects in the making of the research project, but are also interventions into areas that I would align with a human rights agenda. Nicole Blalock’s ‘More than me’ (Chapter Six) perhaps speaks most specifically to the issues of cultural recovery, invisibility, and knowledge construction/self-determination as human rights issues, as she interweaves poetry and prose to tell the story of her own family with that of indigenous peoples throughout history who have struggled with trauma, poverty, and the very essence of research as a tool for self-determination and knowledge construction as necessary steps towards justice and liberation. In Part Two, ‘Research Justice: strategies for community mobilization,’ we learn the story of Alan Crotzer through the work of Akeem Ray and Phyllis Gray, who enact Research Justice as a strategy for mobilization through teaching. Ray and Gray explain the pressures that students undertake in studying wrongful convictions and the limits of the criminal justice system when it comes to those most marginalized in society. Continuing with the theme of prison incarceration, Chapter Eight, ‘Formerly incarcerated women: returning home to family and community,’ also examines the impact of the prison industrial complex on the lived daily experiences of women and mothers who were formerly incarcerated. Marta López-Garza asks critical questions about the role that these formerly incarcerated women play in their own healing processes in the face of societal inequalities. Again, López-Garza, like Ray and Gray, reveals how issues of solidarity, collective action, and resistance to unfair policies can lead to mobilization as well as new forms of knowledge production. The Belmont Report, which was created by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in 1978, not addressed key guiding principles for conducting research, but also identifies vulnerable populations. The incarcerated and formerly incarcerated are among the groups identified as vulnerable, at-risk populations because of the exploitation that has taken place within this segment 10

Radical love as a strategy for social transformation

of society. These chapter contributions go along way toward reimagining how we can better support those who are at risk or already living within prisons. While Zainichi Koreans (Koreans residing in Japan) are not physically incarcerated, they are politically, socially, and ideologically displaced and removed from conversations about equity and social justice in the face of natural disaster. In an effort to understand how these processes work, one must consider the history and representation of Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation. The displacement of Koreans, according to Haruki Eda, in the face of Japanese disaster nationalism functions in both structural and social mechanisms that rob Zainichi of true liberation as a result of imperialism and ongoing colonial acts during natural disasters. In Chapter Nine Haruki Eda demonstrates how utilizing Research Justice arms Zainichi people with effective mobilization strategies to respond to Japanese colonial rule in the face of natural disasters that scapegoat and ignore the material and physical losses of a minority population in an imperialist nation. Chapter Ten, ‘Undocumented research and researchers: a collective journey to document our stories and speak for ourselves,’ similar to Eda’s chapter, takes up the issues of mobilization through direct participatory research. Alma Leyva, together with Imelda Plascencia and Mayra Jaimes Pena, demonstrates how placing the power of constructing a research agenda into the hands of those being researched can bring about powerful changes at both the micro and macro levels of policy reform in disenfranchised populations such as those fighting for legal status in the United States. Chapter Eleven by Oparah and her co-authors, examines the politics of birthing within the context of public space, racial representation, and gendered politics. Chapter Twelve by Merla-Watson with the Corazones del Westside, takes up the question of the digital divide in Latina/o communities by making use of Research Justice methodologies that focus on access to technology as a tool for empowerment, historical preservation and as a strategy for community mobilization. Part Three, ‘Research Justice: strategies for social transformation and policy reform,’ examines the ways in which Research Justice as a strategy for social transformation and policy reform can re-center the political, economic, legal, and cultural concerns of indigenous nations and across different communities of color. Chapter Thirteen, by Sandra Weissinger, begins the final section of the book with a look at discrimination in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and what mobilization tactics are most useful when we consider the need for policy reforms that disproportionately impact communities of color and other marginalized population demographics. Chapter Fourteen, ‘The revolutionary, non-violent action of Danilo Dolci and his maieutic approach,’ offers an important overview of a key figure in revolutionary theory, Danilo Dolci, and presents the maieutic approach as a tactic for achieving social and political reforms by shifting the modes of knowledge production and power. Amrah Salomon uses oral tradition and storytelling as a methodological intervention in documenting the stories of resistance and survival among marginalized populations both in Mexico and across the Mexican diaspora. The final chapters are transcribed written 11

Research Justice

remarks from leading international scholars Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Michelle Fine, who were both invited to deliver keynote lectures to an audience of nearly 600 people for the 35th anniversary of DCRJ and to also celebrate the 15th anniversary of the groundbreaking publication, Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. This event, ‘Decolonizing knowledge: Toward a critical Research Justice praxis,’ brings together many of the central themes of this book. Issues of power, knowledge, and policy are covered by each of the speakers, along with remarks that will inform, inspire, and motivate students and academics alike to study the foundations of Research Justice as a new methodological framework that can shift the balance of power in not only producing knowledge, but also in disseminating that knowledge and cultivating a generation of leaders who will focus more on research as a relationship of solidarity and reciprocity to achieve liberation, democracy, and justice for those global citizens who are most often marginalized by traditional western research practices that render them invisible and/or powerless. References Jolivétte, A., 2012, Obama and the biracial factor: The battle for a new American majority. Bristol: Policy Press DataCenter: Research for Justice website, www.datacenter.org

12

TWO

Imagining justice: Politics, pedagogy, and dissent1 Antonia Darder

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. (Frederick Douglas) Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it. (Howard Zinn) The current international landscape leaves little doubt that we are living in a tumultuous era. Steeped in the lingering political fears of the culture of terror, dissenting voices are still discouraged or silenced altogether, while neoliberal policies of greed and destruction seem rendered impenetrable in the face of massive global protests. Xenophobic pundits of the last decade denounced the Muslim world, the poor, and the foreign, exploiting the fear of both material scarcity and military invasion as clear and present dangers. The threat of terrorists, immigrants, and the impoverished vividly commingle in our historical psyches. Yet, U.S. acts of aggression persist in the Middle East and other parts of the world, while overwhelming economic, political, and military violence at home are made invisible by distorted notions of patriotism and speculative schemes of corporate greed. During the last decade, the political ramifications of conservative zeal were not only responsible for the passage of the Patriot Act, the war in Iraq, and the invasion of Afghanistan, but also numerous mean-spirited political antics dramatically enacted in Congress, as well as state capitals. On the domestic scene, the rampant incarceration of more than two million people has been justified through a flood of media stereotypes that parade as news, reality cop shows, and pseudo criminal documentaries, such as American Justice and Cold Case Files. Whether at home or in the international arena, U.S. citizens are systematically conditioned to perceive the impoverished and undocumented as ignorant or criminal—two major sectors

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A slightly different version of this chapter (‘Imagining justice in a culture of terror: pedagogy, politics, and dissent’) appeared in Sheila Macrine’s Critical pedagogy in uncertain times: Hope and possibilities. Education, politics and public life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Many thanks to Antonia Darder for granting permission to print this revised version here. 13

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of the population that are rapidly expanding, given the hardening structures of economic inequality in the United States and abroad. The fear of uncertainty generated by the tragedy of 9/11 led to the formation of Homeland Security, which deeply shifted our perceptions of safety on both city streets and in the air. Over the past two decades, civil liberties seem to have been vastly compromised in the name of protecting our borders. Through a variety of politically induced media campaigns, U.S. citizens are warned repeatedly of ‘orange alerts’ and aroused to question the safety of our own homes. In turn, this has inspired nativist sentiments, giving rise to a variety of local, state, and federal legislative actions geared toward ridding the country of ‘illegal’ immigrants. Simultaneously, widespread efforts to militarize the border by both official border patrol agents and border vigilantes prevail, as unemployment continues to rise for every income group, but particularly those in the poorest sector (Darder, 2007). In the new millennium, Muslims and other immigrants became the scapegoats of the culture of terror, shrouding America’s political and economic improprieties at home and abroad. A Newsweek poll, although fairly positive, reported that 25% of Americans would consider putting Muslims in U.S. detention camps if another 9/11-style attack were to occur (Braiker, 2007). Meanwhile, obvious and long-standing determinants of inequality—poor job security, insufficient income, lack of healthcare, substandard education, and the wholesale incarceration of the deeply impoverished—are ignored or dismissed as secondary to issues of national protection or economic exigencies. As a consequence, trillions of dollars have being poured into Homeland Security and military actions at the border and overseas, while social justice is conveniently redefined in ways that abdicate the state of any responsibility to its distressed citizenry. Instead, the free market continues to be touted as the great equalizer of the 21st century, leaving those outside the field of its neoliberal global order to fend for themselves or suffer the bitter consequences. A leading proponent of neoliberal policies on the international arena, the U.S. remains the world’s wealthiest nation, yet one of the most economically unequal. ‘We live in a society in which 1 percent of the population owns 60 percent of stock and 40 percent of total wealth. The top 10 percent of Americans own over 80 percent of the total wealth’ (Noury and Smith, 2004). At the same time, the poor are ‘nickel and dimed’ into subsistence by the increasing cost of substandard housing and food products, the lack of healthcare benefits, expensive transportation and commuting costs, poor childcare options, lowwage employment, and increasing job insecurities tied to persistent outsourcing of well-paying jobs and plant shutdowns (Ehrenreich, 2002). It is disturbing to note that neoliberals often claim that such actions are good for the world because they redistribute the wealth, while remaining close-mouthed about the staggering profits gained from employing low-wage workers and operating their enterprises in environmentally deregulated zones. To forge a socially just pedagogy that supports political dissent in the face of persistent inequalities requires educators to remain thoughtful about the manner 14

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in which neoconservative values and neoliberal policies can easily conflate to protect profits and a hegemonic stronghold on the economy. As such, dissenting voices that clamor against current national policies or persistently demand greater democratization of institutional structures are often perceived as a danger to the unity of our ‘American’ identity as a nation, justifying the silencing of protestors and dissenters. This is even more disturbing when the politics of neoliberalism, couched in alarmist rhetoric, is enacted on the both the domestic and international arena in the name of democratic life. Often, such rhetoric functions well to conceal the inseparability of racism and class inequalities, in ways that perpetuate the underlying social injustices at work within schools and society.

The hidden inseparability of racism and class inequality What tends to disappear from view is the relations of exploitation and domination that irreducibly constitute civil society, not just as some alien and correctable disorder but as its very essence, the particular structure of domination and coercion that is specific to capitalism as a systemic totality—and which also determines the coercive function of the state (Meiksins Wood, 1995). Contemporary struggles for democratic schooling do not arise in a vacuum. They are, instead, historically on a continuum with the dissent and struggles of workers at the turn of the 20th century and the antiwar, feminist, and civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. However, unlike earlier political protests, the civil rights movement incorporated a liberal politics of rights, which prevailed as the common orthodoxy for dissent. Notwithstanding, a small cadre of political dissenters argued adamantly that any movement for social justice in the United States should be linked to a larger international anti-imperialist agenda, one that clearly challenged the inequalities and social exclusions intrinsic to a capitalist political economy. In concert with the times, however, the decision was made to retain a civil rights approach, firmly anchored in a strategy of litigation to wage dissent and organize communities. This direction in the movement was to represent a significant political juncture that, unwittingly, left unchallenged the unfettered advancement of globalization in the final decades of the 20th century. As a result of court gains, movement efforts in schools were driven chiefly by repeated demands for a multicultural curriculum, bilingual education, ethnic studies programs, and affirmative action efforts that were principally founded upon identity politics, which pushed aggressively against traditional institutional boundaries linked to ‘race’ and other forms of inequality. Although this approach to dissent most certainly served to initiate and marshal a new population of ‘minority’ professionals and elites into a variety of fields and professions, it did little to transform the larger structural conditions of inequality that prevailed in poor, working-class, and racialized communities. Moreover, despite its contribution to debates on ‘race’ inequalities, the ‘race relations’ paradigm, unfortunately, also failed to challenge the fundamental contradictions of capitalism that misinformed

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policies and practices within schools and society—contradictions that inadvertently conserved and disguised asymmetrical relations of power. Necessary, then, to this discussion is an understanding of racism that acknowledges the totalizing logic of capitalism as inextricably linked in ways that do not apply to other categories of exclusion. Class inequalities encompass the state’s cultural and political-economic apparatus, which functions systematically to retain widespread control and governance over material wealth and resources. As such, racism operates in conjunction with other ideologies of exclusion (whether cultural, political, class, gendered, sexual, or racialized) to preserve the hegemony of the modern capitalist state, engendering its capacity to appropriate even revolutionary projects born of dissent and strip them of their transformative potential. An important study conducted by Gary Orfield (2001) at the Civil Rights Project, for example, concluded that although progress toward school desegregation had peaked in the late 1980s—with the courts concluding that the goals of Brown v. Board of Education had largely been met—the current trend is moving rapidly in the opposite direction. Concerns regarding segregation, therefore, still have tremendous political saliency today, particularly with respect to questions of academic achievement and the failure of U.S. schools to educate Latino, African American, Native American, and other racialized and working-class student populations. In fact, as Latinos became the largest minority population in the U.S., hegemonic forces at work in the reproduction of racialized class inequalities have rendered Latino students—who can be considered today the new face of segregation—more segregated today than their African American counterparts. Accordingly, contemporary theories of segregation as an outcome of racialized class reproduction must also be considered with respect to the politics of class struggle. This is to say that racism, as a significant political strategy of exclusion, domination, marginalization, violence, and exploitation, cannot be separated from its underlying economic imperative. Thus, it should be no surprise that more than 90% of segregated African American and Latino neighborhood schools are located in areas of concentrated poverty (Orfield, 2001). In fact, students who attend segregated minority schools are 11 times more likely to live in areas of concentrated poverty than students (of all ethnicities) who attend desegregated schools. When problems of schooling are racialized, as is often the case, deep-seated questions of economic injustice are often deeply camouflaged. For example, poor students labeled ‘white’ exhibit comparatively similar social and academic difficulties as their counterparts of color. This is most visible in rural schools of the Midwest or the South, where poor ‘white’ students are generally the majority. However, this phenomenon in the U.S. has been deceptively masked and obscured through the racialized portrayals of youth of color in the media and the social sciences. It is interesting to note that this process of youth racialization became most pronounced following the protests of African American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American students of color in the 1960s and 1970s. It was 16

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at this historical juncture that the media shifted from commonplace portrayals of white ‘hoodlum’ youth as juvenile delinquents to the commonplace racialized depictions of gangbangers as urban terrorists that we see so readily today. The point here is that the impoverished conditions that prevail in segregated communities are inextricably tied to the reproduction of racialized class formations—not some biological or cultural predisposition. Hence, racism can be ameliorated only through a vision of social justice and a politics of dissent firmly rooted in the redistribution of wealth, power, and privilege. Moreover, such a political vision must be informed fundamentally by a humanizing shift in consciousness and a deep-rooted commitment to liberation (Freire, 1971). Although much good has been attributed to the politics of Brown v. Board of Education, we find ourselves in a new historical moment that warrants a critical rethinking of emancipatory solutions and strategies of dissent rooted in another time and place. Given the lessons of the past 50 years, many solutions anchored in the ‘race relations’ paradigm of the civil rights era have been called into question by the conditions of today’s world. For instance, there are researchers who contend that the ‘race relations’ paradigm actually functions, unwittingly, to obscure the phenomenon of racism and, hence, the hegemonic forces at work within the sociopolitical construction of segregation (Miles, 1993; Darder and Torres, 2004). As such, the racialized practices founded upon a reified commonsense notion of ‘race’ inadvertently leave the fundamental structural inequalities of an internationalized capitalist mode of production unchanged. The consequence is that our contemporary society has become entrenched in the language of ‘race’ as destiny, with an implicit dictum that membership in particular ‘races’ enacts social processes, rather than ideologies and material conditions of survival. Today, political discourses of every kind are structured by attaching deterministic meaning to social constructs of physical and cultural characteristics, although the racialized landscape has become far more complex. Interestingly, this same myopic lens is often reflected both in liberal advocates of identity politics and in those conservatives who espouse xenophobic views of ‘foreigners’ or ‘the other.’ In sharp contrast, pedagogies for social justice must seek to reinforce an open-minded understanding and democratic vision of dissent, beyond dichotomies of black and white. In the absence of a more complex vision of ethnic, religious, and political differences, the outcome is an absolutizing of social and political relations, with little room for the formation of a heterogeneous national identity in the United States. Instead of waging dissent, across differences, over issues and concerns that impact all communities (health, income, education, environment, and so on), political interests are categorically racialized. As such, the notion of ‘race’ becomes both absolute and instrumentalized by even well-meaning theorists and policy makers, who seek to analyze the difficulties and concerns of racialized populations. Accordingly, the malignant ideologies of oppression that sustain necessary capitalist inequalities, and result in segregation and other forms of social exclusion (Gilroy, 2000), are left unattended or reputed as irrelevant. 17

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A key point to be made here is that the ideology that informs how we define a social or institutional problem will also determine our choice of political strategies and tactics, potential solutions, and ultimately the outcome. The busing solution of the 1970s is a useful example. Busing was one of the predominant integration solutions chosen to wage protest against segregation—a solution anchored in a ‘race relations’ paradigm. But to the chagrin of many African American and Latino communities, this solution actually functioned to destroy the strength, cohesion, and coherence of community life. Some would further argue that it was, in fact, the already more economically privileged minorities (who, incidentally, defined the problem and chose the predominant means for dissent), who made the greatest gains. And, despite the interventions of the civil rights movement, 40 years later the class composition of U.S. society based on control of wealth has failed to improve, becoming, in fact, more polarized between the rich and the poor across all population groups. That is to say, members of the ruling class, of all ethnicities, are wealthier today than they were in the 1960s. Hence, the expansion of an elite, professional class of African American and Latinos ultimately failed to dismantle the oppressive economic and racialized policies and practices of the capitalist state. Instead, hegemonic practices of economic exploitation and the hardened structures of racialized inequality became further camouflaged behind neoliberal aspirations. Such was also the fate of multiculturalism, which, falling prey to both the politics of identity and state appropriation, became an effective vehicle for further depoliticizing the remnants of political dissent rooted in the civil rights era. Notwithstanding its original emancipatory intent, the politics of multiculturalism was, from its inception, flawed by its adherence to the language of ‘race relations’ and its rejection of class struggle. Moreover, the well-meaning celebrations of difference and the hard-fought battles of a variety of identity movements for representation failed to generate any real or lasting structural change, beyond liberal proposals such as affirmative action, for instance, which more often than not served the interests of the more privileged. In the final analysis, multiculturalism became an effective mechanism of the state, used to manage, preserve, and obscure racialized class divisions, while in the marketplace the new multiplicity of identities generated new products for global consumption.

Pedagogy of dissent: Beyond domestication One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. (Martin Luther King) In the midst of empire building abroad and the tightening of individual civil liberties at home, radical educators have attempted to make sense of the world through our practice and our theoretical reflections. It was in response to the culture of terror, along with the everyday fears and uncertainties of old, that many sought critical pedagogy as a means to provide direction and inspiration to their

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teaching, beyond the widening inequalities that functioned to domesticate the vitality of students’ lives and their dreams. Unfortunately, however, critical pedagogy’s promise to contend with growing oppressive conditions within schools and to develop a consistent project of dissent has often fallen short. This has been as much due to the repressive conditions within schools as due to its depthless and misguided use. In the latter instance, critical pedagogy has been reified into simplistic fetishized methods that are converted into mere rhetoric and instrumentalized formulas of intervention, discouraging dissent and leaving untouched the inequities and asymmetrical power relations in schools today. But, in truth, a critical pedagogy cannot be fully realized as merely a classroom-centered pedagogy. Instead, it must reach beyond the boundaries of the classroom, into communities, workplaces, and public arenas where people congregate, reflect, and negotiate daily survival. In the absence of such a public project, critical pedagogy can neither support dissent nor advance an emancipatory vision for the eradication of political and economic enslavement. Moreover, its revolutionary potential for contending with uncertainty and despair must be grounded in the material conditions that give rise to oppression. It is the power of this emancipatory perspective—enacted through both political and pedagogical actions within schools and communities—that holds the promise for recreating a more socially just world. Many educators in poor communities express a deep sense of powerlessness in their efforts to teach marginalized students. In the midst of a vitriolic rhetoric of terrorism and deceptive justifications, this sense of powerlessness is intensified, particularly in regions where the population is increasingly poor, diverse, and immigrant. School issues related to academic failure, student delinquency, or classroom inattentiveness are generally addressed in superficial or alienating ways. The objective becomes solely to eliminate the immediate symptom, masking the underlying social malaise. Meanwhile, the deeply serious problems students face within schools and in their private lives are ignored, swept under the carpet of institutional efficiency, meritocratic fantasies, and the politics of social containment. Still, the Jeffersonian ideal of educating citizens for participation in a democratic society continues to be expressed, even by the most conservative educators and policy makers. Never mind that poor, working-class, and racialized students are socially and politically exiled within schools, resulting in their academic demise. As teachers intentionally embrace or unintentionally internalize a belief in the neutrality and benevolence of schooling, students are simultaneously tested, labeled, sorted, and tracked to the tune of bootstrap platitudes of self-reliance, which readily warp the very human sensibilities necessary for a commitment of social justice and institutional equality. Instead, misguided notions undergird the policies and practices of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—touted as the panacea for excellence. Rooted in traditional authoritarianism and the instrumentalization of knowledge, these ‘evidence based’ policies have been translated most forcefully within public schools that serve the most disenfranchised. 19

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As such, this fragmented approach to schooling effectively trumps the development of critical consciousness, civic sensibilities, and political empowerment. Instead, students are ushered into a world of limited careerism, where college acceptance and consequent graduation are the predominant measures of academic success. In the process, students learn little about themselves as integral human beings or the motivations and sensibilities that shape their understanding of the world. Students who do not march in step with the college readiness bandwagon can find themselves shifting from one thing to another, emotionally abandoned within a school culture that pretends academic preparation is the only viable means by which human success can be measured and social well-being obtained. In the interest of capitalist accumulation, schooling in the U.S. also socializes the majority of students to accept the betrayal of their civil rights, in exchange for a fantasy of accumulation and security that can never be guaranteed. The construction and control of knowledge are at the heart of this phenomenon. Despite democratic claims, conditions within public schools reproduce inequalities and social exclusions through pedagogical relationships that reinforce repression and deny most students, and faculty for that matter, their freedom and autonomy to think and express themselves without undue fear of retaliation. Consequently, marginalized populations are tyrannized daily by policies and practices systematically designed to limit their imaginations and, thus, participation in their empowerment. Meanwhile, the dissonance between the culture of the school and students’ lives is often dismissed as irrelevant to their education or academic success. Unfortunately, even well-crafted programs that claim to be committed to social justice tend to sabotage student autonomy and cultural integrity, compelling them to adopt prescribed ways of knowing and manufactured identities that prove false when brushed against the conditions of their daily experience (Butson, 2003). Here, well-meaning teachers use their authority and privilege to invalidate, intentionally or unintentionally, students who become involved in the construction of oppositional knowledge, thus reinforcing students’ silences and self-doubt. Unfortunately, many teachers who are able to recognize the violence of injustice within other instructional settings are less willing to accept that they themselves might need to make fundamental changes in their classroom teaching, in order to support democratic practices, including political dissent. Critical ideas and practices in the interest of democratic schooling must, then, remain central to our efforts to confront the hidden curriculum of alienation and powerlessness so prevalent in schools and society today. To challenge repressive pedagogical tendencies, educators must stretch the boundaries of critical educational principles in order to infuse public contexts with critiques that counter the violence of both ultraconservative values and neoliberal solutions. It is a moment when emancipatory theories of schooling that challenge deficit notions and support democratic life must be put into action, in an effort to counter repressive national educational agendas that render teachers, students, parents, and communities voiceless and devoid of social agency. There is an urgent need 20

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for civic courage here—the kind that challenges the contemporary rhetoric of rugged individualism, self-reliance, and economic Darwinism, which shamelessly undermines difference, dissuades dissent, and disrupts justice. Through authoritarian educational practices and the imposition of the hidden curriculum of the marketplace, the ideological practices of public schooling uncritically nourish patriotic zeal, defend the violence of war as a necessity, and justify the violation of our civil rights in the name of national protection. Simultaneously, strident individualism and backlash politics destroy historical memory and impose an official public transcript (an apolitical, ahistorical, and, at moments, blatantly dishonest spin) on events, in concert with the imperatives of neoliberalism. Namely, the expansion of the ‘free’ market, the deregulation of environmental policies, the corporatization of all bureaucratic institutional functions, the monopoly of the media, and the wholesale commodification and privatization of every aspect of our humanity. In response to this political climate, an important role of critical educators, then, is not only to unveil this hidden curriculum in schools and society but also to work toward the decolonization of education, in ways that support the reinstitution of a multiplicity of historical memories and epistemologies tied to the survival of historically oppressed communities (Paraskeva, 2011). For in these repressed histories is often found the collective possibility to wage protest through a courageous willingness to imagine a different world. As such, this constitutes an essential dimension in forging a critical pedagogy that can challenge civic domestication, forge the ground for political engagement, and embrace the passion of dissent so necessary to the transformation of our communities.

Imagination and dissent Imagine all the people Sharing all the world [...] I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will live as one (John Lennon, ‘Imagine’, 1971) A culture of fear disrupts our critical powers to imagine a different world—a world in which our shared humanity can also be central to our politics. The sensibilities of a neoliberal culture seem to thrive upon ‘cynicism, fear, insecurity, and despair’ (Giroux, 2004). Neoliberalism renders unfettered imagination as suspicious; yet it is precisely our ability to imagine beyond the limited boundaries of the status quo that opens the door to a new vision of politics and the world. As such, it is not surprising that the voices and participation of those who refuse to offer their consent to hegemonic structures are rendered invisible or marked for subjugation. The crackdown on civil liberties, including the right to information, movement, and dissent, rapidly intensified over the past two decades; and the last seven years 21

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of the Obama administration have done little to shift prevailing policies and practices supporting wide-scale surveillance. However, it is important to note that the practices of the Department for Homeland Security and other institutional mechanisms of surveillance did not materialize overnight. Since the late 1980s, an increasing number of men and women from working-class and racialized communities have lost their civil rights as a consequence of felony convictions and increasing rates of incarceration. In fact, the overwhelming increase in incarceration from 1990 to 2010 constituted the most dramatic rise in the inmate population ever witnessed in the history of the nation. Also dramatic was the increasing level of public surveillance within many public schools, including the use of armed personnel. In concert, it is worth noting that a plethora of federal, state, and local policies were proposed and enacted specifically to repress the movement of people (but not capital, of course) across U.S. borders. During the past 20 years, actions were also instigated against antiwar protestors, critics of globalization, and other political dissenters. In 2005, for example, a Flag Amendment was passed that made burning the American flag a felony. In 2002, Joseph Frederick unveiled a 14-foot paper sign declaring, ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus.’ Although he was on a public sidewalk outside his Juneau, Alaska, high school, he was suspended. His civil rights case reached the Supreme Court, where the court’s decision drew a fuzzy line between advocacy of illegal conduct and political dissent, ultimately limiting student rights (Mears, 2007). The Democracy Now! archive is replete with news stories of peace and antiwar dissidents who have been spied on, jailed, or fired from their workplaces, including longtime progressive columnist Robert Scheer, who was fired by the LA Times in 2005 (see Democracy Now!, 2005). And many know of the light of Ward Churchill, a professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, who was fired for his political views, despite the ostensible protection of academic freedom. Yet, private militant groups such as the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps at the U.S./ Mexico border and ‘internet terrorist hunters’ such as Shannon Rossmiller became the new millennium’s self-appointed vigilantes, drenched in the moralistic rhetoric of the Bush administration (Harden, 2006; to see the Minuteman website, go to www.minutemanhq.com/hq/). Much of the lingering commotion was fueled by the hysteria that resulted in the passage of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act 2001, better known as the Patriot Act. In response, Michael Steinberg, Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, encouraged political dissent saying, “in times of crises, it is even more important for citizens to dissent when the government is doing wrong … Dissent is not antipatriotic” (Chang, 2002). Given the repressive context illustrated by these examples, it is imperative that critical educators take on issues of social justice publicly in a serious, forthright, and sustained manner. To accomplish this requires that we remain ever cognizant of the political nature

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of education and its inextricable relationship to the larger societal and economic forces that govern our lives. As such, the relationship between pedagogy, politics, and dissent must intermingle with the emancipatory principles of engaged public life, making it impossible to deny that dissent, though not synonymous with democracy, is an essential political ingredient for the evolution of a just and democratic society. Dissent is, in fact, absolutely necessary to the enactment of democratic principles, particularly within a nation so tremendously diverse (for example, ethnic, gender, class, culture, language, sexuality, and so on) as the United States. Politics stripped of dissent leaves the powerful unaccountable, to run roughshod over the interests, needs, and aspirations of the majority of the world’s population, irrespective of any national rhetoric proclaimed about freedom and democracy. Imagining justice demands that we also reimagine the world anew. As such, Freire often pointed to the pedagogical significance of imagination and curiosity to the process of learning, critical formation, and political development. Unfortunately, imagination and curiosity are aspects of education that seldom receive the attention they merit, particularly within this democratic society. Yet, the capacity to imagine the world beyond our current social and material conditions, with confidence in our individual and collective abilities to enact change, is central to any transformative process. It is the tremendous power of imagination that opens the field for students to simultaneously reflect on what is, as well as dream about what might be. As students are supported in their efforts to grapple with possibilities beyond their present conditions, they are ‘midwifed,’ so to speak, into critical social insights that unveil the hidden ideologies and material conditions that repress their freedom. By so doing, imagination and curiosity both compel students to break through the silences of injustice, as well as to speak the unspeakable that suffocates their will to be. Once spoken, new ideas of the world can be reinvented in dialogue and critically engaged. It is through the organic regeneration of a pedagogy of imagination that teachers, students, and communities can become empowered, so that we might forge together a vision of social justice, one founded on an ethical concern for our moral responsibility as free subjects of history. In line with radical philosophical traditions of education, both Paulo Freire and Maxine Greene spoke often in their work about the importance of imagination to the forging of an emancipatory political vision. They similarly linked the notion of imagination to our capacity to step back from a set of familiar circumstances or conditions in order to enter into a more complex understanding of the world. By opening up to a variety of tested and untested possibilities of knowing and experiences of the world, we are better able to understand how students from different cultural traditions come to think or act differently in the world. Unlike the narrow rationality and ethnocentrism of a conservative identity politics, critical imagination can exist only within a realm where plurality of thought and practice resides. This is so because critical thought requires open-mindedness and expansiveness of vision, which can be found only through our willingness to 23

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confront fear as a normal aspect of everyday life. This also entails our willingness to counter, individually and collectively, those values and practices that seek to pathologize those who dissent. To nourish imagination within the classroom, then, is to fuel one of the most indispensable qualities inherent in the practice of genuine democracy and, thus, transformative dissent. For, without imagination, the injustice of an exploitive status quo is rendered intractable, as is often the case in schools where bureaucratic power, in direct contradiction to democratic rights and principles, represses creativity, fosters dependency, and coerces consent. In contrast, a critical pedagogy cultivates imagination and seeks to create opportunities to insert students into new and unfamiliar contexts so they can grapple with the cognitive dissonance and ambiguity that are intrinsic to a highly diverse society. Moreover, such imagination is important to the process of critical dissent, because it not only centers its focus on undoing but also is attentive to critically rethinking conditions of inequality and offering ‘solutions that arise from collaboration and consensus’ (Hart, 2007). Rather than simply entering into dissent and conflict with wholesale antagonism, critical educators recognize the complexity of both human relationships and material existence and, thus, enter into conflict with not only clear values and vision but also with a much needed sense of humility and faith in humanity. Humility, anchored in a politics of love, provides the open-mindedness to listen to an adversary without stripping the person of dignity and respect (see Darder, 2002, for an extensive discussion of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy and the indispensable characteristics that he identifies within a revolutionary understanding of love). In the absence of humility and political imagination, any possibility of dialogue becomes stifled. Generally, this is so because the communication can easily become stonewalled or oppositional. Once this happens, the two sides of a conflict become mired in the ego-pursuit of winning the battle and being right, rather than remaining focused on a collective democratic intent. Righteousness and moralism seem to be by-products of such a contentious process, limiting the possibility of critical compassion and revolutionary solidarity in the course for political struggle. A critical pedagogy, through invigorating critical discourse with imagination and faith in our humanity, supports students in building sound epistemological and ontological pursuits in resonance with universal principles of emancipatory life. It is here that, often, there is a departure between postmodernists and those who remain committed to the belief in the salience of class struggle and an anticapitalist project. Just as it was for Marx, the struggle against capitalism today is indeed a fiercely moral one. Undoubtedly, the ferocity of Marx was as much a part of his political convictions as it was his ability to imagine the limitless capacity of human beings to continuously make, unmake, and remake the world. As the relentless immorality of global capital threatens environmental collapse, we must work tirelessly to enact a critical pedagogy that is unapologetically political, ethical, and moral. To do this, we need to teach in ways that help us to unearth the virulent structures of power that limit our dreams, incarcerate our 24

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bodies, and betray our love for justice. We need a revolutionary pedagogy of love that embraces our civic responsibility as critical citizens of the world, and fully authorizes our kinship as interdependent human beings. And, from here, we can begin to break out of our one-dimensional egos and move, instead, toward a soulful understanding of ourselves as both collective subjects of our cultural destinies and universal beings, in a very long and bloody historical struggle for our humanity. References Braiker, B. , 2007, Americans and Islam, Newsweek, July 20 Butson, R., 2003, Teaching as a practice of social injustice: Perspective from a teacher, Radical Pedagogy, http:radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/Issue5_1/10_ butson.html Chang, S., 2002, ACLU encourages political dissent as a patriotic action, Michigan Daily, April 12 Chomsky, N., 1998, Profit over people: Neoliberalism and global order, New York: Seven Stories Press, Darder, A., 2002, Reinventing Paulo Freire: A pedagogy of love, Boulder, CO: Westview Press Darder, A., 2007, Radicalizing the immigration debate: A call for open borders and global human rights, New Political Science, 29, 2 Darder, A. and Torres, R.D., 2004, After race: Racism after multiculturalism, New York: University Press Democracy Now!, 2005, November 14, www.democracynow.org Ehrenreich, B., 2002, Nickel and dimed, New York: Turtleback Books Gilroy, P., 2000, Against race: Imagining political culture beyond the colorline, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Giroux, H.A., 2004, Public pedagogy and the politics of neoliberalism: Making the political more pedagogical, Policy Futures in Education, 2, 3–4, 494 Greene, M., 1995, Metaphors and responsibility, On Common Ground: Partnerships and the Arts, 5, Fall, www.yale.edu/ynhti/pubs/A18/greene.html Harden, B., 2006, In Montana, casting a web for terrorists, Washington Post, June 4, A03, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/03/ AR2006060300530.html Hart, J., 2007, Meet the new boss: You. How and why the people are taking charge, Utne Reader, May–June, 42 Ivie, R.L., 2004, Prologue to democratic dissent in America, Javnost/The Public, 11, 2, 19–36 Mears, B., 2007, ‘Bong hits for Jesus’ case limits student rights, CNN Washington Bureau, www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/06/25/free.speech/index.html Meiksins Wood, E., 1995, Democracy against capitalism, New York: Cambridge University Press, 256 Miles, R., 1993, Racism after ‘race relations’, London: Routledge

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Noury, A.J. and Smith, N.C., 2004, Bye, bye American dream, Political Affairs, December, 26 Orfield, G., 2001, Schools more separate: Consequences of a decade of resegregation, Boston, MA: Civil Rights Project, Harvard University Paraskeva, J., 2011, Conflicts in curriculum theory. Challenging hegemonic epistemicides. New York, NY: Palgrave

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THREE

Blurred lines: Creating and crossing boundaries between interviewer and subject Amanda Freeman When I started working with low-income single mothers, I was a graduate student studying creative non-fiction writing at Columbia University. I taught high school equivalency classes for adults at a community service center, and remedial writing at the City University of New York. The moms in my classes captivated me with their stories, fighting their way back to school and past bad relationships to move their families out of poverty. I recognized the way in which crafting a narrative could be empowering and help them to move forward in their own lives. A student in one of my remedial writing classes, a fortysomething single mom trying to “get a better job” and set an example for her two young sons, lingered one day after class. Her questions were shy and halting. She wanted to write, really to write. To tell the story of her father’s abuse back in their home country when she was too young to understand. I encouraged her. Writing can help us make sense of our own experiences and connect with other women, I said. Out of my remedial classes, grew an informal writers’ workshop. One of the mothers wanted an outlet to talk about her husband’s cheating, another about her addict father. One mom told the group about winning a college scholarship, while her son climbed her back, jamming a pudgy finger into her ear. But the logistical problems were overwhelming—conferences at school, babysitters who canceled at the last minute, pressures at work and from fathers. After a few months, meeting times became impossible to schedule. Two years later, my own story began to unravel. I was pregnant and my husband was cheating with a co-worker. I stared at the computer screen in disbelief; his username was ‘myweakside.’ I assumed we would try therapy. He was my best friend. We’d been together on and off for seven years and engaged for two of them. But it quickly became clear that the marriage was over, and I had to decide whether or not to continue with the pregnancy as a single mother. I thrashed around, unable to see a future. That’s when my single-mother students came back to me. I’d taken a job substitute teaching in an inner-city middle school after moving out of the apartment with my husband. Most days I would return home to smudges of dog crap rubbed into the carpet by our angry little dog. One afternoon I was scrubbing the carpet, tears and snot dripping into the heady cleaning potion, when I sat back heavily and tore open one in a stack 27

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of boxes. Inside were black-and-white composition notebooks, journals from my workshop. I stayed there on the floor, amid the fumes, and read them from cover to cover. Their stories were my medicine. Tales thick with grammatical mistakes, but honest and expressive about the endless needs and wants of children, past hurts and unfaithful men, and hard-won victories for the moms and their kids. Their struggles helped to put my own into context. Through their voices, I could see a future for my daughter and me. A year later, watching my daughter grow into the babbling, tottering love of my life, I decided to return to school to pursue my scholarly interest in the life narratives of low-income single mothers. Becoming a single mother myself further sealed my commitment to the stories and struggles of this marginalized and often misrepresented population. I applied to PhD programs that would support my research and found a home at Boston College, working with Research Professor Lisa Dodson, whose work centered on low-income single mother-headed families. As a research assistant and a poverty fellow, I was assigned to conduct annual interviews of single-mother participants in an anti-poverty program in South Boston. At the same time, I enrolled in the requisite classes to complete my master’s degree in sociology. Though I had plenty of experience as an interviewer, not only from my non-fiction writing program but also before that working as a reporter, I was not prepared for the Research Methods version of interviewing. The seminar stressed the proper methodology of interview guide composition and coding, of maintaining appropriate distance between subject and researcher, of not expressing overt emotion in response to answers that might indicate a certain orientation or preference. For me, interviewing had always been a natural dialogue, heavy on listening and responding, sometimes allowing for silence, to dig deeper, to understand better, to get the story. Now I was unsure. And listening back to a recording of my first interview, my self-doubt was obvious. At one point, the interviewee choked up, talking about her son’s father. Why didn’t I comfort her? Offer words of understanding or compassion? Instead, I stayed on my side of the table, averting my eyes, making notes, trying to create distance between researcher and subject. Thankfully, the distance dissolved quickly. Partly because Research Methods ended and partly because, while transcribing the interviews, I saw the missed opportunities for connection and discovery, and the void where compassion and empathy belonged. But it was clear that my interviewing technique did need some adjusting to academic research. I remembered to withhold value judgments when I thought I might influence responses or to wait until the women had fully processed their thoughts about, for instance, the arcane rules and processes holding up their childcare vouchers before responding or offering affirmation. I also realized it was important to be mindful of the differences between my experience and that of the women I was interviewing. In Research Methods, we read Zavella’s (1993) description of her experience interviewing Chicana women. She discusses the problematic situation of interviewing people with whom you may assume 28

Blurred lines

you have shared experiences. It was not until she was able to acknowledge and confront the differences between herself and the interviewees that she was able to study them with greater success. Zavella suggests that closer attention to the voice of the subject is needed, and this notion began to guide my own research. Reflexivity was essential, checking in on the ways in which my identity and experience might be influencing my data collection, analysis and interpretation. ‘Obviously, the agency of the teller is central to composing narratives from personal experience, but so are the actions of others—listener, transcriber, analyst, and reader’ (Riessman, 1993: 15). I paid attention to the way my preconceived ideas affected the interview process. However, I also found that my natural tendency to make the interviews more personal and less clinical was key to full, meaty responses. The interviewees grew to know that I was the single mother of a young daughter. The more I opened up about my story, the more flowed between us about toxic men and struggles to get complaints heard by the kids’ teachers. They asked me questions about my situation and I answered honestly. Their gradual understanding of some of the commonalities we shared, despite obvious differences, helped me to gain their trust. We exchanged stories about our children’s fathers and girlfriends, about the blame we felt when parents at the playground asked where the kids’ fathers were. They called and sent messages to check in when my daughter had sinus surgery and advised me about getting extra support from the school when she returned. The study lasted three years and, as time passed, the women confided in me more and more. They realized if they told me about a boyfriend living in their public housing unit or an unfair situation they were navigating at work or in school, I would keep the information confidential and help in any way I could. At the same time, the women also knew I was a white graduate student attending Boston College. I did not live in subsidized housing. My ex-husband was a public defender who made a decent salary and was likely to pay child support on time, visit regularly and contribute to college. This was not the case for most of them, who received little or no support from the fathers of their children. Though saddled with more than 150,000 dollars of student loan debt, I was on my way to a second master’s and eventually a PhD degree. While my education set me apart, many of the women I spoke with were pursuing associates, bachelor’s and even master’s degrees. They asked me questions about juggling my studies with single parenting. When my father struggled to find a job after a long stretch of unemployment and my parents were on the verge of losing their home where my daughter and I lived part-time, I confided in a few of the women, and they offered compassion, understanding, and useful advice. So many of us are one illness, car accident, divorce, or lost job away from needing government assistance to help our families to survive. There was great diversity of experiences and backgrounds of the single mothers I interviewed. I met several women whose families had lived in the same public housing development for generations, as well as women who had been raised by middle- and working-class families, who sometimes even refused to visit them in their ‘project’ apartments. 29

Research Justice

Circumstances like domestic violence, abandonment, and addiction left many of the women to be labeled low-income single mothers in need of ‘empowerment.’ Many of the interviewees expressed an overall lack of regard for neighbors in their public housing community and tried to differentiate themselves, probably in part because they were talking to me, a white graduate student interviewer. Jane, a single mother of a five-year-old son, moved into public housing from a shelter for survivors of domestic violence. Jane said of her son, “I’m just keeping him inside until we get out of here. Have you seen this place? Drugs everywhere. It’s just disgusting … the neighbor upstairs has a two year old and a five year old, and the way she talks to them, you’d think she was talking to an adult. It’s just so horrible. My son, you know, calls her the loud lady. It’s just not the way we were raised. We were raised poor, but not like that.” When a person puts together a narrative of their life story, they are creating a version of their identity to represent to the listener (Rosenwald and Ochberg, 1992; Riessman, 1993). Social forces, like stereotypes, might be at work under the surface of a narrative, even if they are not apparent from the actual text of the interview: ‘Respondents narrativize particular experiences in their lives, often when there has been a breach between the ideal and real, self and society’ (Riessman, 1993: 3). As such, the narrative presented in the interview can also be seen as a counter-narrative responding to existing cultural expectations about low-income women, like that of a neglectful, lazy, welfare mother using her government-issued checks for weekly pedicures. The single mothers I interviewed constructed narratives about their lives that resisted commonly held myths about low-income mothers, to reclaim their own versions of their identities. All of the mothers understood the negative stereotypes associated with low income single mothers in America as lazy, unmotivated, uneducated, young, and promiscuous (Luker, 1996; Seccombe, James, and Walters, 1998; Bock, 2000), sexually irresponsible (Luker, 1996), and young’ (quoted in Bock, 2000: 64). This stereotype remains surprisingly powerful, despite the fact that pregnancy among unmarried teens has dropped dramatically over the past two decades, while the rate for college-educated, unmarried white women in their thirties has more than doubled, and for women in managerial and professional jobs, the rate has tripled (Sands and Nuccio, 1989). The single mother label weighed heavily on me, even as I resisted. Should I conceal my circumstances on fellowship applications? More than one person advised this might be a good idea, until I was able to prove that I could handle the work. I will never forget one afternoon sitting in my parents’ kitchen, feeding my daughter carrots. I heard my father on the phone with a friend in the other room. “No, I’m not sure about retirement,” he said. “My daughter, yes Amanda, she became, well she’s a—single mother now, so you know, all bets are off.” These words from the man who had bragged to his friends about my grades and jobs for the last 20-plus years. I wanted to yell at my dad, but I knew he was not alone. “Conjure a single mother in your mind,” I’d often ask in the classes I taught. Inevitably the women they imagined were young, uneducated, 30

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welfare-dependent minorities. The stigma remains powerful despite the fact that they are the fastest-growing family form in the country, with an estimated 11 million single moms living in the United States. My reaction to feeling stigmatized was to dive in to my schoolwork. My research became my refuge and many of my interview subjects became my friends. Did I sometimes cross the boundary between interviewer and subject? Yes. I passed along personal and professional contacts, lent five dollars and a subway card, offered babysitting and rides. But I never violated the trust and integrity of my relationship with the women, as a researcher, advocate, or friend. Partly because of the rigorous disclosures and consent required by IRB (Institutional Review Board) and because I’ve always been open about my role, all of the women I interviewed understood I was writing about them. Many told me they believed it was important for people to hear their stories. They wanted to be part of a public dialogue about low-income single mother-headed families in America, and I was uniquely situated to bring their voices into the conversation in the academy. The experiences and values of low-income single mothers were at the center of my research and analysis. Dorothy Smith (1997) points to the importance of learning about society from a standpoint on the sidelines, in this case, through the experiences of economically marginalized women. Being embedded in a single-parent empowerment program as a graduate student researcher enabled me to collect a wealth of original ethnographic data. These data are now the focus of my dissertation. In reviewing the data, what struck me most about this group of women was their willingness to help others, despite the high levels of stress and burden in their own lives. When my daughter went away with her father on a five-day trip for the first time, the women offered tips and support. When my dad had a stroke, several of the women asked what they could do to help. Perhaps their experiences made them more sympathetic to others, more willing to help, as they had been helped from time to time. In fact, I observed them organize to volunteer for ‘Dress for Success’ and a book drive, share information about charter school admissions for their kids, and raise money when one of the moms was diagnosed with cancer. Many of the women checked in when someone was sick or in the hospital, dog- and child-sat for one another, and shared job contacts—not behaviors typically associated with the low-income single mothers imagined by my students or my father. I wanted to give something back to these women who had supported me through such a difficult time in my life, and offered themselves and their experiences up to become the subjects of academic and popular news articles about women in poverty. When I learned the play, Good People, by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abair, was slated to bring the role of a single mother from South Boston to Broadway, I knew I had to get them there. Many phone calls and emails later, I came up with 10 donated tickets. Some carpooled and others took the bus to New York City. My daughter and I spent the afternoon with them in Times Square, buzzing like tourists around restaurants and street vendors. 31

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Later, inside the theater, the women sat together in a row halfway down the orchestra, stage left. I sat behind, watching. A few of them laughed aloud, hooted, and cheered in a way that doesn’t happen enough in Broadway theaters. “I was just like so proud to say, you know, that’s like me up there. You don’t see single moms on Broadway,” said one of the moms. The play confronts the idea that the family and circumstances we are all born in to are out of our control, dumb luck. While the main character, Margie Walsh, played by Frances McDormand, is stuck in Southie caring for her disabled daughter, working as a cashier, her former fling and her daughter’s father, Mike Dillon, had moved up and out. With support from his father, he earned a scholarship to college and became a doctor, living in Chestnut Hill with a beautiful young wife and a house full of breakables. But the point the play drives home is this: for every one person like Mike Dillon, who finds a way out, there are hundreds of people, struggling and working hard, who are still stuck. And many of them are hard-working, good people. Many of them are single moms. References Bock, J.D., 2000, Doing the right thing? Single mothers by choice and the struggle for legitimacy, Gender and Society, 14, 1, 62–86 Luker, K., 1996, Dubious conception: The politics of teenage pregnancy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Riessman, C.K. (ed.), 1993, Narrative analysis, Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications Rosenwald, G.C. and Ochberg, R.L. (eds.), 1992, Storied lives: The cultural politics of self-understanding, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Sands, R.G. and Nuccio, K.E., 1989, Mother-headed single-parent families: A feminist perspective, Affilia, 4, 3, 25–41 Seccombe, K., James, D. and Walters, K.B., 1998, ‘They think you ain’t much of nothing’: The social construction of the welfare mother, Journal of Marriage and Family, 60, 4, 849–65 Smith, D.E., 1997, Comment on Hekman’s Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited, Signs, 22, 2, 392–98 Zavella, P., 1993, Feminist insider dilemmas: Constructing ethnic identity with ‘Chicana’ informants, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 13, 3, 53–76

32

FOUR

Ethnography as a Research Justice strategy Liam Martin

Joe Badillo arrived at the county jail with a cyst on his spine. Growing back pain was the only clue. For five days he asked for medical treatment, while jail officials, suspicious of drug use, left him unattended. Then Joe lost feeling in his legs. For another week he stayed on the bunk in his cell, each day filing a pink slip for treatment, each day being denied. Only when he became feverish, then passed out, was he rushed to hospital outside. Surgeons removing the cyst damaged his nervous system. Joe spent five months in a hospital bed unable to move his legs, another six in a rehabilitation center, before being released to the street in a wheelchair. Broke and depressed, heavily medicated, and staying with a friend who was using drugs, he started selling heroin again. Six months later: return to the county jail. Caged in the place that almost took his life, Joe Badillo formed the resolve he would never again return. This time Joe left for a halfway house. He had been there two days when I moved in, an ethnographer looking to learn about prisons from ex-prisoners. Soon I was walking with Joe to a probation drug test at the Sheriff’s office downtown. Joe made the trip with a cane and gritted teeth, breathing heavily through the summer heat, resting on a window ledge then a stone tree pot. When we crossed the road, traffic slowed and stopped. Back in the neighborhood where Joe was born, friendly faces interrupted every few feet: “How long you been out man? You look good man.” At the probation office, he knew the three men with crisp basketball gear and silver jewelry. I told him it feels like an episode of Cheers. On the bus home, the powerade he had drunk to ease the ‘piss test’ continued to take effect. By the time we got off it was a toilet emergency. Joe put his hand on my shoulder, and sweated and spluttered slowly up the hill. There was no rushing, until we came across an office chair with a worn orange back and shiny steel wheels discarded by the footpath. Joe slumped in it, and I pumped my legs and pushed the chair while we laughed our way towards home. It was moments of friendship like these—made possible by sharing a roof— that underwrote the successes of bringing Joe in to the project as an interviewer and co-researcher. I came to the work with strong ideological commitments: that academics studying prisons too often ignore the people most affected by prisons, that conventional models of research establish unequal relationships, and channel benefits (of knowledge, resources, and prestige) upwards from researched 33

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to researcher, and that the everyday practices of sociological research should be used to empower those most affected by the problem being studied. But, on the ground, living in a halfway house and scrambling to get the research moving, much more visible were the immediate, practical fruits of having Joe involved in the project. Gone were my concerns about finding people to interview—he seemed to know everyone—and almost three decades after leaving school as a 14 year old, he fast became an effective interviewer. He had, after all, spent his life cycling between prison and the street, places where ‘people skills’ are the most important resource of all, sometimes quite literally the difference between life and death. In that first three months I lived in the house, we did 25 life-history interviews with former prisoners, half each. Each lasted around three hours, and most were done in the Worcester Commons, a popular place for people from the halfway houses and programs in the neighborhood to socialize on summer days—in large part because you can’t be ‘moved along’ from a commons. These were ethnographic interviews done on park benches and tables, some even on the grass, sitting among others relaxing in the summer shade—often friends of participants. A year later, I returned to the same house for another three-month stay. Joe was still living there, and this time I focused on doing follow-up interviews with the people in our original network, while he took the lead as interviewer in a project about criminal records. I understand this work as an experiment in using ethnography as a Research Justice strategy, and hope that others can learn by my sharing the experience.

Research across social boundaries I’ve never been to prison. Dad did two nights in jail, once as a union organizer caught in the wrong workplace, another as a hitchhiker walking where people didn’t walk. Uncle Steve spent three days locked up after having his passport stolen then trying to cross the Iranian border. A friend got six months’ home detention for dealing cannabis. These are stories remembered and told for being exceptions: not one of my friends or family has ever been sentenced to prison time. Growing up in New Zealand, prisons entered my world only in the abstract. I moved to America to work in an elite academic institution, and spend my days on a campus of old stone buildings and maple trees on a hill overlooking a reservoir. The community is overwhelmingly affluent and white. This always felt like a strange place to study prisons, so I packed my possessions and headed for a halfway house in the old industrial city of Worcester. The house is part of a network of three programs run by the same husband and wife—a farm outside the city, the structured halfway house, and a small number of apartments for independent living. Some of the 12–15 men living there are recent arrivals directly from prison and jail, others have been there longer. There is no time limit on stays. It was founded by a priest from a local university, and emphasizes integrating the house and surrounding community—I was able to 34

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live there because of a broader policy of bringing student interns into the house. Church groups bring meals five nights a week and share food at a table big enough for 20. There are no live-in staff, and a paid former prisoner and exresident does much of the day-to-day running. There are strict rules: compulsory attendance at evening meals, a 10 pm curfew, mandatory attendance at four AA or NA meetings per week, and random drug testing. But the day-to-day feel of the house is quite relaxed, and the men who live there routinely describe it as the best program in the city. My decision to move in to the house as a researcher opened an ethical Pandora’s box. I found the work of Robert Blauner and David Wellman especially helpful in thinking through the problems—perhaps it resonated because they too were white men initiating research in a marginalized community. Working out of UC Berkeley in the 1960s, Blauner and Wellman’s research on race took them into African-American neighborhoods where the researcher—like the policeman and social worker—was viewed as an outsider who entered ghettos and barrios to serve personal and institutional goals decided outside the community of study. Both the challenges of participants and upsurge of political activism within their own institution forced them to confront the way conventional research practices reproduce social hierarchies (Blauner and Wellman, 1973: 314): Scientific research does not exist in a vacuum. Its theory and practice reflect the structure and values of society. In capitalist America, where massive inequalities in wealth and power exist between classes and racial groups, the processes of social research express both race and class oppression. The control, exploitation and privilege that are generic components of social oppression exist in the relation of researchers to researched, even though their manifestations may be subtle and masked by professional ideologies. Social scientists control the research process from beginning to end. Norms of professional autonomy and expertise dictate that only a social scientist can define a suitable problem for study, and the theories and interests that organize projects respond to the need to increase knowledge within academic disciplines and professions. The life problems and needs of the community are secondary and rarely the start point for research. At the point of research production—delivering a survey, interviewing, recording observations—there is a gap between the researcher’s purpose and the participants’ awareness of what they are doing, and knowledge flows one way—the interviewee reveals often intimate and personal details, while the researcher records neutrally, revealing nothing of their own life or beliefs. In analysis, unique perspectives are lost in statistical summaries and ideal-type classifications of aggregate data. There is then a large communication gap in the presentation of research: social scientists write for other ‘experts,’ so that those who are studied cannot make head or tail of the research report to which their own responses contributed. Structuring research projects in this way channels 35

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benefits from researched to researcher. Subjects give up some time, energy, and trust—and usually get nothing from the transaction. Social scientists get grants that pay their salaries, research findings that bring professional status, and publications that advance careers in rank and income. These inequalities reproduce hierarchies the researcher is often explicitly committed to breaking down. Recognizing these dynamics raised a range of issues as I worked to use ethnography as a Research Justice strategy. Looking for meaningful ways to challenge these institutional arrangements is especially difficult as a graduate student, training to become a professional sociologist while being bombarded with dystopian messages about conditions in the academic job market. Publish or perish, we are told, there will be no work for those who leave graduate school without journal publications. Publishing in academic journals requires styles of communicating research that all but dictate staying close to established conventions. With this in mind, the rest of the chapter is based not on how the knowledge produced by the project is used, but on where I felt more room to be creative: the relationships I established with participants in the field, and small ways I tried to imbue the exploitative researcher–researched relationship with elements of egalitarianism and empowerment.

Building relationships with former prisoners As a doctoral candidate at Boston College, I get a good deal out of doing research. Academic work with flexible hours and little outside control is my livelihood. Upward mobility is also implied in the position: research good enough will lead to long-term stable employment, well paid under even better conditions. At the same time, my immediate financial resources are limited. To provide some perspective: I earn about the same as my girlfriend, a Starbucks barista. Many of the rewards I earn doing research remain somewhat intangible, difficult to divide or deferred to the future. But the opportunity for spreading these rewards came when I was awarded a $4,000 grant by the sociology department to spend three months living in a halfway house doing life histories with former prisoners. Easily accessible, relatively informal and internal to the department, the grant provided resources outside mainstream bureaucratic channels often reluctant to fund research organized around collaborative methods. The grant funded not only moving to Worcester and staying in the house for the summer, but the two main strategies I hoped would start to break down exploitative structures for doing social research. First, I brought a former prisoner onboard as a co-researcher and interviewer to build a modest element of community empowerment into the project, replacing the researcher–researched relationship with a connection that included basic training and professional engagement. Second, I committed early to putting half the grant money into the hands of community members, paying both the co-researcher and all interview respondents. As an interviewer, Joe got $70 for each three-hour life history, and each respondent got $40. I stressed that the money was a wage for labor time, not 36

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a bribe for information, and insisted on paying respondents even when people offered to do the interview for free. The benefits provided to participants by these direct payments were more tangible and immediate than anything else I could come up with. If this was all I achieved, at least I put some money into the hands of people who many times had nothing. It’s hard to imagine doing research in this setting without providing some form of compensation: these were hard times for the people we interviewed. One respondent, Owen Roberts, put it simply: “every time you go to jail you lose everything.” Living at the halfway house, I saw up close what this means for people coming out the other side. Peter Tennant moved in to the house the day before I arrived. He had no bank account or assets, and leaving Worcester county jail received nothing but the clothes he was wearing on the day he arrived, which had been sitting, unwashed in a plastic bag, in jail storage for the year he was locked up. Three weeks later, bureaucratic tangles meant Peter had received a total of $14 in social welfare assistance. He often left the house early in the morning to collect cans off the street for the change to use the washing machine. His only pair of jeans didn’t fit, and he once spent most of a day walking around Worcester trying to find a belt he could afford with his last $4. But paying people for interviews also created its own problems. Structuring research relationships as business transactions makes establishing more open-ended connections difficult. Once a ‘direct payment for time’ model was created, more fluid relationships and forms of exchange were pushed to the side, and I was left wondering how best to sustain connections over time. Where no money is involved, a person agreeing to sit down with you signals they believe in the importance of the research, opening possibilities for integrating them into the work in lasting ways. Cash payments muddle the interpretation of motives. There were also times when I worried that paying people under conditions of often extreme material scarcity introduced an element of coercion. How can a person with so little turn down $40 for a few hours work? Ty Kelley and Mark Bernard, for example, grew tired during the interview and pushed for a finish, sliding toward lack of interest and one-sentence responses. I tried to undermine the wage-labor structure of the relationships established with interviewees by making the interview itself a creative, human encounter. I put a lot of emphasis on the immediate, physical surroundings, and did the interviews in places in which I hoped the person would feel comfortable. Usually this was the Worcester Commons, but also included people’s houses, other public parks and the backyard of the halfway house. These were informal settings, places where friends gathered for conversation. When I was meeting people for the first time on the day of the interview, I also asked if they would come a little early so I would buy lunch—usually a Subway sandwich—and, over food, tried to let them know what the project was all about. I used a small, inconspicuous recorder, shared cigarettes, and never took notes or read from the question sheet. I hinted and prodded, but ultimately let the interviews flow in the direction set by the participant. Sparked by questioning about being caught in the violent white 37

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backlash to school busing in Boston, Lloyd Andrews spoke for close to two hours in almost stream-of-consciousness reflection on racism and punishment, pain and hope and violence—to which I just listened, saying barely a word. Many of the problems of paying respondents carried over to paying Joe Badillo for his work as an interviewer. At one level, this was an effective way of channeling the benefits of the research into the community: he received money for his time, some basic training in qualitative methods, and a credential for his resume. At the same time, the relationship was structured as a wage-labor exchange—a model hardly brimming with emancipatory potential. With the limited resources I brought to the project, this was temporary work of the highest order: no contract, no holiday or sick pay, not even a guaranteed wage. Just a small payment for each interview conducted, one at a time. No interview, no pay. This raises the issue of whether one form of exploitation is being replaced by another, the research participant for the temporary wage laborer. For all my efforts to eliminate the boss–worker dynamic, the underlying structure of the relationship established by the research remains: cash payment for time worked. But despite the underlying structure, the relationship I established with Joe Badillo rarely felt like that of boss and employee. Here, the business transaction was wrapped in a relationship of friendship, and there were many exchanges of time and energy that took place outside any financial transaction. Sometimes these blended research and day-to-day living. Perhaps I would give Joe a ride to an NA meeting downtown, or to the optometrists to get a pair of glasses, and on the way we would talk about what people were saying in the interviews, where the next recruit was coming from, or the history of the neighborhood. At other times, they were just the back-and-forth gifts of two men sharing a roof: a cigarette or a lighter, cooking a meal and breaking bread in the halfway house kitchen. There were also lots of laughs. On a trip to Hampton beach, I sprinkled a napping Aidan Meaney with potato chips to induce a seagull attack—while the birds swarmed, Joe and I laughed until tears formed. Aidan and I nicknamed a visible hernia on Joe’s stomach ‘little Joe’ and personified it as a house member daily. I wore a corn-cob outfit to advertise a farmer’s market—Joe got a photo and hung it on the halfway house fridge. The value of ethnography as a Research Justice strategy rests on these little moments of friendship introducing a qualitative change to the research relationships. Joking and humor were constant features of my time at the house, an allmale space where ‘busting balls’ and ‘shooting the shit’ are the default modes of conversation. A young college student out of my comfort zone, I was a constant target. The ‘work’ I do is not really considered work by the men in the house. To an academic audience, spending time just being with people is ‘participant observation’ and ‘immersion in the field.’ To the men in the house it looks a lot like hanging around smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. The practical work of sociology—sitting at a computer, reading, and writing—are also activities that fall outside what would usually be considered work in this setting. My dubious work ethic therefore became fertile ground for jokes. Kevin Jones, the paid house 38

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manager, ex-convict and former resident, went out of his way to publicly police my chore and loudly describe my laziness to anyone who would listen. At the dinner table, where the whole house shares a meal each week night, I was often the main topic of conversation, attacked for everything from my large portions of food and fast eating—indications I only came to the house for the free meals—to hating America or being a terrorist—inferred from my critical social views. This joking and laughing was the texture of my daily rounds in the house. Sometimes being a friend came into conflict with being a researcher. I spent a lot of time with Aidan Meaney during my second stay in the house. He was going through tough times, a recovering heroin addict four months clean, still shaken by the recent memory of squirming through withdrawals on the concrete floor of a jail cell, while being berated by a guard—a friend of his brother—who asked repeatedly: “Do you even know where your kids are?” Aidan didn’t. His wife was in a drug treatment program down the road, her parents looking after their twin sons with Department of Child and Family monitoring. I was the first person he told when she said she wanted a divorce. When she left the program, I drove him to find her and talk. One day we went to swim at a local pond; she was there in a group with another man and I talked Aidan down from a fight. We spent lots of nights sitting on the halfway house porch smoking cigarettes and talking about life—not just his, but mine too. I decided early on not to record our unfolding relationship in field-note writing and analysis. It just felt wrong to do so: here was a man in crisis, trying damn hard to make things work, and doing it with a smile and a laugh. It just seemed right to be there as friend without objectifying the experience. Within the house, I tried to align myself with the residents rather than the staff. This came to a head early in the work—I had been there only three days when Kevin Jones, the paid house manager, asked me to complete weekly ‘checkins’ with each resident. This involved filling in a form about their progress— attendance at NA and AA meetings, plans for housing and work, financial situation—and filing it in a cabinet in the office. This made me uncomfortable from the beginning: sitting with the guys with a clipboard and form to fill out for the house manager was precisely what I was trying not to do. I did only two check-ins before mumbling to Kevin that I didn’t want to be involved in monitoring residents, then just avoided doing them. After a couple of weeks it came to a head and we had a proper conversation. I told him that I’m doing research among people who have been monitored and controlled their whole life, and am paranoid about my research perpetuating this. For the rest of the project he loudly and routinely brought up how I’ll do three-hour interviews with people, asking about the intimate details of their life since birth, but won’t do a basic check-in. My reply—when I actually engaged—was to say that the difference is that I have control over how the information is used. What I didn’t say was that I was also concerned about how doing check-ins would change my relationships with the men in the house.

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There was also constant conflict between my goal of being practically useful to participants and the endless need for more data collection. There were always opportunities to contribute: I helped Lloyd Andrews put together a CV, wrote a letter to the judge for Aidan Meaney, and worked with Matt Carmine on his community college homework. When I got a car halfway through my second stay at the house, giving rides became part of my daily rounds. But I also felt constantly overwhelmed by the mountain of possible things to record in field notes, and the need to organize and do more interviews. Living in a halfway house is an amazing place for a sociologist of the prison to learn—so much to write down, so little time—and I had been given money to go there and do research, after all. Giving time to both the daily tasks of research and the work of making practical contributions was a constant juggling act. This is especially difficult because efficient academic work requires routine, but helping out requires dropping what you’re doing and grabbing the moment when it comes along. It was also intensified by most students who live in the house being paid interns who work full-time for the organization. My ambiguous position as an unpaid intern/researcher—always pushing my time toward the latter—again opened me up for work ethic humor. Kevin Jones coined the phrase—“It’s not what Liam can do for Banum, but what Banum can do for Liam”1—and threatened to get a T-shirt printed. In these messy, human relationships—with all their strains and conflicts—lies the biggest strength of ethnography as a Research Justice strategy. Living in a place over time allows for forming lasting connections based on trust, and doing research through relationships imbued with an ethic of friendship. Perhaps the researcher–researched relationship will always include an element of exploitation. But where techniques and strategies can be found to start moving benefits the other way, these are most effective where they can be channeled between people who know and care about one another. These connections allow for working things out in fluid, open ways, through the kinds of exchanges that take place in intimate relationships and organic friendships.

Small victories Establishing more egalitarian relationships with participants in ethnographic research is no panacea. The historical roots of the method can be traced to the role of early ethnographers in colonial expeditions—alongside missionaries and cartographers—on the frontiers of often brutal state expansions. The issue is not so much whether these ethnographers became friends with participants, but the role of their research in broader structures of power and oppression. Like the ethnographer able to live in an African village because of European infiltration of the territory, I was able to live alongside former prisoners in a halfway house

1

I use the name Banum House as a pseudonym for the program. 40

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because of their marginalized position within a broader network of oppressive relationships—there would be no such place to stay if the research were about Wall Street bankers. Ultimately, my work should be judged on the extent to which it challenges these structures. But framing the potential of ethnography as a Research Justice strategy in these terms can easily make progress seem out of reach. As I study the prison—that place where pain and rejection so often swamp hope—I keep my eyes open always for small victories. I have learned that there are low-hanging fruit in the everyday ways I practice ethnography and relate to people in my work. At the end of my first stay at the halfway house, I designed and printed a certificate to say thanks to Joe for good work. I designed it on the computer—a picture frame with scalloped edges, faded blue, Joe’s name printed in big letters across the front, above the words “for exceptional work as co-researcher and interviewer in the Worcester prison cycle project.” I got it printed at Fedex and signed my name above the institution: Department of Sociology, Boston College. I gave it to Joe the day before I left. He laughed and said thanks, but I felt a little sheepish. It seemed a cheesy token, out of place, like something only a teacher would do. Back living at the house a year later, I went to Joe’s room to talk. I knocked then opened the door, leaned on the frame looking in to where he lay on the bed watching TV. I glanced around the small halfway house room while he spoke—just wide enough for a bed and a desk—across five neat rows of shoes, a broken laptop, silver blinds that cast thin lines of light through the shadows, and then, set apart from everything else on an otherwise bare wall: the certificate. Reference Blauner, R. and Wellman, D., 1973, Toward the decolonization of social research, in J.A. Ladner (ed.) The death of white sociology: Essays on race and culture, Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 310–31

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FIVE

Queered by the archive: No More Potlucks and the activist potential of archival theory Andrea Zeffiro and Mél Hogan Launched on January 1, 2009, No More Potlucks1 (NMP) is the first and only independent web-based and print-on-demand journal of arts and politics in Canada, housed at the Library Archives Canada. Co-founded by Mél Hogan, M.-C. MacPhee and Dayna McLeod, the project came to fruition from a longstanding friendship, and also from a four-year volunteer experience with the Dykes on Mykes (DoMs) community radio show at CKUT, in Montreal. The project, however, was a decisive response to what they perceived to be lacking in content—politics, ideologies, and aesthetics—in arts and cultural publications, often sidestepped and largely overshadowed by American endeavors (Autostraddle and Bitch, for example). Over the course of the past five years, Hogan and MacPhee have hit the proverbial nail on the head in their assessment of what was lacking in queer feminist arts and cultural venues of publication: 29 issues have been published, and upcoming editions of NMP are curated months in advance. NMP supports marginalized voices, and modes of knowledge production and dissemination, which ideally facilitate acts of self-determination and cultural autonomy. Communities of artists, activists, and academics continue to supply the journal with material including artworks and collections, personal reflection pieces, critical interviews, works of fiction, and poetic political interventions, which together document the possibilities of new media publishing venues and a sense of urgency around the dissemination of underspoken voices and underappreciated perspectives. The focus is decidedly Canadian, with some international content. NMP’s stake in Research Justice however, pertains not only to bringing to light the journal’s strong feminist underpinnings, its Canadian-ness, and visibly queer ethics, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to the archival trajectory of the project and the political implications of the Archive. To understand NMP as a queer archive, and as queerer by the archive, is the intention of our intervention. In our contribution to this anthology, we use NMP as a site of inquiry to explore 1

www.nomorepotlucks.org

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how the politics of social movements such as queer, GLBT, and feminist, are reflected in that movement’s preservation of itself, though by no means always advertently. In the discussion that follows, we attempt to address how NMP positions itself politically through its strategies for sustenance—not so much to come up with a definitive stance about who and what NMP is, or how it can or will be read historically, but rather to demonstrate the correlation between self-preservation and politics, or, in other words, to identify the link between NMP and the activist potential of the history it creates and tells about itself and its community. What does it mean for a social movement to use the intention of the archive to frame itself moving forward? NMP is also intended—as a gesture outwards—as an opportunity to demonstrate the necessary link between politics and action built in to NMP’s ideal queer feminist posturing, and to start a conversation about the ways in which social justice serves as an impetus to shape history differently, as a mode of storytelling.

Knowledge inqueery Before shifting our attention to an appraisal of the activist potential of archival theory vis-à-vis NMP, it is necessary that we make visible our association with the journal and, by extension, the process through which this article came to be. As co-founders of NMP, Mél Hogan and M.-C. MacPhee share the work of curation, artistic vision and design, and editorship. Andrea Zeffiro has been working with NMP since the journal’s inception, first as copy editor, then as a regular interviewer and contributor, and more recently as co-curator. Despite the varying degrees of involvement from those who help generate the journal, in various capacities—though all volunteers—there is a sense of community that emerges from the relationships forged by the journal. The queer network is the product, and the journal its best byproduct. Over the past year, we (the authors of this chapter) have become increasingly invested in collaborative writing as a mode of queer feminist inquiry, or as a method of knowledge inqueery. In part, this means challenging what is accepted or considered original to scholarly knowledge and its modes of distribution. This challenge has become a declaration of our enunciative agencies: our capacity to articulate our lived experiences into material forms—as speech acts, written accounts, or channeled through artistic practice—is to assert ownership not only over our emotions, but our thoughts, skills, politics, and experiences. Enunciative actions are acts of critical agency through which we engage with the world around us, and respond accordingly. This is made manifest through our involvement with NMP, which at its core is about reconciling feminist ideals with queer ethics and aesthetics, as a reminder that our politics are of no use if not implemented, articulated, and mindfully challenged on an ongoing personal and creative basis. And so, beyond the revelation of our personal and professional ties to NMP, and our vested interests in the publication, we engage in dialogue that is representative 44

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of our personal and political inclinations, both in, around, and beyond our work with the journal. Having been formally trained as academics, we are straddling the inner and outer worlds of the scholarly tradition. This piece is a testament to that balancing act between scholarly reflection and activism possible only with a certain distance to that privileged positioning. It is also proof of how research—in our case, archival theory—can ignite activist impulses.

A transcript: Foundational queeries by Zeffiro and Hogan Zeffiro: Despite having had the opportunity to observe NMP’s evolution over the past five years, it was only recently—in preparation for this piece—that I became aware of NMP’s parallel trajectories: (1) the website—nomorepotlucks.org—which was launched in 2003 and served as a virtual posting board for queer feminist events in Montreal (Canada); and (2) the community radio program—Dykes on Mykes—which you, Marie-Claire MacPhee, and Dayna McLeod took over in 2004. Hogan: I registered the domain name nomorepotlucks.org in 2003, a few years after coming out of design school (Algonquin College in Ottawa) where I had developed the basic skills to set up a website. At the time, it was, as you say, a posting board of queer events in Montreal and surrounding areas. It was a hand-coded static HTML website. In 2005, the site shifted to its first content management system (CMS) but retained much of the same purpose: to promote events in the city. This is also what gave NMP its meaning: ‘no more potlucks’ was a nod to feminist gatherings, but by saying ‘no more,’ we were also getting at the idea that there is more to do, socially, for women. To get out there. To have queer public women’s culture. The main difference in shifting to a CMS from static HTML is that it allows for content to be archived in some sense, rather than overwritten. I would say that this is more important than it sounds, and something we should expand on; the archival potential of technology has become really important for NMP’s position as a queer archive. In 2009, nomorepotlucks.org was revamped conceptually, aesthetically, and technologically to become what is now, an online and print-on-demand journal of arts and politics, showcasing a new issue every two months. January 2014 marked its fifth anniversary as an independent publication. Over the course of 10 years, the site shifted from Textpattern to Drupal to WordPress, with the technology feeding into a concern about the project’s preservation. Now, we have 38 issues online, hundreds of pages in print, media hosted on our server and third-party sites, and a database that is constantly and manually backed up. We 45

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also instated the print on demand version right away because it is a format that can be housed safely. Print is something archivists know how to care for, such as our partners at e-artexte.2 For us, though, it’s not ideal—not everything can be preserved in print and it’s incredibly laborious—but we’re the first and probably only print-on-demand publication at Library Archives Canada! As co-founder of the journal, and as the web developer and technician for the project, I can explain in detail the archival trajectory of the project and its political implications. I have a growing—personal and academic—interest to tease out the ways in which archival strategies are always in part a product of the politics of the social movement they emerge from. As a creative queer feminist intervention, I want us to talk and reflect on the kind of archival analysis that invariably creates for the archive as much as it draws (archaeologically) from it. Zeffiro: What is fascinating for me is that, despite their specific technological and social anchors, these two paths came together and developed into something entirely different, but also remarkably congruent. Could you speak to the background narrative of NMP? Hogan: Radio was really the lead-up to NMP. Dayna, M.-C., and I sat around imagining what it would mean to get artists and curators and scholars and activists working together on a bimonthly publication. We got the momentum and developed the ability to work together through community radio. Through radio programming, we started to define queer and feminist, and what it had meant to previous hosts, and how these definitions continued to change quite a bit over time. Influenced by academic queer theory (most of it US-based), trashy parties, trans culture, franco GLBT initiatives, lesbian art movements, and so on, we began to think that the common thread there would be a good basis for a journal. I think these are terms we should explore What do these terms mean to you? Zeffiro: For me, queer has always signaled a positionality that has to do with the ways in which one moves through the world. Queer postures—politics, theory, identity, pedagogy—point towards the possibility that something else exists beyond the limits of a heteronormative dominant logic. I suppose what I’ve described is akin to a worldview. But it’s more than that, too. It’s also very much a mode of doing or rooted in action. To queer (verb) is to challenge the

2

e-artexte is the library catalogue of Artexte and a digital repository for contemporary Canadian art publications. See: http://e-artexte.ca/ 46

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assumptions, boundaries, and biases that are taken as neutral indicators that ‘this is the way things should be.’ And the most efficient means of queering, I think, is by creating alternatives that undermine the status quo. Feminism, for me, it is a struggle. And I mean this in the most productive sense possible. I think that becoming a feminist is a continuous process that is marked by striving to do what we know is right even when we know it will prove to be difficult. It means that we are onerous towards our limitations and faults, but that we see those limitations and faults as another point of departure in building our politic. I think that being/becoming a feminist means that, even when we’re not consciously deploying feminist strategies or actively enforcing a feminist politic, feminist perspectives become ingrained in the way that we carry out our work—practically, methodologically, theoretically, and personally—even when we’re not naming or qualifying our actions as specifically feminist. As for the feminist agenda, I’m wary of employing the visibility of women as an index of equality. In identifying the activities and achievements, or the material productions of women, it is evident that women have, and continue to have, influence within all facets of life. And while taking stock of contributions is vitally important and necessary, so too is ascertaining ideological positions that encourage (or not) feminist perspectives and positionalities. Beyond enumerating women, it is also necessary to examine the manner in which feminist perspectives are permitted to shape, critique, and contribute to official discourses. How do you define queer and feminism? Hogan: As you know, I’ve had similar struggles with the meaning of feminism. It’s not always been obvious to look ‘up’ in academia and see the kinds of feminisms we read about being enacted in people’s everyday lives. I think that, for me, this is the only thing that matters—how politics transfers into action. This is the only hope for social change: how you live is an embodied politic. And so while we’ve come to hold the personal is political as a feminist mantra, that’s where the most painful contradictions lie. Academia seems to amplify this because the system is hierarchical and what’s perceived as rewards often requires aligning oneself within that cadre, if not reinforcing those boundaries. With NMP, as with the arts more generally, there’s more room to maneuver. So I think I’ve let go of the idea of feminist in favor of feminism—an action-based idea rather and an identity category that nobody can live up to all the time, mainly because feminism is not understood by all in the same way, depending on location, experience, rank, education, and 47

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so on. As Elizabeth Grosz and Heather Davis (2012) discuss in NMP 23, ‘feminist theory has the potential to make us become other than ourselves, to make us unrecognizable’ for better or worse. Feminism becomes visible in moments, ways of being, theories, gestures, art, performance, and writing. It’s feminism when it’s enacted. The more time I spend collaborating on projects that have feminist values, the more I think that feminists, as people, don’t exist. Does that make sense? So it’s not that contradictions are inherently ‘unfeminist,’ but it does require us to be self-reflexive, accountable and empathetic. To care about one another beyond the call of duty. I’m off on a tangent … but not really. I think we can also define queer around action—queering stuff. But as a verb, I think it risks downplaying the bodies attached to ‘difference’ and the discrimination that comes with it. That’s still real. So ‘queering’ is problematic and useful. I think ‘queering’ does work like ‘racing’ (Morrison, 1993), as a reading tool. Our queer experience and bodies allow us to read against/across moments or texts to see how fear and desire play out. Maybe a ‘lens’ is the best metaphor? So if we’re talking about the reader and reception, queering works. In the same way that in a room full of queers people will presume others queer, NMP ‘queers’ content, and perhaps, by default, our contributors. In this sense, ‘being queered’ is an effect … but I’m not sure that the verb and noun ‘queer’ occupy the same conceptual space. Something to think more about. Both feminism and queer politics become the activist force behind NMP, though I think there’s a way in which feminism could reinvigorate queer, so for me that’s the dominant force. Because misogyny is at the root of both. In NMP, there are an increasing number of reflection pieces that are dissecting the limits of queer/feminist activism within academia, or academia in relation to larger issues of social justice, as academia tends more and more toward privatization and corporate partnerships (Ceraso and Zeffiro, 2013; Wallace and Hogan, 2013). Zeffiro: Let’s talk a little bit more about the activist force behind NMP. The journal is sustained by the participation of the queer/ feminist/GLBT community. In fact, the project is entirely volunteer driven, from the editorial team to the artists, activists, and academics submitting material. Tell me a little bit more about this community. Hogan: I first imagine the readers to be the people featured in the journal. And then I imagine that some of their friends, communities, families, and part of their expanded online social networks become

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readers, too. And then some readers become contributors, and the cycle repeats itself, and grows. It’s ‘organic.’ We did consider applying for funding at some point but since money has never driven the project, nor are their funding bodies that we know of that would cover the actual costs of labor for all involved, we dropped the idea of money. I personally think that NMP wouldn’t be better for it. The sustainability of the journal depends a lot on the efforts and the drive of people—money, and technology for that matter, are second to that. I do all the web and print design myself so that’s labor that’s paid for through the queer network it generates. For me, this is a real pay-off. Same for M.-C. As for contributors, we hope that NMP offers a place to have their work seen, if not written about, in a context that is decidedly independent, mostly Canadian, and hopefully queer. Anyway, you weren’t really asking about money, but I guess it’s a question a lot of people have. We’ve managed to run this journal online, and in print, at minimal costs, paid out of our pocket (and a few donations in the early days). I think labor should be paid for generally, and while I have a hard time articulating why NMP is better off without money, for now, I think it’s because M.-C. and I do the bulk of the labor and we answer to nobody. That kind of freedom is unusual. Queer. Fulfilling. Is there a way in which doing free labor for NMP seems in contradiction with feminism? We ask ourselves this a lot, or we did at the beginning. Zeffiro: I can see how a conversational thread concerning the volunteer base of the journal can lead to a discussion about money or lack thereof. I think your concerns intimate larger issues regarding the devaluation of individual labor power and the cult of the intern. It’s been socially accepted that internships are a means to paid employment, but it’s become increasingly evident that a real job might not materialize at the end. And this phenomenon isn’t isolated to the corporate world. I’ve witnessed this within academic formations. Regardless of the institutional location, it’s problematic when some people are receiving a healthy salary, while others barely receive a note of recognition. But to bring it back to NMP, no one receives monetary restitution. So it isn’t as though you have a cash reserve and that you are choosing where to invest it. Hogan: Money is just one component of value. I think you’re right that doing this kind of volunteer work has traditionally be a promise of paid work down the line, but I do feel that being involved in NMP in any capacity generates a lot of cultural capital. There are limits to 49

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this notion of cultural capital, though—it can just as easily become a way of justifying free labor. I think you need to know the limits of this value and when to cash it in. Let’s return briefly to the community in and around NMP. Given that NMP is reliant on participation from volunteers, we ask ourselves as the editors how to reflect the community and allow its ideas to drive and push NMP’s development—and what the limits of that process might be. As far as what people contribute, we’re very open and we often publish things that push our own boundaries as editors, or that we don’t fully agree with, or that we’re not sure we fully understand. We try to balance that with being accountable and responsible for the overall publication, seeing as one contribution belongs to an issue and invariably influences the overall content of NMP. The material that tends to get published in NMP might not be published elsewhere. It can be raw (Bellissent & Hogan, 2011), a provocation (Nair, 2011), a thesis (Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2009), an experiment (Suerich-Gulick, 2012), blog posts (Bryson, 2009) that would otherwise fade away. It’s sometimes ‘unpolished’ by traditional standards of publication. For academics in particular, this can mean work that is presented as fiction (Kember, 2013), or experiential writing (Cvetkovich, 2013; Gajjala, 2013) that wouldn’t be accepted by more traditional peer-reviewed journals, which also normally have a very long turnaround time. NMP also has works that are presented as video, audio, or any combination of these things. For artists, NMP is a great place to not only showcase their work but to have it reviewed and written about, either by being matched to a curator (Pozniak, 2010; Boyce and Frater, 2013), interviewer (Muholi & Pearson Clarke, 2011), or an NMP editor (Picard and McLeod, 2010). It is very important to write about art and to get interviews with artists to be posted alongside the work itself. For activists, we think NMP is a place to be heard—it’s definitely an alternative to a newspaper or blog, in part because it’s within the context of an arts and culture journal. And it’s when all three spheres come together— academic, artistic, and activist—that an issue is at its best. My goal is to get more francophone content into the journal, and more representation from outside of Montreal and Toronto, our two main hubs—and to stay Canadian.

A transcript: Activating the archive Zeffiro: In your academic work, you have discussed how the growing popularity of online archives, including social networking 50

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sites, unaffiliated online repositories, podcasts and blogs, reinstate the importance of knowledge sharing and point to the limitations of the traditional archive, in its gatekeeping function. Specifically, you have supported your claims with evidence of how the online archive relies on users to participate in its ongoing development: as programmers, curators, fans, hackers, editors, writers, organizers, commenters and commentators, designers, contributors, readers, and so on, but also for the preservation of the projects themselves. And, you’ve argued that participation in a project online often means sustaining it: by generating copies, conversations, and activating a culture and community around a shared reference point, from which a project can be both grounded and expanded. Hogan: Yes. And since presenting that idea (Hogan, 2012) at Console-ing Passions in Boston in 2012 I’ve been wondering: what if we take that idea even further? What if we conceived of the queer archive as embodied in its community. Inhabited. Occupied. What if we developed a theory of the queer archive that was counter to ideals of property, and ownership, and authorship? What would that look like, I wonder … What do you think of that? Zeffiro: So the queer archive, if it’s embodied/inhabited/occupied, suggests that it is ‘alive’: continuous in existence and full of activity. It isn’t something to be watched over or guarded, rather it demands interaction. This archive would be open to mutations and forces. In fact, it would depend on mutabilities. The queer archive, therefore, is unreliable as a linear narrative. It doesn’t have any kind of recognizable beginning point, nor does it prioritize the future. Instead, the queer archive is fragmented. It is always in flux. Are we proposing that the queer archive is a mode of (archival) intervention? Hogan: Yes, an intervention, and a creative act? To think of the archive in this way, then, is to consider the means by which to assemble stories, as a mode of ‘doing’ that records its own trajectory and history. Not to overstate what NMP does, but I think the conversation that it opens is what reveals its potential. It places NMP within the context of various projects—from the Body Politic3 in the 1970s, to Fembot4

3

4

For a timeline of the Body Politic see: www.uwo.ca/pridelib/bodypolitic/bphistory/timeline. htm Fembot Collective: http://fembotcollective.org/ 51

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launched a few years ago, to the new Queer Public Podcast.5 These constitute the queer archive, together. Over time, NMP is likely to take on more value and a different meaning. In the present, NMP is about the network, the people and connections, that it generates. A sense of or an attempt at belonging through shared cultural references. Zeffiro: Does NMP pose challenges to the traditional archive? If so, how is the archive reimagined vis-à-vis NMP? In what ways does this reimagining open towards activist potentialities? And, finally, what constitutes participation for NMP? Hogan: I think NMP challenges the archive in a few ways. First, I think that we’re queers and feminists recording our own culture, ideas, and art. If we don’t do it, nobody else will. Even in GLBT archives, the diversity of content or contributors—women, trans folks, people of color—aren’t documented or participating in the archival project or vision. Would you consider that an activist potentiality? I do. In some ways NMP is even more important because it’s Canadian, and what we do and say is constantly overshadowed by what’s happening in the United States. I also think the online and print-on-demand publication—both of which potentially have no ‘final’ version—challenge the notion of an original. NMP is the first, and I think only, POD journal housed at Library Archives Canada … and I remember having to explain to the staff that there was no print run for NMP, that it had to be ordered direct from the printer and that only the online version contained the video and audio, and so on. Not to be all utopic about the affordances of technology, but it’s proving to allow more people to broadcast, publish, and express themselves. Based on your work dealing with cultural politics and practices of emerging technologies, contemporary media histories, feminist media studies, and transdisciplinary research methods, how do you read NMP’s activist potential? Zeffiro: The common thread stitching my research together has always been one of making the invisible visible—ideologies, power, knowledge—in relation to social, cultural, and political contexts of production. And what stands out for me—in relation to NMP—is the visibility of its communities. I’m thinking here about the many ways in which communities of artists, activists and academics in and around the journal contribute to the production and circulation of

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Queer Public Podcast: http://queerpublic.org/ 52

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a myriad of knowledge formations. And these communities—and the scope of the journal itself—mutate with the evolution of NMP. So, to answer your question: I have always read NMP’s activist potential through its communities, and their modes of storytelling, documentation, speculative thinking—in other words, in the sustenance of a culture. Hogan: Your scholarly work also focuses on the practices and processes of experimental media production and consumption; how/ do you see what NMP is doing as having activist potential? Zeffiro: If I were to examine NMP as a form of experimental media production/consumption, I think I would begin by examining it alongside the tradition of queer-feminist zines. Along with its historical antecedents NMP shares a non-assimilationist ideology, and this pertains not only to the scope of the journal but also to the destabilization of queer and feminist identities in and around the journal. Its culture is always in the making and always in process. Using queer-feminist zines as a comparative measure with NMP is also a way to talk more about its form or medium. When I think of a zine, I think of a photocopied booklet that is cheaply produced and locally distributed. Zines, in other words, are the antithesis to glossy mainstream publications. So, in terms of its medium, zines communicate an oppositional (publishing) culture and politics. With NMP, however, its form isn’t easily read in the same manner. NMP is slick. It looks ‘professional,’ so its oppositional politics are not readily found in its form or chosen medium. But NMP is precisely NMP because of the internet and digital platforms, and tools that allow for the journal to exist as it does. And the key word here is ‘platform.’ NMP is a platform in the way that it facilitates dialogue within and across queer and feminist communities. It is a platform that supports creative contribution. And, for me, creative contribution implies actions—real lived actions—that aim to instigate novel or imaginative outcomes. It is a mode of cultural production that is transformative. Zeffiro: In preparation for this piece, we discussed the ways in which a ‘queer method’ informs both the practices and processes of NMP. How do you define queer method? And how has a queer method activated NMP? Hogan: I think there’s been a concerted effort to think through queer as a verb/action, to steer the conversation away from identity politics. In terms of method, it’s about putting politics—however shifting—into practice, and exposing that process, making it visible. 53

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How do you define queer method? Zeffiro: I definitely agree with you. I don’t think that there is a ‘Queer Method’ as some kind of preordained modus operandi. It has certainly been sedimented within identity politics, and that tradition continues to act as a marker of queerness, but, as you mention, there has been a queerying of queerness—away from an essentialist notion of who belongs—and this has shaped a queer posture that is inhabitable and that can be occupied by doing. It’s definitely, as you say, putting politics into practice. How is NMP queered by the archive? I envision this as a transformative process of sorts that has impact on the configuration of ‘the archive’ itself, but also the ways in which the archive configures the community inhabiting it. In your experiences, what marks the process of being/becoming queered? And how do you view this process as enacted on NMP? Hogan: On the site, we don’t state what NMP is—we have no mandate or vision, or anything like that. We don’t have a tagline or a pitch, beyond stating that we’re a journal of arts and politics. We don’t identify ourselves as explicitly ‘feminist’ or ‘queer’—but it comes through in the creative labor and through the content, obviously. I think that the content is queered by NMP, by virtue of the underlying politics of the journal, and by committing to the project—which runs without funds, based entirely on volunteer work. Queered also acknowledges the way things are simultaneously recorded and documented, if we think of NMP as an archive of sorts. That to participate in NMP means being part of a larger project, a community that propels forward certain politics. Unlike the more popular notion of ‘queering the archive’,’ we can say that NMP plays an important part in shaping the way things are read and recirculated. It also means that the identity and bodies attached to the contributions are queered, thus expanding the notion of who counts, who gets to play, participate, activate, and ultimately queer the archive. References Bellissent, S. and Hogan, M., 2011, Une promenade avec Sophie Bellissent, No More Potlucks, 14, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/une-promenade-avecsophie-bellissent/ Boyce, S. and Frater, S., 2013, Fluid locations: Discussion archives and representation with Sonia Boyce, No More Potlucks, 25, http://nomorepotlucks. org/site/fluid-locations-discussing-archives-and-representation-with-soniaboyce-sally-frater/ 54

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Bryson, M., 2009, Adventures in deconstruction: Field notes from a cancer battle ground where queer life meets precarious life head on, No More Potlucks, 1, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/adventures-in-deconstruction/ Ceraso, S. and Zeffiro, A., 2013, Grad school confidential: In conversation with Steph Ceraso, No More Potlucks, 28, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gradschool-confidential-in-conversation-with-steph-ceraso-andrea-zeffiro/ Cvetkovich, A., 2013, Personal effects: The material archive of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s Domestic Life, No More Potlucks, 25, http://nomorepotlucks. org/site/personal-effects-the-material-archive-of-gertrude-stein-and-alice-btoklass-domestic-life-ann-cvetkovich/ Gajjala, R., 2013, Use/Use less: Affect, labor and non/materiality, No More Potlucks, 29, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/useuse-less-affect-labor-andnonmateriality-radhika-gajjala/ Grosz, E. and Davis, E., 2012, Of worldliness and being otherwise: A conversation with Elizabeth Grosz, No More Potlucks, 23, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/aconversation-with-elizabeth-grosz-heather-davis/ Hogan, M., 2012, No More Potlucks: Media archeology as feminist archival intervention, Console-ing Passions, Suffolk University, July 19-21 Kember, S., 2013, An open letter on the subject of life on Mars, No More Potlucks, 28, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/an-open-letter-on-the-subject-of-life-onmars-sarah-kember/ Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, L., 2009, sweetest thing/tierra sagrada, No More Potlucks, 1, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/sweetest-thingtierra-sagrada/ Morrison, T., 1993, Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the Llterary imagination, Cambridge: Harvard University Press Muholi, Z. and Pearson Clarke, M., 2011, Captured and seen: A conversation with Zanele Muholi, No More Potlucks, 16, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/ captured-and-seen-a-conversation-with-zanele-muholi/ Nair, Y., 2011, Fuck love, No More Potlucks, 18, http://nomorepotlucks.org/ site/fuck-love/ Picard, A. and McLeod, D., 2010, Ally Picard and the Emotional Relay, No More Potlucks, 7, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/ally-picard-and-the-emotionalrelay/ Pozniak, J., 2010, Auto/pathologies: Re-constructing identity through representations of illness, No More Potlucks, 7, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/ autopathographies-re-constructing-identity-through-representations-of-illness/ Suerich-Gulick, F., 2012, Scarred fruit/people, No More Potlucks, 21, http:// nomorepotlucks.org/site/scarred-fruitpeople-frank-suerich-gulick/ Wallace, J. and Hogan, M., 2013, Design crush: Profiling Jacqueline Wallace, No More Potlucks, 27, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/design-crush-profilingjacqueline-wallace-mel-hogan/

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SIX

More than me Nicole Blalock

I. I am not just me; I am all the people who come before me. I am connected to my ancestors, not just through the blood we share, but through the ways of life experienced by each generation. We are connected by the life-altering events of the generations that created shifts in social status, cultural practice, and geographic localities. As a researcher, I am also connected to the scholars who have come before me. I am connected in the sharing and generation of ancient and new knowledges with the communities and people with whom I collaborate in my work. There is a collective knowledge of which I am part in both these roles, separately and in combination. These are the things that are foremost in my mind when I conceptualize and engage in educational research. Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson (2008) uses the term ‘relationality’ to describe this ontological and epistemological stance. As an element of an Indigenous research paradigm, to which Research Justice is intrinsic, cultivating meaningful relationship with the people, the land, and the knowledge, is essential (see also Kovach, 2009). Equally important as relationality to my research approach are centering on Indigenous knowledges and reflexivity (Wilson, 2008; Kovach, 2009). There is a great responsibility upon me, particularly in my position of privilege as a scholar, to be mindful of the lasting impacts my decisions have on the generations.

II. I do not want to write that my mother had a poor childhood or that she was raised in a home troubled by parental conflict. It feels too much like painting an image of hopelessness and victimization to say these things; contrived even. As the youngest of four children, with a decade separating her birth and that of her next youngest sibling, growing up was very different for her than the other children in the family. Although a number of photographs exist depicting a happy family at home with two older siblings and a smile on the faces of my grandparents from when Mother was an infant, after 34 years of marriage, with three grown children, Grandma Merle became a single mother just at the time my own mother was reaching adolescence. This was working-class America. Having grown up in a family

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that changed cities frequently, and with just eight years of formal schooling to back her job prospects, Grandma Merle was interested in helping her family survive. Not many stories were handed down. It is only in the last several years that my auntie has been really active in tracking down our family history, though we have been discovering bits and pieces of it for more than a decade. Although Grandma Merle had only one sister, her mother, Jessie, came from a large family with six children. Her father Milton Baldwin, a laid-off railroad employee, committed suicide in the dining room of their home when she was 12. A news story published about his death reports frequent talk of suicide to family and friends; a signal of his internal struggle. Milton’s parents were George and Mary. We know little about them, except what Auntie was able to learn from conversing with a cousin many years ago and from census records. Mary is sometimes called Margaret and the family secret no one wanted to talk about was that she was Apsáalooke.1 It is perhaps a familiar story to many, though the specific details are different. Driven by a need to survive, families were uprooted to follow employment; they experienced alcohol abuse and mental illness; and tradition became a casualty given the need for self-preservation The effectiveness of eliminating knowledge transmission to the disruption of Indigenous cultures has been known and practiced as policy by the governments of many nation-states for centuries. Manufactured shame of tradition, expansive poverty, and the disruption of families through militaristic residential schools and forced adoptions to non-Indigenous families have all contributed to the forgetting of tribal identities. The consequences have been disastrous for generations of descendants, resulting in the loss of history, language, family connections, and traditions. Obviously, Indigenous nations still exist across the United States. Efforts over the past several decades in particular have resulted in the growth of reclaimed languages and a resurgence of traditions, especially among those raised on or near remaining tribally controlled lands or in strong urban-based communities. But, for a number of families, those like mine, fueled by conditions of low employability in rural areas and the shaming of traditional culture, community ties were left behind as a means of survival. Despite having established a treaty with the U.S. government in 1825, reservation lands for the Crow Nation were not formed until 1868, when Grandma Mary would have been about 30 years old. The original treaty clearly speaks to the damaging nature of U.S. treaty-making policies, which suppressed nations’ rights. While the preamble of the Treaty with the Crow Tribe of 1825 proclaims it is ‘for the purpose of perpetuating the friendship [between the United States and the Crow Tribe],’ the very first article asserts ‘it is admitted by the Crow tribe of Indians, that they reside within the territorial limits of the United States, acknowledge their supremacy, and claim their protection.’ In the same spirit of subjugation, Article II states that the federal government would ‘extend to [the Crow

1

Apsáalooke translates to ‘children of the large-beaked bird,’ later misinterpreted by colonizers to mean Crow. 58

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Tribe], from time to time, such benefits and acts of kindness as may be convenient.’ Although nearly 75% of currently enrolled members live near these lands, it is easy to imagine the effects on the Nation’s people of being turned into a domestic dependent nation, even just in the years between treaty making and re-establishing (some) land rights. According to census records in 1880, Mary was born in New York before moving to Michigan with George. Her parents’ birthplaces are both listed as Massachusetts. Without family oral traditions or other official records, we might surmise that her family left their traditional territory much earlier, or, in the face of discrimination, she, or her husband, gave the census takers false information.

III. Breaking out of the framework academic institutions are built upon is an essential task for the future of Indigenous peoples. The reclaiming of our histories, storytelling, and sharing of testimonials are just a few examples of how Indigenous knowledge may transform the academy (Smith, 1999; Wilson, 2004). In positioning our Indigenous selves as the place from which our academic selves spring forth, traditional ways of knowledge production and sharing can be integrated into our research practices. Such positionality, and indeed the very act of telling the story of one’s position, has been discussed as one of the most essential elements of an Indigenous research praxis (Absolon and Willett, 2005). Despite this, there is virtually no discussion in academic literature of how scholars with more ambiguous Indigenous identities and complicated family narratives around membership in Indigenous communities perform their positions (Blalock, 2013). I am of mixed heritage. On my mother’s side, I am a descendant of the Apsáalooke as well as part of a line of more recently immigrated Danish families. We are also part of the direct lineage of an English woman hanged as a witch decades before the Salem witch trials. On my father’s side, I am descended from the Tsalagi2 and Chickasaw. We have other European roots mixed in, which are from unknown origin, due to a sparse oral history and document trail. The vision that I hold for myself as a mixed-heritage woman, and as an educational scholar, is to contribute to the decolonization of the Indigenous nations.

IV. I recognize there is a long and damaging history of research on Indigenous peoples. I am both mindful of this and a product of the policies and practices designed to interrupt our very existence. Yet, I was still shocked by the difficulty of reclaiming my own history. While volunteering as a tutor at Chemawa Indian School, I witnessed glinting eyes and accepted the chuckles of students joking about the

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More commonly known as the Cherokee Nation. 59

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Cherokee princess with her white skin. As a graduate student, I felt the sting of rejection by Indigenous scholars. The first (and only) time that I built up the courage to identify my heritage along with my name in a call for participation in my research, a scholar questioned my legitimacy despite my never claiming to be a tribal member. How can I be anything other than myself? I can share my story, but I cannot transform myself into another’s model of a ‘real’ Indian. And yet, here I am, sharing with you all our story. Communities have been so fractured by the colonial membership frameworks that authenticity has become a highly contested space. The damage of these essentialist definitions comes in being mediated by colonizing forces—it is, as defined by Grande (2004), a crisis of power. This crisis, is constituted of the destructive membership policies (instituted by the nation-state) restricting tribes’ rights to name themselves and shape their communities in whatever way they choose. I have appreciated the times and places when colleagues have given me the space to claim my identity as my own. As I continue to develop my scholarship, I find this happens more. Moving out of the somewhat powerless, though privileged, space of graduate student to that of a scholar designing research for the benefit of communities, that work has begun to intertwine with the image that others see. Positioning oneself as an Indigenous researcher is not so straightforward as naming clans and communities for those whose families have been disconnected. I must learn to be strong in my own self in order to balance the conflicting external validations and disvalidations that have, in the past, and likely will in the future be offered by colleagues and communities. When I approach communities and individuals about developing research partnerships, positionality constantly comes into the discussion. While my desire to contribute to decolonizing knowledge and knowledge transmission in Indigenous communities is rooted in my authentic desire for communities to continue to become less fragmented from one another, this means also accepting that I may never be recognized as a member of those communities; that my own voice was not raised from within a traditional Indigenous knowledge system. While I work to develop myself as an ally to Indigenous educational communities, I may at times also be excluded on account of position. Practicing Indigenous methodology as an educational scholar in a state with nearly two dozen different nations, some of which cross geo-political boundaries into other states, illuminates the challenges created by the loss of being thought of as distinct nations in the nation-state consciousness. For research situated within a single Indigenous nation, methodologies arising from that nation’s own knowledge structure can be engaged. But, where inquiry is situated in a context that nations, such as those in urban centers, appropriate structuring becomes more complex, given that Indigenous knowledges are exclusive to cultures and locales (Dei, Hall and Rosenberg, 2000). These issues compound when I take my own positionality as a mixed-heritage woman into account. The same decolonizing frameworks that are suited for pushing back against standard research frames and 60

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the individualism of the academy, are not designed in a way that clearly includes someone reclaiming themselves from a family that has such blended heritage. I am here. I exist. My path into educational research with Indigenous communities has been complicated by political nature of my position, but it is at the same time formed and informed by my family’s story. Like hooks (1990), my voice comes from a (little discussed) margin—one created by the colonized space that makes up Indigenous identity and membership.

V. Alice Lake is my tenth great-grandmother. I am descended from David, her third and youngest child to survive to adulthood. Research by other descendants of hers has not yet uncovered any record of her trial or even her life, but rather the aftermath of her execution. Once she was put to death, her husband fled, leaving her four living children without guardians. The story of her execution as a witch, which took place nearly 40 years before the witch trials in Salem, is grim. Poor immigrants from England, Alice and her husband Henry lived in Dorchester, Massachusetts, with their five children until the day that the youngest, less than a year out of the womb, died of unknown causes. It is written that Alice harbored guilt in the death of her infant due to an attempt to abort the (presumably) first child she carried. In his A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft, the Reverend John Hale wrote of Alice’s execution, And she utterly denyed [sic] her guilt of Witchcraft: yet justified God for bringing her to that punishment: for she had when a single woman played the harlot, and being with Child used means to destroy the fruit of her body to conceal her sin and shame, and although she did not effect it, yet she was a Murderer in the sight of God for her endeavours, and shewed [sic] great penitency for that sin; but owned nothing of the crime laid to her charge. This is one explanation for her claim to seeing the infant even after its death, although the oral traditions of cultures worldwide have ghosts—those that haunt and those that simply need their loved ones to help them in their journey. Each story uncovered of my ancestors leads me to a deeper understanding of the impact of cultural norms on individuals and reminds me of the very different histories of each of my ancestral lineages.

VI. Although reclaiming will be a lifelong process, much of my family’s story is lost. I am the sixth generation from Grandma Mary, and her parents, my seventhgeneration ancestors. Their lives, and the decisions they made, have shaped our family just as much as my great-grandparents’ decision to emigrate from Denmark and that of my paternal great-grandmother moving from the south to California with my grandfather as a young boy after the death of her husband. 61

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I believe in the power of education and the sustaining of Indigenous knowledges to contribute to the strength of other families. Leveraging my position and my education for these purposes aligns with the need to disrupt colonial systems that continue to negatively impact Indigenous nations today. Research Justice is my ceremonial praxis. References Absolon, K. and Willett, C., 2005, Putting ourselves forward: Location in Aboriginal research, in L. Brown and S. Strega (eds.) Research as resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and anti-oppressive approaches, Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 97–126 Blalock, N., 2013, Federal unenrollment impacts on scholar careers: A study on Indigenous identity and membership in academia, International Journal of Diverse Identities, A Section of the International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations, 12, 4, 1–11 Dei, G.S., Hall, B. and Rosenberg, D., 2000, Situating Indigenous knowledges: Definitions and boundaries, in G.S. Dei, L.B. Hall and G.D. Rosenberg (eds.) Indigenous knowledges in global contexts: Multiple reading of our world, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 19–20 Grande, S., 2004, Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield hooks, b., 1990, Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics, Boston, MA: South End Press Kovach, M., 2009 Indigenous methodologies: Characteristics, conversations, and contexts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press Smith, L.T., 1999, Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples, London and New York: Zed Books Wilson, A.C., 2004, Reclaiming our humanity: Decolonization and the recovery of Indigenous knowledge, in D.A. Mihesuah and A.C. Wilson (eds.) Indigenizing the academy: Transforming scholarship and empowering communities, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 69–87 Wilson, S., 2008, Research is ceremony, Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing Useful resources and websites on Research Justice Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society: http://decolonization. wordpress.com/ National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network: www.nirakn.edu.au/ Ethnos Project: www.ethnosproject.org/

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Part Two Research Justice: Strategies for community mobilization In their chapter, ‘The socio-psychological stress of “justice denied”: the Alan Crotzer story,’ co-authors Akeem Ray and Phyllis Gray not only examine strategies for community mobilization and self-awareness using Research Justice as a tool, but also explore how Alan Crotzer’s wrongful conviction has touched the lives of many, including students in Florida. In fact, his story and speeches have raised the consciousness of college students who have innovatively taken it upon themselves to intervene in his miscarriage of justice by becoming social change agents in the community. Through a required class project, students actively worked to sponsor educational forums and fundraisers to assist the Innocence Project of Florida in their work with the wrongfully convicted, and to raise the awareness of others in the community who may have taken miscarriages of justice for granted. A major feature of the class was to include individuals from the community who are instrumental in bringing a real-life perspective to the course. Hence, Mr. Alan Crotzer was a guest speaker in the class each semester. One semester, the class project included a forum held at the university’s Developmental Research School, which includes students from elementary to high school. During a different semester, a forum was held on the university’s main campus and was open to the public. Mr. Alan Crotzer was the keynote speaker at both forums. At the second forum, the students were more adamant about moving beyond just a forum, and wanted to do more about the cause of wrongful convictions. Therefore, as a part of their mission to contribute more, and thus become emergent leaders in this area, they also added a fundraising component in which they conducted a raffle and donated the proceeds to the Innocence Project of Florida. The class project on wrongful convictions was not only conducted for a grade, but allowed the students to become extremely proactive in educating others and making them aware of this unfortunate encounter with the American criminal justice system. Many of the students developed a keen interest in wrongful convictions and hoped to be a part of the solution, to help ensure that others do not fall prey to such an unfortunate stint with ‘justice denied.’ Through this project, Ray and Gray are able to demonstrate the transformative aspects of community mobilization. Students, as not only researchers but as social justice advocates, became more aware of public policies impacting incarceration rates and wrongful convictions. Learning to become a researcher in a collective context, as was done with Florida students, creates the conditions for others to form a ceremonial context where mutual responsibility for community well-being is placed at the center of any research agenda. What follows in their chapter is a story of deep community engagement, mobilization, and transformation of a deeply unjust prison system. 63

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A common theme amongst several chapters in this collection is the impact of the prison system on both the incarcerated as well as the formerly incarcerated. Chapters by Martin, Ray and Gray focus on men while Lopez-Garza explores the lives of women, an often understudied area of research and public policy in the United States. Marta López-Garza’s contribution on formerly incarcerated women, builds upon the other chapters in this section on strategies for community mobilization by examining the connections between readers, researchers, and community members. Specifically, she examines the ways in which women’s lives are transformed when they have been released from prison. Like the other authors in this section, López-Garza presents accounts of the ‘marginalized’ and their resolve to create counter-narratives and organize on their own behalf. At the heart of her research are formerly incarcerated women of diverse ethnicities, and their attempts to rebuild their lives. She carefully examines the entities that support their efforts to reunite with family and reintegrate back into society, as well as the barriers that impede such efforts. López-Garza also discusses the women who are activists and the issues important to them. She concludes with an analysis of the ‘larger’ problems facing these women and the communities they come from, by utilizing a critique of current policies and attitudes toward the formerly incarcerated. Much like the work of Akeem Ray and Phyllis Gray in Chapter Seven, LópezGarza demonstrates how community mobilization strategies are increasingly important in the context of transforming the criminal ‘justice’ system. Throughout the chapter, the author makes use of Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness (CCRR) by introducing a scarcely known subject and set of stories primarily from the voices and perspectives of the women themselves as they intimately detail the challenges they encounter as they attempt to rebuild their lives upon release from prison. As the chapter reveals, the majority of formerly incarcerated women do not themselves become activists or researchers, but—for those who do—their reasons are closely linked to their purpose and meaning in life. They see transformative justice as intricately linked to their everyday needs and as an important strategy for community mobilization to end discriminatory policies against the formerly incarcerated. The themes in this volume explore topics and societal issues that are often neglected by politicians and policymakers. As scientists, environmentalists and others caution us about global warming, natural disasters are on the rise and research on the disproportionate impact of natural disasters on marginalized communities is still an emerging area that has gained only minor attention since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Louisiana in 2005. In Chapter Nine, Haruki Eda proposes a new term, disaster justice, to underscore the importance of strategies for community mobilization and grassroots organizing in the face of natural disasters and the unequal distribution of resources during such events. Rooted in the framework of Research Justice, Eda provides a compelling history of the need for shifts in policies related to disaster preparedness, 64

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and in deconstructing racist, nationalist propaganda that treats minority ethnic groups in Japan as second-class citizens and scapegoats during times of national disaster. Eda, in similar fashion to the other contributors to this section, offers alternative, community-based approaches for addressing inequities in public policy. This chapter, as with the others in this section of the anthology, not only discusses the social problems associated with disaster nationalism, but the author painstakingly provides detailed, real-life examples of how community mobilization strategies have been successful in meeting the needs of those most underserved during disasters. Eda also provides tangible steps for transformational justice and policy reform. Mobilization strategies often require group consensus, and this chapter provides a roadmap for multi-organizational research strategies that cut across potential disagreements to meet the needs of communities based on what they themselves articulate as being necessary to produce radical change through a collective research/organizing effort. Collective research approaches continue to be marginalized because the voices of those being studied are almost always filtered through the lens of academics. Despite the argument that researchers are ‘protecting’ participants by keeping their identities confidential this is also another mechanism for controlling and erasing the expertise of community members who best know the ways to produce meaningful policy change within their communities. This issue of participation is no more important than in the area of immigration reform where outsiders often determine the causes and effects of undocumented immigration. The solution to co-existence as more and more people move across socially constructed borders is to place the undocumented at the center of their own stories so mainstream society will have a better understanding of how reform should take place. In Chapter Ten co-authors, Imelda Plascencia, Mayra Yoana Jaimes Pena, and Alma Leyva assert the importance of collective approaches to research. According to the co-authors, ‘As an undocumented community we are constantly subjects of research. Though we are the subjects, we are not given the space to be part of the development, execution, or analysis of research. Even without our input, research informs policies that have a significant impact on the lives of our community. As experts of the needs of our communities, it is vital that we lead the research and organizing efforts that will be impacting our lives.’ Their chapter, dealing primarily with immigration status and Research Justice, has been included in this part of the book because it models the importance of Research Justice in mobilizing the community through the Healthy California Survey Project. As the undocumented community directly impacted by the lack of health access, it is important that the authors (and community members like them) be the ones deciding which issues are important and developing the tools needed to mobilize. The co-authors also suggest that the Healthy California Survey Project provides an example of how research developed and led by immigrant youth can positively impact the community on both a policy level and a grassroots level. Strongly linked by the other themes in this section (such as disaster justice by Haruki Eda), Plascencia, Jaimes Pena, and Leyva persuasively demonstrate the need for more 65

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inclusive, ceremonial research responsiveness measures when it comes to health justice among undocumented populations in the United States. Throughout their chapter they argue that, for the people who are undocumented, health is seen as a luxury rather than a right, which has made it difficult to mobilize the community. Through the Healthy California Survey project we were able to gather data on the reality of healthcare access for undocumented communities. Just as importantly, we were able to create visibility around health by having those directly affected collect data. Participating in the research process as researchers and analysts helped develop an understanding of the injustice we face when it comes to healthcare, and created a sense of urgency. In order to mobilize community it was important for the team not just to collect data, but also provide resources that the community expressed a need for, such as CIRCLES. By leading a holistic and inclusive approach to research, we were able not only to shed light on an issue and mobilize around it, but also use the data to create resources and push for policies that are necessary for the community. Economic and cultural capital are resources being developed within indigenous communities and among people of color on a global scale. Indigenous and community of color organizations and cooperatives have existed for decades and as new issues emerge other areas of life are being examined from a cooperative framework. Birthing justice within African American communities for example is an under explored topic of social inquiry in the United States. Julia Chinyere Oparah, Fatimah Salahuddin, Ronnesha Cato, Linda Jones, Talita Oseguera, and Shanelle Matthews, in Chapter Eleven, build upon the Research Justice framework by adding birthing justice to the areas within this section on community mobilization. In a similar vein as Eda, with disaster justice and Leyva, Plascencia, and Jaimes Pena with health justice, the co-authors demonstrate the ways in which collective and sacred space can build opportunities for restorative justice, not only in terms of methodologies for social change, but in envisioning practical strategies for community mobilization and policy reform at local community levels. Birthing justice, as an extension of health and environmental justice, requires not individual action but requires solidarity across groups. The co-authors of this chapter assert in compelling fashion how mainstream health facilities and hospitals are so embedded within the medical industrial complex that new ways of documenting the stories and experiences of women of color are central to understanding the power of Research Justice with marginalized communities. Using oral history, participant observation, and CCRR, Oparah, Salahuddin, Cato, Jones, Oseguera, and Matthews provide a methodological roadmap for moving from what they term medical apartheid to Research Justice. Their chapter is framed by looking at the historical scientific abuses against African American women, particularly in the fields of gynecology and obstetrics, which they argue, ‘aimed to enhance the survival rates and successful birth outcomes of white birthing women, depended on physicians’ access to black women’s bodies and impunity for the violence they inflicted in the name of science.’ By drawing a distinction between the differential treatment of black and white bodies, the 66

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co-authors of this groundbreaking, empirical chapter on birthing justice bring to light the contemporary medical abuses and disparities within medical research and women’s health. Many of the women from the Black Women’s Birthing Justice (BWBJ) group did not feel that their stories were important, but by sharing their stories, like the stories of the undocumented youth in Chapter Ten and the minority ethnic groups in Chapter Nine, they collectively demonstrate the power of communities telling their own stories, conducting their own research, and creating their own sacred spaces of health promotion and community restoration/self-determination. The authors conclude the chapter by highlighting the power of Research Justice as a tool for community mobilization and radical love. They write, ‘Research Justice is an essential tool for activists and scholars in the reproductive justice movement. Reproductive justice advocates demand that women, transgender, and gender non-conforming people own the social, political, and economic power to make healthy, informed decisions about sexuality, pregnancy, and parenting. Central to reproductive justice is the understanding that making healthy decisions for ourselves is predicated on access to resources, including information. By producing community-driven knowledge rooted in a collective process, we dismantle our over-reliance on outside “experts” and tap in to our own capacities to solve the problems we face.’ Chapter Twelve, ‘Actos del corazón (acts of the heart): Las sabias (wise ones), bridging the digital divide, and redefining historical preservation,’ builds upon the groundbreaking theory of ‘bridging’ by Chicana feminist, Gloria Anzaldúa, as a methodology for reconceiving the ‘digital divide’ to engender more inclusive digital archives of space, which, in turn, may be used to transform the hierarchical and neo-colonial processes and frameworks of historic preservation and urban planning more generally. To do so, Merla-Watson draws on the collective insights generated by an advisory board entitled the ‘Corazones del West Side’—comprising mainly elders or self-identified sabia/os (‘wise ones’)—during an ongoing oral and fotohistoria (photo-history) project facilitated by the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. By centering the wisdom, expert knowledge, and collective research/testimony skills of elders within the Mexican American and Chicana/o community of San Antonio, Merla-Watson is able to use oral histories to document the ways in which urban revitalization and ‘renewal’ often lead to forms of ethnic erasure and gentrification. Her goal is to redefine the ways in which we think about community revitalization and historical preservation with communities of color. By centering Research Justice as an act of decolonization of traditional western methodological practice, the author is able to demonstrate the importance of collective testimonies and internal community knowledge as a best practice for social change within marginalized populations. Similar to the arguments presented in Chapter Five by Zeffiro and Hogan, and those in Chapters Eight, Ten, and Eleven, a solid case is made for both self-determination and community mobilization on the basis of identifying shared commitments to re-envisioning alternative methodologies to address issues of inequality. Common threads tying together the chapters in Part Two are the need for research methods that focus on 67

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collective action, centering sacred/communal space, and a highlighted emphasis on community members as essential experts. Connecting bridging (collective, cross-generation, and intersectional identity-based organizing) to Research Justice highlights the importance of self-determination and knowledge construction as well as the other components of Research Justice–community mobilization and socially transformative policy reform.

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SEVEN

The socio-psychological stress of ‘justice denied’: Alan Crotzer’s story Akeem T. Ray and Phyllis A. Gray

Alan Crotzer, a young black male, was convicted of a crime that he did not commit in Tampa, Florida, in 1981. Based on eyewitness misidentification and improper forensics, he was charged and convicted of sexual battery, kidnapping, burglary, aggravated assault, robbery, and attempted robbery. He served 24.5 years in a Florida prison on an original sentence of 130 years. On January 23, 2006, Crotzer was exonerated and compensated $1.25 million from the state of Florida (innocenceproject.org). Currently, he resides in Florida’s capital city, Tallahassee, is enrolled in a community college, and speaks at local universities, schools, and other areas of town and the state. Crotzer uses his unfortunate experience to tell his unimaginable ordeal and nightmare of being wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit. Through his oral historical account of that experience, he raises awareness and educates others on wrongful convictions; specifically how it could happen to anyone at any time. As a young black male in an urban city, his ordeal involved racism and other human rights violations at many different levels. He remains a target of law enforcement and has had other stints (run-ins) with the law since his release from prison in 2006. Despite this, he remains focused and is self-determined to become truly ‘free.’ In Florida, Alan Crotzer is perceived as the ‘poster child’ for the Innocence Project of Florida, and as a spokesperson for wrongful convictions. His speeches have raised the consciousness of college students who have innovatively taken it upon themselves, through a class project, to intervene by becoming change agents. They have actively worked to sponsor educational forums and fundraisers to assist the Innocence Project of Florida. Thus, this chapter chronicles not only how Alan Crotzer’s case has transformed the life of an innocent man, but also how it has enlightened the awareness of others, who may have taken this type of miscarriage of justice for granted. It will also describe how a new set of emerging criminal justice leaders have now created a sense of urgency to advocate for ‘justice denied’ due to wrongful convictions in the American criminal justice system. This chapter also shares Mr. Crotzer’s story, in his own words, and brings to the forefront this serious flaw in the criminal justice system.

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The Alan Crotzer criminal case Tampa, located on the west coast of central Florida, is one of the state’s best and most vibrant cities, especially in the summertime. Tourists have dream vacations there and locals enjoy the pleasure of a natural dream vacation, which comes with the good fortune of living in the city or in the area. Unfortunately, on July 8, 1981, this ‘dream’ land became a nightmare spot for Alan Crotzer, who was wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit. At such a young age (20), his life was turned upside down and he would spend nearly 25 years in prison, most of his young adult life, before justice was finally granted to him through DNA testing, which resulted in his exoneration on January 23, 2006 (innocenceproject.org). Alan Crotzer was wrongly convicted of sexual battery, kidnapping, burglary, aggravated assault, robbery, and attempted robbery when he was misidentified as one of the co-defendants with two other black males, Douglas James and Corlenzo James, for a crime that involved a forced home invasion where one of the assailants had a shotgun. The five white people within the home were robbed and two of the victims, a 38-year-old female and a 12-year-old female, were forced in to the trunk of the assailants’ car, taken to a dark, wooded area of town and raped by two of the assailants. However, according to the victims, the third assailant did not participate in the rapes. After the rapes, the assailants tied the victims to trees and left. The victims freed themselves, sought help from a nearby house and called the police. Later, both victims were given rape kits at a hospital. Simultaneously, the remaining robbery victims at the original crime scene, the house, were able to untie themselves, and two of them got the license plate number from the assailants’ Buick. They attempted to follow the car but could not keep up with it, so they then called the police (innocenceproject.org). When the assailants’ car license plate number was run, the Tampa police discovered that it was registered to an owner from St. Petersburg, Florida, which is very close to Tampa. Then the St. Petersburg police gathered a group of photographs, which included the car’s owner, and showed them to the hospitalized raped victims, of which neither could make an identification of the assailants. Even though two of the robbery victims were not positive of the owner’s identification, they still made identifications of the assailants. The next day, July 9, 1981, more photographs were gathered, which not only included the car’s owner, but also Douglas James and Alan Crotzer. This time, when shown to the rape victims, the adult female made a positive identification of Douglas James and Alan Crotzer, and one of the robbery victims also identified Douglas James. A noteworthy fact discovered by police was that the owner of the car was incarcerated on the day of the crime and that Douglas James had borrowed his car. On July 10, 1981, Douglas James’ brother, Corlenzo James, was added to the photographic line-up and shown to the victims. This time, both rape victims and one of the robbery victims identified Corlenzo James as the third assailant. Unfortunately, Alan Crotzer was identified as the one with the gun who had raped both victims (innocenceproject.org). 70

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The victims’ misidentification of Alan Crotzer as the main assailant was only the beginning of the ‘justice denied’ stress on him in the Florida criminal justice system. As his case went deeper into the process, his wrongful conviction became more certain when the biological evidence from the rape kit was tested by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE). Unfortunately, flawed testimony from an FDLE crime evidence lab analyst failed to explain the full ramifications of the evidence. For example, the analyst testifying on the results of the rape kits stated that semen was found on the adult rape victim’s vaginal swabs and clothing, including her underwear. Further, it was stated that the blood group markers of semen matched the markers of both Alan Crotzer and the victim. However, what was not stated or made clear is that, when testing evidence from a mixed sample stain of semen and vaginal secretions from both the offender and the victim, and the results from testing do not detect blood group substance or enzymes that do not belong to the victim, then no possible semen donor can be excluded due to the fact that the victim’s blood group markers could be hiding or masking the offender’s blood group markers. Therefore, given those facts, the jury was misled and should have been told that 100% of the male population (all of them) could be included and, most importantly, no male could be excluded from the analysis (innocenceproject.org). ‘Justice denied’ stress continued to be evident as Alan Crotzer went to trial and was framed for a crime he did not commit. The circumstances were becoming worse as the trial got under way, yet Crotzer held out and kept stating that he was not guilty of the crimes he was wrongly accused of committing. At a separate trial, Corlenzo James pled guilty to both robbery and burglary charges. Unfortunately, Douglas James and Alan Crotzer were tried together, although Alan tried to have a separate trial from Douglas, who unsuccessfully represented himself. Douglas stated that the adult victim consented to the sexual act, while Crotzer continued to plead that he was never there, had never participated in the crime, and had no knowledge of any of the crimes. Crotzer even stated that he was with his girlfriend, a friend, and members of his girlfriend’s family on the night of the crime. Nonetheless, horrifically, all five crime victims identified Crotzer during the trial as the perpetrator, and more specifically as the assailant with the shotgun, who raped both victims. Sadly, on April 22, 1982, in a stressful, incredible case of miscarriage of justice, based on misidentifications and faulty crime lab evidence, Alan Crotzer was wrongly convicted of sexual battery, kidnapping, aggravated assault, burglary, robbery, and attempted robbery, and sentenced to 130 years in prison (innocenceproject.org). Although justice was denied to him in the beginning, Crotzer never gave up on proclaiming his innocence. Then, advancements in forensic science provided a second chance at freedom for Crotzer, when in 2003 he was finally given access to the FDLE evidence from his trial, which had been stored in a lab for many years. Fortunately, the prosecutors agreed that the re-examination of the evidence, which consisted of six slides of spermatozoa, should undergo three rounds of DNA testing at three different labs. Luckily, it was the third test, performed by 71

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Forensic Science Associates, which confirmed that Alan Crotzer could not have been the person that raped the female victims. In fact, the spermatozoa from the rape kit slide of the adult female victim, was that of an unknown male. It was further concluded that it could not have come from Crotzer, the James brothers or the woman’s husband. Moreover, Douglas James even admitted that he, his brother, and a childhood friend, and not Crotzer, committed the crime. They did not even know Crotzer before the trial. Amazingly on January 23, 2006, after nearly 25 years, Crotzer’s wrongful conviction was overturned and he was released from prison for a crime he had said from the beginning he did not commit. Joining him as he walked out of the courthouse were family members and his legal team: David Menschel, Sam Roberts, Martin McClain, and Jenny Greenberg of the Florida Innocence Initiative (innocenceproject.org).

Alan Crotzer’s story … in his own words On October 7, 2013, Mr. Alan Crotzer was telephone interviewed about the sociopsychological stress of his wrongful conviction before, during, and after his incarceration. He discussed this miscarriage of justice ‘in his own words’, which are reported below. 1. Please describe your childhood and your life before the wrongful conviction (birthplace, siblings, family life, friends, school, disposition, general description of life, etc.). Okay, well I was an average urban youth raised by a single-parent mom and no dad in the picture. With my older brother who got murdered at the age of 19 in the projects over there where they call it ‘sunrise,’ and was killed by mistaken identity by the way. And with my sister who was seven years older than me. My mom was a maid, a housekeeper, a bar tender or whatever she had to do to take care of her kids. At 10 years old I was already committing crimes but not understanding crime.

2. Do you believe in God? Do you pray? Yes I definitely do believe in God and yes I do pray. I never gave up on God and God never gave up on me.

3. What were your future plans before the charge? There were two things I had in mind. The first thing was to be a heavy equipment operator. I also wanted to be a coastguard and I wanted to be a part of that.

4. Did you have any prior contact with the criminal or juvenile justice system? I was arrested at 10 for breaking and entering, and taken to the juvenile center, where they didn’t even tell my parents where I was for three days. Talked to me so nasty and so despicably that from then on I always had a problem with authority. I was black and they 72

Alan Crotzer’s story were all Caucasian and they were always abrasive and very abusive to me as a young man who was just asking for a toothbrush. After that I had a problem with authority figures. At 15 I had a period where I wasn’t dealing with law enforcement, because I noticed girls. I was also in state school for boys and spent several months in for that. It was for kids who were there for violence, criminal mischief, and assaulting police officers. Every Friday, they would pick me up and lock us up until Monday. A lot of times my mom didn’t know where I was and I thought this was wrong. After that I was charged with robbing a convenience store. A snatch and grab. Either I would go in and my friend would drive us away or vice versa. But I was convicted and served 29 months in jail and paroled for seven months and was out for 31 days and was arrested and wrongly convicted for three counts of armed robbery, one count for attempted robbery, two counts of kidnapping, two counts of rape, one count of assault with a deadly weapon, and one count of burglary.

5. How did you feel when you were arrested for a crime you did not commit? Did you think it was a mistake that would be settled since you knew you were not guilty? I was only 20 years old, and I felt that once everybody saw me and the victims saw me and all of that, that they would tell everyone that I didn’t do it and that was that.

6. How did you feel when it seemed that no one was going to believe you as time went on and you were processed deeper into the system? It felt horrible, like no one cared to listen.

7. Before the verdict was stated, did you think you were going to be convicted? If so, had you prepared mentally for such a verdict? I really thought that it wouldn’t get that far, but I really couldn’t prepare for something like this.

8. What were you thinking as the trial went on and they were trying to convict you for a crime that you knew you did not commit? How did it feel to be lied on and no one seemed to believe you for such a horrible crime? It felt horrible, like they just wanted to find and put away anybody.

9. When you heard the verdict, ‘guilty,’ what was the first thing that went through your head and what impact did this have on you mentally? I didn’t believe. I honestly didn’t believe it.

10. When you were given the sentence of 130 years, how did you mentally come to grips with that much time for a crime you did not commit? I didn’t, I still couldn’t believe it. 73

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11. Did you feel like your life had ended? Yes I did.

12. What was the first night in prison like, after you were handed that 130-year sentence for a crime you did not commit? It was horrible.

13. What was your mental state upon realizing this wrongful conviction was a reality for you? I was hurt and confused.

14. Did you ever feel depressed? Yes, yes I did.

15. Did you have thoughts of suicide? Homicide? No, I didn’t because I had God on my side, and I just didn’t have it in me to cause harm to someone else.

16. Were you angry or enraged? Neither, I was mostly upset and still in disbelief.

17. What other emotions did you have? Just confused, hurt, mad.

18. When did you realize that prison was your reality and what was that like? That day when they booked me and read the verdict. It was horrible, nothing like it before.

19. How did you cope with the day-to-day events of this horrific travesty? I stayed close to God and prayed and just kept going.

20. What was a typical day like for you? Like being a robot, same routine every day, always the same.

21. Did you ever give up? No, I never did. I always had God by my side.

22. Did you think you would ever be free again? Not until those guys decided to reach out to me.

23. Did you ever accept your miscarriage of justice or did you believe deep within your soul that one day you would be free? I thought that I was gonna stay in jail for ever, until those two guys reached out to me.

24. What was the impact on your family? It weighed heavily on my mom and she couldn’t handle it and she passed away while I was in jail.

25. What milestones did you miss while in prison that had the greatest impact on you? I missed being a father, and a family to my daughter. Ya know I’m 52 and she’s 26.

26. Did you pray in prison? Yes I did.

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27. After serving nearly 25 years, who or what caused attention on your potential innocence? Let me tell you what caused that, my lawyers David Mitchell and Sam Roberts, and Anna Cruz.

28. How did you feel when you realized that others finally started to believe in your innocence? I felt like there was hope, and relieved that somebody was listening.

29. Were you hopeful that you might have a second chance at freedom? Right, almost didn’t feel real.

30. What was ‘waiting for answers’ like for you? You know, even though they said they were gonna let me go, I was still not convinced until I actually walked out of there.

31. Was the real perpetrator caught? Yes, one was. They both were tracked down by running the plates on the vehicle. But the other, I don’t know. I hope he finds God and tells the truth.

32. Then one day, you were told that you would be exonerated … How did you feel on the day you were told that you were exonerated? I didn’t believe it. But when it happened I felt like I was on top of the world.

33. Who do you thank most for setting you free? I thank God off top, and these two young white Jewish guys, because they didn’t have to help me, David and Sam.

34. How did your family react to this wrongful conviction being overturned? I mean, I really didn’t have a lot of family to come back to. My mom passed away while I was in prison and that’s all I really had.

35. How did you prepare mentally for re-entry and freedom? I mean how could I? I mean I couldn’t even believe it was goanna happen.

36. What was the first thing you wanted to do? I wanted a burger, I wanted a Coke, I wanted to go to McDonald’s.

37. How did it feel the first day out? It felt good but I was just overwhelmed.

38. What was the first thing you did? We went to Starbucks. And I had no idea what Starbucks was, and I wasn’t about to let these people pay $7 for one cup of coffee for me.Then we went to McDonald’s. I bought a Big Mac, a quarter pounder, a fish filet, and a apple pie.

39. Was it hard readjusting to being free again? Yeah, it was so many new technologies and ways to do stuff. 75

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40. Did you have a hard time catching up to the technology and other societal changes? Yeah, I had a job working as a janitor at St. Anthony’s hospital and the faucets in the bathrooms I couldn’t turn them on and I felt embarrassed and ashamed. Then I had to have Jacob to show me how to use them and they told me it was electronic and had a sensor. And soon as I learned to use it I started to use all of them and had all the water in the bathroom running.

41. How did you pick up the pieces of your life? Slowly and I’m still picking them up, through school and other things.

42. Are you angry? Do you feel ‘free?’ No I’m not angry but even though I’m free I still feel like the system still wants to put me down.

43. How often do you think about this horrific ordeal? Every day.

44. After exoneration, did you have other stints with the criminal justice system? Yes and I was pulled over and lied to, police officer talking about this is a routine random check and they harassed me and said that my plates were covered and that was illegal when they weren’t.

45. Do you believe that racism and social class played a role in your conviction and in your subsequent treatment by law enforcement officials? Yes I really do, oh yeah no doubt. I didn’t have a jury of my peers. There was nothing black in the courthouse.They were just looking for someone to pin it on.

46. Do you believe in the U.S. criminal justice system? Is it fair? It definitely isn’t fair. And it’s so easy to get caught up.

47. What advice would you give to others? Don’t be scared.They want you to be scared. Load that gun you got in between your shoulders and fire away.

48. What are you doing to tell your story and to make others aware of wrongful convictions? Going and speaking in colleges and other programs.

49. What are your future plans? What else would you like to add? Finish school and get my education.

50. What is the one word that could describe your ordeal for a crime you did not commit? Dilemma.

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New emergent leaders: Students as change agents Alan Crotzer’s wrongful conviction has touched the lives and feelings of many, including students in Florida. In fact, his story and speeches have raised the consciousness of college students who have innovatively taken it upon themselves to intervene in this miscarriage of justice by becoming change agents. Through a required class project, they have actively worked to sponsor educational forums and fundraisers to assist the Innocence Project of Florida in their work with the wrongfully convicted, and to raise the awareness of others who may have taken this type of miscarriage of justice for granted. While students have been working on miscarriage of justice cases in other parts of the country, the students at Florida’s only public historically black university, a new set of emerging criminal justice leaders, took it upon themselves to create a sense of urgency to advocate for ‘justice denied’ in the American criminal justice system. The class project required and allowed them to be creative in deciding the ‘what,’ ‘when,’ ‘why,’ ‘where,’ ‘who,’ and ‘how’ they chose to address the issue of wrongful convictions. The Criminal Justice (CCJ 4939) Special Topics: Qualitative Field Research on Wrongful Convictions is a course at an historical black university in Tallahassee, Florida, which is designed to engage the students in a hands-on qualitative research project focusing on a very serious problem in the field of criminal justice: wrongful convictions. As cold cases are being reopened and reinvestigated, and those once found guilty of crimes they did not commit are now being exonerated, this topic is gaining more popularity than ever before. As forensics such as ultraviolet lighting, odontology, and other DNA testing make their way as prominent forces in the field of criminal justice, officials of the law are focusing more careful attention on the falsely accused and wrongly convicted. For those who are so very unfortunate in becoming prey to such an ordeal, the results can end in a terrible stint with ‘justice denied.’ Therefore, this course provided the students with an opportunity to undertake a thorough, intensive review of cases, both cold and hot, which resulted in denied justice for the falsely accused and wrongly convicted. It was further designed to provide students with a thorough understanding of the very complex journey of seeking justice when it has been denied. A major feature of the class was to include individuals from the community who are instrumental in bringing a real-life perspective to the course. Hence, Mr. Alan Crotzer was a guest speaker in the class each semester. Throughout the semester, students were required to complete a two-phase class project on wrongful convictions. The research part of the class project required students to work collaboratively in groups of two or three to write a short, 15-page research paper. The objectives of this assignment were two-fold: (1) to foster an atmosphere of collaborative peer-to-peer learning; and (2) to ensure upper-level students bring to fruition the skills and abilities criminal justice majors should be able to demonstrate upon graduation, including but not limited to research, communication, critical thinking, analysis, and advocating for social change. After

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identifying the group members they wished to work with, each group selected a wrongful conviction case to research; one of the cases selected was Alan Crotzer’s. The research paper included a discussion of the wrongful conviction cases. Students summarized significant findings and discussed what could have been done differently; what the criminal justice system should have done then and what it should do in the future; they also discussed any existing criminal procedures and any constitutional protections that attempt to prevent wrongful convictions; and they discussed the current procedural mechanisms available to convicted individuals who seek exoneration or to vacate wrongful convictions with new evidence. Then they discussed the reforms that have been proposed to address the causes of wrongful convictions. Finally, they discussed the exonerated individual’s sociopsychological state while incarcerated, after incarceration, and on re-entry into society, and focused on what were the sociopsychological stressors of denied justice on the ‘victim’ (the wrongly convicted are also victims in this ordeal), what can society and its major institutions do about this problem, and what they could do about this problem (for example, awareness campaign, fundraiser to assist agencies such as the Innocence Project), then they stated any recommendations, policy implications, suggestions for future research, and concluded with their specific reaction to the problem of the wrongly convicted—in other words: ‘justice denied.’ The second phase of the class project allowed the students to engage in a collaborative, applied, realistic approach that could be used to address the wrongful conviction problem and to further impact social change in the criminal justice system. In creating a new emerging group of leaders among students in the class, a project manager was chosen who led the rest of the class in constructing and implementing an awareness program on wrongful convictions for the class project. The rest of the students became a ‘task force,’ who decided from the various research papers what to include in the final paper. The cases from all groups were analyzed as a set of cases grouped together, summarized, discussed, and included in a chart. In essence, they condensed the research papers into one class paper, using the same format as the research papers, but shorter in terms of maximum number of pages. A description of the Awareness Program was included in an Appendix. The Awareness Program was implemented on or near campus. The aforementioned class project is done each semester that the course is taught. One semester, the class project included a forum held at a university’s Developmental Research School, which includes students from elementary to high school. During a different semester, a forum was held on the university’s main campus and open to the public. Mr. Alan Crotzer was the keynote speaker at both forums. At the second forum, the students were more adamant about moving beyond just a forum, and wanted to do more for the cause of wrongful convictions. Therefore, as a part of their mission to contribute more, and thereby become emergent leaders in this area, they added the fundraising component in which they conducted a raffle and donated the proceeds to the Innocence Project of Florida. The class project on wrongful convictions was not only conducted for a grade, but allowed the students to become extremely proactive 78

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in educating others and making them aware of this unfortunate encounter with the American criminal justice system. Many of the students developed a keen interest in this area of criminal justice, wanting to become part of the solution and to help ensure that others do not fall prey to such an unfortunate stint with ‘justice denied.’ Upon completion of the assignments, the course objectives were met and students were more familiar with the problems of the wrongly convicted in the American criminal and juvenile justice systems. They were also more familiar with elements such as recent trends in cold case reinvestigations, recognizing the factors that affect the falsely accused and wrongly convicted, knowing how wrongly convicted individuals are processed by the justice system, beginning with arrest and concluding with re-entry into society, understanding the need for a comprehensive justice strategy to deal with individuals who are denied justice, and knowing how to communicate effectively and professionally about the wrongly convicted in the justice area—thus, becoming emergent leaders in the field of criminal justice. Reference Telephone interview with Alan Crotzer, October 7, 2013, Tallahassee, FL Useful resources http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=60 http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/page.cfm?pageid=1300 www.outsidethebeltway.com/study-at-least-2000-people-wrongfully-convicted-in-23-years/ www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Alan_Crotzer.php www.innocenceproject.org/understand/?gclid=CPqT_riKtLQCFQWonQodGQ4AHg www.floridainnocence.org

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EIGHT

Formerly incarcerated women: Returning home to family and community Marta López-Garza

Seven years ago I began a study of formerly incarcerated women, and two years ago I completed a documentary on the topic, titled When will the punishment end?1 This paper examines the experiences of the women in my study upon their release from prison, the entities that support their efforts to rebuild their lives, along with the barriers that impede such efforts. After presenting background information on formerly incarcerated women and the literature, and my date collecting methods, I focus on women’s experiences when they are first released and their need to find safe shelter. I examine addiction and the factors that lead to incarceration and present the issues surrounding recovery, family reunification, and the search for employment and housing. I further discuss the women who are activists and the issues important to them. I conclude with an analysis of the ‘larger’ problems and a critique of current policies and attitudes toward the formerly incarcerated. My research on formerly incarcerated women rebuilding their lives is significant for a number of reasons. Methodologically, by applying feminist ethnographic methods, such as personal oral narratives, in my research and in the documentary, I have created an avenue by which there exists a direct link/connection between the women and the readers/viewers; a relationship built on the principles of Research Justice, and community solidarity and movement building as an intervention strategy (Collins, 1990; White, 2008). The second significance of this chapter is that my focus on women will underscore the particular issues women and their families face as result of their incarceration, largely for non-violent, drug-related offenses. Third, I examine possible causes for recidivism. My writings, along with my documentary, add to the limited yet important literature on women who have come out of prison, that critical period where they can stay out of or return to prison, and the decisive factors that lead in either direction. Lastly, highlighting these sources of the problem will hopefully encourage discussions of new policies and attitudes that facilitate, rather than hinder, women’s re-entry to society.

1

My documentary is available for viewing through the website: www.whenwillpunishementend. net. 81

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Official statistics indicate that, while 5% of the world’s population reside in the U.S., nearly 25% of the world’s 10.1 million prisoners are incarcerated here. That translates to 2.29 million prisoners in the U.S., which amounts to 743 incarcerated per 100,000 population (World Prison Brief Online, 2011). The increase in the number of women serving time since 1980 is alarming. From 1980 to 2002 the number of incarcerated women increased eight-fold, from 12,300 to 105,000 (Sentencing Project, 2003). Of particular significance is the disproportionate number of African American women in prisons and jails, who comprise 46% of the nationwide prison population, while European American women comprise 36% (National Women’s Law Center & Chicago Legal Aid to Incarcerated Mothers, 2007). In the state of California, ‘the number of women in the prison population has increased fivefold since the early 1980s, 65% of whom are sentenced for non-violent property and drug crimes’ (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 2005). Although African Americans comprise only 6.2% of California’s population, they account for 28% of the state’s incarcerated women. The Latina prison population runs close to their state population at around 30–35% (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 2011; U.S. Census Bureau, 2011). The increase in the prison population, particularly among women, is directly linked to the influx of drugs into their neighborhoods and the Get Tough on Crime agenda rolled out by politicians since the mid-1970s.2 A quarter of all U.S. prisoners are drug violators with non-violent crimes (California Senate Bill No. 617, 2005), and more than half of the 100,000-plus women in prison across the country are serving sentences for non-violent drug-related crimes (Levi and Waldman, 2011). Scholars in the field have found that both the overall spike in the population of the prison-industrial complex, and the racial and class imbalance therein, cannot be understood apart from the ‘war on drugs’ that greatly facilitated this increase (Mauer & King, 2007; Alexander, 2010). Coincidentally, the influx of crack cocaine into poor and inner-city neighborhoods occurred as deindustrialization wiped out hundreds of factories and businesses along with hundreds of thousands of working-class jobs beginning in the late 1970s. A major difference between when a woman goes to prison, versus when a man goes to prison, is the increased likelihood of a family falling apart when the mother is imprisoned. When a man goes to prison the mother of his children frequently keeps the family together. However, when a woman goes to prison, either she is a single mother or, if a man is in the home, he often makes a precipitate departure, thereby leaving the children in someone else’s care. The children of a woman who goes to prison are either sent to live with a family member (if that individual is financially able and does not possess a felony record) or to foster

2

With the Nixon administration, and accelerated in the Reagan and subsequent administrations. 82

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care where siblings may be separated. Moreover, women are often incarcerated at a considerable distance from their families’ residence. Visiting a mother in prison is therefore often not an option for children, thus creating a physical gulf between them for considerable lengths of time. In short, one significant difference between the incarceration of a woman and a man is that, in the former case, the family often falls apart and the children experience trauma and loss as result of that separation,

Methods For this chapter, I relied on the raw material I collected between 2005 and 2009, which was also utilized to make the aforementioned documentary. This material includes the initial 17 audio interviews, the 55 hours of film footage plus my extensive notes written throughout the years of my study. Participants for my research were selected largely through Dr. Marilyn Montenegro (who has provided social work services for women in prison and women leaving prison for more than 20 years) and the project directors of three sober living homes for women: Susan Burton at A New Way of Life in Watts; Kim Carter at Time for Change in San Bernardino; and Monica Stel at Harbour Area Halfway Houses in Long Beach; as well as through Shirley Torres at Homeboy Industries/Homegirl Café.3

The literature Excellent research has been conducted on the causes and consequences of mass incarceration of poor people and people of color. Included is the decisive book The new Jim Crow by civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander (2010), who lays out the details of the U.S. system maintaining a ‘permanent secondclass citizenship’ through massive incarceration. Physician Gabor Mate (2008) writes convincingly and movingly about addictions, incorporating the fields of medicine, developmental neurobiology, social sciences, and history. Reports by governmental offices, foundations and institutes have additionally contributed to our understanding of the purpose and consequences of the incarcerating of people from poor and ‘minority’ communities (for example, Children’s Defense Fund, 2007; National Women’s Law Center & Chicago Legal Aid to Incarcerated Mothers, 2007). Notwithstanding the outstanding contributions by these and other scholars, the research topic on which I have concentrated my research focuses on the challenges women in particular face in their transition from prison back into

3

I was drawn to the topic by my involvement with Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment, which had been working with South Los Angeles service providers in assisting community members returning from prison in search of employment, housing, and drug treatment programs, and hoping to regain custody of their children. 83

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their communities. Among the most prolific, if not the leading, experts on women leaving prison is Patricia O’Brien. In her extensive work, conducted largely in the Midwest on formerly incarcerated women—at times in concert with colleagues—O’Brien notes the limited research on this subject. My research parallels Patricia O’Brien’s in that we both address questions related to women leaving prison, rebuilding their lives, reconnecting to family members and children, and ‘how … parole or supervision processes affect women’s ability to renegotiate their reentry after incarceration’ (O’Brien, 2001: xi). We both reflect upon and listen to the women regarding what they need to rebuild their lives. Applying a feminist methodological approach, she, as do I, relies largely on the voices of the women themselves as the main source of her data collecting. In her work, O’Brien presents her concept, ‘empowerment framework,’ which refers to the ‘external’ socio-economic resources surrounding the women, along with the ‘internal’ resources within the women themselves, that they marshal together to rebuild their lives (O’Brien, 2001: Ch. 5). Other important contributors to the field are Keta Miranda and Juanita Díaz-Cotto, who specifically studied Chicana/ Latina experiences with the criminal justice system, and Kim Carter4 (along with Disep Ojukwau and Lance Miller), who conducted extensive research among women in prison and those released, on topics such as education, employment, finances, and access to health services.

Upon release from prison For all the people who are imprisoned, the majority are eventually released (Travis, 2005). What happens to women who are released from prison? How do they reenter society? What helps them stay out? What are the barriers to their re-entry? As Susan Burton, founder and Executive Director of A New Way of Life states, “Being released from prison holds a lot of anxiety … You have just been given back all your choices, in a split second from having no choices to having a lot of choices.” Women leave prison theoretically with 200 dollars’ ‘gate’ money, but often have to pay the prison for the clothes they wear when they leave, and if no one picks them up at the prison gate, they pay for their transportation to their destination. A typical scenario among the women in my study is that they board the bus to downtown Los Angeles, and arrive at the bus depot adjacent to skid row, where they are surrounded by drugs, drug dealers, and pimps, who can readily identify women fresh out of prison, wearing the standard prison clothing and carrying a box or bag. So, the women’s chances of getting caught in the web of drugs and abuse in those trouble spots on the way to their destination are high and they

4

Kim Carter was also instrumental in my own research, allowing me access to her halfway homes for women, Time for Change Foundation in San Bernardino, California. 84

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risk the chance of running out of money, becoming homeless and strung out if they do not leave these danger zones quickly. Because it is standard practice for documents to be destroyed by jail personnel after a prescribed period of time, the women leave prison without identification (for example, California driver’s license or social security). So when a woman is released, she needs to obtain some form of personal identification. Now if a woman does not have a place to stay because she got caught in the web of one of the danger zones, such as the bus depot surroundings mentioned above, and because she may not have family or friends on whom she can rely, then she is homeless. If a woman becomes homeless, she cannot get her ID because she does not have an address. This set of developments is one of the first obstacles to a woman’s successful re-entry. This perpetual cycling of people back to prison has been called a ‘closed circuit of perpetual marginality’ (Wacquant, 2000). The perils a woman encounters upon release from prison make finding safe shelter immediately absolutely crucial. Monica Stel, Executive Director of Harbour Areas Halfway Houses, relays a story of a woman who, upon release from prison, did not have a ride home: ‘the only person she knew that she could call was the pimp. He paid for the cab for her to get from jail to Long Beach and she spent 3 days doing services to pay for the cab. By the time she was done with that she was so loaded she couldn’t get out of the addiction, and she was off … in prison now doing another term.’ Precisely because many women cannot rely on friends or family members, they often turn to those who draw them back in to the life that led them into trouble. Unfortunately, the system and government officials (such as parole officers) that still have jurisdiction over them do not help the women find housing. For those women fortunate enough to not end up on the streets, there are recovery or sober living homes. Regrettably, too many of these recovery shelters serve to merely warehouse the women and minimally assist them in their attempts to rebuild their lives. In my research, I encountered three among the few actually helpful recovery homes.5 Because women convicted of drug felonies are banned from services such as Section 8 housing (according to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development guidelines), many welfare services, CalWorks benefits, and federal subsidies such as college loans, these recovery homes provide crucially needed transitional shelter and supportive services such as regaining custody of children, parenting classes, drug and alcohol programs, life skills training, job placement, medical referrals, and counseling (Allard, 2002; interview, M. Stel, June 29, 2007; interview, K. Carter, March 17, 2008). Evidence suggests therefore that if women do not find this transitional space immediately upon their release, and if they do not receive the services they need, then the cycle of addiction and incarceration is virtually inevitable.

5

As mentioned above, the three are Harbour Areas Halfway Houses (Long Beach), A New Way of Life (Watts in South Los Angeles), and Time for Change (San Bernardino). 85

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How do women become addicted, and why? This problem has been extensively studied and written about (Swartz, O’Brien and Lurigio, 2001; Díaz-Cotto, 2006: 31–52; Mate, 2008). The findings in my research are similar to the findings among these scholars. A major indicator is childhood sexual abuse. Up to 95% of incarcerated women who have come through the doors of the transitions homes in my study have been sexually abused as children. Along with this are physical and psychological abuses that continue into adulthood, where some women are drawn into abusive relationships with partners who exploit them, beat them, pimp them, and so on. In addition are issues such as racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia. Classism is a big factor. Women from poor and working-class communities do not have access to counseling that may assist them in addressing, in a healthy and healing way, the abuse and violence they have experienced. When traumas from the abuses are repressed or ignored, healing does not take place, and the pain is ameliorated by drugs, alcohol and other forms of anesthetizing, readily available in their neighborhoods. Not addressing these deeper issues related to drug addiction is one more reason the cycle continues.

Returning to family and children Reuniting with children is particularly urgent for some women and yet it remains a loaded and emotionally charged issue. In cases where the children have been raised by relatives who allow and give space for the reconciliation to take place, the focus is on whether a woman has the wherewithal to support herself and her children. Can she find employment? What entity will financially assist her? Is she eligible for schooling and training? Is she eligible for SSI (Supplemental Security Income)—that is, are there mental or physical reasons she cannot find employment? Can she receive public assistance? As established above, she is ineligible for Section 8 housing as a result of her felony, so in the Los Angeles area this essentially means she is unable to obtain affordable housing. And while her children may be eligible for various welfare benefits, she is not eligible because of her felony record. Aside from the concrete physical needs of her children, a woman is often faced with the psychological and emotional consequences of her separation from them. The children may be angry with their mother for abandoning them, for finding drugs more important than them, and they may be more attached to their caregivers or, on the other hand, resentful because they have been abused or treated badly by a relative-caretaker. While a large number of the children of women sent to prison are cared for by family members, 10% of children who lose their parents through incarceration become themselves wards of the state, housed in foster homes and agencies (Little Hoover Institute, 2004; Carter, Ojukwu and Miller, 2006). In 2003 there were 97,261 children in foster care in California (Children’s Defense Fund, 2007). Obtaining custody of one’s children becomes exponentially more complicated 86

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when the children are in the foster system. A woman must show that she is able to care for her children and has a safe place for them to live, which is difficult to accomplish given the limited access she has to services and resources. Consequently, if her children have been placed in foster care, a mother released from prison needs to move quickly to regain custody of her children before her time runs out and her children become adopted. What unfortunately takes place is that, while the mother attempts to regain custody of her children, they live in uncertain and often unfriendly environments. Reunification with the family is often fraught with the very history that led to a woman’s fall into despair and addiction, and eventual incarceration. Family members in turn are tired of the cycle of addiction and incarceration, and the broken promises of recovery. Family members have also been the victims of their loved ones’ addictions, experiencing the theft of their possessions and having drugs brought to their homes. On the other hand, they are often the causes of their children’s or spouses’ addictions. They may have been the abusers or allowed the abuse to take place. They themselves could also have been victims of abuse as children, and are holding on to unresolved pain and fears. Often most family situations are a combination of both scenarios, where the families are factors in the addictions as well as the victims of the addicts’ misdeeds.

Employment Clearly a criminal record is a barrier to women’s attempts to finding gainful employment. Conservative statistics indicate that only four out of ten formerly incarcerated women find employment in the ‘regular labor market’ within the first year of release (Women’s Prison Association). In one study conducted in San Bernardino, California,6 81.6% of recently released women had not been employed full-time in more than a year (Carter et al., 2006: 43). Without jobs, how will they be able to support their families, pay rent and their bills, and become productive members of their communities and society? According to Kim Carter, founder and Executive Director of Time for Change Foundation, “if a person cannot find a job, cannot find housing, then there is nothing tangible to connect her back to the community.” There are numerous barriers to employment, including lack of education and training. However, most experts in the field agree that employers’ systematic exclusion of anyone with a felony record is the major barrier to their access to gainful employment (Employers Group Research Services, 2002; Legal Action Center, 2004). Kim Carter’s study found that the one thing formerly incarcerated people would change, as they rebuild their lives, would be the elimination of the ‘Have you ever been convicted of a felony?’ box on employment applications. If they did not have to check that box the respondents in her research study strongly

6

San Bernardino is located 30 minutes east of Los Angeles. 87

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believed that they would have a fair and reasonable chance to start again, to secure employment, and become productive members of society (Carter et al., 2006; interview, K. Carter, March 17, 2008). In my conversations with the women in my study, I heard of numerous thwarted attempts to find employment. Michelle, for instance, applied for 45 jobs within the course of a two-month period, to no avail. On her 46th attempt, she ‘lied’ on the application and checked ‘No’ on the box. Interestingly, she received a call from that 46th employer requesting an interview. There Michelle admitted having lied on her application. However, upon hearing of her felonies, the employer stated that these had nothing to do with the job for which she was applying, but admitted that had Michelle checked the box, she, the employer, would not have called her back for an interview (interview, M. Freeman, March 17, 2008). Variations of this story include Maribel’s. After months of frustration and a disappointing search for work, Maribel found only two potential employers: one where she was honest with the coffee shop manager, who advised her not to check the box because her superiors would not hire ‘ex felons’; Maribel lied in applying for the other position, and the employer did not conduct a background check and hired her. It is increasingly clear that formerly incarcerated women have a difficult time securing employment. Many suspect that checking the box plays a major role in an employer’s decision as to whether or not to hire formerly incarcerated applicants. What are their options if society does not consider hiring these women, irrespective of their and their families’ needs? This is an important question to raise in light of the high recidivism rates throughout the U.S.7

Those who become activists What leads to activism? The majority of formerly incarcerated women do not become activists but, for those who do, their reasons are closely linked to their purpose and meaning in life. Susan Burton became an activist once she understood the devastating consequences the ‘larger picture’ had on formerly incarcerated women and their families. She ‘reconnected’ with her voice, and “found ways and avenues to speak out about it and that naturally turned into activism” (interview, S. Burton, November 12, 2007). For Rhonda Jones, being an activist was a way—instead of giving in to the fear she was holding inside—to use the energy she felt in a positive way (interview, R. Jones, January 18, 2008). As Kim McGill eloquently stated at a Peace & Justice Summit, formerly incarcerated women have been told repeatedly that they should be ashamed, and that they do not deserve the rights offered to most others in our society. They are consistently and deliberately reminded of their status as second-class citizens/residents each

7

In California alone, the rate of recidivism (the highest in the country) is between 65 and 70% within 18 months (Petersilia, 2000). 88

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time they fill out an application for employment, for housing, or try to get an education. The message is that they are undeserving of the rights of which other people in the U.S. partake (McGill, 2005). Nonetheless, those women in my research who realize the larger societal and economic picture from which their issues arise gain the self-confidence and readiness to ‘fight back for the rights that every human deserves, including ourselves’ (McGill, 2005). Most formerly incarcerated women, as much as anyone else, search for life’s meaning, and yearn for family and gainful employment. They realize that a new direction entails a change in both themselves and society in general—what O’Brien calls the ‘empowerment framework.’ Benign neglect and regressive laws led formerly detained men and women to organize among themselves and begin All Of Us Or None efforts to challenge the rampant discrimination against prisoners and former prisoners in the U.S.8 This organization, as reflected in its name, ‘explicitly challenges a politics that affords inclusion and acceptance for a few but guarantees exclusion for many’ (Alexander, 2010: 242). Its members encourage cities and counties across the U.S. to overhaul their hiring practices. This campaign, called Ban the Box, pursues strategies that differ from city to city, county to county. The approach envisions employers focusing on learning about applicants’ potential before checking their records. Although many cities and counties have repositioned or banned the box altogether (for example, Compton, Boston, San Francisco, East Palo Alto), Los Angeles city council and county have repeatedly avoided and dismissed the issue, despite numerous attempts by All Of Us Or None members and their supporters. To understand the pervasiveness of drug addiction and massive incarceration in the U.S. one must understand the national and international political and economic context wherein these phenomena take place. According to O’Brien (2006), understanding the political context of female incarceration is crucial to unraveling the ‘war on drugs’ program and the industrial prison system. I submit that two major contexts or causes of drug addiction and incarceration are international in scope but play out in a specific manner within the U.S. The first is economic restructuring, which began in the 1980s, triggered by the stagflation of the previous decade, and resulted in plant closures in low-income and workingclass neighborhoods, thereby causing widespread loss of employment. It came in tandem with the Reagan administration’s cuts in social services and was followed by the more recent 2008 budgetary crisis. I watched our community became saturated with cocaine while many corporations that supplied jobs to those communities were relocating to other countries. So there was a loss of income, jobs and revenue for many people in the community while there was saturation of a drug

8

Chapters of All Of Us Or None are located in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, East Palo Alto, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and Oakland, as well as in the states of Texas and Oklahoma. 89

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that would relieve your depression from the loss of your income and community. (Susan Burton) A combination of deindustrialization and reindustrialization—two sides of the same economic restructuring coin—continue, exacerbating the loss of well-paying working-class and white-collar jobs (Bluestone and Harrison, 1982; Wilson, 1997). These two components of economic restructuring have manifested differently in different parts of the country, depending on the makeup of the region’s economy. In the Los Angeles region, a combination of deindustrialization and reindustrialization has taken place. Deindustrialization occurred primarily in those areas where heavy-industry manufacturing plants were located (for example, South Los Angeles, and the adjacent working-class cities of South Gate, Bell, and Cudahy), and reindustrialization cropped up where banks, financial entities, corporate headquarters and other professional types of business were located (such as the downtown and west side areas of Los Angeles) near the more affluent vicinities. In those areas where many manufacturing industries were shut down, the largely African American and Latino residents who had previously made a modest living, were ‘downsized’ by economic restructuring. Since 1980s, most laid-off workers either remain unemployed or find (under)employment, often in the growing service sector (such as fast food or sweatshops) for less than half of their of previous salaries and without benefits (Ong, 1989). The second global context within which addiction and incarceration take place is with the political dealings at the international level, which began in the early 1980s. The Reagan administration’s illegal exchange of money, military equipment, and drugs among the U.S., Iran, and Nicaraguan Contras in Honduras (fighting the Sandinista government) eventually exposed the Iran ‘Contragate’ scandal. This ‘dark alliance’ led to massive influxes of drugs, namely crack cocaine, into poor, inner-city enclaves of Los Angeles, which were already reeling from plant closures, layoffs and cuts to social services (Webb, 1998; Ruppert, 1999; Alexander, 2010: 5–6). The association revealed between the appearance of crack cocaine in our inner cities and the government secretive workings that led to the Iran–Contra scandal, has done little to resolve the ongoing unabated problems of mass drug addiction and mass incarceration (Webb, 1998; Ruppert, 1999). This elaborate set-up is linked to the Prison Industrial Complex, one industry that has certainly grown as result of economic restructuring, locking up, among other people, the laid off/unemployed workers and their children. This, along with the disease of addiction, has shattered communities and families. This larger picture is critical to fully comprehending the ‘war on drugs’ and the growing prison industrial complex, and how principally poor people get caught in the cycle of addiction and incarceration. To understand this connection is the first step to changing the conditions and policies that currently exist in the U.S. In conclusion, in this chapter I have highlighted the obstacles to women’s successful re-entry, which include lack of provision in prison to address addiction, destruction of personal documents (such as I.D.) by prison personnel, difficulty 90

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in finding safe shelter, which consequently leads to homelessness, which in turn creates difficulty in obtaining identification as well as the services they need to rebuild their lives. I have also pointed out the excessively high unemployment rates for the formerly incarcerated. Employers’ refusal to hire the formerly detained is one more major obstacle to recovery. Furthermore, if deeper issues, such as childhood abuse, poverty and economic deprivation, are not addressed, we can be assured that the cycle of addiction and incarceration is virtually inevitable for a large portion of formerly incarcerated women. Given the consequences discussed here, we need to ask ourselves why we continue to maintain tough-on-crime policies that are costly and do not allow people to reintegrate into society. We need to ask ourselves why we live within a culture in which the punishment never ends—for what purpose and for whose benefit? To date, both the U.S. and the state of California have been unwilling to examine evident reasons that lead to incarceration. Instead, a ‘tough on crime’ culture has been created on which politicians base their campaigns and careers. They and the media generate and feed on the fear and hatred the public feel toward people who commit even the most innocuous non-violent crimes. This manufactured fear produces regressive and ultimately self-defeating policies. For example, between 1996 and 1999, approximately 32% (37,825) of women in state and federal prisons for drug offenses were parents of minor children, and once released the women have been banned from receiving CalWorks,9 as a result of Clinton’s revisions to the welfare system (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 2006). This punitive law is a considerable barrier for women, upon their release from prison, attempting to become responsible parents and support their children. Instead of spending money on education, health issues (including recovery programs), and employment opportunities, millions of dollars in the ‘sink hole’ of the prison industrial complex, filling the coffers of private industries in the business of running prisons at the expense of the tax payer. This approach ‘is extremely self defeating,’ whereas, on the other hand, drug treatment programs reap more positive results and are cheaper in the long run, yet are largely discounted by the powers-that-be (O’Brien, 2006; interview, G. Killian, June 25, 2007; Alexander, 2010). We in California can see the budgetary consequence that is partially the outcome of this philosophy of repeatedly locking up people without the necessary support for rehabilitation. As mentioned earlier, we cannot address drug addiction (the leading cause of incarceration among women) by repeatedly placing people in prison. So while we continue to ignore the sources of the problem, we perpetuate a system with policies and a culture that facilitate the cyclical journey where women

9

CalWorks is the California version of the federal program Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. 91

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are incarcerated for their drug use, placed in prison, where their addiction is not resolved, then released, yet not allowed employment, housing or social services, nor offered sufficient recovery alternatives. Who benefits from this not merely inhumane but also ineffective approach to solving the social ills in our society? Bibliography Alexander, M., 2010, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness, New York: The New Press Allard, P., 2002, Life sentences: Denying welfare benefits to women convicted of drug offenses 5, Washington, D.C.: The Sentencing Project, February Bluestone, B. and Harrison B., 1982, The deindustrialization of America: Plant closing, community abandonment, and the dismantling of basic industry, New York: Basic Books Burton, S., 2007, Interview, November 12 California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 2005, Prison census data, Table 3, www.corr.ca.gov/OffenderInfoServices/Reports/Annual/Census/ CENSUSd0412.pdf California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 2006, Adult Programs, Division of Addiction and Recovery Services (DARS) California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 2011, Prison census data as of December 2010, Sacramento, CA: Offender Information Service Branch, Estimates and Statistical Analysis Section, February California Senate Bill No. 617, 2005, Women prisoners: Gender specific standards for women in prison, Task Force, introduced by Sen. Speier, February 22 Carter, K., 2008, Interview, March 17 Carter, K., Ojukwu, D. and Miller, L., 2006, Invisible bars: Barriers to women’s health & well-being during and after incarceration, California Endowment, San Bernardino, CA: Time for Change Foundation Children’s Defense Fund, 2007, Cradle to prison pipeline, Washington, D.C.: Howard University Collins, P.H., 1990, Black feminist thought: Consciousness and the politics of empowerment, Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman Díaz-Cotto, J., 2006, Chicana lives and criminal justice: Voices from El Barrio, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I. & Shaw, L.L. (1995). Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Employers Group Research Services, 2002, Employment of ex-offenders: A survey of employer’s policies and practices, San Francisco, CA: SF Works, April Fellner, J., 2010, A drug abuse policy that fails everyone, Huffington Post, August 10, www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-fellner/a-drug-abuse-policythat_b_677640.html Freeman, M., 2008, Interview, March 17 Gorski, T., n.d., Post incarceration syndrome, Seattle, WA: Pacific Northwest Relapse Prevention Specialists, www.tlctx.com/ar_pages/post_incarceration_syndrome.htm 92

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Jones, R., 2008, Interview, January 18 Killian, G., 2007, Interview, June 25 Legal Action Center, 2004, After prison: Roadblocks to reentry, a report on state legal barriers facing people with criminal records, New York: Legal Action Center, 10 Levi, R. and Waldman, A. (eds.), 2011, Inside this place, not of it: Narratives from women’s prisons, San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s Books, Voice of Witness Series Little Hoover Institute, 2004, Breaking the barriers for women on parole, Sacramento, CA: Little Hoover Commission Mate, G., 2008, In the realm of hungry ghosts, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books Mauer, M. and King, R., 2007, A 25-year quagmire: The ‘war on drugs’ and it’s impact on American society, Washington, D.C.: The Sentencing Project McGill, K., 2005, Speaking at Peace & Justice Summit [on film] Miranda, M., 2003, Keta, Homegirls in the public sphere, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press Montenegro, M., 2007, Interview, June 25 Montenegro, M., 2007, Interview, August 9 Montenegro, M., 2011, personal communication, August 12 Moore, M. (Producer, Director & Writer), 1989, Roger & Me [Motion Picture]. U.S.: Warner Bros. Production. National Women’s Law Center & Chicago Legal Aid to Incarcerated Mothers, 2007, Women in prison. Care2 make a difference, April 8, www.care2.com/ c2c/groups/disc.html?gpp=9918&pst=668606 O’Brien, P., 2001, Making it in the ‘free world’: Women in transition from prison, New York: SUNY Press O’Brien, P., 2006, Maximizing success for drug-affected women after release from prisons: Examining access to and use of social services during reentry, in J. Swartz, P. O’Brian and A. Lurigion (eds.) Drugs, women, and justice: Roles of the criminal justice system for drug-affected women, New York: Haworth Press, 95–114 Ong, P., 1989, The State of South Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA: University of California, Urban Planning Department Petersilia, J., 2000, Challenges of prisoner reentry and parole in California 1, Child Policy Research Center Brief, 12, 3, June Ruppert, M.C., 1999, Blacks were targeted for CIA cocaine: It can be proven, January 28 Sentencing Project, the, 2003, Fact sheet: Women in prison, May, Washington, D.C., www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/sp/1032.pdf Stel, M., 2007, Interview, June 29 Strauss, A. and Corbin, J., 1998, Basics of qualitative research: Techniques for developing grounded theory, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Swartz, J., O’Brien, P. and Lurigio, A. (eds.), 2001, Drugs, women, and justice: Roles of the criminal justice system for drug-affected women, New York: Haworth Press Travis, J., 2005, ‘But they all come back’: Facing the challenges of prisoner reentry, Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press U.S. Census Bureau, 2007, Population Estimates Program. Washington, D.C. 93

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U.S. Census Bureau, 2010, Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin 2010, U.S. Census Brief. 2010. Washington, D.C. U.S. Census Bureau, 2011, State and county quick facts, June 3, Washington, D.C., www.census.gov/qfd/states/34000.html Wacquant, L., 2000, The new ‘peculiar institution’: On the prison as surrogate ghetto. Theoretical Criminology, 4, 3, 377–89 Waters, M. (Congresswoman), 2006, Speaking at Los Angeles County Board of Supervisor hearing, November 21 Webb, G., 1998, Dark alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the crack cocaine explosion, New York: Seven Stories Press White, R.T., 2008, Talking about sex and HIV: Conceptualizing a new sociology of experiences, in A.M. Jagger (ed.) Just methods: An interdisciplinary feminist reader, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers Wilson, W.J., 1997, When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor, New York: Vintage Women’s Prison Association, the Sentencing Project, www.wpaonline.org World Prison Brief Online, 2011, Harm Reduction International, www.ihra. net/contents/1055

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Disaster justice: Mobilizing grassroots knowledge against disaster nationalism in Japan Haruki Eda Nature may be the primary cause of a disaster, but very little of its consequences is ‘natural.’ In fact, some researchers suggest we develop an understanding of disasters as relational events between the natural, environmental, and ecological on the one hand, and the political, sociological, and cultural on the other. According to the sociologists Picou and Marshall (2007), the categorization of disasters has evolved over time. They illustrate that disasters were initially classified as either natural or technological, and new categories were suggested later to account for natural-technological (or ‘na-tech’) disasters as well as terrorism. However, Picou and Marshall suggest the need to move beyond the limitations imposed by such simple theoretical classifications, for three reasons. First, some disasters we have conventionally considered natural are increasingly viewed as anthropogenic, or human-made. Second, regardless of the perceived ‘naturalness’ of the disaster, the subsequent severity and duration of chronic impacts may be ascribed to anthropogenic factors. Finally, some of the most recent disaster events cannot be clearly characterized as any of those four categories. Moreover, Clarke (2006) reminds us of the possibilities of the ‘worst case,’ in which everything that could possibly go wrong goes wrong, whether natural, technological, social-structural, institutional, economic, or environmental. This suggests the importance of addressing the interrelated nature of our precarious world. Indeed, humans are not in opposition to nature, but in fact part of it. From such a relational perspective, I develop a historical, environmental, and cultural sociology of disasters through the case of Japan within the context of its colonialism, integrating social justice and decolonization into my analysis. People from various socially marginalized communities have the most intimate knowledge of the relationship between the natural and the sociopolitical dimensions of disasters. They know, in other words, that disasters do not impact everyone equally. Social inequalities based on indigeneity, race, class, gender, disability, immigration status, and sexuality all factor in to numerous aspects of disasters, such as the causes, vulnerability, population impacted, evacuation process, mortality, efforts for rescue, access to relief aid and housing, speed of recovery, media representation, and subsequent social change. Activists and scholars on environmental and climate justice also make similar points that 95

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the issues of settler colonialism and social justice must be addressed along with environmental problems, as well as racism and other forms of oppression within various environmental movements (for example, Bullard, 1999; Pulido, 2000; Schlosberg and Carruthers, 2010). Central to such projects is, therefore, to incite epistemological changes, or shifts in the ways in which we create and legitimize knowledge. Specifically, people who are most impacted by a particular issue must be recognized as the experts in the issue, and their knowledge must be recognized as community expertise. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for example, African American people were not only most severely victimized by the disaster due to poverty but also heavily criminalized, particularly through the media (Tomlinson, 2006), which disseminated unsubstantiated or exaggerated information (Dynes and Rodríguez, 2007). As the concept of Research Justice vividly points out (DCRJ, 2014), for marginalized communities with limited access to resources, mobilizing information through research is crucial for this process to make their voice heard and counter the dominant discourse of disasters. Drawing on this insight, I propose the concept of disaster justice, a process of bridging together struggles for social justice on the one hand, and efforts into disaster preparation and response on the other. While the technicalities of state-led disaster preparation and response are outside the scope of this chapter, I aim to broaden the discussions of disasters by presenting some cases in which grassroots communities organized themselves to address inequalities and injustices in the aftermaths of disasters. In particular, I examine the relief work of some community organizations after two major disasters in Japan in 1995 and 2011, using online archival materials (for example, newsletters, websites) as well as autoethnographic accounts. I believe their work highlights some of the principles of disaster justice that could be informative, if not directly replicable, for other communities and localities across the world. Focusing on how they mobilized people, money, and information, I argue that, paired together, Research Justice and disaster justice greatly enhance each other. Fundamental to this process is reclaiming the grassroots, transnational, decolonial, anticapitalist, antiracist, feminist, queer, and accessible knowledge systems, which we have long been cultivating. To contextualize my arguments, let me briefly discuss Japan’s historical, social, and political climate, in which disasters may often exacerbate the pre-existing injustices by consolidating colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism.

Disaster nationalism Japan has a long history of what I call disaster nationalism. Japanese nationalism is a cause and an effect of imperialism and colonialism, as well as their legacies, which are very much alive today. They can be traced back to the time when Japan began to ‘modernize’ itself by waging wars with and colonizing other neighboring

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countries in the name of the Emperor, whose power was restored in 1867.1 In 1879, the Japanese gained full control over what used to be the Ryukyu Kingdom and had been made into Okinawa Prefecture; around this time period, they also assimilated the Ainu, the indigenous people of what is now called Hokkaido in northern Japan, by force, legislation, and discrimination, gradually but steadily. In 1895, the Empire of Japan defeated China’s Qing Dynasty in the First SinoJapanese War, which took place largely in Korea and consequently gave Japan control over Korea. This allowed Japan to take over Taiwan. Ten years later, the Japanese Empire also defeated the Russian Empire in the Russo-Japanese War, which took place largely in Manchuria over the control of Korea and Manchuria. This led to the colonization of Korea by Japan. Koreans of course did not remain docile; throughout the colonial period, they continued to resist. In 1919, they organized the March First Movement, an independence movement that was initiated by religious leaders of indigenous Donghak, Christianity, and Buddhism, and spread all over the Korean Peninsula and mobilized millions of people.2 This was portrayed in the Japanese mass media as a series of violent riots, and the image of unruly Koreans became further popularized. It was under such a circumstance of ethnic and racial relations that an M-7.9 earthquake hit the Tokyo Metropolitan area in 1923. The Great Kanto Earthquake also caused tsunami, landslides, and enormous fires, killing approximately 105,000 people. Rumors spread immediately after the earthquake, in fact only a couple of hours afterwards, that ‘unruly Koreans’ were setting things on fire, bombing, and poisoning wells, as well as murdering, robbing, looting, and raping the Japanese. According to a report authored by the Japan Federation of Bar Association (2003) based on military records and files, court cases, and testimonies, state officials took part in propagating these rumors via telegram, and people’s sense of chaos and crisis was further exacerbated by the proclamation of martial law on the next day, which was expanded the day after. Martial law was usually to be invoked in a state of emergency to activate the military forces to restore order, presupposing a body of enemies threatening the nation-state, whether foreign forces or domestic military coups. However, the stereotypes and rumors made the state officials, military, police, and ordinary citizens excessively vigilant and fearful of the Korean and Chinese residents (Kim 1978). This resulted in an organized massacre of approximately 6,000 Koreans, which was conducted by the military and civilian vigilante groups. Encouraged by the government, these groups threw cordons to interrogate passersby; to tell Koreans apart, they asked everyone to say a Japanese phrase that is difficult for Koreans to pronounce. The massacre victims included

1

2

There are multiple prior instances of such attempts of conquest. For instance, Toyotomi Hideyoshi deployed his army to Korea in 1592 and 1597 in his attempt to conquer the Ming Dynasty of China. The Donghak, originally an academic movement, has since gradually evolved into a religion now called Cheondoism. 97

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not only Korean and Chinese people, but also those who had been mistaken as such due to their dialects (for example, Okinawans) or speech disabilities, as well as socialists. This historical case demonstrates how Japan’s colonialism and imperialism heavily impacted the social and political circumstances in the postdisaster situation of the 1923 earthquake through discourse of nationalism. Another historical example of Japanese disaster nationalism is the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. At the time of the bombings, about 50,000 and 20,000 Koreans were residing in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. A simple calculation from the total of 420,000 and 270,000 victims in each city lets us estimate that roughly one in ten atomic bombing victims and survivors were Koreans (Kawaguchi, 2008). If we focus on Hiroshima, about one in five lives claimed immediately by the bombing itself was Korean. This fact has not gained full recognition in the mainstream narratives of the bombings today. Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park was created in 1954, but there was no acknowledgment of the Korean victims until 1970, when the Hiroshima chapter of the Korean Residents Union in Japan (Mindan) erected a monument. Yet the city did not give permission to build it inside the park, and it was established outside of it, across a river. Moreover, many of the Korean survivors, who migrated to Japan while Korea was undivided, have since returned to Korea, to both the northern and southern side of the border. Those in the Republic of Korea, socalled South Korea, could not receive any of the compensation they deserved from the Japanese government until 2003; meanwhile, those in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea, remain uncompensated despite various efforts (Ishikida, 2005).3 Importantly, the erasure of the Korean victims and survivors accentuates the dominant narrative of the atomic bombings, that Japan is the only country to have been a victim of nuclear weapons, hence that only the Japanese people have such a collective experience and memory of shared victimhood. Thus, Japan’s peace education today, which adopts such a narrative, ironically works to consolidate nationalism. This historical case may not be considered as a disaster in the sense of earthquakes, but I use this to further highlight the ways in which the narratives of catastrophic events have been shaped by Japan’s nationalistic discourse to erase and silence its colonial subjects. These examples point out two dimensions of disaster nationalism in Japan. First, disastrous events have often resulted in a heightened sense of nationalism, as shock, grief, trauma, fear, anxiety, insecurity, and confusion circulate and 3

According to Ishikida (2005), the Japanese government is responsible for providing medical and economic aid as well as compensations for the victims of atomic bombs. Because Article 19 of the 1951 Peace Treaty disallowed Japan and its nationals to sue the Allied Powers for the consequences of the bombings, the 1957 Law Concerning Medical Care for the Atomic Bomb Exposed and the 1968 Law Concerning Special Measures for the Atomic Bomb Exposed were legislated, later to be combined into the 1994 Law Concerning Support for the Atomic Bomb Exposed, which now guarantees medical care, checkups, medical benefits, allowances, counseling, welfare programs, and funeral benefits. 98

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intensify in what Sara Ahmed (2004) calls ‘affective economies.’ Ahmed argues that emotions do not reside within the individual or the social; rather, emotions stick to signs and objects, and create the very surface and boundaries that delineate the individual or the social. In the case of disaster racism in Japan, such emotions as fear, anxiety, and terror become attached to signs of threat and contained in the bodies of non-Japanese residents, and materialize in the symbolic body of the Japanese nation. Second, how disastrous events are narrativized and commemorated is deeply implicated in nationalist ideologies. Many writers on narrative, trauma, and collective memory agree that the social understandings of the past are actively constructed in the present, the collective experiences of trauma are culturally mediated, and these processes are highly political (for example, Zeruvabel, 2003; Alexander et al., 2004; Neal, 2005; Polletta, 2006; Sarat, Davidovitch and Alberstein, 2007; Eyerman, Alexander and Breese, 2011; Alexander, 2012). Dominant nationalist ideologies help structure the dominant accounts of disasters, which in return help enhance nationalist sentiments. Thus, in both of these dimensions, disasters reinforce the boundaries between those characters who figure and others who are absent in the narrative of national victimhood. With this knowledge in mind, in the next sections, I examine how marginalized communities in contemporary Japan have responded to major disasters to articulate counter-narratives of disaster justice.

Case I: Southern Hyogo prefecture earthquake, 1995 An M-7.3 earthquake hit the urban center of Kobe and its surrounding areas in the early morning of Tuesday, January 17, 1995, claiming more than 6,000 lives and displacing more than 300,000 residents. It was the most devastating disaster in the country at that time since the Second World War. As a port city and an industrial hub, Kobe has historically been one of the major destinations in Japan for migrants from Korea, China, and India (Miyauchi, 2004). More recently, the city has received migrants and refugees from the Philippines, Vietnam, Brazil, and Peru, among other countries, and consistently ranks among the cities with the highest proportion of residents with non-Japanese nationalities (Sasaki, 1995; Miyauchi, 2004). Many of these migrants had founded their communities through labor, religious, and ethnic networks in the face of harsh discrimination and racism, establishing ‘ethnic enclaves’ in certain parts of the city (Miyauchi, 2004). The houses and buildings in which they lived tended to be old, overcrowded, and vulnerable to earthquakes and fires, as in the case of Nagata Ward, which houses one of the largest concentrations of Zainichi Koreans, or Korean postcolonial exiles and their descendants residing in Japan.4 While non-Japanese residents accounted for 2.9% of the city’s total population in 1995, they made up 4.0%

4

‘Zainichi’ literally means ‘residing in Japan.’ There are also Zainichi Chinese, Zainichi Brazilians, and so on, but when used alone, the term usually refers to Zainichi Koreans. 99

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of the victims in Kobe (Sasaki, 1995). My paternal grandmother was one of the thousands of Zainichi Koreans whose houses were demolished by the disaster; she survived, fortunately, because she was sleeping on the second floor when the ground floor was crushed. My Japanese maternal grandmother lived in the same Nagata Ward, but on a hillside rather than the lowlands where many Koreans concentrated. Thus, her neighborhood was less severely affected. Despite its large population of non-Japanese residents, Kobe was not equipped to aid them in a disaster situation. In the aftermath of the earthquake, those who did not have sufficient Japanese skills suffered from lack of information in languages they could understand; without language support, they could not obtain crucial information on the extent of the devastation, evacuation procedure, relief aid, governmental compensation, housing and relocation, and so on (Takatori Community Center, 2005). Undocumented and unauthorized migrants underwent extreme hardship because they could not receive aid and support for fear of deportation; regardless of immigration status, many migrants who had not joined the national health insurance system were forced to cover the entire medical costs incurred by the disaster (Miyauchi, 2004). Some of the Vietnamese survivors also faced racist discrimination at the evacuation spaces due to stereotypes, the language barrier, and cultural misunderstandings (Takatori Community Center, 2005). For instance, Japanese evacuees would feel threatened by the group of Vietnamese evacuees or irritated by their young children; in the stressful post-disaster situation, this would easily lead to conflicts that would only be exacerbated by the lack of language resources. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese also had conflicts among themselves due to political and ideological differences between northern and southern Vietnam. Furthermore, many of the Vietnamese evacuees could not secure temporary housing to relocate to for several reasons: their social networks were limited in comparison to those of Japanese survivors; most temporary housing was constructed in the suburbs, far away from their community and too inconvenient as a place for short-term relocation; and elders and people with disabilities were given priority for temporary housing, while many Vietnamese families had a large number of children and could not be accommodated. In spite of such structural inequalities, which hit the migrant communities, local residents often helped one another out, pooling resources and working together. The history of the Takatori Community Center (TCC) illustrates such resilient actions; below, I examine its report (Takatori Community Center, 2005), which archived its various activities for 10 years after the earthquake. Immediately after the earthquake, local survivors who lived near the Catholic Takatori Church in Nagata Ward, including a large number of Vietnamese residents, gathered and organized themselves at the church, establishing the Takatori Church Relief Station. They provided meals for the local survivors (including themselves), organized the young volunteers who came from all over the country, and housed a temporary medical care facility that was operated for three months by doctors and nurses from Catholic hospitals throughout Japan. Unofficial evacuation 100

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spaces like this church, Korean schools, and small parks did not initially receive relief aid from the government, so the volunteers brought food to such places.5 Supporters of the Vietnamese community established the Vietnamese Survivors Relief Liaison Group, addressing the housing and relocation issues, among many others. A priest, himself a Vietnamese refugee, was sent from Shizuoka Prefecture to the church, and he helped bridge the language gap. They shortly merged with the Hyogo Prefecture Foreign Residents Livelihood Restoration Center, which had been providing support for Korean survivors; together they formed the Kobe Foreigners Friendship Center (KFC) one month after the earthquake (Kobe Foreigners Friendship Center, n.d.). In the meantime, within two weeks of the disaster, FM Yoboseyo, a small Korean language community radio, started airing relevant and accurate information, learning from the experience of the 1923 massacre (FM YY 2004). It reached out to the Takatori Church Relief Station and the Liaison Group, and the Vietnamese community radio FM Yeu Men was created to provide critical information in Vietnamese. Within a few months, the two radio stations merged and established FM YY, which now airs programs in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, English, Vietnamese, Spanish, Tagalog, and Portuguese. In non-disaster times, its programs focus on raising awareness about issues around the migrant and/or ethnic minority communities, as well as discussing the cultures and histories of these diverse communities. This shift for multilingual and multicultural services helped the evolution of the Takatori Church Relief Station, which was later renamed the Takatori Relief Station in 1997, and then became the Takatori Community Center (TCC) in 2000 (Takatori Community Center, n.d.). As an umbrella organization, the TCC today houses nine organizations including FM YY, working mainly with the migrant and ethnic minority communities, as well as elders. These organizations, for example, provide and coordinate professional translation services in 28 languages, offer a community space for Japanese Latin American children, or work to empower women from various parts of Asia. In 2001, NGO Vietnam in Kobe was formally founded out of the KFC to specialize in organizing the local Vietnamese community; currently, it offers language classes, works on antidrug campaigns, organizes community events, and conducts advocacy work (NGO Vietnam in Kobe, 2010). The KFC then became independent of the TCC in 2003, continuing to provide advocacy, research, language, and educational services for Korean and other non-Japanese populations, particularly children and seniors. As these stories illustrate, in the aftermath of the 1995 earthquake, the local survivors immediately came together and organized other volunteers and themselves for relief and reconstruction. Gradually, as the needs of the local communities shifted, many organizations were established, merged together,

5

Korean schools, despite their capacity to function as official evacuation spaces, are not designated as such mainly due to governmental discrimination against these schools. See Rang (1997) for more on the issues around Korean schools. 101

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became independent, and grew larger. More recently, these organizations have worked on projects sponsored by the city of Kobe and other governmental offices, organized lectures and symposia, hosted numerous concerts, events, and festivities, published multilingual resource media, created job opportunities for migrant workers, appeared in a number of films and TV programs, and won multiple awards. They have also been playing critical roles in the subsequent disaster situations within the country and beyond in terms of providing migrant communities with information and other forms of support. These actions taken by the grassroots communities are not necessarily considered as ‘research’ in the conventional sense. However, they are certainly mobilizing community knowledge to enhance social justice in response to the disaster, as various governmental offices did not have appropriate knowledge (or, sometimes, an intention) to serve these communities. Initially, their activities centered on securing access to essential information for survival, as well as organizing themselves as community rebuilders. While they used pre-existing social networks, they also made new connections and cultivated relationships beyond language, nationality, and ethnicity. Eventually, the communities around the TCC came to be known as the experts on issues of culturally sensitive post-disaster relief and recovery. In other words, their community knowledge rooted in their lived experiences has come to be regarded as a valuable body of information that the government, the media, and the academy now seek to share in partnership. Although questions around the ownership of their knowledge remain to be explored, the case of these communities provides an important and impressive model for future post-disaster community building. In sum, this case illustrates how the dominant discourse of disaster nationalism that silences or distorts the voices of non-Japanese disaster survivors could be subverted by community-led research that prioritizes the experiences of the actual survivors as expert knowledge.

Case II: Great Eastern Japan earthquake, 2011 The 1995 earthquakes that hit my parents’ hometown left me, eight years old at the time, with a profound sense of impermanence and precariousness. Yet it was only years later that I realized how structural inequalities impact disaster consequences and how the nation-state is woven into dominant narratives of disaster. I came to the United States in 2006 to attend San Francisco State University. During my undergraduate years, I became involved in the Bay Area-based Zainichi Korean community organization, Eclipse Rising, which ‘recognizes and celebrates the rich and unique history of Zainichi Koreans in Japan, promotes Zainichi community development, peace and reunification in the Korean Peninsula, and social justice for all oppressed groups in Japan, the United States, and beyond, through transnational education, advocacy, and solidarity’ (Eclipse Rising, n.d.). It was founded in 2008 by a group of Zainichi Koreans with diverse backgrounds, and it has organized film events locally, developed a transnational solidarity education tour to Japan, and collaborated with other radical Korean American 102

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groups and organizations across the country. This was the first time in my life that I was able to fully embrace my Zainichi Korean subjectivity and articulate it through a collectivity in which I felt safe as a queer person. I was with my friends in and around Eclipse Rising when I heard the news of the earthquakes, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown on March 11, 2011, in Japan. We were in Riverside, California, to present a panel together at a conference. I thought it was just another earthquake until, back in our motel, we saw the video footage of the tsunami washing everything away. Yet it did not hit me emotionally while we were in Riverside; after coming back to the Bay Area the next day, I stayed alone in my apartment watching news on the disaster, becoming sleepless and depressed. Although my family was not impacted at all this time, it was difficult being so far away and still wanting to share the sense of absolute despair and hope for change. Soon enough, however, I witnessed how the post-disaster trauma became nationalized. Both within and beyond Japan, the victim of the disaster is the Japanese nation-state, rather than the actual people in the northeastern region, including migrant and ethnic minority populations. The national flag was suddenly omnipresent; the rhetoric of national disaster was deafeningly pervasive. While the victims and survivors immediately came to symbolize the nation that must be rescued and saved, they still remain largely as a narrative figure that merely legitimates the state, with little voice to narrate their own experiences other than how ‘grateful’ and ‘empowered’ they are, if they are allowed to speak at all. Against the grain of such disaster nationalism, members of Eclipse Rising came together to discuss what we could do. Our answer was to establish a philanthropic bridge between grassroots communities in Japan and the U.S., and within a few days of the disaster, we co-founded the Japan Multicultural Relief Fund (JMRF) in partnership with Japan Pacific Resource Network (JPRN), a non-profit organization also based in the Bay Area for Japan–U.S. cross-cultural grassroots education and exchange. The relationship that Eclipse Rising and JPRN had previously been cultivating culminated in this collaborative project, in which JPRN as a 501(c)(3) organization technically houses the JMRF in order to facilitate the flow of financial relief aid, while Eclipse Rising mainly mobilizes and provides necessary volunteer labor. In addition to providing immediate and long-term relief and recovery support, the primary goals of this organization include letting people in the U.S. know about the experiences of marginalized communities confronted by the material impacts of the earthquakes and tsunami, as well as the social impacts of disaster nationalism. Our immediate work included soliciting donations, applying for grants, communicating with benefit event organizers, collecting information about the disaster-struck regions, and identifying the grantee organizations in Japan, all the while learning how to establish a relief fund by doing it. The Fund was soon endorsed by Peace Development Fund, awarded a grant by the Levi Foundation, and became a beneficiary of various local charity events, including the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Fundraiser. Meanwhile, seven recipient organizations were identified on the basis that they 103

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had established records of working with marginalized populations: non-Japanese residents, migrant workers, single-parent households, people with disabilities, and older adults. Here, Solidarity Network with Migrants Japan (SMJ), one of the recipient organizations, was in fact among the people and organizations that Eclipse Rising had visited during the previous summer as part of its education and solidarity tour to Japan. Some members also had had a connection with another recipient organization, NPO Woori Hakkyo, which supports Korean schools in the Tohoku region. Most of the tasks, administrative or otherwise, were carried out by volunteer labor; this includes the logo design, website design and coordination, volunteer coordination, research, and translation. As a result, in May 2011, the seven recipient organizations received approximately $6,300 each for their relief efforts. In particular, NPO Woori Hakkyo’s support for the Korean schools was significant in Japan’s political atmosphere in which Korean schools continue to be excluded from the government’s high school subsidization programs, as it partially offset the insufficient amount of governmental aid to the destroyed Korean schools. More recently, the JMRF delivered additional aid money to SMJ and Hotline Chamae, supported by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, a human rights and social justice organization based in Cambridge, MA. SMJ used this money to build a multicultural community center and cafeteria in the town of Minami Sanriku, which was utterly destroyed by the tsunami. This center was envisioned and is run by a multi-ethnic leadership team, which includes local Filipina women. It provides a space for the local community to interact across generation, nationality, and culture, while securing a safe local food supply system in light of the nuclear radiation issues. Initially, the cafeteria struggled to become financially independent, as the donations had been used up in establishing the building and obtaining equipment. The leadership team was working as volunteer labor until a translocal support system was developed. Through multiple campaigns, this project mobilized volunteers and supporters all over the country. First, volunteers knit small key chains, which are wrapped along with Sansa Café postcards by the project team. These products are then sold at various venues around Japan along with meal vouchers, which will be issued to local residents in Minami Sanriku. Thus, support from people elsewhere directly benefits both Sansa Café and the local customers. As of June 2013, more than 2,200 meals had been provided through this system. In the meantime, Hotline Chamae has been working to establish a national multilingual hotline service for women-identified migrant and ethnic minority people affected by the disaster. This project aims to connect domestic and sexual violence survivors with appropriate counseling, support, and services; in addition, it will advocate with the Japanese government and Japanese feminist movements to provide permanent infrastructure, training support, and administrative support to sustain multilingual services for such women survivors. In all of these instances, many of us, both survivors and supporters, conducted various kinds of research. Some of this may not be seen as ‘research’ in a traditional academic sense, however: finding local organizations that were serving vulnerable 104

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populations, through the internet and personal connections; surveying media reports on how the disasters impacted these communities; conversely, pointing out the lack of media coverage on non-Japanese victims and survivors; interviewing the survivors about their needs and concerns; translating information into English; finding events to do outreach at; observing the extent of damages done to Korean schools; sharing stories of desperate farmers in the areas around the nuclear power plant, and so on. In fact, most of what we did is informal knowledge sharing, quite far from ‘academic rigor.’ Yet I would like to emphasize that all of these research activities were done for the aim of relief, recovery, and reconstruction. We needed to mobilize resources, not theorize inequalities and disaster. We needed to listen to one another, not consult journal articles. We needed to create and disseminate new knowledge out of our grassroots community knowledge, not consume and rely on unreliable information provided by the state. Research, in this sense, was crucial to our efforts to move the necessary people and money. Like the 1995 earthquake, this more recent case also highlights the various ways in which ordinary people’s knowledge was organized quickly and effectively to counter disaster nationalism. Importantly, the transnational and translocal connections of solidarity developed, and strengthened further, through this relief process.

Disaster justice Drawing on these cases, I propose a concept of disaster justice. I argue that disaster justice is a necessary process of combining the struggles for social justice and decolonization on the one hand, and the efforts into disaster preparation and response on the other. It is necessary because the dominant discourse of disaster nationalism blurs the boundaries between the social, cultural, and political (or ‘subjective’) dimensions and physical, material, and technical (or ‘objective’) dimensions of disastrous events and their aftermaths. The strategies to counter this must therefore address these multiple dimensions altogether. Specifically, disaster justice promotes the understanding of preparation as response, as well as response as preparation. Preparations must integrate lessons learned from experiences of the past disasters, particularly around the issues of social and economic justice, cross-cultural solidarity, and conviviality. Meanwhile, responses must also be carried out with a long-term vision of building a society that is not only physically resistant to disasters but also attentive to social and cultural conflicts that may exacerbate the damage of disasters. Disasters will happen (again), and global climate change is only worsening the situation we live in. Some disasters are recurring, like hurricanes, and others are unprecedented, like nuclear meltdowns. Some disasters, like tornados, only impact limited geographical areas and others have global consequences, like global warming. Some disasters are sudden and drastic, like earthquakes, and others are gradual and difficult to recognize, like water and air pollution. All disasters are further complicated by structural inequalities around class, race, gender, age, ability, and sexuality. To respond to a disaster, therefore, does not mean it is all over when everything goes back to 105

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normal, when the ‘normal’ pre-disaster conditions were already oppressive. The response must address various injustices as an inherent part of the cause of the disaster. Similarly, to prepare for a disaster cannot be merely to conduct drills and stock up on necessary items without considering who will and will not have access to the resources. The preparation must pay close attention to how previous disasters have impacted different communities differently, and it must entail fundamental social, cultural, political, and infrastructural changes. This is precisely why disaster justice is a process that takes a holistic approach, combining response and preparation altogether. Indispensable to this process of disaster justice is Research Justice. The process of Research Justice may entail numerous principles, and the first is perhaps to recognize research oppression. As many scholars, like Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) and Shawn Wilson (2008), sharply critique, academia remains a fundamentally oppressive institution that continues to privilege certain voices over others through its research agenda and curricula. Research Justice as a critical response seems to entail at least two overall interrelated and simultaneous processes. The first is to make academic and other authoritative knowledge relevant and accessible to those who never had access previously, despite always being the subject of research. This requires doing away with jargon, holding researchers accountable, teaching about fewer white men and more women of color, providing more resources to students of color, and so on. The second is to democratize research by enabling communities of color and indigenous communities to create and mobilize their own knowledge as as ‘legitimate’ and ‘valid’ as more mainstream types of knowledge. This requires privileging of community expertise over outside experts, providing methodological training and support, supporting scholars of color, and asserting the grassroots communities’ ownership of knowledge, as well as actually listening to these communities. I emphasize here that what is imperative in this process is the reclaiming of the grassroots, transnational, diasporic, indigenous, decolonial, anticapitalist, antiracist, feminist, queer, and accessible knowledge systems—which various marginalized communities have long been cultivating. By engaging in the dual processes of Research Justice and disaster justice, we must continue to build a society that can sustain and persevere through disastrous times together. Information regarding a disaster situation must be accessible and transparent—unlike how the Japanese government has handled the nuclear meltdown with much secrecy and deception. Meanwhile, the survivors must have the capacity and resources to mobilize their grassroots knowledge and represent themselves in the way they regard appropriate and meaningful. Disaster justice asserts that a society that is truly just, peaceful, and sustainable is also prepared for the worst. It is about promoting multilingual resources and culturally relevant education; it is about housing everyone in safe housing; it is about securing safe working environments; it is about conserving energy while promoting ‘green’ and ‘clean’ energy; it is about growing our own food; it is about training ourselves to be collaborative, not competitive; it is about furthering demilitarization and prison abolition; it is about establishing accessible public transportation; it is about 106

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having affordable and reliable healthcare; it is about eliminating sexual violence; it is about promoting sensitivity towards gender non-conforming people; and it is about cultivating grassroots solidarity for collective healing. In reality, these might be difficult if not impossible to achieve, but it is nevertheless a blueprint that we can and shall work on and towards. Disasters will happen, over and over again, but it is possible to make them less and less disastrous for everyone.

References Ahmed, S., 2004, The cultural politics of emotion, New York: Routledge Alexander, J.C., 2012, Trauma: A social theory, Cambridge: Polity Alexander, J.C., Eyerman, R., Giesen, B., Smelser, N.J. and Sztompka, P., 2004, Cultural trauma and collective identity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press Bullard, R.D., 1999, Dismantling environmental racism in the USA, Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, 4, 1, 5–19 Clarke, L., 2006, Worst cases: Terror and catastrophe in the popular imagination, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press DCRJ (DataCenter: Research for Justice), 2014, Research Justice: A strategic framework to transform structural inequities in research to centralize community power, www.datacenter.org/what-we-do/research-justice Dynes, R.R. and Rodríguez, H., 2007, Finding and framing Katrina: The social construction of disaster, in D. Brunsma, D. Overfelt and J.S. Picou (eds.) The sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a modern catastrophe, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 23–34 Eclipse Rising, n.d., About us, https://sites.google.com/site/eclipserising/ about-us Eyerman, R., Alexander, J.C. and Breese, E.B. (eds.), 2011, Narrating trauma: On the impact of collective suffering, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers FM YY, 2004, FM YY history, www.tcc117.org/fmyy/hystory/index.html Ishikida, M.Y., 2005, Toward peace: War responsibility, postwar compensation, and peace movements and education in Japan, Lincoln, NE: iUniverse Japan Federation of Bar Association Human Rights Advocacy Committee, 2003, The Great Kanto earthquake human rights redress appeal investigation report., www.azusawa.jp/shiryou/kantou-200309.html Kawaguchi, T., 2008, Genbaku bungaku to iu mondai-ryoiki/puroburematiku (The problematic of atomic bomb literature), Tokyo: Sogensha Kim, I.M., 1978, Chosenjin ga naze minzokumei wo nanorunoka (Why Koreans use their ethnic names), Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo Kobe Foreigners Friendship Center, n.d., KFC’s activities, www.social-b.net/ kfc/katudou/katudou.html Miyauchi, S., 2004, Shinsai kara miru gaikokujin no seikatsu jokyo: ‘Machi’ o katachizukuru hitobito (Foreigners’ living situations through the lens of an earthquake: people who shape the ‘town’), undergraduate thesis, Waseda University, www.waseda.jp/sem-muranolt01/SR/S2007/SR2007-chin.pdf 107

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Neal, A.G., 2005, National trauma and collective memory: Extraordinary events in the American experience, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe NGO Vietnam in Kobe, 2010, Overview of the organization, www.tcc117.org/ ngovt/dantaigaiyou.html Picou, J.S. and Marshall, B.K., 2007, Introduction: Katrina as paradigm shift: Reflections on disaster research in the twenty-first century, in D. Brunsma, D. Overfelt and J.S. Picou (eds.), 2007, The sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a modern catastrophe, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1–22 Polletta, F., 2006, It was like a fever: Storytelling in protest and politics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press Pulido, L., 2000, Rethinking environmental racism: White privilege and urban development in Southern California, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90, 1, 12–40 Ryang, S., 1997, North Koreans in Japan: Language, ideology, and identity, Boulder, CO: Westview Press Sarat, A., Davidovitch, N. and Alberstein, M. (eds.), 2007, Trauma and memory: Reading, healing, and making law, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press Sasaki, K., 1995, Hanshin-Awaji dai-shinsai to gaikokujin mondai (The Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake and the issues of foreigners), www.focusglobal.org/ leading/pdf/kobe_earthquake.pdf Schlosberg, D. and Carruthers, D., 2010, Indigenous struggles, environmental justice, and community capabilities, Global Environmental Politics, 10, 4, 12–35 Smith, L.T., 1999, Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples, Dunedin: University of Otago Press Takatori Community Center, n.d., About the Takatori Community Center, www.tcc117.org/tcc/tcc.html Takatori Community Center, 2005, Takibi: The 10-year record of Takatori: History of town-building for living together, www.tcc117.org/tcc/ pdf/ takibi_TCC10th.pdf Tomlinson, S.A., 2006, No New Orleanians left behind: An examination of the disparate impact of Hurricane Katrina on minorities, Connecticut Law Review, 38, 5, 1153–88 Wilson, S., 2008, Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods, Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing Zeruvabel, E., 2003, Time maps: Collective memory and the social shape of the past, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press

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TEN

A health justice journey: Documenting our stories and speaking for ourselves Alma Leyva, Imelda S. Plascencia and Mayra Yoana Jaimes Pena

“Ain’t no power like research power, ’cause research power is legit!” (Immigrant youth, research participant)

Healthy California and the immigrant health movement Undocumented people are nationally excluded from health policies. Without healthcare access, many undocumented immigrants suffer from chronic pain, easily treatable diseases, and remain unaware of existing health conditions. Undocumented people have been taught that accessing social services may result in deportation. This belief has led immigrants to perceive health as a privilege; care that is needed is delayed and they resort to band-aid services. Unlearning unhealthy perceptions and reframing immigrant health is part of the work embarked on by Healthy California and the immigrant health movement. Healthy California developed to address the wellness and lack of health access for undocumented Californians. With limited information on the subject and even fewer insight from individuals directly impacted by the health exclusion, there was a need to first engage in research. In the summer of 2013, 34 intern researchers and three coordinating team members conducted statewide research on barriers to healthcare access for immigrant youth in California. The study is the first statewide research initiative in California where immigrant youth led the development, reporting and dissemination phases of the work. Intern researchers participated in the study through their involvement in the Healthy California project of Dream1 Summer, 1

We consciously do not identify as Dreamers or use the word Dreamer to share our narrative and write this journey. The word Dreamer has been constructed to refer to a select few individuals who are considered the exception by gaining some access and opportunities within the United States, and we choose to not perpetuate this narrative. Although the term has been reappropriated, reframed and reclaimed by various individuals within the immigrant youth movement, within a larger context the word Dreamer represents exceptionalism and a new form of model minority when discussing immigration. 109

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a national summer internship program for immigrant youth by immigrant youth. The Healthy California project provided a space to examine the political and personal layers of being undocumented and uninsured. Most importantly it provided immigrant youth, who are commonly the subjects of research, the opportunity to produce knowledge about their own lives and within their community.

An intentional Research Justice lens The level of power researchers have over community information and knowledge production became evident in the project’s development. The structure of research affords influence over the framework and analysis of each subject’s story by those investigating a community. Decisions such as the survey questions, population sample, regional focus, and number of surveys are generally made by a few individuals, and often without the involvement of the communities being researched. When members of a researched community are not involved, the researcher is positioned as an expert, even though they may not be a part of the community. Recognizing this dynamic, and its potential for instilling harm to research subjects, the team intentionally implemented a Research Justice framework. Research Justice offers a paradigm shift in research practices. It begins with the premise that the community is the expert and positions them as the drivers of the research agenda. It recognizes existing colonizing and oppressive research processes, and challenges traditional practices of knowledge creation, expertise, resource sharing and dissemination. Even mainstream participatory- and community-based research can fall back into traditional roles of researcher and subject, allowing limited opportunities for community participation. Research Justice validates the understanding that community members have the capacity to produce information and document their own experiences, recognizing the agency communities have over their lives, and that they are in the best position to represent their interests and tell their own stories. The goal of the statewide research was to capture the health experiences of undocumented youth in California and topackage that data into representative information of the population.

An empowering development The coordinating team understood the importance of centering the work around those directly impacted. Initiating a project as unique as this required institutional support. The coordinating team worked alongside Saba Waheed, research director of the UCLA Labor Center, to move the project forward. As a leading pioneer in Research Justice, Saba openly shared her expertise and provided the tools to learn through the experience, while trusting the decisions and direction of the team. Although Saba held power that could have been used to direct the project,

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she approached the process in a manner that empowered the team and served as a guiding principle for working and conducting research with community. In three short months the coordinating team developed a survey, organized a statewide research project and selected the intern researchers who led the data collection. Construction of the survey involved conversations with immigrant youth and undocumented community members. Once the survey was finalized, the team began to partner with health- and community-based organizations throughout the state and to solidify the participation of intern researchers. Thirtyfour immigrant youth were selected and tasked with collectively gathering 400 surveys; the initial goal and a representative sample of undocumented Californians. The development of the project allowed for the team to recognize the amount of interest and need on this issue. Outside of the research, the project stood as an opportunity to uplift the undocumented community, reframe unhealthy perceptions, contribute to the dominant narrative of the undocumented and uninsured population and use the research as a tool to create change.

Convening the researcher team Prior to initiating the study, intern researchers convened in Los Angeles to prepare for the task ahead. The opening orientation consisted of trainings on health policies, Research Justice methodology, self- and community-care practices, and personal discussions about living undocumented and uninsured. The connection and intersecting framework between health and immigrant rights became evident as the two issues were discussed. Conversations about healthcare access personally resonated with many individuals in the room. There was an unspoken understanding of what it meant to be denied healthcare. For many interns and coordinating team members, the issue was a living reality currently experienced by themselves or close family members. In addition to courageous and vulnerable conversations, the team planned for collecting 400 surveys by brainstorming outreach methods and finalizing travel dates throughout the state. The 34 Healthy California interns came from diverse backgrounds that ranged across education, age, skills, sexual orientation, politics, experience in activism, immigration status, race and geography. After the opening orientation, intern researchers traveled back to their home regions to begin collecting data.

The summer process It was important that the process by which the team carried out the work was reflective of desired changes in traditional methods of research. In order to truly commit to Research Justice, the team ensured that entering a community involved more than extracting information. The coordinating team intentionally provided tools to empower the intern researchers as well as the survey participants. Healing justice practices and health resources were intentionally promoted to develop a 111

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reciprocal relationship with participants. To address trauma that came up during the survey, we shared the work of the Collective of Immigrant Resilience through Community Led Empowerment (CIRCLE) Project. The CIRCLE Project creates healing spaces by and for undocumented individuals. Through healing circles, participants built community by sharing their experience with other undocumented people in their area. For the coordinating team, everyday was a conscious effort to adapt our work to bring the most benefit to the community. Conversations with participants provided deeper insight into community needs that could be addressed through the research.

First look at the data By the end of the summer the research team exceeded the goal of 400 surveys and collected 550. The coordinating team developed a way for the researchers to be part of the analysis of the preliminary data in an interactive way. The data was presented in the form of a gallery walk, which was much like an art gallery. The gallery walk presented data in a visual format for the researchers to analyze. As they walked through the different sections, the research team discussed topics such as what surprised them about the data, what pieces of data stood out the most, what was pieces of data were missing. For the most part, the research team was not surprised by the numbers. The information validated the reality in our communities that as undocumented people the research team knew well. Reviewing the data gave the team confidence to recognize their capacity to produce research, which is an opportunity that rarely exists for the undocumented community. More than just data, the statistics represented the very real experiences in the undocumented community. Walking through the gallery triggered many emotions and frustration for the research team. These were not just numbers on the wall, they represented families and loved ones. The conscious and thoughtful conversations that took place during the closing orientation demonstrated the amount of growth that took place during the summer. The research had served not only as a tool for knowledge but also a stepping stone to something more impactful.

An insider’s analysis There is great deal of power that comes with data analysis. Although numbers may seem objective, the way they are used is not. The coordinating team reviewed the data, and made decisions about what aspects to highlight and which to disregard. The biggest learning experience in this regard was the power of stories through numbers. The experiences of undocumented Californians are well known within community, but numbers allow outsiders to recognize the depth of the issue and understand how they are connected.

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A great deal of time was spent learning data analysis skills through the research process. There were numerous variables to work with, and at first the SPSS2 software used to analyze data was intimidating. The process challenged the team to step out of their comfort zones and continue to develop their roles as researchers. With time, learning the software taught the team to better trust themselves with the work and their skills.

Looking forward in research The journey was a personal and professional learning experience. The summer was emotionally and physically challenging, but through it the coordinating team learned how to better approach the research process in a healthy and collective way. Through this experience, the need to incorporate reciprocity between researchers and community members is evident, as well as wellness practices within the Research Justice model. When we are well, we are less likely to hurt others and ourselves. Wellness is a critical component to sustaining our resilient struggle for change. Without it, our praxis is impacted and it is reflected in the our models of creating change. From this experience, the interns developed confidence to participate in research and a deeper understanding of how health barriers impact their immigrant community. Having an opportunity to listen to the needs of our community was also identified as a positive outcome. Many participants felt a deeper connection to the fight for healthcare access and developing health sustainability practices for the immigrant youth movement. Moreover, the experience gave the opportunity to implement a new framework for conducting research with immigrant communities. It created an opportunity to uplift members of the community and to have research be more than just a report. Research is a stepping stone to creating change through its use as tool by community to pass beneficial legislation and the development of resources, and by providing elite opportunities by positioning community members as experts. The process by which research is conducted is important and in moving research forward there is a need to be just as mindful of how to use the knowledge obtained to benefit the community.

Advancing the immigrant health movement Through the research, the report ‘Undocumented and uninsured: a five-part report on immigrant youth and the struggle to access healthcare in California’ was developed. In February of 2014, Parts 1 and 2 of the report were released. In the same month, Senate Bill 1005 was introduced in California, which would provide healthcare access for all Californians regardless of immigration status. The policy development was significant to our work. Undocumented and Uninsured is being

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used to speak to the need for bills that advance health policy in California. As the community that is directly impacted by exclusion from healthcare, it was not enough to simply produce the document and stories of families and communities. Using the reports as tools Healthy California has continued to engage and develop leaders at the intersection of health and immigration and to position them as agents of change. Healthy California interns are developing a political and personal understanding of health and committing to incorporate health in social justice work. Interns who did not see themselves as experts now are the leaders within their region in immigrant health organizing. They have developed statewide and regional resource guides to aid the undocumented community in finding health services and have created guides on enrolling DACA recipients into Medi-Cal. As the findings continue to be disseminated, conversations with community members and key stakeholders continue to be essential in determining the needs of the community. The hope is that the work of Healthy California will continue to have a significant impact in the lives of undocumented communities and in our pursuit of social justice.

Pursuing research and personal reflections Alma Leyva Practicing Research Justice has been an empowering experience. However, there is a great difficulty that comes with conducting research in your own community. The possibility of triggering your experiences, or those of your participant’s, is ever present, and emotional wounds can be reopened through the research process. This dynamic became evident throughout our Healthy California Survey Project when we began to have conversations with immigrant youth across the state. It has been a beautiful experience to listen to people throughout California who have shared my undocumented journey. As they revealed their stories, I couldn’t help but feel that their lives were a reflection of mine. I remembered going through those same painful feelings of neglect and fear that come with being undocumented. Being a part of this process allowed me to reflect on the times that I was the subject of research, and the disconnect I felt towards researchers. For researchers who are not undocumented and who are conducting research, it seems justified to enter our community and extract information. As academics who are supported by educational institutions, their perspective of knowledge production takes away from their position as guests in our communities and homes. Challenging this perspective is why I continue to actively engage in Research Justice. Imelda S. Plascencia I developed an interest in research my last year at UCLA when I started to feel like a guinea pig among the various interviews and research studies on the lives 114

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of immigrant youth. The dominant narrative produced the perception of a new brown model minority that embodied a narrow perspective of the immigrant reality. Initially there were stories that victimized immigrant youth and glorified their assets, while simultaneously blaming immigrant families for their courageous acts of migration. It was a narrative that was not constructed or guided by our immigrant community or one that I felt comfortable perpetuating. As an undocumented, queer, brown female who was raised in La Puente, participating in research initially seemed like an elite practice that was beyond my rationale. Through the immigrant youth movement I learned the importance of community members being able to speak for themselves, and the development of research doesn’t stand outside of that. I began to question the production of knowledge and the purpose that it served within our community. There were a lot of questions that I was challenged to consider that were often too painful to think about. Who is benefiting from the analysis and findings that are produced? What impact is research having on the actual community? What harm is being caused by the production of research? How is research uplifting or empowering the community that it is dissecting? Why aren’t we a part of the process, when they are talking about our lives? How are researchers considered experts when they are not a part of the community? After engaging in personal reflections and various discussions with mentors, I began to perceive research as a form of active resistance and decided to conduct my own research project as a senior at UCLA. I’ve consciously engaged in research since then, and my position at the Dream Resource Center has allowed me to do so in formal ways. As I have continued to engage in this work, it has been evident that researchers and academics outside of the undocumented community have various blind spots. They have the potential to misinterpret and misguide our reality, when ultimately, it is our families and communities that must live with the consequences. These dynamics often remain unquestioned and unacknowledged, further validating the need for Research Justice practices in academia. Mayra Yoana Jaimes Pena As someone who is undocumented and part of a heavily researched community, I personally understand how intrusive research can be. It feels strange to read about the experiences of people in my undocumented community, especially when the information doesn’t accurately capture our reality. Instead, research often offers an assumed narrative that scratches the surface of the struggles faced by undocumented immigrants. Being aware of the harm that research can cause, I did not want to replicate ruthless research methods that take information from communities. As the Healthy California research project was emerging, I initially played a consulting role whereby I provided recommendations on working with the undocumented population. Through my work with the CIRCLE Project I was familiar with facilitating healing justice circles and consciously approaching 115

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undocumented communities. The CIRCLE Project utilizes critical race theory (CRT) as a framework to guide the courageous conversations that take place in the circles. Research Justice parallels CRT through a social justice lens that acknowledges the importance of communities speaking for themselves. The Healthy California research project has been a very empowering learning experience. Understanding myself as a person who holds authority and power to conduct research has positively impacted my perception of self. As a circle keeper I have recognized that there is a lot of internalized oppression that occurs within our community. Much of it is due to the hostile social environment that we live in, the constant dehumanization, and micro-aggressions that we face on a daily basis. Experiences such as these inhibit our ability to realize the power we hold as individuals and as a community. Reference Dream Resource Center, 2014, Undocumented and uninsured: a five-part report on immigrant youth and the struggle to access healthcare in California, Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Downtown Labor Center Healthy California 2013 intern researchers Adriana Aguilar, Esthela Aguilar,* Jewell Alingasa, Yesenia Ayala, Cristhian Barrera, Nayelli Casarrubias, David Castro, Mayra Contreras, Hairo Cortes, Nidia De Leon, Amanda Em, Marco Flores,* Perla Flores,* Angelica Hernandez, Dalia Hernandez, Adrian James, Carlos Juarez, Janeth Lopez, Miguel Montalva, Lizeth Montiel, Malin Ouk, Ma Denise Panaligan, Luis Ramirez, Cesar Resendiz, Giovanni Rodriguez, Maria Rodriguez, Nadia Rojas, Seleny Rodriguez, Angelica Tellez Hernandez,* Crisly Ulloa, Alex Vazquez, Jose Vazquez, Xiomara Ramos Villasenor, Elizabeth Zambrano * Intern coordinators

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By us, not for us: Black women researching pregnancy and childbirth Julia Chinyere Oparah, Fatimah Salahuddin, Ronnesha Cato, Linda Jones, Talita Oseguera, and Shanelle Matthews

Introduction [F]or generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden. (Alain Locke, The New Negro) In 1925, Alain Locke issued a call to African American artists, intellectuals, and activists to throw off the shackles of racial stereotypes, and to embrace the uncompromising aesthetics and politics of the ‘New Negro.’ No longer would African Americans be thought of as a ‘problem,’ Locke asserted; to be worried over and solved by white scholars, politicians, and social reformers. Instead, rejecting wellmeaning efforts at reform that denied black self-determination, African Americans would reclaim agency, set our own agendas and, in the process, transform ourselves and the nation. More than eight decades later, Locke’s words still ring true. In study after study, black experiences of education, criminal (in)justice, employment, healthcare, pregnancy, and motherhood are documented, dissected, and analyzed by researchers who have no lived experience of the topic under examination. And those of us whose bodies are metaphorically placed under the scalpel are seldom consulted about the research agendas, design, findings, or recommendations. This chapter explores what happened when a small group of black women in Oakland, CA, decided to take back control over the research process. It documents our journey, from forming a community-based organization, to becoming co-researchers, and designing and carrying out research that we believed should have integrity and humanity, as well as scholarly rigor and legitimacy. In researching and writing this essay, we were committed to telling the real deal, rather than producing a cleaned-up, ‘hygienic’ version of the research. To this end, we discuss both how the research journey empowered and strengthened us, and the struggles and challenges we experienced along the way. Six members of 117

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the collective contributed to this essay: Linda, a doula, grandmother, and elder; Talita, a newly qualified doula, mom, and former research participant; Chinyere, an activist-scholar, mom, and relative newcomer to birth justice activism; Ronnesha, a young single mom of three, student, and environmental justice activist; Shanelle, a communications expert and reproductive justice advocate; and Fatimah, a student intern and Research Justice advocate. This chapter aims to encourage communities to determine for themselves what knowledge would be useful to them, and how it should be obtained, disseminated, and utilized. It also aims to challenge professional and academic researchers to their complicity with research injustice, and to dismantle the power inequities that remain at the heart of traditional research practices.

The context: From medical apartheid to Research Justice I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. (Deborah Lacks, in Skloot, 2010) When tobacco farmer, mother of five, and cervical cancer sufferer Henrietta Lacks lay on her deathbed in 1951, her family had no idea that, within a few years, her cells would be mass produced and shipped across the United States. The harvesting of Mrs. Lacks’ cancer cells—dubbed immortal for their ability to divide indefinitely—heralded a dramatic breakthrough for medical research. Her cells, named HeLa, could be grown and replicated en masse, enabling scientists to use them for research in immunization, cell culture and cloning, Today, Mrs. Lacks’ cells can be found in test tubes and under microscopes in laboratories across the globe. Needless to stay, the Lacks family did not benefit from the trillions of HeLa cells sold to medical researchers across the globe. And Henrietta Lacks, buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, remained nameless and unknown to most of the scientists who later used her immortalized body to advance their research agendas. This is the shadowy underbelly of the astounding advances that have transformed medicine during the past century. While elite researchers and research institutions have built reputations, won prestige and gained access to multimillion-dollar research budgets, their research subjects—often poor people, people in institutions, and people of color—have suffered exploitation, human rights abuses, disability, and death in the name of scientific progress. Accounts of research abuses in the U.S. usually start and end with the story of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In 1997, President Clinton issued an apology for the study, initiated and funded by the U.S. Health Service and carried out by the Tuskegee Institute, in which 399 poor, black men in impoverished and segregated Macon County, AL, were deliberately allowed to suffer and in some cases die from syphilis (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.). Misled into believing they were receiving treatment for ‘bad blood,’ when in fact that they were receiving useless vitamins, the men were denied treatment for 40 years and even prevented from enlisting 118

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in the army so that penicillin treatment would not pollute the research findings. Holding the government and medical research industry accountable for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study is of critical importance, given the egregious racism and lack of regard for human life involved. But we also need to look critically at how the story of Tuskegee is told. In numerous popular and scholarly accounts, we learn little about the women impacted by the study. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted, congenital disease. Uninformed about the risk of sexual transmission, at least 40 wives contracted the illness, and 19 of their children contracted the disease during fetal development or at birth (Landau, 2010). Black women and their infants were therefore the invisible victims of the study. The history of medical research abuses against African-American women and their reproductive capacities far pre-dates Tuskegee. In fact, the fields of gynecology and obstetrics, which aimed to enhance the survival rates and successful birth outcomes of white birthing women, depended on physicians’ access to black women’s bodies and impunity for the violence they inflicted in the name of science. South Carolina physician J. Marion Sims, the celebrated ‘father of American gynecology’, who developed instruments such as the speculum and medical techniques that laid the foundation for modern-day obstetrics, could not have done so without experiments amounting to torture on 11 enslaved black women. The enslaved women had vesicovaginal fistulas, ruptures between the vagina and the bladder and rectum, which often occur due to birthing children too young, which Sims determined to cure. At the time, physicians commonly dealt with white women’s gynecological problems by touch only, to safeguard their honor (Washington, 2006). In contrast, Harriet Washington tells the grueling story of the five years during which Sims performed numerous experimental surgeries, slicing open the vaginal tissues of the women without anesthesia as his assistants held them down by force. One of the women, Anarcha, subsequently became the first successful fistula patient, but only after 30 agonizing surgeries. In this context, the blatant disregard for the safety of the black men, women, and infants of Macon County can be seen as the continuation of a long history of what Harriet Washington labels ‘medical apartheid,’ whereby African Americans are used as guinea pigs by a largely white male medical establishment in order to generate scientific knowledge that seldom benefits them. For black women, medical research abuses have often been focused on our reproductive capacities. Our wombs, and the infants we carry in them, have been the terrain on which medical researchers have built reputations and medical breakthroughs. Our bodies have been disposable raw materials in the knowledge production machine of the medical industrial complex. Yet, no bronze statue has ever been erected in honor of the nameless black women who paid for medical advances with their blood and pain.1

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The marker at his birthplace honors J. Marion Simms for ‘his service to suffering women, empress and slave alike’ (Spettel and White, 2011). 119

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How can we ensure that, in President Clinton’s words, such abuses ‘can never be allowed to happen again’ (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.)? Today, medical researchers have to undergo stringent ethics review processes by independent ethics boards to ensure that ‘human subjects’ give meaningful informed consent, and that protocols are in place to protect them from harm. This is essential, but not enough. Regardless of such measures, black birthing women continue to be the subjects of research over which we have no say. Huge sums of federal money fund research institutions where research is carried out by and about black women’s perinatal experiences, yet we are seldom consulted about what research would be helpful to address the crisis in maternal health in our communities, or how that research should be carried out. Today, many researchers carry out research on black women, pregnancy, and childbirth outcomes without ever interacting with a single black woman. Instead, researchers rely on birth and death records and medical histories, which are gleaned without our explicit consent. Once again, our voices are silenced, our lived experiences are erased, and our interpretations of how we live in our bodies, how we carry and push out our babies, are ignored. While ethical protocols may protect us from the explicit violence documented by Harriet Washington, black women continue to experience medical research injustice that is rooted in the social relations of medical apartheid. Only when the power dynamics of research are completely transformed, and birthing women become recognized as the experts on our own experiences, will medical research become a tool for real social change. That is the goal of Research Justice.

This shouldn’t be happening! Setting a research agenda Women shouldn’t have PTSD because they had a baby. (Linda) Coined by DataCenter: Research for Justice, a community-based research organization located in Oakland, CA, Research Justice builds on Participatory Action Research (PAR), a model that seeks to break down traditional hierarchies between ‘experts’ and communities, and put research capabilities into the hands of community members so that they can participate in producing knowledge for social change (Lee Sohng, 1996; DCRJ, 2013). Since its origins in radical social movements in Latin America in the 1960s, PAR principles have become selectively incorporated into U.S. academia, and into health research in particular. Health policy makers and scholars have come to recognize that Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), including affected communities in partnerships with scientific researchers, leads to more relevant research and research outcomes that can more easily be translated into sustainable and meaningful interventions (National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, n.d.). CBPR pushes medical researchers to collaborate with the communities affected by health inequalities, however it can lead to cooption of the energy and creativity of marginalized communities, and to partnerships that replicate the hierarchies 120

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between knowledge haves and have nots (Hagey, 1997). Thus CBPR often sidesteps a radical analysis that would enable participants to confront powerful institutions and demand fundamental social transformation. Research Justice addresses the limitations of community-based research by moving beyond participation to ‘community driven’ research, which prioritizes self-determination and community power (DCRJ, 2013: 6). In the Research Justice paradigm, a research agenda is set when traditionally marginalized communities identify a need for knowledge that can be used as a basis for building power and creating institutional change. Rather than growing out of funding priorities or scholarly debates or interests, Research Justice starts with lived experiences and a commitment to making change happen. Our action research project began with two very different birth stories. Chinyere was in her forties when she learned that she was pregnant. As a lesbian who had earlier been diagnosed with infertility, Chinyere’s journey to conception was long, expensive, and filled with visits to clinics, invasive examinations, injections, and disappointments. Dutifully attending prenatal sessions with her female obstetrician-gynecologist (Ob/Gyn), Chinyere experienced a gradual process of disempowerment as she internalized the labels ‘AMA [Advanced Maternal Age] mom’ and at-risk pregnancy. Following her Ob/Gyn’s directions, she took a series of tests during her second trimester and was informed that her fetus had a one in three chance of a potentially fatal chromosomal abnormality: I went in for my test results and they said that my baby might have … this one-in-a-million-chance [genetic abnormality]. So basically, to clarify, they were telling me that my baby was going to die. And then they said, ‘So you have to go and have this amniocentesis,’ which is when they put a needle [into your stomach] to get into the [amniotic] fluid. So I went and had that and now they said, ‘Okay, we can give you the results.’ But it was … like two weeks or something. ‘Or you pay $400 and you can have the results in two days.’ [Laughs] It was just really horrendous you know. (Chinyere) When an amniocentesis proved that the growing infant was healthy, Chinyere continued to be treated as an at-risk pregnancy: I ended up constantly seeing my doctor and feeling like I was a problem; that I was irresponsible for getting pregnant so late. It just felt like I was just seen as a problem the minute I walked into the door and it was awful. You know I was already [feeling] poorly. I had lost so much weight, I was anemic … And I didn’t feel supported; I felt judged. (Chinyere) Chinyere came to believe that her Ob/Gyn would not be able or willing to honor her birth plan and, at eight months pregnant, she reclaimed her agency, and fired 121

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her Ob/Gyn. She later had a midwife-assisted natural birth of her healthy sevenpound, seven-ounce baby girl at a Berkeley hospital. In contrast, Cherisse was in her mid-twenties when she gave birth to a preterm baby boy in the bathroom of her North Oakland house. Cherisse had planned a home birth with the support of her mother-in-law, midwife, and birth justice elder Nonkululeko Tyehembe. During her labor, however, Cherisse’s parents, who were skeptical about the safety of natural birth, called the paramedics to transport her to hospital against her wishes. Riding the waves of contractions and dealing with her own fears about going into labor a month early, Cherisse resisted the paramedics’ and her parents’ attempts to use scare tactics and guilt to coerce her into going to the hospital. Later that day, however, she had to face disparaging attitudes when she failed to deliver the placenta and her midwife had her transported to the hospital to do so. Later that month, as Cherisse and Chinyere sat and shared war stories, they were shocked at how disempowered they had both become during their pregnancies and giving birth. Both women were activists and advocates, and consider themselves informed and assertive, yet they experienced pregnancy and childbirth as sites of struggle, silencing, and trauma. By sharing with each other, they began to put their experiences into the context of broader struggle by black women to have emotionally and physically safe pregnancies, and to determine where, when and with whom they would deliver their infants. Later, the two traded stories with Nonkululeko, who shared wisdom and experiences from four decades of birthwork among black and low-income women in Harlem. The seeds for an Oakland-based birth justice project were sown in that conversation, and the two women recruited a small group of birthworkers, birth activists, and women who had been impacted by their birth experiences to come together. In our initial meetings, we discussed what we knew about black women and childbirth. Black women in California are four times more likely than white women to die during childbirth or later from pregnancy-related complications. Our infants are twice as likely to perish during the first year, and less likely to receive life-saving mother’s milk exclusively during the first six months and beyond. Yet this official knowledge represented only a small proportion of the knowledge that was in the room. Linda, a doula for more than two decades, spoke about supporting women who survived their birth experience, but emerged traumatized and disempowered. Harriet spoke about giving birth behind bars, and her fight with the criminal justice system and child protective services to retain custody of her granddaughter. Ronnesha spoke about medical practitioners treating her and other younger black pregnant women as if they were irresponsible and did not deserve the right to make decisions about their birth experience. We talked about the silencing of any birth story that is not sanitized and happy, the alienation that many black women feel from the natural birth movement, and the lack of understanding and support many women experience in our families and communities. We also spoke of the growing black midwifery and doula movement, of black women who invoked ancestors, or leaned on communities and loved 122

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ones to strengthen them to birth in a way that felt authentic and empowering. Collectively, we crafted a mission statement to reflect our vision for change: Black Women Birthing Justice is a collective of African-American, African, Caribbean and multiracial women who are committed to transforming birthing experiences for Black women. Our vision is that that every woman should have an empowering birthing experience free of unnecessary medical interventions. Our goals are to educate women to advocate for themselves, to document birth stories and to raise awareness about birthing alternatives. We aim to challenge medical violence, rebuild women’s confidence in giving birth naturally and decrease disproportionate maternal mortality. (Black Women Birthing Justice, n.d.) From the beginning, the project unfolded in ways that were sometimes unexpected. Initially Chinyere—the sole academic in the group—envisioned the group as a PAR team. This shifted when participants asserted a different vision: [A]t the very first BWBJ (Black Women Birthing Justice) meeting, which was supposed to be a ‘research team’ meeting—everyone’s like, ‘We don’t want to be a research team, we want to be an organization. We’ve got way more vision than just a research project.’ And that’s where it became BWBJ and it became its own living breathing entity that was way beyond the research project. (Chinyere) It was clear from the first meeting that research was only one strategy that the group would need from a much broader toolkit in order to create the change we envisioned. It was equally important that we develop our teamwork, community building, popular education, outreach, advocacy, social media, and communications capacity, so that any research outcomes could be translated into meaningful and sustainable change. Thus BWBJ was born as a multifaceted, research- and activism-oriented, grassroots community organization.

Collecting stories: Making community knowledge visible [W]hat it’s meant to me is to have a sacred kind of place for a woman to tell these stories. (Linda) What constitutes legitimate knowledge? Who gets to provide authoritative knowledge, and whose perspective is discounted as anecdote or opinion? In a postindustrial age, knowledge industries, including research and development, design and innovation, digital media and communications, and higher education, have replaced manufacturing as the new sources of wealth and power. As a commodity, knowledge is fiercely protected by knowledge elites—institutions and individuals 123

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that produce and market information technologies. One way that knowledge elites preserve their market share is to mystify knowledge production processes, so that only select educated experts may claim the right to produce, own, and exchange knowledge. Another way of protecting elite knowledge control is by validating certain types of knowledge—specifically, knowledge generated from quantitative data, written in scholarly language, dissociated from emotions and bodies, and associated with academic institutions. In this process, other ways of knowing become delegitimized and made invisible. Marginalized communities own enormous resources of knowledge, including sacred knowledge—the deep knowing that comes from an encounter with the spiritual realm; embodied knowledge­—the insights and perceptions that come from living in a body and experiencing bodily functions like pregnancy, as well as violence against or pain in the body; experiential knowledge—the wisdom that comes from having lived through something; intergenerational knowledge—the collective memory and re-narration that lives in community oral histories; and spatial knowledge—the savvy that comes from inhabiting a neighborhood, community, or ecosystem. We are often discouraged from seeing what we know as valid, legitimate, or important. Yet, it is precisely this layered, deeply humanized knowledge that has the capacity to challenge and move us: [W]e’re having human flesh and blood women mom’s tell their stories and you can’t get more credible than that. You just can’t get more credible than that … it’s not just: I read this at the supermarket, ‘somebody told me.’ It’s actual women telling their actual stories. (Linda) As black birthmothers and birthworkers, we sensed that our knowledge about pregnancy and childbirth—embodied, experiential, intergenerational, sacred, and spatial—was key to healing the nation’s broken maternal care system and empowering black women to take control of their birth experience. However, we faced several challenges. The first was to figure out whether our experiences and insights accurately reflected the concerns facing other black birthing women. It seemed obvious that we needed to place our limited experiences into the context of other women’s experiences, and that meant carrying out research with women who had recently given birth. But how would we avoid the exploitative dynamic of traditional research models? As the only academic researcher in the collective, Chinyere led a group discussion and shared readings about PAR. In this discussion, she emphasized feminist and post-positivist critiques of quantitative data and individual interviews, and suggested that we gather qualitative data through a series of focus groups. Collective members were not convinced that research findings without statistics would be an effective tool for changing attitudes. Members also felt that the term ‘focus group’ was intimidating and sounded like something from marketing. Ultimately, we opted to use questionnaires and to

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host ‘sharing circles’ where women would be invited to share their pregnancy and birth stories in a supportive, sacred space. A second challenge was to translate black women’s embodied and experiential knowledge into a format that would be heard by those we wished to influence: health policy makers, health practitioners, and black pregnant women, their families and communities. As an action research project, we were not just interested in documenting women’s stories, we were committed to using the research to bring about changes in policies, practices, and attitudes: [O]ne of the things that we’re doing as a community-based organization that’s committed to creating empowerment for black women is putting black women’s voices at the center of that research so that we can be heard and also so that we can define what kind of research can be done about us and our lives that would make a difference to us. I think that you can carry out great research that has incredible content, but if it doesn’t translate into any meaningful change and it’s not accessible to communities it’s really meaningless. So I think that that’s a big piece of what we’re doing that’s different about research with BWBJ. (Chinyere) Since we were concerned with how others would receive our research findings and recommendations, the question of legitimacy haunted us, in part because most of us were not positioned in society as ‘experts’ or knowledge producers. As we sat in meetings of the collective, nursing a baby or trying to stop a toddler from screwing up the agenda, the question hovered in the air: Who would listen to what we had to say? Wouldn’t our stories of coercion and abuse by medical staff, traumatic loss of control, or cascading medical interventions simply be dismissed as anecdotal? To address this fear, the collective set an ambitious goal of recording 100 women’s stories: So to me that’s the part of collecting a hundred stories. It makes it real. It’s not just someone standing up to say, ‘… we think this is happening.’ No! We know this is happening. A hundred women have said this. (Talita) [T]he goal is that we’ll collect these stories and hopefully there will be some kind of common threads running through them … So I’m hoping that we can take these common threads and show people that … it’s not just happening to one person. It’s happening to ninety of the hundred people we talked to … so hopefully we can take that as a concrete kind of thing. Not just some nebulous hearsay kind of thing, but actually happening, and turn that into a change. That we can impact the people that are doing this or impact enough people to care that this is happening; to make a change happen. (Linda) 125

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A third difficulty was that many of the women we spoke to did not view their story as important, or their negative experiences as a legitimate cause for discussion and action. For Talita, telling her story at a sharing circle and then participating in creating a structured space for others to do so, empowered her to see her perceptions as valid: I think a lot of people don’t realize that their story should be shared. It’s just not commonplace to share these types of stories. I never thought to share my story publicly to influence change. My birth story is not exceptionally traumatic. In the sharing circle, though, I realized there were some things I experienced during my daughter’s birth that I needed healing from… Things I wouldn’t want the next black birthing woman to experience. When we are trying to make a change happen, we need to show what exists now. That’s the research. The research aspect makes what we are trying to say valid. We have to make it real and valid. We have to speak up, to empower ourselves and one another. (Talita) While images of women in labor, screaming at loved ones and being rushed along corridors on hospital gurneys are common in popular media, there is little tolerance for the complex emotional journey of women’s real birth stories. Yet the experience of co-creating life, nurturing a growing fetus, navigating the maternal healthcare system, going through the marathon of labor, pushing out a baby or experiencing major abdominal surgery, is enormously multifaceted. Most women envision how they would like to give birth. Some experience feelings of loss, lack of control or disappointment with themselves if they are unable to have the birth experience they imagined. Others feel enormous joy, empowerment and a sense of achievement after giving birth. Some feel intense gratitude toward medical staff or alternative birthworkers. Others feel intense anger and betrayal at their treatment. Creating and holding space for women to revisit and reflect on their experience requires a depth of emotional intelligence that is beyond the training of most medical researchers. It also requires a commitment to the wellbeing and healing of our participants that goes well beyond the remit of traditional research, as Linda reflected: [It’s] very powerful to listen to these women kind of talk about their births and what it was like for them and how emotional it is for them and how emotional it is for me. And I just think it’s just amazing cause these women haven’t been able to tell these stories—a lot of them. You know, a lot of them say, ‘This is the first time I’ve shared this.’ And they carry this inside—sometimes something that’s hurting them—they’re carrying it inside and they haven’t had a place to do that. And I just think that what we’re doing—if we didn’t take it any further than

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that; if we only took it to [us giving] a safe place for these women to tell their stories … that would be enough for me. [Laughs] (Linda) A final challenge we experienced was to ensure that our research recognized the diversity of black birth experiences by including women from a wide range of social backgrounds. In the early sharing circles, we noticed that many of our participants were in their thirties, and well versed in information about birth injustice and birth alternatives. Our word-of-mouth recruitment efforts and outreach to daycares and library storytimes had attracted a disproportionate number of mature professional women. When Ronnesha, a youth advocate and young mom from the East Oakland flats, joined the collective, her involvement enabled us to carry out more effective outreach among young workingclass women, and women living on public assistance. We also began to make connections with local organizations that could help us connect with women living with addictions, involved with Child Protective Services and the criminal justice system: [I]n a sense, we are doing research by and for ourselves. But we’re also doing research by and for a wider group and that includes women who really aren’t able to speak for themselves. Particularly, you know, teen moms who are already sort of despised and treated like they just shouldn’t be pregnant and then not worthy of being listened to and making real decisions for themselves. You know, incarcerated women who when pregnant have absolutely have no choices at all. So … that’s why we’ve been really intentional in this research. To go beyond recruiting the usual suspects of women who are into ‘birth justice’ or women who go to the ‘birth fair,’ but really reach out to low income women, women from East Oakland, women from West Oakland, particularly young women. [Otherwise] it’s going to be this sort of 30-plus, natural birth moms who are buying organic cotton diapers—you know, we want to go beyond that. (Chinyere) We also grappled with how to include the experiences of women who experience pregnancy and neonatal loss. A total of 10.5 in 1,000 infants born to black women in California will not survive their first year (California Department of Public Health, 2014). Relying on traditional mothering networks would erase this often hidden experience, yet we were initially nervous about our ability to host a safe space to discuss such an emotionally charged topic. However, after one of the participants at a circle chose to share her experience of pregnancy loss as well as a live birth, we were able to work with her to host an intimate circle entitled ‘Honoring Our Losses.’ Part ceremony, part documentation, the loss circle created the space to honor grief and resilience among the participants.

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Becoming co-researchers? As we recruited women for the circles, recorded their stories, handed out consent forms and questionnaires, and discussed the themes arising from each circle, members of the collective—in some cases reluctantly—became co-researchers: I don’t see myself as a researcher. [Laughs] Yeah, that’s probably the farthest thing ever from my mind that I’m a researcher. I think probably because of the place I stand in BWBJ I’m a researcher, but I don’t see it that way. I see it as, I’m a woman who is with a group of other women trying to enable some change. And if researcher’s a label that has to go on it, so be it … you know, it was news to me that I was a researcher actually. [Laughs] Nice to know I’m a researcher. I’ll add that to my resume that I’m a researcher, but I don’t see myself as a researcher. (Linda) A key goal of PAR is to break down the barriers between researcher and researched by forging a partnership in which community members take the lead and the researcher acts as a facilitator and resource. This conceptualization of research differs from a Research Justice approach, in which those directly affected by a social problem initiate, drive, and carry out the research. Rather than conceptualizing the researcher as an academic or professional with research expertise, who is seeking egalitarian relationships with community partners, Research Justice proponents seek to dismantle altogether the researcher–researched dyad, with its inherent power hierarchy. Thus research becomes an accessible and demystified process of ‘learning and discovering’ that is owned and carried out by community members. BWBJ members entered the action research project with very different understandings and experiences of, and confidence in, carrying out research. Talita entered the project as a participant in one of the sharing circles. For her, the shift to becoming a researcher was an incremental process connected to her hands-on experience with different aspects of the research process: I see myself as an intermediate researcher [laughs]. At this point, I am in data collection mode. I’m excited to transcribe conversations, to pull themes out, and make our issues real and heard in a concrete way. Not just statistics, but the actual stories behind the statistics. I am seeing myself grow in the area of research and that’s exciting. The most exciting aspect is that it’s research that directly affects me and my community. (Talita) Ronnesha also joined the project after sharing her birth story. But, for her, research was a more organic experience, and part of her everyday life as an activist. Her involvement in the action research project simply strengthened her identification as a researcher: 128

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I do see myself as a researcher, because I’m always trying to figure out what’s going and what’s the cause of issues. And you really can’t figure that out unless you do research and you document things. And being a part of BWBJ definitely affirmed visualizing myself as a researcher. (Ronnesha) Fatimah entered the project as an undergraduate student and research assistant for Chinyere. Working alongside a black feminist activist scholar, attending BWBJ meetings and attending a DataCenter event on Research Justice encouraged her to own the label ‘researcher’ as a political act. I think that we all also have a brain that collects, filters and analyses data, even unconsciously, and this makes me a researcher at heart giving me the innate ability and capacity to research internally and externally all the time. But it took some time for me … to own being a researcher … So after attending the event Decolonizing Knowledge I think I really owned it with a more critical understanding; with a sense of urgency because I saw the research injustices more clearly … [A]fter that time I felt a sense of urgency to fully own being a researcher that applies anti-oppressive methods because I strongly felt that my survival—better yet, my community’s survival depended on it. (Fatimah) Chinyere came to the project as an academic who had already gained recognition as a researcher and had published several books. Her training, while incorporating feminist critiques of positivist research, did not address questions of power and participation within the research process itself: I went through a traditional sociology PhD training program in England … I was exposed to the idea that research outside of the traditional positivist paradigm was possible but I wasn’t necessarily exposed to the idea that research even done in that post-positivist way that engages with emotions, and is interested in dialogue, and challenges the typical detachment that’s required of a researcher; even research that does that can still disempower communities because if we’re not actually engaging and working with communities to define the research agenda and to decide how the research is going to be carried out—it’s just softer, kinder, prettier, alienating research. [Laughs] And that was something I wasn’t exposed to when I first started out my career. And ‘Research Justice’ certainly wasn’t the language that was used back than at all. (Chinyere) Chinyere’s work as an activist scholar in support of antiracist, antiviolence, and prison abolition movements, and her engagement with PAR literature, led her 129

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to question her role as a researcher. For her, working with BWBJ represented a shift from being the researcher in community settings, to working alongside peers as co-researchers: I can see a trajectory in my own research where I’ve gone from being a part of a movement and doing research on—kind of on that movement with people. So people were very aware of the research I was doing, they were very supportive in helping me with this. They thought it was important that this should be documented. And in a sense I was almost like the research ‘arm’ of the movement. Like people saw me as doing something for the Black women’s movement, but they saw me as doing something for the Black women’s movement. I don’t think they saw themselves as co-researchers. I’m pretty certain they didn’t. (Chinyere) Despite a shared commitment to documenting women’s experiences of childbirth, collective members did not all agree on whether that activity constituted research. While Chinyere, Ronnesha, and Talita viewed the ‘100 women’s stories project’ as action research, Linda preferred to think about the work in ways that were more relational: Like I said, Chinyere probably knew it was research, we didn’t. To me it was talking to some women about their birth stories. But I think we were always on the same page around how we wanted to do that so that we would get the information and find out just exactly what these women had to say and see if there was a common thread running through what they were saying and doing it that way. (Linda) Linda’s comment raises important questions. Do community members want to be researchers? This is particularly tricky in the black community given a long history of abuse that has given research a bad name. Are learning about research injustice and reclaiming research as a tool for social change goals that are useful for communities? Or is research a ‘dirty word’ that should be jettisoned (Smith, 2012). Perhaps we should use other terms that are less intimidating and carry less baggage, such as telling stories, recording our realities, identifying our solutions? Regardless of what we call ourselves, what is important to BWBJ members is that we are documenting black women’s stories, learning about their struggles, and identifying strategies to improve their experiences of childbirth. And we are doing it in a way that honors the women’s whole being, affirms their resilience, and creates a space for healing.

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Our whole selves: How Research Justice changed us In traditional medical research, the researcher is invisible. First-person narratives are discouraged and the reader receives the impression that the author is an omniscient and impartial scientist, documenting what s/he sees without impacting or being impacted by what s/he studies. In reality, of course, as indigenous, feminist and other anti-oppressive researchers have documented, the researcher is very much a part of and in turn shaped by what s/he observes. Her training, intellectual baggage, and social location influence what she looks for, and how she understands and interprets her data. Her interactions with ‘human subjects,’ if any, impact both them and her, as the two negotiate unspoken power inequalities. And her work as a researcher impacts and is impacted by her other roles, as a caregiver, partner, or community member. An enormous amount of what constitutes research, then, remains undocumented and unacknowledged. This silence on how research really happens is a further form of mystification that makes the role of researcher appear inaccessible to most of us, because our lives are messy, we have emotional reactions to people and information, and we care passionately about the injustice in our lives. In other words, when we acknowledge our whole selves, it becomes impossible to perform the role of the impartial, emotionally uninvolved, invisible scientific researcher. Instead, we become embodied researchers, who are more honest and reflexive about who we are in the research, how we impact others and how the research impacts ourselves. BWBJ members identified three ways in which doing research has changed or enhanced our lives. First, listening to the women’s stories pushed the members who are birthworkers to become more accountable and reflexive about our work. For Linda, who has an established practice as a doula, hearing from women who would have benefited from an advocate and support person during their birth, but could not afford one, heightened her awareness of the economic inequalities that govern who can afford to employ her: It’s made me more aware of what women are going through … this is actually bringing it to the forefront by hearing women’s stories … I want to make a change; I want to be able to impact people who maybe can’t afford to pay me … I think it’s important that everybody have access to support around their birth. (Linda) Involvement with BWBJ pushed Shanelle to think critically about her work and to expand her definition of reproductive justice: [R]eproductive justice is, by definition, the right to have children, not have children and so on but it often involves talking about abortion … we always want to make sure that people have access to terminate the pregnancies that they want, but we don’t do a very good job in ensuring that people have access to ensuring they have the birth 131

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outcomes that they want. And there is just—you know too—a very long history of white feminist ideology being pushed into a space that includes women of color. So this work has helped me to be able do the other side of my birth justice work, which is to not always engage people in talking about abortion, but to engage people in talking about healthy birth outcomes and raising the children that they want with dignity. Second, BWBJ became much more than a research team or community organization in our lives. It became a source of support, love and empowerment, particularly during difficult times. [I]t’s filled a hole that I had and I didn’t even know I had that hole which was something about, you know, Black [women] as sisters coming together on a regular basis and being support to each other. It’s been a source of support. It’s been a source of—just feeling very loved. It’s been something that I’ve felt an enormous amount of love and connection; commitment to the women in the other group. We don’t just sit around talking about research. We do whatever is needed for each other. We’re there for each other and I really feel like the small close circle of that group has my back. (Chinyere) Agreeing with Chinyere, Ronnesha reflected on her experience of having postpartum depression with her third child: I feel like you guys were really there for me. You and Linda came and cleaned up, and my family wouldn’t even do that. [Laughs] That was just [pauses] I don’t know how to put it into words. That was another side of BWBJ. That we’re here for each other aside from [the work]. I was going through a lot experiencing postpartum [depression], and I feel like I had emotional and physical support from everybody in the collective. (Ronnesha) For Fatimah, the BWBJ collective was a powerful source of strength and courage: It has given me new language and a kind of invisible armor … It’s deep to me. It has made me braver. I am not as afraid anymore to speak up; I’m not afraid to speak out against injustice and have a voice or point of view. I know even more that my knowledge, especially the knowledge I have gained from my life experiences, is unique and legitimate. I am empowered to be more intellectually and spiritually; to be more of who I already am; to own and stand in my intellectual power as a black woman and to utilize my mind in ways I never thought were

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possible in the larger world, even within academia where my stories or experiences aren’t always honored. (Fatimah) Third, participating in the sharing circles was an emotional experience that brought up a lot of difficult and sometimes traumatic memories among the collective’s members. Facing and working through these emotions in a supportive community was a source of healing for some members: To hear women talk about their births and what it meant to them … it’s always very emotional … it touches me and it brings up a lot of the stuff around my birth that were horrible [laughs] in one way or another. And I end up—there’s been, like I said, couple [of] circles where I end up sobbing because it just reaches and touches and triggers a lot of stuff that I’m trying to deal with and probably haven’t dealt with very well. So part of me is like, ‘Oh God! Why am I sobbing? I’m supposed to be this researcher. [Laughs] Why am I sobbing?’ And the other part of me is like, it needs to be done. I need to let that happen. I need to let that feeling because it’s healing for me as well as it’s healing for those other women to tell their stories. (Linda) For Chinyere, the act of witnessing women reliving intense experiences with the honesty and openness that the sharing circles invited, required a level of emotional maturity that she had not had to develop in previous research. Like Linda, the research forced her to deal with unresolved grief about a difficult pregnancy that she had not had time to process due to the dual demands of paid work and parenting. As women with complex and sometimes painful relationships to birth, BWBJ members did not seek to detach from the object of our research. Instead, we allowed ourselves to bring our embodied and experiential knowledge into the research process. As a result, the line between facilitator and participant sometimes became blurred, as BWBJ members challenged ourselves to show the same vulnerability that we were asking of our participants. As we did so, we created a sacred communal space in which grief and loss could be named and honored, and triumphs and victories celebrated. In this sense, the research was as much a process of collective witnessing, and healing, as one of inquiry and documentation. The emotional labor that BWBJ members carry out during the research process mirrors the invisible labor that black women perform in financially and socially stressed families and communities. Complex race, class, and gender dynamics arise when we invite members of marginalized and often economically disadvantaged communities to volunteer their time as co-researchers. In BWBJ, as in many participatory research projects, our members are not paid for their labor as coresearchers. Only one member, Chinyere, researches, writes, and publishes as a part of her employment, and thus she is the only person who is able to do BWBJ work during paid work hours. Since BWBJ meetings and sharing circles 133

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take place on Saturdays or at the end of the workday, the action research is an additional source of labor for all collective members. Shanelle expressed the challenges posed by this additional demand on her time: [T]here have been times where I’ve tried to walk away from the organization simply because I work a full time job and I consult and I’m on the board of [another] organization, so the time thing is hard at times. But I love it too much and I love the people who are a part of it. In BWBJ, as in the U.S. as a whole, women do the bulk of the caring labor in their families; nursing infants, getting children ready for school, taking care of sick children, preparing and serving meals, washing clothes and tending to emotional needs, in addition to caring for struggling siblings or aging parents. The challenges of doing research while parenting showed up during one of the conversations conducted for this essay, as numerous interruptions took place to attend to children who were hungry, upset, or just bored. A particularly poignant moment showed up in a dialogue between Chinyere and Ronnesha: Ronnesha:

I feel like I had emotional and physical support from everybody in the collective. [Raises voice] Oh goodness, my son just went everywhere …

Chinyere:

Oh my goodness did he have a leak?

Ronnesha:

No he just pooped everywhere. They have a stomach thing going on. My daughter Zwena she’s sick. Zwena and Zenaya are throwing up, Adigun, he just got diarrhea.

Chinyere:

Do you want to stop?

Ronnesha:

No, it’s OK.

Chinyere:

OK, so how do you balance parenting, being a single mom of three, and taking care of yourself?

Ronnesha:

It’s somewhat hard … I don’t feel like it’s that hard.

Keeping a focus on our own needs in the face of competing demands and racialized gender roles that support self-exploitation is not easy. As Shanelle reluctantly acknowledged: [I]f we’re being completely honest, I don’t have a self-care routine. You know, my partner, my relationship is probably the most self-care that I get. It’s just that I have a hard time saying no and I over commit. 134

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And that’s not good for me or the people I overcommit to … I’ve been trying to sign up for a fucking ceramics class for like a month and I just can’t bring myself to actually do it. (Shanelle) Nevertheless, many collective members found effective coping strategies to balance the multiple demands on our time. For Talita, sharing domestic labor with her husband, and having clear boundaries with the group was important. She was also mindful of her need to make adequate time for her daughter and for self-care. For Ronnesha, the child-friendly environment at BWBJ meetings and events, and knowledge that other members were non-judgmental if she was less active at times were important factors supporting her participation. This atmosphere was fostered by collective member agreements adopted by the group that acknowledge the multiple demands on our time, create transparency about how much work we expect of one another, and provide guidelines about how we will hold each other accountable. Keeping in balance, making time for self-care, and not allowing ourselves or our children to become martyrs to our activist commitments, are essential but sometimes overlooked components of Research Justice. Bringing a womanist/black women’s perspective to Research Justice foregrounds the multiple forms of labor that we perform, and the need to create a sustainable model for community involvement centered on wellness for our whole selves.

Conclusion For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others—for their use and to our detriment. (Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider) Despite advances in the field of research ethics since Tuskegee, black women and other marginalized women continue to be treated as raw materials in medical research. Whether our cells, our wombs, or our lost infants are the subjects of investigation, medical researchers seldom think to ask us what kind of research would benefit us, how we envision solving community problems, how our wounds should be honored, or how research could be used as a tool for healing and social transformation. Research Justice offers an exciting alternative by uncovering the value of the multiple forms of knowledge that reside in lay communities, and mobilizing that knowledge toward developing relevant research praxis driven by those who are most affected. This approach challenges research injustice, empowers us to take back control of the research process and promotes selfdetermination. Research Justice is an essential tool for activists and scholars in the reproductive justice movement. Reproductive justice advocates demand that women, transgender, and gender non-conforming people own the social, political, and economic power to make healthy, informed decisions about sexuality, pregnancy, 135

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and parenting. Central to reproductive justice is the understanding that making healthy decisions for ourselves is predicated on access to resources, including information. By producing community-driven knowledge rooted in a collective process, we dismantle our over-reliance on outside ‘experts’ and tap in to our own capacities to solve the problems we face. It is our hope that this chapter will encourage other birth justice and reproductive justice activists and scholars to investigate the value of a Research Justice lens. Research Justice is not just a useful tool that medical researchers and research institutions can easily adopt as part of a menu of other options, for it suggests rethinking and jettisoning some core beliefs and practices that are central to how research is traditionally carried out. This chapter invites medical researchers to consider the possibility of relinquishing power in order to honor the leadership and vision of those directly affected by health inequities. As BWBJ members moved in and out of the roles of participant, researcher, listener, friend, caregiver, and witness, we created a research process that is multilayered, powerful and deeply human. Sharing their stories, in a sacred, deeply grounded, and accepting space has been transformative for many of the 94 women who have participated as of the time of writing (April 2015). Sharing our own testimonies, and being a witness to others has also changed each of us. We have had deep encounters with our own humanity, accepted the challenge of our vulnerability, and experienced the love and support of the BWBJ sisterhood. We have been inspired to do more to change the conditions in which women birth their infants, and at the same time, to do more to treat ourselves with care and tenderness as we do this work. We are grateful for the time you have taken to share our journey, and hope that it will serve as inspiration for all those who seek to take back research as an act of self-determination and community transformation. References Black Women Birthing Justice, n.d., Who we are, www.bwbj.org California Department of Public Health, 2014, California’s infant mortality rate continues to decline, but disparities persist, January 13, www.cdph.ca.gov/ Pages/NR14-006.aspx Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d., U.S. public health service syphilis study at Tuskegee, presidential apology, www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/ clintonp.htm DCRJ (DataCenter: Research for Justice), 2013, An introduction to Research Justice, Oakland: DCRJ, www.datacenter.org/new-toolkit-an-introductionto-research-justice/ Hagey, R., 1997, The use and abuse of participatory action research, Chronic Diseases in Canada, 18, 2, 1–4 Landau, E., 2010, Studies show ‘dark chapter’ of medical research, CNN, October 1, www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/10/01/guatemala.syphilis.tuskegee/index. html 136

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Lee Sohng, S.S., 1996, Participatory research and community organizing, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, December, XXIII, 4, 77–97 Locke, A., 1925, The New Negro, reprinted in I am Because We Are: Readings in Black Philosophy, F.L. Hord and J.S. Lee (eds.), Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995, 261-271, 261 National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, n.d., Community based participatory research program, www.nimhd.nih.gov/programs/extra/ cbpr.html Skloot, R., 2010, The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks, New York: Random House, 9 Washington, H., 2006, Medical apartheid, New York: Doubleday, 63–65 Smith, L.T., 2012, Decolonizing knowledge: Research and indigenous peoples, London: Zed Books Spettel, S. and White, M.D., 2011, The portrayal of J. Marion Sims’ controversial surgical legacy, Journal of Urology, 185, June, 2424–7, June, Albany, NY: Division of Urology, Albany Medical College, www.urologichistory.museum/content/ exhibits/historyforum/spettel_on_sims.pdf

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Actos del corazón: Las sabias1 — bridging the digital divide, and redefining historical preservation Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson with the Corazones del Westside Despite numerous protests by San Antonio’s Mexican American and Chicana/o community, and reproof by numerous prominent U.S. Latina/o historians, on November 12, 2013, North Carolina-based Greystar Real Estate Partners demolished the historic mid-century Univision building—the first Spanishlanguage broadcasting network in the U.S.—for the construction of a 55-milliondollar apartment complex along the southern reach of the city’s River Walk. Eight protesters were arrested for trespassing, in an effort to halt bulldozers from further razing the building, including the director of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, Graciela Sánchez, and prominent Chicana historian and activist Antonia Casteñeda. As protesters and many others insisted, it was not just bricks and mortar being demolished that day, but an intangible cultural, political, and social history embodied within that building—one that spoke to the struggles and perseverance of the Mexican American community, locally and nationally. The demolition of the former Univision building is not an isolated event, though, but rather symptomatic of viral neoliberal gentrification (Hackworth, 2006) as evinced in the destruction of several other historically and culturally significant structures in San Antonio in the recent past, including La Gloria dance hall as well as the Zaragosa and El Nacional theaters. It also indexes a more racialized and classed national trend. It was not merely coincidental that the devastating destruction of the 5Pointz Aerosol Art Center in Long Island City, a premier ‘graffiti mecca,’ was also demolished in 2013 for luxury residential development. These grievous examples thus signal an exigent need to generate alternative, more radically democratic and bottom-up methodologies for enacting urban revitalization, resisting the spatial fix of capitalism in our present neoliberal milieu, and honoring and recognizing the value of places beyond their potential for creating surplus value. This chapter begins to take up this challenge by exploring the complex dynamics of intergenerational collaboration and organizing in relationship to historic preservation, public history, and digital technology.

1

Corazon can be translated as ‘compassion’ in this context and sabia/os can be translated as ‘elders’ or ‘wise ones’. 139

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More specifically, this chapter engages Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s (2002) concept of ‘bridging’ as a methodology for reconceiving the ‘digital divide’ to engender more inclusive digital archives of space, which, in turn, may be used to transform the hierarchical and neocolonial processes and frameworks of historic preservation and urban planning more generally. To do so, I draw on the collective insights generated by an advisory board entitled the ‘Corazones del West Side’— comprising mainly elders or self-identified sabia/os (‘wise ones’)—during an ongoing oral and fotohistoria (photo-history) project facilitated by the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center.

Context: ‘Urban renewal equals Mexican removal’ In San Antonio there is a saying that ‘urban renewal equals Mexican removal,’ which adapts novelist James Baldwin’s famous statement regarding urban renewal and ‘Negro removal’ in the 1960s. Like continued African-American displacement in Chicago, Mexican Americans and Chicana/os in San Antonio have been (and continue to be) physically and socially marginalized, ‘removed’ and made invisible, throughout the last century due to capitalist forces shaping urban development and planning coupled with the historical exclusion or the ‘illusion of inclusion’ (Rosales, 2000) of San Antonio’s Mexican American population in city government. In the 20th century, for example, San Antonio’s Mexican American West Side was ‘barrioized’ (Villa, 2000) through the construction of an interstate in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Bexar County Jail in the 1960s, whereby the city continued to instate de facto racial segregation, consigning this barrio to social death. Within roughly the past decade, San Antonio has endured an onslaught of revanchist neoliberal urban renewal of its downtown core, obscuring the histories and spatial stories of poor and working-class residents of color as well as physically displacing them. San Antonio’s West Side, due to its proximity to the downtown core, has become the most recent target of neoliberal gentrification. Historic preservation, moreover, has played a significant role in gentrification and maintaining racialized and classed hierarchies in San Antonio because of its Eurocentric bias and antiquated conceptual frameworks, which exclude working-class Mexican and Mexican American design aesthetics. San Antonio mayor Julián Castro’s proclaimed ‘Decade of Downtown,’ in tandem with the national ‘back-to-the-city’ movement, has generated intense interest from corporate developers to ‘revive’ San Antonio’s downtown core. Since gentrification has already spread throughout the near south, east, and north areas surrounding downtown, the relatively untouched West Side has consequently been imagined as an uncharted last urban frontier for developers to expand. The West Side’s proximity to the downward expansion of San Antonio’s River Walk, an urban streetcar project, and the creation of new commercialized ‘cultural zone’ in the downtown area make it especially attractive to investors and developers. This sudden interest, in turn, has been met with great support from the City of San Antonio through the creation of various public–private partnerships, such as that 140

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with the Westside Development Corporation, and issuing of local (in addition to federal) tax credits. In doing so, the city effectively privatizes public space, and once again reconsolidates a social and racial hierarchy that positions the city government and developers at the top and the West Side community at the bottom. While development corporations are required to facilitate community input or town hall meetings, they are frequently conducted in English, even though they take place in a community with a large percentage of Spanish speakers. What is more, since these town hall meetings are often centered around a design charrette, which consists of a set series of images introduced by architects and planners, community members are denied a real voice in generating and determining design outcomes in their built environment. Instead, they are interpolated into a topdown mechanism of corporate urban planning organized around a liberal choice model in which community members are viewed as ‘stakeholders’ who are then offered prefabricated ‘choices’ (Hackworth, 2006: 185; Johnson, 2011: 196–7). The current and impending neoliberal gentrification of the West Side, though, has been conditioned by intertwined histories of colonialism, modernization, and industrialization. Neoliberal gentrification in San Antonio, and particularly on the West Side, thus enacts a ‘new urban colonialism’ due to ‘its privileging of whiteness, … the more class-based identities and preferences for urban living, … [and] white Anglo appropriation of urban space and urban history’ (Atkinson & Bridge, 2005: 2). In addition, the very precondition for neoliberal gentrification is actually colonialism2 and its violent instantiation of racial categories and hierarchies, which have been mapped on to the segregated cityscape. Informed by colonizing visual logics of new urbanism, neoliberal gentrification in the ‘Mission City’ relies upon a neotraditional or neoclassical design aesthetic emphasizing ‘compact, mixed use, walkable, and relatively self-contained communities’ (Grant, 2005: 1). According to the new urbanist perspective, these are the key ingredients for creating the ideal social body or ‘good community,’ an imagined community that implies a white middle-class citizenry and an attendant politics of respectability. In fact, San Antonio’s new city Master Plan for downtown revitalization was directly shaped by these new urbanist principles (Greenburg, 2004). However, as David Diaz (2005) powerfully agues, the hegemony of new urbanism elides what he terms ‘Chicana/o’ or ‘barrio urbanism’: that is, the way in which barrios have always enacted the ‘social function of the city’ that new urbanism artificially recreates through their ‘rich interrelationships and social networks’ (2005: 15–16). This glaring elision, Diaz concludes, ‘is only the latest form of exclusionary Eurocentric urban visions’ (2005: 17). Additionally contributing to exclusionary urban renewal practices are the myopic design criteria and conceptual frameworks for obtaining historic

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San Antonio was an outpost of New Spain from 1690 to 1821. The first mission was constructed in this city in 1718. With five missions, San Antonio has the largest constellation of missions in North America (including the infamous ‘Alamo,’ or Mission San Antonio de Valero). 141

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preservation status that fail to recognize the historic significance of buildings, sites, and structures related to poor and working-class communities of color—places that have cultivated and represent the rich social life of barrio urbanism. Numerous buildings have been demolished on the West Side because of how the guidelines set forth by the Office of Historic Preservation (OHP) ignore the significance of poor, working-class, and multicultural histories. The historic design guidelines privilege European architecture, favoring, for instance, Spanish Colonial and Spanish Colonial Revival, or even Victorian styles. In fact, it was not until the most recent, 2012, revision of the design guidelines that the OHP recognized the historic significance and integrity of corrales, or ‘shotgun’-style houses that document the vital and rich history of Mexican American and transnational labor in this area, thanks to the research of and intense pressure exerted by the West Side Preservation Alliance. Despite ample scholarship emerging from ethnic studies in the past three decades, which provides more inclusive historiographies of place and heritage, Ned Kaufman (2009) notes that ‘preservation has not kept pace’ (2009: 11). In fact, only 1% of historically recognized sites in the nation reflect U.S. Latina/o culture and history, and most of these sites are limited to the colonial period. Indeed, for historic preservation to loosen the stranglehold of neoliberal gentrification, which largely benefits the predominantly white middle and upper classes, methodologies must be created ‘for making historic preservation into an inclusionary rather than exclusionary force’ (Smith, 1996: 483). To that end, in the following section, I explore the role of Anzaldúa’s (2002) concept of ‘bridging’ in intergenerational collaboration, specifically in regard to creating grassroots oral and fotohistoria projects that provide alternative spatial stories and archives of space from which more democratic historic preservation criteria might be incited.

Digital technology, intergenerational organizing, and bridging as methodology In response to encroaching corporate development and the increasing threat of historical erasure, the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center inaugurated an ongoing oral and fotohistoria (photo history) project entitled En Aquellos Tiempos (‘In Those Times’) at the Esperanza’s West Side location ‘El Riconcito [‘The little corner’] de Esperanza’ in the mid-2000s. This community-based project provides an autonomous space for cultivating alternative, bottom-up methodologies to those of city planners and development corporations, such as recording the oral histories of community sabia/os and preserving their photographs and other objects documenting West Side histories. In the spring of 2013, a self-appointed group of sabio/as and allies, including myself, created an advisory board for En Aquellos Tiempos entitled the ‘Corazones del West Side.’ Comprising roughly 10 members, our group meets on a weekly basis to plan for monthly Convivios, or digitally recorded conversations, among West Side community sabia/os; to conduct training sessions for using the scanner and digital recorder; and to plan 142

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long-range projects, such as a community cookbook and a public history exhibit at the Rinconcito. Through such projects we excavate and re-member site-specific histories of the West Side that may be used to substantiate and reimagine the historic significance of buildings, sites, and structures in this barrio. Our group additionally collaborates with the West Side Preservation Alliance, which meets bimonthly to collaboratively work toward the revision of historic preservation guidelines to include working-class design aesthetics. In short, our community organizations operate in concert to reconceive what and who constitute historic significance, and to repurpose the classed, raced, and gendered criteria informing local and national design standards, thereby strategically pressuring neoliberal gentrification. And though I—an able-bodied contingent university faculty in her midthirties—have authored this chapter, the insights presented here are not mine alone, but rather stem from dialogue animated by the larger collective group of the Corazones. And while I have never permanently resided on the West Side, it was the long-time home of my abuela, or grandmother, Josefina Merla Martin; the intermittent childhood home of my mother Cynthia Spielman; and the current residence of my cousin Angie Merla, all of whom are also Corazones. Because of the West Side’s centrality to my own family history and that of a wider Mexican American community, it has been a centerpiece of my activism and scholarship. In addition to my own family members, West Side sabia/os include Isabel and Enrique Sánchez, Rey and Lucy Pérez, and Mildred Hilbrich. In addition, community activist and attorney Elva Treviño and award-winning communitybased visual artist Mary Agnes Rodríguez are members and West Side residents. Though we differ in age, class, and even geography, the West Side—in varying manners—is a place we all call home and to which we are politically, socially, and affectively committed. Drawing on the conversations and collaborations of the Corazones, this section focuses specifically on the complex negotiations and social dynamics of intergenerational organizing in relationship to the use of digital technology in preserving public history. Curiously, very little scholarship addresses the role of age and ageism, particularly as it intersects with other categories of difference, in radical and progressive organizing and politics, and I thus seek here to open conversation around this important yet understudied topic. Rather than rehearsing here the patronizing and dominant positivist narrative that digital technology inherently empowers individuals and communities, I critically approach diverse relationships to digital technology through the lens of a collective group, or as ‘actos del corazón.’ Although the direct translation of corazón is ‘heart,’ it is a powerful cultural symbol for passion and creative energy. These ‘acts of the heart,’ then, signify a collective and collaborative compassion that propels us to reach beyond ourselves to connect and organize with others so as to document and transmit the histories of the West Side. I further explore this compassion, through Anzaldúa’s (2002) ‘bridging.’ Anzaldúa conceptualizes bridging as the contingent and sometimes uncomfortable process of self-reflectively connecting and moving 143

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with others toward social transformation: ‘To bridge means loosening our borders, not closing off to others. Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the stranger within and without. To step across the threshold is to be stripped of the illusion of safety because it moves us into unfamiliar territory and does not grant safe passage. To bridge is to attempt community, and for that we must risk being open to personal, political, and spiritual intimacy, to risk being wounded’ (2002: 3). Thus, the title of this chapter does not necessarily call upon the conventional usage of ‘bridging the digital divide,’ or paternalistically providing minorities with access to digital technology, but rather gestures toward a collective, fluid, contingent, and imperfect process of moving or ‘bridging’ toward a shared vision of social justice that happens to involve digital technology. A central objective of our group is the transmission of cultural knowledge rooted in the space of the West Side. Many of the sabia/os have variously commented on how they are afraid that their culture is vanishing, and understand themselves as stewards of such knowledge who are responsible for conveying it to the next generation. When discussing the prevalence of boleros, danzones, and the paso doble during the 1930s and 1940s in West Side dance halls such as La Gloria, for example, Enrique poetically ruminated, ‘We who enjoy this music feel we should sing and dance and let the youth know how we entertained ourselves. Music in the barrio and for most of San Antonio’s Spanish-speaking people was important, and we have a duty to teach to our young about this era. Let us not forget that if this is lost we are to blame ourselves’ (personal communication, October 3, 2013). Enrique underlines the urgency of passing on the music history that was so central to creating a sentimiento, or feeling of place, on the West Side. He further suggests a sonic landscape connecting many sabia/os to one another and to this barrio, and one that remaps this barrio within regional, national, and transnational sonic landscapes. Because of this desire to transmit memories and histories of the West Side—one further heightened by the demolition of La Gloria and, most recently, the Univision building—the Corazones are enthusiastic about the potential of digital technology to document and transmit this vital knowledge to future generations. Consequently, during the summer of 2013, we decided to launch the blog ‘Actos del Corázon: Historias of San Anto’s West Side’ (http:// corazonesdelwestside.blogspot.com) to accomplish this objective. The relationship between U.S. people of color (and the subaltern more generally) and technology, though, has been a fraught one, both in regard to ideology and physical access, and colors present discourse on the digital divide. Scholars of Chicanafuturism (Ramírez, 2004) and Afrofuturism (Nelson, 2002) have analyzed how racist ideologies begat by systems of colonialism, U.S. expansionism, and slavery have cast people of color as ‘primitive’ and therefore incompatible with progress and technology. Similarly, in her examination of how representations of technology in popular culture are moored in a white male western perspective, Michelle M. Wright (2002) rightly asserts: ‘It is difficult, if not impossible, to fairly assess all aspects of this debate on the “digital divide” when the assumptions we bring to bear on this discussion rest on 250-year-old 144

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Western myths of European superiority …’ (2002: 47). Yet, often the internet and recent communications technologies are imagined as great equalizers of social difference, because of their apparent capacity to connect previously separate individuals and communities to information and resources. However, this view unintentionally reinforces liberal multiculturalist colorblindness in its failure to recognize the role that social difference plays in access to digital technology. In Digitizing race, Lisa Nakamura (2008) adopts a more nuanced approach to issues of difference and access, asserting that ‘[w]e must create nuanced terms and concepts for evaluating participation to assess the impact of cultural power differentials on the ability of people of color, youth, senior citizens, and others to deploy their identities on the Internet’ (2008: 176). In other words, instead of understanding the digital divide in binary terms of whether or not individuals have internet access, Nakamura suggests paying attention to ‘kinds of access’ (2008: 176). In this manner, the Corazones approach issues of access to the internet and digital technology not as an individual endeavor, but as a collective endeavor of bridging. However, many Corazones are quick to point out that ‘technology’ is not just limited to the digital or electronic, but circumscribes a whole range of applications, practices, and forms of knowledge production. Chela Sandoval (1992) has similarly observed how ‘colonized peoples of the Americas’ have cultivated an oppositional consciousness and subjugated knowledges ‘requisite for survival under domination over the last three hundred years’ (1992: 248). The Corazones have engaged in several formal and informal conversations concerning how most efficiently to integrate everyone’s various knowledges or technologies. The sabia/os understand their role as ‘keepers of community stories and memory’ (Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, 2013: 1), as living archives, whereas the younger generations, due to our technological acumen, are viewed as responsible for documenting and transmitting this valuable historical knowledge. During a weekly meeting, Enrique made clear that he had no interest in using email or even the internet, but that he did see the great value of digital communications technology such as a blog for reaching a younger generation and for the purpose of assembling a digital archive. He also emphasized, though, that while he may not have an interest in learning how to navigate the internet, he would very much like to contribute to the blog by submitting handwritten memories and stories that I could post. Others also chimed in that they would like to contribute by providing handwritten pieces, or through recording and interviewing one another during weekly meetings. Although we are currently still experimenting with and modifying this collective process, we have determined that the main role of the sabio/as is to share their memories and community stories, while the younger generations, including Cynthia and myself, will use communications technology such as the blog to disseminate information and frame it in a larger historical and sociopolitical perspective, ultimately creating a collective digital archive and historical narrative. Importantly, though, during weekly meetings, we decide together on which themes to focus and what archival material will be featured on the blog. For 145

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instance, Enrique has contributed personal recollections of various musical styles incubated in West Side dance halls, while Isabel has shared how, unlike the overtly political and public Día de los Muertos altars of today, the ones of her childhood were much more personal and domestic. In addition, Lilia has recounted the importance of parteras, or midwives, while growing up, and how they relied upon natural remedies, or remedies, like marijuana, or yerba Buena, to cure ailments. West Side community-based artist Mary Agnes additionally contributes artwork for the blog. After weekly meetings and Convivios, Cynthia edits digital footage into three-minute clips, scans written documents, and uploads photos into a form of cloud storage. I then call upon my academic background to contextualize these texts on the blog. When framing Enrique’s contribution on dance halls, for instance, I discussed how the popularity of the danzón, which is informed by African-Caribbean rhythms, exemplifies the convergence of transnational and diasporic cultural influences on the West Side—a fact of which Enrique is well aware since he originally hails from the coast of the Mexican state of Veracruz. While we view the maintenance of the blog as a collective undertaking, or a form of bridging, it is important to note that the sabia/os’ access to digital technology is not only impeded by stereotypes but also material factors. A pervasive stereotype is that the elderly are inherently unable to attain command of new technology (McCann and Giles, 2004). Ageism, though, is not a mutually exclusive category of identity, and must be understood as intersecting with other forms of social difference, including, as in the in the case of the Corazones, race, class, gender, and citizenship. Many in the group perceive technology such as the internet intimidating and cost prohibitive, and have endured the devastating consequences of structural inequality on the West Side. Some in the group do not possess a high-school or even middle-school education, and struggle with basic literacy and/or live on a fixed income and are unable to afford a computer or internet service. Josefina commented, ‘Computers are complex … unless you have someone to ask in the family, and things come up on the screen that ask you stuff … And if something goes wrong with it, who do you call?’ (personal communication, November 2, 2013). Mildred Hilbrich echoed this concern: ‘I worry about how to fix anything that goes wrong. It all seems so complicated. When things go wrong, they go really wrong’ (personal communication, November 2, 2013). In addition, there are physical deterrents to access. When asked about any physical limitations that might hinder them from comfortably using a computer, some of the Corazones shared that their diminished vision was a deterrent to computer use. As Cynthia noted, although some brands of computers and operating systems claim to be ‘user friendly’ or have more intuitive interfaces, what qualifies as such is highly subjective and varies between generations (personal communication, October 15, 2013). For example, Isabel remarked upon how using the computer feels as though it is out of her zone of proximal development: ‘It takes so long to learn anything on the computer. It isn’t connected to anything I already know’ (personal communication, November 5, 2013). Enrique and Ray 146

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not only intimated that perhaps computers were out of their learning comfort zone, but also suggested that computers simply do not fit their learning styles, needs, or preferences, a notion that actually resonates with contemporary theories of learning and cognition. Enrique reflected: ‘I don’t use computers or technology. I value it, but I find that my mind works slowly, it always has. I like to think things over and take my time. The computer is about everything being fast. I am from a different era, and I guess I am a little old fashioned. Figuring out things is a slow process, not fast. I like it that way’ (personal communication, November 5, 2013). Ray succinctly stated: ‘I don’t use a computer. I like the old days: pencil and paper’ (personal communication, November 5, 2013). While many of the sabia/os do not like to read the blog online, they have commented that they very much enjoy when blog entries are printed out for them. For a variety of complex reasons, then, ranging from vision problems, and the prohibitive costs of buying and maintaining a computer, to perceiving its interface as alien and preferring analogue, many Corazones are unable or reluctant to use computers or the internet. It should also be mentioned that further exacerbating issues of access is the fact that Texas libraries have experienced draconian cuts at both the state and federal levels, severely reducing already decimated computer literacy programs for the elderly. While these ideological and material factors impacting the Corazones’ access and preferences cannot be denied or ignored, they cannot, at the same, time be allowed to completely immobilize us, particularly in view of our limited resources and energies as well as the exponential rise of neoliberal gentrification in San Antonio’s West Side. Given our circumstances, then, we must experiment as we go along and cultivate forms of bridging and mutual aid. In this collective spirit of bridging, we the Corazones have been prompted to rethink kinds of access not just in terms of computer literacy or access to information, but also in terms of alternative ways to bridge one another’s talents, interests, and skillsets. Insofar as actos del corazón collectively constructs bridges across uncertain terrain, it shares an affinity with what Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber (2007) call ‘militant investigation’ in that bridging, too, is ‘a process of collective wondering and wandering that is not afraid to admit that the question of how to move forward is always uncertain, difficult, and never resolved in easy answers that are eternally correct’ (2007: 11). Like bridging, ‘militant investigation discovers new possibilities within the present, turning bottlenecks and seeming dead ends into new opportunities for joyful insurgency’ (2007: 11). Thus, we the Corazones have decided to pool our own respective facilities with technology, broadly (re)conceived, in order to attain our objective of generating new historical designation criteria rooted in the aesthetics, life ways, and values of poor and working-class communities of color.

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Bridging toward new urban commons As in any form of collective action or organizing, the Corazones are continually involved in imperfect and complex negotiations and collaborations. In face of the continual threat of historical erasure and displacement by the city and development corporations, we attempt to connect across class, age, and other forms of difference, and are fully aware that, at every turn, we risk reinstating power structures that might silence or wound one another. We continue to bridge and move, moreover, because just beyond the horizon glimmers the utopian possibility of ‘a new urban commons, a public sphere of active democratic participation’ (Harvey, 2003: 939) where the site, structures, and buildings of poor and working-class people of color are acknowledged and honored beyond the potential for creating surplus value in our neoliberal regime. Thus, we do—and we must—continue to self-reflectively bridge with one another, for it is a gesture and act of compassion, mutual aid, and political love. Through bridging, by moving from the individual to the collective, we ‘affirm our present and future’ (Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, 2013: 2). References Anzaldúa, G.E., 2002, Preface: (Un)natural bridges, (un)safe spaces, in G.E. Anzaldúa and A. Keating (eds.) This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Social Transformation, London: Routledge, 1–5 Atkinson, R. and Bridge, G. (eds.), 2005, Introduction, in Gentrification in a global context: The new urban colonialism, London: Routledge, 1–17 Diaz, D.R., 2005, Barrio urbanism: Chicanos, planning and urban cities, London: Routledge Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, 2013, Corazones del Westside [brochure], San Antonio, TX: Esperanza Peace and Justice Center Grant, J., 2005, Planning the good community: New urbanism in theory and practice, London: Routledge Greenburg, E., 2004, Codifying new urbanism: How to reform municipal land development regulations, in American Planning Association PAS Report Number 526 Hackworth, J., 2006, The neoliberal city: Governance, ideology, and development in American urbanism, 1 Edition, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Harvey, D., 2003, The right to the city, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27, 4, 939–41 Johnson, C. (ed.), 2011, Introduction: The neoliberal deluge, The neoliberal deluge: Hurricane Katrina, late capitalism, and the remaking of New Orleans, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, xvii–1 Kaufman, N., 2009, Place, race, and story, New York and London: Routledge Leitner, H., Peck, J. and Sheppard, E. (eds.), 2006, Contesting neoliberalism: Urban frontiers, New York: The Guilford Press

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McCann, R. and Giles, H., 2004, Ageism in the workplace: A communication perspective, in T.D. Nelson (ed.) Ageism: Stereotyping and prejudice against older persons, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 163–99 Nakamura, L., 2008, Digitizing race: Visual cultures of the internet, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press Nelson, A., 2002, Introduction: Future texts, Social Text, 20, 2, 1–15 Ramírez, C.S., 2004, Deus ex machina: Tradition, technology, and the Chicanafuturist art of Marion C. Martinez, Aztlán, 29, 2, 55–92 Rosales, R., 2000, The illusion of inclusion: The untold political history of San Antonio, Texas, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press Sandoval, C., 1992, New sciences: Cyborg feminism and the methodology of the oppressed, in J. Womack (ed.) Cybersexualities: A reader on feminist theory, cyborgs, and cyberspace, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 247–63 Smith, N., 1996, The new urban frontier: Gentrification and the revanchist city. New York: Routledge Shukaitis, S. and Graeber, D. (eds.), 2007, Introduction, Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization, Oakland, CA: AK Press, 11–34 Villa, R.H., 2000, Barrio-Logos: Space and place in Urban Chicano literature and culture, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press Wright, M.M., 2002, Racism, technology, and the limits of western knowledge, in M. Fernandez, F. Wilding and M.M. Wright (eds.) Domain errors, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 43–62

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Part Three Research Justice: Strategies for social transformation and policy reform According to Sandra Weissinger, Part Three of this anthology illuminates the practicality of the Research Justice framework as it pertains to crafting social and policy changes. In each chapter, readers see how radical love binds and shapes the actions of everyday people as they seek structural and lasting change. Through non-violent means, each author demonstrates how social actors, in daily, ceremonial practices, resists state and institutional knowledge or rules. And, while non-violence cannot (and should not) circumvent conflict, it can set up the foundation for long-lasting re-education models that lead to peace. In this sense, the struggle for peace is without generational limits. In fact, these selections speak to the fact that justice work is done because of the context and ancestors that have worked to radicalize us. Justice work today is a continuation and building upon what was accomplished by previous generations. Weissinger goes on to state that, clearly, the point of changing policies or taken-for-granted (yet exploitative) rules is to transform society—revitalizing our communities for the greater health of all, including those yet to come. This major theme is reflected in the four pieces that make up Part Three. To this end, Weissinger describes how members of New Orleans University engaged in radical love in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. New Orleanians sought to maintain this HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) because of the energy and resources past generations of community experts had put in to the school and city. All shared the hope that the school would remain a viable educational institute for new generations of black college hopefuls. Post-Katrina, university members saw the inequality in funding and in resources as both an assault on themselves and on those they called family. In seeking justice, they worked to re-establish how the state and school officials would treat them—creating new and improved communicative structures. Like the calls for non-violence and rebuilding seen in Weissinger’s Chapter Thirteen, ‘Everyday justice: tactics for navigating micro, macro, and structural discriminations from the intersection of Jim Crow and Hurricane Katrina,’ Chapter Fourteen, ‘The revolutionary, non-violent action of Danilo Dolci and his maieutic approach,’ highlights how individuals must develop a sociological imagination. That is, they must come to be aware of inequality and learn to work together with the end goal of peace. One tool promoted by Dolci is that of education. Though it will take time to see the fruits of educational work, this should not cause us dismay. Our work today paves the way for the generations to come.

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The last two chapters of this section further the themes of non-violence, new communicative structure building, and peace work by highlighting the voices of social justice activist scholars, Michelle Fine and Linda Tuhiwai Smith. From the outset, Fine pays close attention to how context and the people within that particular place matter. It is their lived experiences that set the tone for education, communicative forms and the role history plays in strengthening activist traditions. Smith does this, too, referring to context by way of ancestral knowledge as an impetus for justice work. In these pieces, readers are provided with precise tools for accomplishing the Research Justice agenda. First, there is a call to build and maintain cross-site solidarity networks. This enables us to speak of both resistance and dispossession. It also facilitates ways for us to convey the needs of our ‘families.’ Conveying these messages is as important as gathering and disseminating data. Issues of violence are central to a Research Justice paradigm. In Research Justice models ending all forms of violence are central to creating and maintaining a socially just and equitable society. By centering non-violence as a Research Justice tool, like the other works in this final section, by Weissinger, Salomon, Fine and Smith, Maviglia in Chapter Fourteen demonstrates that social transformation and policy reform have taken place not when the oppressed have engaged in violence, but rather when they have in the face of violence stood up and resisted through means of collective action and sacred ceremonial love. To clarify, the revolutionary, nonviolent action of Danilo Dolci within the context of his maieutic approach is an example of Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness (CCRR) because it seeks a common denominator between individual members of disenfranchised populations and demands a centering of community researchers and activists in the development of best practices and strategies for dismantling unequal systems of knowledge production and policy reform. By challenging the forms of knowledge construction that privilege some while marginalizing others, Danilo Dolci, according to Maviglia, provided western Sicilians (and followers of his maieutic method) with creative methods for attacking structures and policies that were inherently oppressive and unequal. Maviglia states, ‘Dolci considered consciousness as the source of revolutionary action and he described his work as “resistance without shooting.” Over the years, his actions promoted the establishment of grassroots structures that were not only “for” the people but also “by” the people. Examples were the dams built to collect rainwater and radically change local agriculture, the water consortium, the management cooperatives, the Centre of Studies and Initiatives for full employment, the Experimental School of Mirto, and the Training Centre of Trappeto. In other words, this structural development had at its core the growth of people in order to address common problems by identifying and solving them creatively. Furthermore, the non-violent reform of “democracy” established its own methodology: a maieutic method that promoted processes of civil growth by fighting against the most elusive and subtle forms of violence, those that ensured a full social control of consciousness through the influence carried out by mechanical, duplicating, and 152

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repetitive ways of thinking and through conformist behavior.’ Like the incisive words of Salomon in Chapter Fifteen, ‘Telling to reweave: social movement and resistance narratives, representations, and the question of justice,’ Maviglia ultimately call for a deconstruction of dominant paradigms used to produce knowledge, change social policies, and in the process transform society. Each of the authors in this section calls for an end to the cyclical patterns of violence that engender silence, invisibility, and methodological assaults against poor, workingclass, and indigenous people, and communities of color in local, national, and global contexts. Stories and storytelling are important methods for carrying out Research Justice projects. In many former colonial nation-states stories were central to education, science, mathematics, and other systems of knowledge production. The over emphasis on written forms of knowledge disturbed this balance. In Chapter Fifteen, Amrah Salomon does not bite her tongue. Her writing is powerful, painful, and a rich narrative of the textures and contours of oral history, family history, social movements, and resistance narratives. What she calls upon readers to understand is the complex, contested, ambiguous, and multidimensional context of cultural memories as tools of Research Justice and, by extension, as modes of knowledge construction, self-determination, movement building, and radical social transformation. The contradictory nature of stories and history as told by ancestors, she reminds us, are not good or bad, they are simply lessons of rebellion against oppressive colonial systems. Like the concluding chapters of this anthology, written by Michelle Fine and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Salomon’s is a methodology of the oppressed. In her own words, ‘Research justice is using our stories as a ceremony to make an ofrenda [offering] to our dead, to make sure their death results in a rebirth of fertile material, to tell stories about the dead and not dead stories, to walk in the path of desire and resistance, to bear witness instead of create silence.’ Here Salomon calls upon marginalized populations to not see oral histories and testimonials as dead or simply archival documents, but as living, breathing examples of the ways in which we can deconstruct universal assumptions and frameworks about best practice and methodologies for conducting research. Indeed her work is a cultural (re)imagining of how students, scholars, and community researchers can, along with activists, produce a more egalitarian method for writing and disseminating knowledge that will ultimately lead to policy reforms at local, national, and global levels. Her chapter, however, suggests that the first place to begin our Research Justice work is with the telling of our own stories and histories, and within our own families and communities. Gatekeeping in research and public policy has been an impediment to sustained, equitable change within and across marginalized populations in the United States and other ‘former colonial nations’. Expertise must be viewed as a widely held commodity not something that only academics possess. Michelle Fine, in Chapter Sixteen, highlights the various projects and communities she has worked on and in over many years of service as both a professor and community activist. An internationally recognized scholar, Fine 153

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in her remarks to a crowd of more than 500 at the 2013 convocation sponsored and organized by DataCenter, ‘Decolonizing knowledge,’ stated that, ‘expertise is widely distributed even if “legitimacy” is not’ when it comes to issues of conducting research. Fine also explained in her speech that people who pay the highest price for injustice carry the most intimate knowledge on how to design research to address inequalities. In her own words, ‘We stand to resist what I think of as the “Gated Community of Policy Researchers” who are making decisions for young people, for educators, for homeless people, for incarcerated people, for immigrants, for working people. Our practice of Research Justice has a number of critical elements. One is that we believe expertise is widely distributed even if legitimacy is not. More particularly, we believe that people who know in their bellies the pain, the resilience, and the strength of what it takes to live in injustice deserve the right to shape the research questions about and for their communities. Second, we are very interested in research that studies and exposes what we call Circuits of Dispossession and Resistance. That is when you are dispossessed from your high school by a high-stakes test. That has consequences not just for your education and your economic well-being. That has consequences for your housing, for your health, for your involvement in criminal justice; for the likelihood that you can stay in your home … That you will stay with your family. So we’re interested in documenting these circuits across sectors.’ Fine’s discussion of circuits of dispossession and resistance highlights the ways in which young people, elders, the poor, students, and people of color are working as experts to impact policy reform and transform society. She concludes by linking Research Justice to resistance and knowledge construction. Her chapter in this anthology speaks powerfully to concept of CCRR as none of the measures of policy reform that she shares would have been possible without the collective knowledge and action of the groups and organizations that she has worked with over the past several decades. Policy reform and societal transformation in a Research Justice framework requires the participation of multiple people, organizations, and spaces in order for collective agreement and some form of harmony to be achieved. In the concluding chapter, internationally renowned scholar-activist, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, suggests that there are no easy answers when it comes to bridging the gap between research, justice, and public policy. It is an issue, she says, that she has worked on for more than 25 years, and it cannot simply be done by conducting research. In fact, she argues that many researchers are poor communicators and are therefore unable to communicate the depth of the importance of linking our findings and new knowledge to policy reforms that will bring about greater levels of justice. As an indigenous woman (Māori) she posits, like Fine, that we must understand that those least likely to be considered researchers often have the most knowledge but don’t often think of themselves as researchers because they have been told since birth that they are not intelligent, that they cannot do anything to change their status or the statuses of the people in their communities. Like Salomon and the other contributors to the final section of this anthology, 154

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Smith asserts that it takes multiple people, multiple sites and spaces of resistance to create a collective community. Traditional western research paradigms often rely on the knowledge of the individual researcher. In a Research Justice framework, particularly one framed by indigenous knowledge, there has to be a collective approach with diverse strategies for knowledge construction, community mobilization, and policy reform. In Smith’s chapter she states that, ‘bridging the gap between Research Justice and public policy, I think is a constant struggle. And it is something that researchers on our own cannot do. The researchers are one part. And in fact that researcher can be very inadequate in the communication of their research. She goes on to suggest that writing in journals is simply not enough: ‘We have to reach broader audiences and different audiences. We have to understand,’ she says, ‘that our communities have expert knowledge on both the conditions we face and the solutions we need.’ The following statement from her speech at the 42nd annual conference of the National Association for Ethnic Studies in April 2014 in Oakland, California speaks clearly to the issue of power that this book is ultimately about: how do we shift and transform public policies so that power is more justly distributed, so power is not used as a tool of oppression, but rather as a method for building stronger, more vibrant healthy communities for all peoples? ‘We think writing in our academic journals is communication enough! Or we think having our students write it for us is even better! So to speak up to the power of public policy takes a number of beyond-research strategies. It is not enough to have the evidence when those in power select which evidence matters. You can have 10 truths but if those in power understand only one truth, then even if you are in to numbers, which I am not, 10 seems quite big, but if you’re up against a group who only sees one truth and only one version of that truth, then 10 is insufficient. And that sort of inequality in power relations or relations of power is an ongoing challenge. I think in my context, you know someone has asked, “Well how do you decolonize knowledge; what do you do?” I always find that a difficult question and, well, … First, in order to decolonize knowledge one has to have some understandings of knowledge … what it means to know, what it means to be known, what it means to come to know, what it means to understand what is known. How do those things, how do those ideas relate, then, to what does it mean to know and what does it mean to be? How is what we are, who we are, defined by what we know; and who tells us that? So, for me growing up as an indigenous person, what we were told was that we didn’t count, we didn’t matter. We had no knowledge. Our ancestors were dumb.’ In the final analysis, we have to understand as students, researchers, community members, policy makers and activists, that all communities have knowledge. As DataCenter’s work on Research Justice suggests, we have to shift the ways that we understand different forms of knowledge as equally valid, whether they are experiential, cultural, or spiritual.

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Everyday justice: Tactics for navigating micro, macro, and structural discriminations from the intersection of Jim Crow and Hurricane Katrina Sandra E.Weissinger

No matter how determining the sociocultural order appears to be, only human beings, actively reflectively and collectively, can be said to be the inventors of social worlds. And only human beings acting reflectively and in concert can reinvent them. (Feagin and Vera, 2008: 214) Researchers have a responsibility to become familiar with, if not a part of, the social movements they are studying. They should know the social problem at hand from the perspectives of all involved and then, upon investigation, choose a side. This should be done in this order, unless the researcher is an organic intellectual— someone who has experienced the personal trouble under investigation and considered their connection to others working against systemic oppression. Upon coming to know the group facing oppression, if not domination, researchers have a responsibility to act as a conduit—a tool for those engaged in activism to further their abilities to be successful in policy changes and getting their message out to a larger audience. Certainly, a researcher will have their biases and opinions. These should be reflected in the research write-up, in addition to doing the work to move social movements forward through strategy building. In short, we make our skills available to those involved in the day-to-day fights because we see ourselves as social change agents (rather than using our skills solely or primarily to further our academic careers). As consultants, conduits, archivists, and allies for movement activists, we produce and distribute our research findings in order to radicalize outsiders (Feagin and Vera, 2008: 1–3, 214). Our work supports insiders struggling through layered and systemic oppression. It is the least we can do with our privileged positions. Therefore, it is essential to be thorough in one’s reporting—so that participants are not further traumatized (by misrepresentations), face less ethnic insensitivity, and so that readers of our work see clear, actionable steps articulated—like a blueprint from which to build and gain clear knowledge of the goals of activists (Fontes, 2004; Pastor et al., 2006; Feagin and Vera, 2008). These rules have guided my work—both in the classroom and in my writing. My biography, as a professor and 157

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scholar in post-Katrina New Orleans, has shaped every class lecture and activity I have engaged in over the past four years. Often, occupying this space (as an activist, who is a scholar in order to be a better activist—see Gamboa, 2013) has made my sociological imagination strong, as I am placed in the middle of social problems and among people (my friends, colleagues, and peers) struggling to make sense of contradictions to equity. That was the case when I began research on North South University.1 All around me, folks associated with the school came to me with or made me knowledgeable about the limitations, or slow recovery, of the university since Hurricane Katrina. Arguably, versions of this inequality existed before, as this school was created as a last-ditch effort to enforce Jim Crow segregation (Francis, 2004; Pope, 2013). These post-Katrina limitations, what Pastor et al. (2006) have called second disasters,2 shaped the learning and work environment in stressful ways. As I sought to be of service and also make sense of the social interactions at the school, I found it necessary to conduct research that would be both relevant and liberation based. That is, I wanted to illustrate how micro, macro, and structural discriminations shape the space. More than this, I wanted to document the resilience of those at North South. While I struggled too, as I was an active participant, I occupied a privileged position by which I could extricate myself from the university by accepting a job elsewhere. This placement allowed me to understand, astutely, what technology limitations in classrooms meant for my students. Where other academics have documented ‘classrooms of shame’ (see Classrooms of Shame, 2013; http://classroomsofshame.tumblr.com/), I knew that I had seen and taught in the worst of them and that having an entire campus in such disrepair is an outgrowth of deeply entrenched systems of race- and class-based domination. The following is my attempt to put this fight on paper. To provide insiders with an assurance that they are not crazy or bourgeois—that what they deal with daily is, in fact, a manifestation of Jim Crow-style segregation, state-sponsored discrimination, secondary marginalization, and daily micro discriminations by

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North South University is a pseudonym I use. While there are numerous newspaper articles about the school, in addition to legal suits—all citing the school’s proper name—I have made a choice to provide some level of anonymity to the school. I do this for my former students who are not yet ready to acknowledge the tenuous position of the university. I do not want to further traumatize them, as I do not want to add to the stresses that make earning a college degree difficult. In the wake of the storm; the authors are very clear: how people fare after a natural disaster is a result of ‘deeply rooted systems of privilege and discrimination’ (Pastor et al. 2006: iii). Because of such hidden, often taken-for-granted oppression, communities at the margin often, and rightly, fear that they will suffer through slow recoveries via agencies (government and insurance) and workers who fail to share information and/or prioritize other communities for needed assistance (Pastor et al. 2006: iii). This has certainly been the case at North South University. There, students, staff, and faculty struggle with the slow rebuilding and lack of a clear plan as it concerns the restoration of their campus and academic programs. 158

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school leaders, or misleaders as Carter G. Woodson would call them (Woodson, 1933; Cohen, 1999). I engage by documenting the steps adherents of the school have taken since Hurricane Katrina. I argue that these steps were not selfish or impractical, but warranted due to the lack of transparency by leaders and the slowness of rebuilding the school after the storm. Each of the strategies documented was political—an attempt to change ineffective and marginalizing politics at the school (in addition to the culture of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the United States that allowed this HBCU (Historically Black College or University) to languish behind area universities in terms of post-Katrina rebuilding and overall university resources). Each attempt to make changes supplied strength to the burgeoning activist struggle, tucked just behind the veil of the trailer campus. To tell this story, I analyzed civil court cases at the Orleans Parish courthouse, Times Picayune (the major newspaper in New Orleans) articles, the informal North South student Facebook page, and through informal conversations while working on the North South campus as a professor of sociology. From their work—to restore the school and rise above being treated as ‘a joke’ or second-class citizens in New Orleans and Louisiana—I argue that informal activism (work by those not in a ‘formal’ social movement organization, yet still banded together by shared interests) by many different parties and to address many different personal troubles, taken together, worked to build a movement for educational equity at the school (Naples, 1991; Stall and Stoecker, 1998). The stories and strategies at North South are just part of a larger push for equal access to education, regardless of class, gender, race, or difference. These strategies can be used at other schools in order to push leaders to be accountable to their constituency, and empower organic intellectuals of those communities, who work for educational equity, with a listing of possible alternative tactics. Participants did not always have picket signs, but certainly they acted, every day, to be change agents; to set right what imbedded Jim Crow and Katrinainduced trauma had made prevalent, a part of the taken-for-granted (by many in the city and state) atmosphere. Here, I provide a brief description of the school and adherents. Then I move on to illustrate different strategies to empowerment. Lastly, I discuss how these strategies have impacted North South and left a cadre, though small, of individuals actively attempting to leave the university a little bit better for those that follow them—despite attempts from insiders that seek to mislead others by encouraging their silence and patience.

North South University: A brief history In 1959, those interested in equality for blacks felt the back-handed sting of North South’s creation. The hard work put in to the fight for integration, Brown v. Board of Education, was summarily ignored as the state of Louisiana broke ground in a New Orleanian black neighborhood to build the school (Francis, 2004, and Pope, 2013, solidly provide a background of this school). Lamented as ‘the Jim Crow school’, according to Francis (2004) and DeBerry (2011) area 159

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activists wrote letters, spoke passionately, and attempted to boycott the new and segregated black university. In their minds, New Orleans already had HBCUs; HBCUs built before Brown and out of activist leanings. With new legislation and a new state institution a short distance away (now known as the University of New Orleans), they could not understand how the state could so boldly trample upon their rights. Despite their objections, New Orleans activists and black college hopefuls realized that their tactic, to boycott the school and enroll in the predominantly white state institution could not work. They faced arrests and an intolerable climate on that campus. With the labors of the school’s first chancellor, black communities warmed up to North South—training their anger into something productive and lasting (Lorde, 1984; Francis, 2004; DeBerry, 2011; Weissinger, 2012; Pope, 2013). They formed a school with little into something black New Orleanians could feel pride in, creating a strong and impressive School of Social Work and a library that would lend materials to community members, regardless of whether they were students at the school—a liberation library (Francis, 2004). After the storm, this pride would be eroded—with students transferring schools and telling newspapers of their disappointment in the offerings and professionalism of employees (Pope, 2013). Though not without struggles (outside police forces on campus, sit-ins by students, and the revolving door of leadership), students continued to enroll at North South and the school became a valued asset to black communities in the city. At each step, adherents worked to create a space more equitable and suited to their needs. Many of the hard-earned changes took a hit in 2005. The buildings that had been fought for filled with high water and that water stood. It stood in the gymnasium and destroyed the pool. It stood in all the buildings, ruining the first floors. It stood in the library and ruined the collection. Books that provided knowledge for both students and community members were destroyed. They remained destroyed, out of reach, until 2013—when rebuilding of the library finally began. Without a campus or resources, and without homes, students and workers felt acute loss and displacement—navigating both home and school second disasters. They connected online, then in borrowed buildings, and then in FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) trailers. This progress was welcomed in the early years after the storm. But, nearly a decade after the disaster, adherents feel left behind and are organizing for change—a campus of permanent structures— one that looks like other universities in the city (majority white and HBCUs); a campus with resources, such as a library. Isn’t this, after all, civil rights activism, something that can be expected? But in a colorblind, yet discriminatory society, the fact that students of color are going without has been coopted. Bringing up race means that someone is a race baiter, even as the facts remain the same: students of color, who wish to earn a college degree, are, at this school, being treated as second-class citizens.

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Legal strategies to empowerment To reach their goals of educational equity, adherents have engaged in a series of different tactics. These tactics were done by people acting alone—for personal and group justice—and acting in unison—with others for the benefit of group uplift at North South University. The first strategy, taking place after Katrina, was civil law suits. On the surface, many of these suits appear self-serving—to remedy a wrong done to individuals. Putting the claims of plaintiffs in context, it becomes clear that they were engaged to remedy both personal troubles and group issues. In the broadest sense, such suits worked to build a foundation and set a precedent. Lack of transparency and bullying by leaders should not be accepted. More than this, individuals have the right to work to make the school, their community,3 better and without retaliation. The whistle-blowers After Hurricane Katrina, North South University needed to demonstrate that the school was still relevant and could attract pre-Katrina enrollment numbers. Even now, this issue remains a key feature of most reports about North South University (the most recent and thorough example comes from Pope, 2013). One way to demonstrate that the school was experiencing a rebirth was by showing service to the larger New Orleans community, specifically by socializing highschool students to the expectations of college. To that end, North South offered a dual enrollment program for high-achieving high-school students. Youth could take classes at North South and earn both high-school and college credits. On paper, this sounds like a wonderful, empowering program. But a deeper look, via civil court documents, unveils that the impact of such a program may have been manufactured. The Whistle-Blowers, Linda Tolbert-Mosley and Timotea Sanchez Bailey, were certain that some of the students listed as participants never actually attended classes, yet North South still used their names and enrollment status to gain resources from the state. Certainly, students change their minds or drop out, and perhaps this was part of the reason for disparities. But, according to the civil court case file (2007), when the plaintiffs brought the issues to the attention of their supervisors at the school, they felt that their claims were valid, yet not taken seriously. It was at this time that the two moved boldly, going above their supervisors, writing an anonymous letter to North South System brass and other state-level educational leaders.

3

Activists at the margins, even if they do not readily label themselves as such, cannot distinguish or compartmentalize the work they do. Rather, as highlighted by Nancy Naples (1991), work engaged in is for themselves, their neighborhoods and their communities as each sphere of life intersects and shapes the others. 161

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Upon receipt of the Whistle-Blowers’ anonymous letter, North South leadership questioned the direct supervisor of Linda Tolbert-Mosley and Timotea Sanchez Bailey. He was fired, according to his widow, because of this scandal. Later, as a result of the stress endured, he died—driving his widow to also file a lawsuit against the school. Seeing that their boss had been terminated, yet the original problem of ghost students remained, the Whistle-Blowers came forward, revealing their identity. This unleashed what they saw as retaliation by North South leaders. Both claimed that they were demoted, lost pay, and suffered physically from the stress. At this point, the two sought legal counsel and proceeded to court. The scandal broke, reported in the Times Picayune newspaper. In the end, the Whistle-Blowers were offered jobs with equivalent pay at the school. In 2012, only one was listed as employed in the school directory. If a dual enrollment program still exists, no mention could be found in online university documents (2010–12) or to the knowledge of faculty, staff, and students I spoke with.

The Student Government Association President Having heard of the ghost student disparities, Christopher Jackson, North South Student Government Association (SGA) President, confronted university leaders—including the chancellor. In his civil suit (2008), he claimed that he was bullied and silenced. Rather than receiving a reasonable explanation or plan of action regarding the ghost student allegations, Jackson states that he was told to mind his business on several occasions—by the chancellor of the school and later by campus police officers. After being called as a witness for the case of Linda Tolbert-Mosley and Timotea Sanchez Bailey, Jackson received a visit by North South campus police at his home—a FEMA trailer set up on school grounds. Jackson was apprehended by the officers (both still employed as of 2012, according to the university’s website) and placed in a police vehicle. Once under the officers’ custody, Jackson was questioned about his involvement in the Whistle-Blower suit. According to case documents, upon noting his involvement, Jackson was beaten by law enforcement and called a ‘fag’ and ‘faggot.’ He was then delivered to the Orleans Parish jail—a jail the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) filed a complaint against in 2012. According to the SPLC: The federal complaint describes a facility where violence and widespread contraband—including knives and drugs—are the norm. It also notes the facility is understaffed and that deputies are poorly trained and supervised—often complicit in the abuses suffered by the prisoners. (Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.) Once at the jail, however understaffed and poorly trained, officials saw the student was injured and transferred Jackson to a hospital, so that he could get care for

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the injuries he claimed North South officers had inflicted. The campus police claimed, however, that it was Jackson, instead, who had battered them. What the Whistle-Blowers and Jackson’s claims demonstrate are examples of individuals standing up to injustice, even without the support of a larger social movement organization. They are doing ‘just what needed to be done’, a widely shared impetus for community work by those facing marginalization, yet not a part of social movement organizations (Naples, 1991: 478–9). In this case, the injustice came from multiple layers—embodied in micro, macro, and structural discriminations. First, micro discrimination and secondary marginalization took place as the result of administrators and workers at the school. Certainly, keeping the university open was a primary concern to leaders. But demanding that staff evaluate programs, yet not evaluate them thoroughly (as to miss discrepancies and to keep their mouths closed upon finding them), destroys the legitimacy of claims that the university provides a unique service to New Orleans. This claim still serves, ironically, as the key go-to argument by school leaders as to why the school should exist at a time where state leaders have slashed funding and have considered merging the institution or closing it altogether (Pope, 2013). Second, system administrators and state officials (who received the anonymous letter), as a group, acted in a manner that allowed macro discrimination to operate within this educational institution. Their in-actions, as supported by university operating papers, provide a layer of sovereignty to individual leaders—a practice that, in this situation, hid discrimination under the guise of procedure. Even if the various bodies involved did not fire Thomas (the supervisor of the WhistleBlowers), they did so by consent. Even if they did not beat Christopher Jackson, failing to supply support (via an external investigation) set up an environment in which school officials (already called out as being corrupt) could bully students and staff wishing to see high-school students served with education at the university. In both case files, at any point had university officials provided transparent answers and action plans the progression towards a civil suit would have been halted. None of these plaintiffs wanted to go to court. Rather, this was a final action engaged in because all other means of communication had been perverted. And the fact that communication issues seem to guide the environment speaks to how discriminatory practices are imbedded into the system of the university (structural discrimination). Students and transparency Like Jackson, Rachael Hart Johnson (in 2009) sought transparent explanations for school officials’ actions. As a transfer student from an area community college, Johnson was told by an adviser that the credits she earned, to gain an associate’s degree, could be applied to earning her bachelor’s degree. When it came time to graduate, Johnson was told that she was ineligible. In her civil suit, she claimed that she had exhausted all channels within the school to remedy the problem. At each avenue, she was given a different answer and directed to another school 163

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official. This theme, of exhausting all possible avenues within the school, is seen in the previous cases noted and in the claims of university adherents after (lawsuits from former faculty in 2012 and 2013 exemplify this). Silencing tactics, as engaged in by school officials (and as lamented by adherents of the school), do not offer transparent explanations. Rather, they make tired the person with a legitimate concern until they stop asking questions or simply go away. This form of micro discrimination (being ignored by individuals) and macro discrimination (attempts to follow disempowering school and university system protocols) costs plaintiffs time and emotional energy—resulting in human waste (DuBois, 1903). Johnson, however, wanted a degree and was unwilling to go away. She was not fully dismayed by the layers of injustice. Instead, she was vocal, making it known that none of the administrators she was sent to see would put, in writing, actionable steps that she could take. Johnson states: Dealing with [North South] has made me cry many nights of frustration, driven 40 miles each way on a day I didn’t even have a class, expose myself to unprofessional practices from the registrar’s office and worst of all … see how a person in position to help someone would rather use their position to cause anxiety and stress instead of peace and serenity. (email from Johnson, included in court file) Johnson did end up earning her undergraduate degree from North South. In fact, in 2010, she was enrolled in the Master’s Program for Criminal Justice. Like one of the Whistle-Blowers, after getting the change she needed as an individual, she stayed on with the university—seeing it as her home or community. Their reasons may be plentiful, but certainly, lawsuits work to warn administrators of their limits. Additionally, such actions are empowering for those who believe that the university cannot or will not change if they remain silent about the second disasters shaping their lives daily. These kinds of examples encourage righteous discontent, on the ground, at the university.

Informal strategies to empowerment While there are several other examples of lawsuits, by faculty and students, it is important to speak about the fully informal (outside of the law, for example, but at times structured by social interactions within a group) ways in which students challenged what they saw as inequality and discrimination as they pursued their degrees. They did this by engaging in town hall meetings and protests to save the school from a potential merger. Students did this by engaging area media outlets and inspiring articles in the local newspaper (recent examples include Capo, 2013; Pope, 2013). They also did this by creating and maintaining a Facebook page. In this venue, students celebrate victories as well as make others aware of current problems within the university gates.

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Facebook and social media Social media is easily accessible to students, as it runs on their phones and computers. As a free tool, students can upload as many images and statements as they wish. That is exactly what North South students did in the decade following Hurricane Katrina. They communicated about upcoming ‘Miss [North South]’ elections, SGA (Student Government Association) news and meetings, sports teams, and other special events. They also communicated as to where to sell books (as the campus lacked a bookstore), travel routes (as high waters, which flooded a portion of the campus, made travel between classes difficult), trailers in disrepair, and how to communicate with campus leaders when their questions went unanswered. Though sometimes their comments seemed to spin around one another—like a venting session, as there were very few easy answers—I observed multiple times in which students created actionable steps that all could engage in. Facebook and social media serve as a way for students to break silences, brainstorm, and respond to one another—even if they are not in the same location. Through this online community, students and alumni can have conversations with one another—not letting the lessons learned by old-heads, during their tenure at the school, fade away, unlearned by newcomers upon the departure of graduates or students who transfer to different institutions. One area that students discussed at length concerned the state of the campus. Nearly a decade after Katrina, North South is the only campus in New Orleans still operating mainly out of trailers (Pope, 2013). Even universities near the North South campus (there are two—one private, one state run) appear to be rebuilt or in late stages of the rebuilding process. Of the buildings available on the North South campus, many endured water damage, which has not been fixed. That is, some parts of the buildings are used, but only the second floors—as the first floors are still, mainly, in disrepair. When new FEMA trailers rolled in during the summer of 2013, students took to Facebook—unnerved, if not livid. They took pictures and talked about what should be done next—whom they should talk to. As organic intellectuals, they theorized as to why their campus still appeared as if Katrina had occurred recently, posting readings about the history of the school as evidence or a predictor as to why the school operated with so few resources. After a week-long discussion, where at times the frustration was misdirected at one another, a student who had just graduated chimed in with an idea everyone could agree on: taking pictures and letting leaders know on their social media pages. This student provided a list of Twitter handles and other ways to contact North South and North South System brass in a public way—so that they would not be ignored. The student advised them to use their best grammar and to stay calm when writing, as their words would be seen by a larger, perhaps hostile, audience. When students saw a broken window, trash overflowing, a door to a FEMA trailer that was falling off of its hinges, a dangerous and poorly lit stairwell— anything that was not as it should be—all were to take a picture and upload it to leaders’ social media pages, asking when the situation would be fixed. This kind 165

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of thinking took the focus off each student (who should organize what, who should be the speaker, who loved the university more, and so on) and put the attention back on leaders who did not talk to students about what to expect at the school in terms of construction. With this tactic, students, resourcefully, sidestepped many of the micro discrimination tactics that had previously been waged against them by individual leaders. Putting their claims up on a public venue, any one following the leader via Twitter, for example, would be called to action. Would they ignore the evidence, a picture, or would they start to understand the multiple problems present on the campus—problems that shape students’ abilities to learn in a clean and safe environment? Protests Outlets like Facebook allow students to spread the word about town hall meetings and times where others will band together to protest rulings by educational leaders in the state. I observed such teamwork in 2011, when North South adherents attended meetings (at the school, at city hall and later at the Board of Regents meeting in Baton Rouge) to deter a plan to merge the school with another area university. Students who attended the meeting in Baton Rouge got on a charter bus. Word of mouth spread information about the time and place to meet. Once at the Board of Regents meeting, students went to speak before the board—almost like a filibuster of sorts. One after another, they talked about the goal of the school and the merits of the university. They talked about all they had gained by attending North South. And when they could talk no more to the Board of Regents, they talked to the press outside and held up signs picketing a decision to merge the school, even as it had never been afforded resources to rebuild after Katrina. In addition to protests and filibustering, students also made their concerns known to media outlets, such as the Times Picayune—a major newspaper in New Orleans. Once with news media officials, students inspired conversations about the effect of state budget cuts on the public university. Additionally, they made certain outsiders had access to images of a dilapidated campus. Some students, during interviews, discussed a major issue facing North South brass—the inability to retain and graduate students. According to one, this issue can be solved, in part, by rebuilding the campus, providing students with transparent answers (in one case, steps to bring back a campus activity—like the newspaper or yearbook) rather than the run around, and employing faculty who are not so burned out that they can offer services to the students they come in contact with (see Pope, 2013). Certainly, if the goal of a school is to encourage students to attend and graduate, negative publicity like this, if not addressed, will lead to the demise of the university. It is worth inquiring, what will happen to North South students if the school is closed? Many will transfer to other area four year colleges, but, as this was the mission of North South until 2010 (when open admissions were 166

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ceased), many may need to attend a community college—to build their college preparation skills. Even with all of the problems present within the school, this movement is something most North South adherents do not want to see. It tempers would be activists from speaking up and illuminates the role of structural, taken-for-granted, discrimination in the maintenance of higher education for people of color in Louisiana.

Effects of strategies In this chapter, I have provided a brief overview of the tactics individuals at North South university engaged in. While the tactics, by and large, occurred as single actions by individuals not formally involved in a social movement organization, I argue that the effect is to further bolster and change the landscape in which activists for educational equity work within the school and state. If this were not the case, then adherents could not rely on the work done by others before them (see Francis, 2004, for example, in addition to the library of articles about the school and students available at nola.com), incorporating such knowledge into their current strategies for empowerment. Here, I speak specifically to how each action (civil suits, protests, social media, and news coverage) talks back to and therefore shapes the atmosphere at North South University and the state of public universities in Louisiana, and provide an example individuals can follow in different vicinities. That is, the work done here—although in a specific city and in the aftermath of a truly specific disaster—provides a blueprint or guide for other agents of change. It does so because their activities are broad and encompass a range of activities any person or group can engage in—many costing little (in terms of economic resources) to the plaintiffs, or those marginalized by the injustice. The blueprint is also of importance because micro, macro, and structural discriminations are not unique to North South University. Rather, these oppressive practices can be found worldwide. The civil suits, although a drastic tactic, place the claims of the plaintiff in a public record—a document that, for the most part, can be studied for years after by those not directly involved in the suit. In these records, one can view how micro discriminations are voiced by plaintiffs and defended by the individuals being sued. In many cases, several parties are listed on the suit (a common example would be a suit in which the chancellor, as an individual, were being sued, in addition to the university and university system). One can observe how, in these instances, an institution claims defense due to school rules and laws—yet does not question how institutional rules and values can be imbedded with discrimination and therefore produce a hierarchy that is disempowering. Like civil suits, which archive past struggles, Facebook and other social media also work to provide a public arena in which claims and defenses can be viewed by others—perhaps generating support for one’s cause. Shaming has long been a tactic used by justice advocates. In this case, students attacked the integrity of the school (like one would do for a company or brand) directly on the advertising arms 167

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(Twitter and Facebook) of ‘brand executives’—school administrators and North South System leaders. Much like picketing outside a flagship store or marching at a strategic site, students used the desire of leaders, to publicly paint the school as recovering and succeeding, to their advantage. This would put leaders in a predicament: either fix the problems or defend your inaction in a public setting, where many eyes will dissect your excuse. Saying nothing, however, demonstrates to followers of the school brand that the claims of activists are correct and that the leaders care too little even to respond. This is damaging, especially as one considers the impact responses (or failure to respond) might have on potential students. Put another way, who would attend a school where leadership cannot be counted on to meet the needs of its current, enrolled, students? Lastly, putting one’s body and voice on the line is a classic organizing tool— one that students appropriated, as documented in this chapter. From pickets to filibustering, from making it on to television to newspaper interviews, these workers for educational equity fight back against mistreatment in mediums those outside the school can see. And, in doing this, they challenge onlookers’ moral compass—therefore linking them to the challenge, to move towards equality, regardless of race or other perceived difference.

Conclusion In order to achieve greater levels of educational equity in post-Katrina New Orleans, North South students, staff and faculty engaged in multi-tactic strategies—some at the same time—to get the attention of North South, North South System and state of Louisiana leaders. Lawsuits, social media shaming and other consciousness-raising activities have not always brought immediate, broad, or long-lasting changes. Still, such tactics serve as thoughtful strategies individuals engage in daily in order to reach the larger goal of giving everyone access to the, often illusive, American Dream. Change rarely occurs overnight. It is hard won. And, for the generations of workers for justice at North South University, it is clear: ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’ (King, 1958). References Capo, B., 2013, With classes still in trailers, students upset at slow [North South] repairs, WWLTV News, July 19 Classrooms of Shame, 2013, Classrooms of Shame, September 6, http:// classroomsofshame.tumblr.com/ Cohen, C.J., 1999, The boundaries of blackness: AIDS and the breakdown of black politics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press DeBerry, J., 2011, Born of evil, [North South] still fights to be good, The Times Picayune, January 30, www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2011/01/born_of_ evil_suno_still_fights.tml

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DuBois, W.E.B., 1903 [1994],  The souls of black folk,  Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc. Feagin, J.R. and Vera, H., 2008,  Liberation sociology,  Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers Fontes, L.A., 2004, Ethics in violence against women research: the sensitive, the dangerous, and the overlooked, Ethics and Behavior, 14, 2, 141–74 Francis, V.T., 2004, Pride and paradox: The history and development of [North South], 1954–1975, unpublished dissertation, New Orleans, LA: University of New Orleans Gamboa, C., 2013, I became a scholar in order to become a better activist, Social Science Space, www.socialsciencespace.com/2013/06/%E2%80%9Ci-became-ascholar-in-order-to-become-a-better-activist King Jr., M.L., 1958, Out of the long night of segregation, The King Center, February 28, www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/out-long-nightsegregation-0 Lorde, A., 1984, Sister outsider. Berkeley, CA: The Crossing Press Naples, N., 1991, ‘Just what needed to be done’: The political practice of women community workers in low-income neighborhoods,  Gender & Society,  5, 4, 478–94 Pastor, M., Bullard, R.D., Boyce, J.K., Fothergill, A., Morello-Frosh, R. and Wright, B., 2006, In the wake of the Storm: Environment, disaster, and race after Katrina, New York, NY: The Russell Sage Foundation Pope, J., 2013, At [North South], the glass can be half-full or half-empty, The Times Picayune, August 30, www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2013/08/ at_suno_in_new_orleans_the_gla.html Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d., Orleans parish prison safety: Jones v. Gusman, Southern Poverty Law Center, www.splcenter.org/opp Stall, S., and Stoecker, R., 1998,  Community organizing or organizing community? Gender and the crafts of empowerment, Gender & Society, 12, 6, 729–56 Weissinger, S.E., 2012, With  Audre  as my guide: Teaching and surviving in post Katrina New Orleans, The Feminist Wire, October 30, thefeministwire. com/2012/10/with-audre-as-my-guide-teaching-and-surviving-in-postkatrina-new-orleans/ Woodson, C.G., 1933 [1990], The mis-education of the negro, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press

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The revolutionary, non-violent action of Danilo Dolci and his maieutic approach Domenica Maviglia

Introduction The figure of Danilo Dolci has been associated with the development of a culture of peace since the period just after the Second World War. By analyzing the work of Dolci, it is possible to discover a life of struggle against the shackles of human existence; a life in which the educator from Trieste challenged the artificial obstacles and invisible mechanisms that tend to convey ready-made truths and strangle the responsibility of critical thought and action linked to the unique characteristics of each individual. This is the essence of the non-violent proposal of Dolci; a civil commitment that is the common denominator of all his fights on behalf of the weakest in society. Violence is identified as an attitude that tends to destroy or lower the ‘quality of man’ of each individual, revealing an antagonistic, damaging, and oppressive behavior in the relationship with other people and nature (Debbaut, 1969). On the other hand, according to Dolci, non-violent action is exactly the opposite; it is a constructive, maieutic, interactive, supportive, and systemic action that does not destroy nor overwhelm the essence of others, but instead helps others build themselves. For these reasons, the culture of peace does not refer to the absence of conflicts but to a reconstructive and developmental action carried out by individuals in themselves and in their environment, in order to create a welcoming and highly productive community. This community must be consistent with its own basic needs and, at the same time, it must respect the identities and differences of personal characters, developing a high level of coherence with a world that is considered as a complex ‘creature of creatures.’ The culture of peace and awareness building described above was experimented with by Danilo Dolci in the microcosm of western Sicily, a territory that the pedagogue from Trieste described as a neglected and morally unacceptable reality. Here, Dolci developed his ideas, and he put them in practice through non-violent action and a maieutic methodology that had the aim of ‘humanizing’ the people living in those areas. According to Dolci, building awareness requires the ability to identify incoherencies, explore the roots of violence, and question one’s needs,

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in order to build an alternative by devising a plan that—from an individual and collective point of view—fully embraces the concept of non-violent action. For Danilo Dolci, the beginning of this ‘democratic’ reform overlapped with the defense of the right to life for those who did not have a job and were therefore forced to live in misery and ignorance. Often, these people had to resort to antisocial behavior, like banditry, in order to survive and feed their children. From this point of view, Dolci’s fight can be considered as a battle against institutional violence. During a press conference that took place in Palermo in January 1958, Dolci stated that ‘you don’t need to shoot to kill’ and that ‘someone’s death sentence can be signed also through neglect’—in other words by not guaranteeing citizens minimal survival conditions. In order to defend the right to life, the pedagogue from Trieste decided to follow the path of non-violence, which was decisive in promoting the educational development of the awareness-building process and the self-planning process of development. The hunger strike in the bed of a child who starved to death, the ‘strikes in reverse’ for employment, the peace walks, the maieutic fasts aimed at raising awareness about the unresolved issues of the Italian ‘democracy’: these were all tools that Dolci employed to channel the power of oppressed people and fight against the squandering of resources and the phenomenon of parasitism. From this point of view, great importance must be attributed to Dolci’s enquiries on different issues. Among other publications, his lucid research on banditry— Banditi a Partinico (Bandits in Partinico) (Dolci, 1955)—and his interest in the living conditions of people in the poorest neighborhoods of Palermo—Inchiesta a Palermo (Inquiry in Palermo) (Dolci, 1956)—informed national and international public opinion about the misdeeds of ‘democracy,’ its criminal neglect, and the violation of human rights and constitutional law by the state itself, which proved then to be the real outlaw. Dolci considered consciousness as the source of revolutionary action, and he described his work as ‘resistance without shooting.’ Over the years, his actions promoted the establishment of grassroots structures that were not only ‘for’ the people but also ‘by’ the people. Examples were the dams built to collect rainwater and radically change local agriculture, the water consortium, the management cooperatives, the Centre of Studies and Initiatives for full employment, the Experimental School of Mirto, and the Training Centre of Trappeto. In other words, this structural development had at its core the growth of people in order to address common problems by identifying and solving them creatively. Furthermore, the non-violent reform of ‘democracy’ established its own methodology: a maieutic method that promoted processes of civil growth by fighting against the most elusive and subtle forms of violence, those that ensured a full social control of consciousness through the influence carried out by mechanical, duplicating, and repetitive ways of thinking, and through conformist behavior. Danilo Dolci is therefore a man who, in a completely innovative way, succeeded in challenging the sturdy, rooted, and apparently unchangeable system of 1960s 172

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Sicily. His ability in exploring the innermost depths of the soul allowed him to correctly perceive even the most complex facets of identity, embarking on a genuine journey to discover the inner ‘I’ of every individual, and enhance his or her unexpressed potential (Fontanelli, 1984: 62). Through his committed educational activity in the town of Partinico, Dolci succeeded in radically changing the consciousness of the people living in this part of Sicily. He gave them the tools necessary to become fully aware of themselves and try to get out of the situation of static oppression and enslavement to which they were subjected. Challenging the conventional wisdom of his time, Dolci understood that the best way to uproot the evils that plagued his society was to restrain from violent clashes and bloodshed, and instead follow the path of pacifism and nonviolence. His pedagogic action was therefore shaped to pursue the goal of finding peaceful solutions to every issue. In order to do so, Dolci proposed a brand-new methodology that made a clean break with the past and focused on the idea of radically changing the conception of the education process of every individual. Considering all this, it is clear how much his action was aimed at creating new individuals who could play leading roles in their own social contexts, fighting against all mafias and at the same time defending democracy.

Non-violent revolution: ‘Resistance without shooting’ To fully understand the educational thought and action of Danilo Dolci, it is crucial to know his personal history. Danilo Dolci was born in Sesana (Trieste) in June 1924. He grew up in a family with strong moral principles, something that strongly influenced his education and promoted the development of particular traits of his personality, like the respect and value attached to the concept of diversity. During the Second World War, the non-violent activist educator had to face the absurd reality of the brutality of the Fascist and Nazi regimes, developing and showing a strong opposition and clear disapproval for all forms of violence. His ‘non-violent consciousness’ sprouted up at the age of 19, when he was arrested by the Nazi-fascist regime in Genoa in 1943. After a brief period of imprisonment, he was able to escape and found refuge in the mountains of Abruzzi, where he had to face a life characterized by poverty and risk. This crucial stage of the life of Dolci determined his future choices and commitment by orienting his actions towards the principles of ‘non-violence’ and the respect of life. Dolci noted the indifference and the contradictions that characterized the social reality surrounding him and he started feeling a deep need to concretize his thoughts in a coherent action (Dolci, 1968: 12). In 1948, during this maturation stage of his thought, Dolci had a meeting with Father Zeno Saltini, an encounter that strongly influenced his life. He met Father Saltini in Nomadelfia, ‘the city where brotherhood is law’ (Barone, 2004: 18), a Christian community that welcomed people left on the street by the war. The community was established in the former Nazi-Fascist concentration camp 173

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of Fossoli (Modena), thanks to the work of Father Zeno Saltini, but it was seen as a vicious nest of rebels by the petty leading class of those years and even by the clergy. In 1950, Dolci decided to move in to the community and started his first experience of community life, where everyone worked for the good of the others and there was no private property. In 1952, the educator from Trieste went to Sicily, one of the poorest and most neglected corners of southern Italy. Dolci moved to the small seaside village of Trappeto, where he had already spent some weeks with his father back in 1940 and 1941. In Trappeto, Dolci was confronted with an absurd reality. The village lacked sewers and even proper roads, unemployment was considered as a ‘normal condition,’ and there was the widespread idea that the street was the natural playground and meeting place for children (Mangano, 1992: 25). According to Barone (2004: 19), Dolci found a town that had been completely left behind; a village that was totally unaware of its needs and hence incapable of changing itself. Therefore, he started to share the misery of those ‘poor souls’ and began asking himself and others how it would have been possible to promote change. At the beginning, he asked some of his friends to identify the most urgent changes needed in the community, and then he started posing the same question to small groups of people. Eventually, after many meetings, people started to become aware of their needs and the urgency of change. A very active, small group of people engaged in an action of community self-analysis, which led to the identification of two main needs: a nursery school for children and jobs for grown-ups. Dolci’s non-violent approach started following this process. His non-violent tactics characterized one of the brightest and most intense chapters of the difficult civil and democratic revival of southern Italy, in order to rebuild it after the moral and material destruction left by the Fascist regime and the Second World War (Barone, 2004: 19). When he had to witness the death by starvation of a child, Dolci went on hunger strike for eight days, staying in the bed of the small child who had died by hunger. He informed the authorities and the press that his hunger strike would have continued until ‘the country did not decide to step back from that daunting cliff’ (Spagnoletti, 1977: 42). After a series of initiatives and the intervention of regional and national authorities, the country started changing. Different books describe the meetings that took place over those years, meetings that allowed people to question themselves, learn how to engage with others, listen to themselves and to others, decide what to do, and plan their actions. This is how the ‘non-violent fight’ started, with a series of community self-analysis initiatives that eventually led to the emergence of a full awareness about the problems and the need for a change. With his actions, Dolci lent his voice to the voiceless, as he used to say. During those years, his work intensified. Between 1953 and 1954, many different structures were built in Borgo di Trappeto: a nursery school for the children of the poorest; a Popular University welcoming volunteers coming from all over the world; and a Popular Library. According to Dolci, these structures were not inspired by the need to assist the community, but the community’s ability 174

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to self-structure. In fact, through these spaces, Dolci gave the possibility to the population of Trappeto to grow, to learn how to recognize its strongest needs, and to understand exactly which resources of its territory could be exploited (Spagnoletti, 1977: 57). Over these years, Dolci’s actions started to bear fruit: with the intervention of regional and national authorities, as promised, the country began to change. Houses started being provided with running water, and proper roads and sewers were built. The group initiatives multiplied. The maieutic group established itself as a political group, in order to address the problems of its people at a grassroots level, giving concrete meaning to the concept of democracy. During the meetings of the group devoted to the analysis of the economic underdevelopment of the region and aimed at finding solutions to it, the group proposed—capitalizing on the hunch of a farmer—the construction of a dam on the Jato river. As Barone highlights (2002: 27), this dam proved to be the crucial project for the economic future of the entire area. It empowered the population against the Mafia, which had exploited the total control it had had on the limited water resources of the territory as a powerful weapon of oppression. After 10 years of fighting and popular mobilization, the dam was finally built, radically improving the lives of thousands of citizens, promoting the establishment in the entire area of many cooperatives, and supporting substantial economic growth. Prior to that, in 1955, Dolci went on hunger strike to force the Italian government to listen to the local population and build the above-mentioned dam to collect the water running during winter in the Jato river, in order to use it to irrigate the land and support in this way the agricultural activities of the area. As a matter of fact, the land of this region was barren and arid for long periods of the year because of the lack of management in the use of the available water resources. The problem was two-fold: on one side, there was the issue of the water ‘wasted’ that went directly into the sea because of the lack of proper infrastructure; on the other side, the local Mafia bosses had been exploiting for many years the limited water resources of the area to hideously blackmail the local farmers and control them. The non-violent, revolutionary action of Dolci and his public denouncement of the situation represented a great example of rebellion against the parasitic oppression of the Mafia. His struggle was fueled by the knowledge that the populations of fishermen and farmers living in those areas were rich in non-violent values, and in people ready to commit and get involved in the development of the territory. The only violent characters in this situation were represented instead by the Mafia and nepotistic groups that forced their will on the territory, and also by the state that—through its absence—neglected the needs of the people and—even worse—contributed in supporting the desperate misery of that part of the country through its complete lack of concern. The hunger strikes of Dolci affected public opinion so much that, in January 1956, thousands of people decided to follow his example. Therefore, they went on hunger strike to denounce the violation of the right to work, enshrined in Article 4 of the Italian Constitution, and the troublesome but accepted phenomenon of illegal 175

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fishing, which stripped fishermen of their only income source. Furthermore, 1,500 signatures were collected to support the request for better management of the water supply and for opening new schools. Despite the widespread support it received, the public manifestation was stopped by the authorities, presenting the peculiar argument that ‘public hunger strikes were illegal’ (Barone 2004: 23). In 1956, Dolci promoted another initiative, the ‘strike in reverse’, which involved hundreds of unemployed citizens who wanted to draw attention to the need to rebuild a countryside road left in terrible shape by the inaction of local authorities. In May 1958, in the neighboring city of Partinico, Dolci founded the Centre of Studies and Initiatives, using money collected by different groups of friends in Italy and abroad, and funds received with the Lenin Prize, which had been awarded to him the previous year. The establishment of the Centre was the practical answer to the need to offer the territory a structure committed to finding concrete solutions to the problems identified through a series of meetings with the local population by exploiting the knowledge and skills of different experts. The activities of the Centre went beyond the municipal boundaries and involved also the territories of Roccamena, Corleone, Menfi, Cammarata, and San Giovanni Gemini. Thanks to the Centre, the population became more aware of the reasons behind the waste of resources of their territories, trying to find ways to avoid it and instead enhance their value. In order to do so, the Centre promoted the development of common projects and it streamlined the management of the territory, putting considerable pressure on the public authorities to find proper solutions to the existing problems. In 1962, Dolci went on a nine-day-long hunger strike to remind public opinion of the crucial importance of the Jato river dam project. In February 1963, thanks to the funds allocated by Cassa del Mezzogiorno (the Italian public fund for the South), the work on the building site of the dam officially started, marking the success of Dolci in the battle against the pernicious oppression of the Mafia, the main perpetrator of the water racket. In 1964, Dolci published the book Verso un mondo nuovo (Towards a new world), in which he presented the findings from the travels he made abroad in order to gain a better insight into the pilot experiences of participatory ‘territory planning’ processes. With this book, the pedagogue from Trieste tried to encourage individuals to become aware of their own power and commit themselves to change. In those years, Trappeto was already showcasing the first results of the commitment of the local population and of Dolci, despite the aggressive attitude of some local influential figures, like the Cardinal Archbishop of Palermo, Ernesto Ruffini. On September 22, 1965, the Italian Antimafia Commission invited Danilo Dolci, in collaboration with Franco Alasia, to bring forward another activity aimed at tackling the clientelistic and Mafia networks of Italy: during a press conference at the headquarters of Circolo della Stampa in Rome, for the first time in the history of the country, Dolci publicly denounced the relations existing between politics and the Mafia, presenting the results of an inquiry carried out in the 176

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surroundings of Palermo. The commitment of Dolci and Franco Alasia was the result of the rising need to stress the fact that people could not grow if subjected to the vicious effects of the established clientelistic-Mafia politics, because its logic of subjugation and oppression was the direct opposite of the self-planning principle and the principle of genuine democracy, which could exist only when it promoted simultaneously the individual and collective growth of all members of its community. Since his arrival in Sicily, Dolci had blamed organized crime for being one of the main obstacles to development. Thanks to a careful, continuous, and farreaching work, a sound anti-Mafia sentiment took root in the region, gradually developing all over the territory. Hundreds and hundreds of volunteers decided to move to Sicily and swell the ranks of this civil army, which was called the ‘continuation of resistance without shooting’ (Mangano, 1992: 33). In the meantime, there was a strong increase in the number of activities of research, and denouncements of the relations between politics and Mafia, which led to a series of serious accusations addressed to important Sicilian and Italian politicians. Similar allegations were leveled even against the then powerful minister Bernardo Mattarella, the undersecretary Calogero Volpe, and many other important Sicilian government officials. More than 100 people, including many farmers, decided to sign their testimonies, exposing themselves directly to possible retribution by the Mafia. On January 10, 1966, Dolci went on hunger strike for seven days in a stablehouse of Castellammare del Golfo, the birthplace of Bernardo Mattarella, in order to take part in a movement promoting personal and community freedom that wanted to expose the truth and invite the government to make responsible choices and take full charge of its civil and moral responsibilities. During the trial that took place in Rome in January 1967, various documents relating to the relations of those politicians with Mafia criminals were publicly read and discussed, but the court decided not to hear the testimonies of different witnesses. After being brought to court on charges of calumny, on June 22, 1967, Dolci and Franco Alasia were sentenced, respectively, to two years and one year and seven months of prison, despite the evidence of the facts and the expulsion from the government of Mattarella and Volpe. In 1967, in Rome, right in front of the buildings of the Parliament and the Antimafia Commission, a ‘non-violent protest’ was officially organized. After this episode, Dolci started promoting a series of solidarity non-violent manifestations: the March for Western Sicily and for a new world, and the Peace March for Vietnam. More than 5,000 people took part in these marches. In January 1968, the works for building a Training Centre for Organic Planning officially started, but a few days later they were brought to a grinding halt by the tragic earthquake of January 15, which struck in particular the area of Belice valley. Two years after the earthquake, in March 1970, Dolci and his collaborators decided to unveil to public opinion the terrible reality of the people living in those areas. To achieve this goal, they started relating on the radio the stories of 177

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all the people that ‘were dying because of the rotting effect of idle words and injustice’ (Chemello, 1988: 322). Using the radio broadcaster Radio Libera of Partinico, which had its studios located at the Centre of Studies and Initiatives, Dolci relayed the voices of those ‘poor souls,’ voices that became a ‘new source of resistance.’ The voices of those people were broadcast all over the country and they denounced the reality of the clientelistic-Mafia politics in the area. This led to the intervention of the police, who pulled the plug on the ‘clandestine’ radio. Despite these episodes, Dolci and his collaborators decided to focus on the establishment of the Training Centre for Organic Planning, in order to find people that could investigate thoroughly the basic needs of this territory (Spagnoletti, 1977: 22). For these reasons, in March 1970, Dolci bought a field of 10 hectares that was completely surrounded by nature. In December 1973, an international seminar was organized in Borgo di Trappeto to solve some problems relating to the opening of the Centre in Mirto. As well as the local population, important experts took part in the seminar, like Johan Galtung, Clotilde and Maurizio Pontecorvo, Jacques Vonèche (a collaborator with Piaget), and Paulo Freire. Finally, during the winter of 1974, the Training Centre was partly completed. Thanks to the help of Ferdinand Conrad and other experts, Dolci launched a training program for teachers and, in 1975, the educational activities of the Centre officially began, welcoming 90 children. The structure proved to be well organized from day one, allowing its young pupils to genuinely grow by involving at the same time their respective families. The unimaginable and inhuman reality of Trappeto back in 1952 had radically improved over the years. Not only roads, but houses and countryside were different and better. The mentality of the people had changed, too, becoming less fatalistic and more aware of the possibility to change and transform reality. Furthermore, the local population was much better at organizing activities, cooperating and struggling to defend the rights of its members. All this had been made possible thanks to the educational-maieutic power unleashed by the activities that had been necessary to build the dam and the Training Centre. Starting from the 1980s, the methodology of Dolci was introduced in different Italian schools and universities (from Mestre to Parma, from Varese to Agropoli, Lingua-glossa, Messina, Cagliari) through the organization of research seminars and meetings, the promotion of international research conferences and seminars, and a series of interventions to promote the development of the poorest areas. Travelling around Italy and all over the world, Dolci took part in seminars in different schools. He met with children, parents, and teachers; he explored the bonds existing between education, creativity, and non-violent development, finetuning his maieutic method. By resorting to hunger strikes, ‘strikes in reverse,’ non-violent occupations, peace walks, and particularly by exploiting the power of dialogue, Dolci tried to redeem the dignity of the populations of southern Italy, showing them how it was concretely possible to self-manage their communities and resources in order to leave behind the misery created and nurtured by local politicians and Mafia bosses. 178

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Building change through maieutic education During his long experience as a revolutionary man, Danilo Dolci always resorted to non-violent resistance, which represented the main constituent of an ethical action based on truth and on the search for a social life in the pursuit of justice and peace. The pedagogue from Trieste promoted with his ideas and maieutic methodology the establishment of a planning, cooperating, and transforming culture that was very different to the cultural models featuring different forms of domination. In the book Palpitare di nessi (Beating bonds) (1985), Dolci describes domination using these terms: domination is like a virus that slowly destroys us. The thirst for power, the craze for oppression, makes us dizzy and controls who is unsure, who is afraid of life and death (it makes dizzier those who feel inferior, invisible, and afraid): it is a disease of the relationship, the wrong answer to the lack of creative involvement. As a matter of fact, in developed societies, domination is achieved by using a technology that is getting more and more sophisticated, a pervasive domination, which is linked to a prevailing violence that manifests itself in different forms, not only physical, but also ethical and intellectual. (Dolci, 1985: 238) From these words, it is possible to understand that, according to Dolci, domination is a sturdy, authoritarian, and ethically despicable structure. It is the pathological expression of power that in the form of clientelistic networks, like the Mafia, inevitably intertwines with violence, maiming individuals by taking away their ability to cooperate and plan their lives together. To support this conclusion, the pedagogue from Trieste talks about the need to ‘wake up consciousness’ (Dolci, 1968: 67) by reconsidering reality, which is not based on separation and conflict, but it is founded on a kind of unity that does not eliminate the characteristics of each individual and instead allows them to develop fully (Dolci, 1968: 66). Non-violence, therefore, ‘is the right revolution for those who want to rebel against limitation but are also aware of the unlimited value of people and unity’ (Mangano, 1992: 42). The commitment of Danilo Dolci started from a deep immersion in human reality, a reality that was ‘rough,’ ‘shapeless,’ ‘painful’, ‘unrealised,’ ‘full of parasites.’ Through his work, Dolci proposed a process to gain awareness of this reality and elaborate a project to change it—project that starts from the deepest aspects of this specific reality, which is thoroughly analyzed and to which the project always refers (Mangano, 1992: 49).

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The fervor of Dolci becomes therefore, through the maieutic method,1 the true voice of this reality, allowing the individuals who are living in it to emerge as new characters and save themselves from the ‘wrecking aggression of an historically hegemonic and technologically well-equipped culture’ (Dolci, 1996: 32). Reality is then carefully studied and assessed considering different dimensions and using different tools, resorting also to scientific analysis.2 In this way it is possible to free human beings from rhetorical ideas, superstitions, and complex dogmas of all kinds. Confronted with the wide diffusion and the divisions caused by this anthropological structure, which was so strong in western Sicily during the 1960s, Dolci contended that a form of pedagogy based on the principle of listening, combined with maieutic education, could mark a possible turning point for the region. According to him, education had to be anchored in the problems of the local social context, without limiting itself to merely promote knowledge, but devising also an ethical-political project in which, through the maieutic method, it could be possible to define the true meaning of the teaching–learning process. Therefore, even education could not be seen as a simple and direct transmission of traditional culture, but it had to aim at teaching a critical-maieutic method. In other words, according to Dolci, education should be embedded in society and give meaning to the life of every human being, becoming a necessary process to create new, creative, and collaborative individuals, in line with the absurd complexity of their time. The education proposed by Dolci is founded therefore on human promotion, a concept characterized by full awareness of one’s rights, the ability to autonomously choose and plan, and the ability to interpret and improve the resources of the territory by analyzing the existing contradictions that hinder the possibility of a concrete democratic transformation. Education can become an ‘awareness building process’ and a personal commitment only through a form of genuine, multilateral, maieutic, and group communication based on creativity. Creativity is at the core of Dolci’s concept of education and therefore it represents the overarching feature of his conceptions of future, history, and civilization, which convey him a revolutionary and simultaneously non-violent character. This type of education, according to Danilo Dolci, creates a superstructure that is installed right over the existing structures. This superstructure affects the existing domination processes by modifying them, 1

2

What characterizes the experience of Dolci is his ‘social enhancement’ based on the maieutic method, in other words a growth based on mutual exchange, active participation of the subject, and genuine communication. This method must help subjects to find the truth in themselves and bring it to the surface, similar to the task of a ‘midwife’, to which the term maieutic refers. The scientific analysis is represented by a community self-analysis through which every member of the society becomes aware of the needs and problems of the community. These issues can then be solved only by rediscovering the authentic creativity of everybody. 180

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turning a divided and dependent mass of people into a group of daring and active individuals. From this point of view, it is clear that the prerequisites of democracy are not only of institutional nature, but also of cultural nature. In other words, to nourish and develop democracy, as Dolci often said, ‘it is crucial to promote a collective growth at grassroots level, to promote the awareness in people about their own value, their resources, and their personal potential to create new structures’ (Mangano, 1989: 45). Therefore, in order to survive, democracy needs individuals who frequently question power, giving voice to the ‘voiceless’ and the ‘poorest in society’. In other words, as the practice of freedom through non-violent action, education is the most influencing and transformational tool of our societies. It must be a form of education that embraces the concept of human growth and evolution; an education that—starting from the needs of the individual, and a collective search for a way to meet them—uses the interactions among individuals and between the individuals and the community to turn individual growth and the development of the community into a maieutic process. Referring to this, Barone (2004: 26) highlights that Dolci never presented himself as a guru. He never proposed his methods as ready-made truths. He never claimed to tell others what to think or how to do it. His methodology was simply a revolutionary method based on the idea that change is impossible without the commitment, full awareness, and direct participation of people. Therefore, his idea of progress can be successfully fulfilled only when everyone feels that the endeavor that must be carried out is truly his or hers. As a matter of fact, Dolci used to say that ‘the best projects, even those that on paper look like the most efficient ones, are always seen as something unfamiliar and hostile when they are imposed from above. Change is impossible without new strengths, but these strengths cannot be created from nothing and they develop only if the individuals wake up and start recognising their interests and needs’ (Barone, 2004: 27). From this point of view, the work of Danilo Dolci can be compared to the work of a speleologist, who has the task of bringing to light what lies immersed in darkness. The educator from Trieste, as Barone (2004: 52) notes: is a speleologist of the knowledge and mortified human dignity that lie buried deep below the rubble left by the civilisation of reinforced concrete […]. Along the line marked by the foxhole between privilege and abused rights, Dolci is on this side of the line, right at the side of other humble and honest men. This is what is really important and what turns this man from Northern Italy into a man from Southern Italy among other men from Southern Italy, a Sicilian among Sicilians. Armed with a diamond pointed axe, Dolci tears down old barriers, sheds light on the hearts and consciousness that had long ago lost their ability to smile and hope. From this point of view, the lifework of Danilo Dolci represents not only a new conception of education and revolution, but also a rare example of human respect. 181

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The sufferance and anguish of the people in Partinico led Dolci to perform a careful and thorough analysis of his society, restoring the value of dialogue and in particular the value of maieutic dialogue. This type of dialogue has the aim of teaching people to know themselves and always search for the truth, characteristics that make it the perfect tool to rediscover the essence of being human and the essence of knowledge (Morgante, 1992: 48–50). It is in the development of this communicative process that human beings acquire the dimensions of ‘must be’ and ‘might be’: ‘might be’ because of their potential; ‘must be’ because of the responsibility, conscience, and ethical sense required in the management of the world and humanity that they represent. According to Dolci, the world is an organism with a potential for growth; it can become a ‘creature of creatures’ (Spagnoletti, 1977: 75). At the same time, as Mangano explains, it is also clear that this task is not easy to perform, since the world is characterized by limited groups of human beings who exert domination and control on nature and on other humans, in a process that aims at ‘inhumanizing’ instead of promoting the authenticity of human beings (Mangano, 1992: 91). Nevertheless, these arguments leave open the possibility that maieutics might become ‘the midwife of reality’ (Mangano, 1992: 95), a non-violent methodology that could overpower violence and promote development, because in a world that sees violent revolution as the only way to free itself from oppressive privileges and promote freedom and justice, maieutics offers a well-grounded experience and all the necessary tools to promote a true form of revolution; the one that follows the path of non-violence.

Conclusions The analysis of Danilo Dolci’s figure highlights not only the extraordinary character of a man who was able to promote a deep innovation in the social sphere, but also conveys an outstanding lesson relating to his renewing and innovative message, not only for the time in which Dolci lived but also for the current age. From different points of view, the issues that characterized the most active years of Dolci’s life are re-emerging also today, jeopardizing the social balances and the status quo that he already denounced, and that unfortunately still exists today because of an unjustifiable static order of things. Unfortunately, in many circumstances, the complete absence or neglect by the state of different issues has been very clear. Often, the Italian institutions decided to intervene only after scandals or striking events. Considering this, it is impossible to forget the words of Dolci, who in an interview stated that: ‘We always need to see a dead body before someone decides to act,’ or ‘those with more powder, shoot.’ With these words, Dolci wanted to highlight the fact that people in power always aim at reaching personal objectives, behaving like animals wearing blinkers (Dolci, 1988: 159). Therefore, even today, the main problem remains the involvement and responsibility of every individual against all forms of domination and oppression disguised as institutional communication—a responsibility that 182

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translates into the ability of everyone to become aware of the situation in order to create communication and peace. In one of his most renowned books, Inventare il futuro (Inventing the future), Dolci (1968: 160) notes that peace is not the synonym of cancellation or annihilation, but instead represents the involvement of everyone in everything. In order to support the ideas of Dolci, it is crucial to turn all schools in the world into communicative structures, destroying in this way the parasitic hypocrisy that normally disguises itself with impunity behind the label of democracy. Therefore, Dolci considers education as a tool to build a new society. Nevertheless, as Morgante notes, the path leading to the rebirth of a worthy society can take time, but progress must be made at a constant pace. As Dolci said, paraphrasing a Chinese saying, ‘if those who plant trees have to wait thirty years to see them bearing fruit, those who teach cannot see immediately the fruit of their educational work, because the process of education requires a much longer time, even 100 years.’ Therefore, it is crucial to plant the seeds that will make possible this leap forward and transform a system that conveys knowledge into a system that communicates (Morgante, 1992: 98). Considering what has been outlined in the previous paragraphs, it is clear that Danilo Dolci, thanks to his work and ideas, deserves the title of benefactor of humanity (Morgante, 1992: 81). Through the humble ideas and universal values of this man, the figure of Danilo Dolci continues to stir the civil consciousness of people by raising awareness and creating the will to be involved in the peaceful civil fight that he started. Besides, his example urges others to follow him on the path of honesty, dedication, and respect for others, with the aim of redeeming their dignity and freeing them from their precarious situation of persecuted, derelicts, and outcasts. Bibliography Barone, G., 2002, Costruire il cambiamento (Building change), Naples: Dante & Descartes Barone, G., 2004, La forza della nonviolenza. Bibliografia e profilo critico di Danilo Dolci (The power of non-violence. Bibliography and critical profile of Danilo Dolci), Naples: Libreria Dante & Descartes Chemello, A., 1988, La parole maieutica (The maieutic word), Florence: Vallecchi Debbaut, P., 1969, Per una definizione della pace (How to define peace), in Actes of the international seminar on ‘City-territory’, published by the Centre of Studies and Initiatives, Partinico Dolci, D., 1955, Banditi a Partinico (Bandits in Partinico), Bari: Laterza Dolci, D., 1956, Inchiesta a Palermo (Enquiry in Palermo), Turin: Einaudi Dolci, D., 1962, Conversazioni (Conversations), Turin: Einaudi Dolci, D., 1964, Verso un mondo nuovo (Towards a new world), Turin: Einaudi Dolci, D., 1968, Inventare il futuro (Inventing the future), Bari: Laterza Dolci, D., 1970, Il limone lunare (Lunar lemon), Bari: Laterza Dolci, D., 1973a, Chissà se i pesci piangono (Who knows if fish can cry), Turin: Einaudi 183

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Dolci, D., 1973b, Poema umano (Human poem), Turin: Einaudi Dolci, D., 1979, Creatura di creature (Creature of creatures), Milan: Feltrinelli Dolci, D., 1985, Palpitare di nessi (Beating bonds), Rome: Armando Dolci, D., 1988, Dal trasmettere al comunicare (From conveying to communicating), Turin: Sonda Dolci, D., 1996, La struttura maieutica e l’evolverci (Maieutic structure and evolution), Florence: La Nuova Italia Fontanelli, G., 1984, Danilo Dolci, Florence: La Nuova Italia Mangano, A., 1989, Problemi e prospettive della pedagogia sociale (Problems and perspectives of social pedagogy), Rome: Editore Bulzoni Mangano, A., 1992, Danilo Dolci educatore. Un nuovo modo di pensare e di essere nell’era atomica (The educator Danilo Dolci. A new way of thinking and being in the atomic era), San Domenico Fiesole: Edizioni Cultura della Pace Morgante, T.R., 1992, Maieutica e sviluppo planetario in Danilo Dolci (Maieutics and global development in Danilo Dolci), Manduria-Bari-Roma: Laicata Spagnoletti, G., 1977, Conversazioni con Danilo Dolci (Conversations with Danilo Dolci), Milan: Mondadori

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Telling to reclaim, not to sell: Resistance narratives and the marketing of justice Amrah Salomón J.

In my humble opinion, the problem with the dead is the task of surviving them. … One can name oneself their spokesperson. After all, they can’t talk, and it’s not their history anyway being told, they are just the justification for one’s own story. … And behind the hijacking of the dead is that incoherent, useless cult of historiography from above, the belief that the history that counts is the one that is found in a book, a thesis, a museum, a monument, and their current and future equivalents, that are nothing other than an infantile way to domesticate history from below. Because there are those who live at the cost of others’ death, and upon their deaths they construct theses, essays, writings, books, films, lyrics, songs, and other more or less stylized ways of justifying their own inaction … or their fruitless action. The saying, ‘you haven’t died,’ remains merely a slogan if nobody continues on the path the dead had walked. Because in our modest and non-academic point of view, what is important is the path, not the one who walks it. … When someone lives and dies in struggle, does their absence say ‘remember me, honor me, carry me’? Or does it tell us to ‘keep going,’ ‘don’t give up,’ ‘don’t give in,’ ‘don’t sell out’? (Marcos, 2013) Porque los responsables de este terrible delito que han querido borrar todo rastro de su forma de actuar criminal, sepan que ahí está la memoria de las madres, padres, hermanos, hijos, esposas, sobrinos, tíos y amigos para decirle al mundo entero que los desaparecidos no son solamente imágenes en papel, que estas fotografías son de personas que ocupaban un banco en un salón de clases, una cama y un lugar en la mesa en el hogar, que platicaban con amigos, que se reían, que bromeaban, que ayudaban a alguien, que peleaban contra la injusticia y nos hacen falta a todos. (La Casa de la Memoria Indómita, México D.F.)

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Bad ancestors and the uncomfortable dead Sometimes, your ancestors are real assholes. But they are your assholes. And no one can take that away from you. This is a lesson my elders have taught me well, as I sit at their feet and listen to bawdy stories of ancestors behaving badly. They make mistakes. They hurt one another and themselves. They suffer. In the stories of their lives there is sorrow, pain, insatiable hungers, stupidity, anger, violence, idiocy, bitterness, laughter, boredom, unrequited desires, survival skills, wrongheaded decisions, mediocrity and unmet dreams. It occurs to me sometimes that not everyone thinks about ancestors in this way … that perhaps this is what is distinct about my culture or my family. But as I stumbled stupidly through my twenties, guided by the stories of my grandfathers who never judged my mistakes openly but rather narrated their advice through raunchy tales of their own misdeeds, and the adventures and sorrows of generations past, I learned that the bad-ancestor stories are the best kind. They are the stories we learn from. The ones that make us stronger, the ones that remind us to be better lest this is what kind of stories we leave to be told about us. But they also remind us to take risks boldly, so at least we will have something to talk about when we get old, if we are lucky to make it that long. Along with bad ancestors, I would not say there are good ancestors, because this dichotomy doesn’t exist in my family lore. Not one of my ancestors was good. What I have instead of bad ancestors are simply more rebellious ancestors. People who did the right thing by doing what someone oppressive thought was the wrong thing to do at the time. Not good, but subversive, resistant, failing, struggling. This is the story of a great grandmother who refused to speak English, even if she knew it and even if it cost her relationships with her grand children. Because fuck colonialism. This is the story of my grandfather drafted against his will sneaking out of boot camp to see Billy Holiday sing in Harlem because fuck the army. Not good people, but folks who survived by saying fuck you to power. When I falter off my path of being the granddaughter of rebellious, overly passionate, bad-decision-making people, their stories are what bring me back. Because I owe them something. The dead are always thirsty. To honor them, we have to make an offering. And it can’t be just some kind of bullshit, my grandfather says. Or you’ll be getting the ceremony all wrong. In the intimacy of the kitchen table or evening fire, many of us have learned a wealth of practices, not always healthy or helpful, but there nonetheless, for dealing with the complexities of the past … a way to hold the challenges that issue from bearing witness and from noticing what is silenced and omitted. Even if sometimes what we learn from our loved ones and chosen family is how not to be. The uncomfortable dead do not lay at rest, they linger and haunt (Marcos and Taibo II, 2005; Gordon, 2008). They urge us to get on the path of struggle, to right the wrong of the past, even if, perhaps especially if, the issue we confront now was our own bad ancestors’ fault. PPerhaps more than longing for what is missing, this presence of the absence of the uncomfortable dead is a very loud, 186

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very disturbing demand. Our task, the living, is to continue to make the path of justice, not to make memories. This path we make through our own momentum can be a form of ceremony or a form of offering. Memory can function through the offering, but the sacrifice of offering itself is what the uncomfortable dead are asking for, why they make themselves known, why we refuse to forget. As Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos of the EZLN writes: I feel (and talking to other compas I know that I am not alone) that the accounting I have to give to our dead is in regard to what has been done, what still has to be done, and what we are doing to complete or fulfill what first motivated this struggle. Probably I am mistaken, and someone will tell me that the meaning of all struggle is to go down in history, in spoken or written history, because it is the example of the dead—and their administered biography—which motivates people to struggle, and not the conditions of injustice, of slavery (which is the real name for the lack of freedom), and of authoritarianism. (Marcos, 2013) We often assume, those of us involved in activism or collective struggle of some kind, that our work will automatically motivate people to struggle. We imaging that we are doing this work, (researching our movement past, interviewing other activists, making this report on the violence that plagues our people, creating this witty, catchy, sharp-as-a-tack messaging around our recent campaign, teaching our youth about the great icons of the struggle they can put on their T-shirts, organizing this protest to memorialize our radical history, etc.) because we feel that people will join us and we will win the battle if we make this history known. But this attitude, taken by many of us in whatever you want to call our current formations, unfortunately is not winning the battle. Those of us who do work in the streets, in the communities, the prisons, unions, hoods, reservations, non-profits, murals, music videos, sweatshops and fields like to think we are better than the academics. Evil, evil, bad-intentioned academics. They are the ones who kill our histories and herstories. They are the ones who exploit our peoples’ knowledges. They are the ones who conscript our memories to the page of a long and boring academic paper, killing our struggles forever through theories and claims on facts, evidence, and knowledges. But sometimes, it is also us. The activists. The organizers. The folks in the struggle who are making bad stories. Or who miss the whole point of the story, as my grandfather would say. Or who tried to put some kind of bullshit on the altar when all that poor little rebel ancestor wants is for you to get up off your ass and do something about this messed up world. As Subcomandante Marcos poetically states, the mere example of the dead really doesn’t do much, aside from perhaps serving as entertainment, fashion, or information. Examples can be interesting, they can perhaps make us think. But examples rarely bring anyone to action. This is a lesson many of us who work in resistance stories forget. For my grandfather to tell me a story about 187

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my great grandmothers resisting assimilation doesn’t do much at all, if he hadn’t impressed upon me that the whole point of the story is that it’s his roundabout way of demanding that I take up their action because I owe them something for being alive now, for surviving. And that he recognizes in me a capacity to also do something rebellious. This is perhaps the difference between stories that serve a pedagogical function, to teach us something, and those that speak to what the Zapatistas refer to as piegogia,1 that form of learning, resulting from action and experimentation, that gets us to move our feet first and theorize about it later after we’ve already tried a few things to work at the problem. This is what I learn from bad and rebellious ancestor stories, to move my feet. This is also what our radical historical work needs to do if it is to be of value to our dead, if it is to actually serve the struggle rather than the historians. Particularly if we find that our activism is stuck at the level of producing events that our communities consume like mere entertainment or selling out of larger demands and further marginalizing ourselves through campaign marketing that panders to the lowest denominator.

Research Justice or justifications? There are several different tendencies, academic and community based, that fall under the guise of Research Justice. Broadly, Research Justice, a term coined by the Data Center,2 is a response to the colonial violence that both academic and popular research has perpetuated against indigenous, colonized, and racialized peoples, as well as those with illness, disability, gender or sexual differences, or who in any way have been disempowered through the regimes of normalization, classification, definition, ownership, representation, and marginalization that research historically has been employed to create and bolster. Through this process, research becomes a colonizing method of claiming sovereignty and ownership over knowledges (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). Colonial research is a way of limiting and defining the world in forms that best suit the formations of power that enact the most violence against the oppressed and different (that is, different from the western, white, Christian, heteropatriarchal, able-bodied, cis-gender, capitalist norm). Research, in its traditional form, is the very process through which domination and violence are justified and carried out via producing knowledges that legitimize the accumulation of power through investigation. Increasingly, neoliberalism

1

2

This term, a deviation of the term ‘pedagogy’, which literally translates into foot-ology, I’ve heard numerous times in direct conversation with members of the Zapatista communities to jokingly describe their practice of learning within the movement. It follows in a line of metaphors used by the movement to describe a process of making the road by walking. See the Data Center’s website for more information on how they have developed this concept and continue to innovate work in this area: www.datacenter.org/what-we-do/research-justice/ 188

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has influenced this process toward an ever-growing socialization that knowledge should be individualized and privatized, fashioned into a commodity that one can own and lay personal claim to. This has shifted relationships to knowledge away from diverse forms of collectivity, memory, feeling, experience, sense, intuition and reciprocity, thus alienating the producers and carriers of knowledges away from their own stories in a quest to map and patent secrets, tools, traditions, relationships, histories, and even ways of knowing and relating to the world. In this process stories become objects and evidence to be archived and vetted for accuracy of facts, losing their collective, ceremonial, and piegogial meaning, along with any sense of poetry and interconnectedness we might feel between ourselves and the story or storyteller/storyholder. Additionally, colonial research as it adheres to Western universalism and white supremacist thought does violence to expansive and non-linear notions of and relationships to time, space, and the cosmos, severing the living from the past while advancing scientific disciplinary epistemologies that sever spiritual, erotic, bodily, and emotional ways of knowing away from the very definition of what constitutes legitimate knowledge (Lorde, 1984; Wilson, 2008). This makes the past, and our dead, uncomfortable to say the least. It creates too much distance between us and them, making us both, in a way, less real and less connected to reality. And it opens our own disconnected and awkward manifestations in this life to the possibility of hauntings as other forms of story and knowing continue to exist, and make apparition when conjured (Gordon, 2008). History and story-telling based on practices of Research Justice is a move toward that conjuring act of reconnecting us to the past in a meaningful way that can both address the need for ongoing resistance and provide tools towards healing from previous and ongoing forms of violence. It is not a linear process, but rather a radical futurism oriented practice that also engages and attends to the past and present in deep and transformative ways. It is also a radical rejection of the use of knowledges and stories in order to oppress, alienate, and commodify. Research Justice is, on the one hand, a deep recognition of the power imbedded in knowledge, the empowerment that derives from holding and enacting knowledge and the potential for research to accumulate power over subjects through extracting knowledge rather than using that knowledge to challenge injustices. While on the other hand, it is a criminal, fugitive act of survival (Moten and Harney, 2004) where we seek ways to exist, get by, and steal away towards freedom within the confines of the research paradigms that have been established for us by markets, academia, militaries, hospitals, missionaries, governments, empires, colonial do-gooders, and the various apparatuses of colonialism and domination that have shaped western approaches to knowledge and ways of knowing. Research Justice stakes out the under-commons of researching as a tool of resistance against being researched ‘from above’ in the manner of colonial research. In its best forms, Research Justice is a practice of questioning that centers the confrontation of injustices created by colonialism, oppression, and systems of violence, domination, and marginalization. Research Justice practices often involve developing critical historical analyses of key moments and power 189

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formations while also working to center marginalized narratives, story-telling practices, and lived experiences within the processes of developing knowledges that can further struggles for social change. The majority of Research Justice practices thus depend upon the participation of marginalized communities within the processes of knowledge production about their lives, histories, representations, and social conditions. Sometimes, however, work that is labeled Research Justice can be limited to the master’s tools and reproduce the very dynamics we turn toward research to resist in the first place. We must be careful with our stories. Sometimes they are all we have left. In cases such as this, research refusal becomes as important as justice-centered research methodologies (Simpson, 2007). Refusal, however is often left out of our collective toolkit when speaking of Research Justice, as if to do research mindfully and by and for the benefit of the oppressed, we must always give up our ghosts and allow ourselves to participate in research. This is not a good idea. Even with the best intentions, and even with the full participation of those impacted, research is not always the answer and, given its history and often violent context, it is never, ever, benign. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2014) argue: social science often works to collect stories of pain and humiliation in the lives of those being researched for commodification. However, these same stories of pain and humiliation are part of the collective wisdom that often informs the writings of researchers who attempt to position their intellectual work as decolonization. Indeed, to refute the crime, we may need to name it. How do we learn from and respect the wisdom and desires in the stories that we (over)hear, while refusing to portray/betray them to the spectacle of the settler colonial gaze? (Tuck and Yang, 2014) The problem with pain narratives is that, often, they capitulate our potential for power in favor of petitioning those who are hurting us to stop, or to be accountable for their violence. But begging is never a dignified position. Tuck and Yang argue that, when a research project or process runs the risk of either reproducing violence, reproducing us as objects of pain and humiliation for the voyeurism of the sadistic who can only see us as the violated object of their desire, or of reducing the oppressed to the disempowered positions of pleading and nagging those who dominate us for relief, that these are situations in which research should be refused, or at least that the most egregious aspect of the research project/process should be refused in favor of other aspects that can give us tools to resist from a stance beyond supplication, objectification, and violation. The means and ends of Research Justice, as they are one and the same, must be the survivance (Vizenor, 1999) and regeneration of our communities. This may mean shifting the focus of our stories away from proving injury and grievance, and toward building our own power and autonomy. It may also mean limiting audiences for our stories,

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keeping secrets, and making sure one has ‘passed the test,’ so to say, of gaining access to certain stories that could reveal vulnerable complexities. This is not, however, to argue for a culture of silence. While refusal is becoming more viable as an approach to navigating questions of justice and research, there is little dialogue about how the benefits of research refusal could be conflated with the silencing of survivors and testimonies, or how one could misuse arguments for refusal of colonial research in order to push issues that demand justice under the rug, into the closet, and further marginalize the most marginalized among us. Rather, what is needed is a conversation about the intersections of colonial research and the use of testimonies to break silence and impunity of violence so as we can develop methods to better use the arsenal of historical and experiential knowledge of suffering we have so as to avoid reducing these experiences of pain and violence into entertainment, fetishism, and wasted energy from useless attempts to provoke the perpetrators of violence to empathy. What I will focus on right now are a few dynamics that I think are common factors in how the use of stories and histories/herstories in social justice and movement work to reenforce colonial research paradigms, through reducing our stories to commodities and through homogenizing the past in ways that further harm the marginalized and reduce our abilities to hold historical complexities. One of the first lessons in storytelling/storyholding is that your intention must be clear. This means that we need to find methods to verify the question my elders often ask: “Are you sure you’re strong enough to handle what I’m going to tell you?”3

Just like Coca-Cola … Advertising, naming, surveilling, and the loss of story craft In social justice organizing there are numerous problems with how we use our stories, which I argue actually limit the power of our narratives and shift the focus of our organizing away from healing and building power in favor of either reinforcing the decision-making power of those who dominate us, creating harmful distances and limitations on our understanding of the past, or further disempowering the most marginalized within our own communities. But in this essay I will focus on an obvious one, and perhaps one of the most detrimental, which is the fact that many activists and social justice orientated organizations have succumbed to a market-based transactional understanding of the ways that storytelling and media work function in a political context. Many activists engaged in research that is narrative or story based center their works on developing outreach and visibility tools that utilize or attempt to influence mainstream media. We create press releases and stage dramatic public actions in order to gain media attention. We want our stories and our version of what happened and what needs to be done out there, circulating in popular discourse and dinner-

3

With an additional nod to Toni Cade Bambara’s experimental novel The Salt Eaters. 191

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table conversations. We have studied Gramsci, or someone influenced by him, in order to understand the formation of the hegemony of ideas that manufacture consent. We study the historical formations of our current conjunctures and crises in order to understand what is happening now, how it got that way, and how we can best create an opening or opportunity in this moment to challenge the ideas and interpretations that have gained popularity, the ideas that drive consent to the status quo, through presenting our own counter-narratives and counterinterpretations. We want our stories to be pedagogical, to teach a better version of what is common sense so that a better version of society can be demanded. At heart of this work is the goal of taking power, often state or capital power, so that socio-economic structures can be reformed. If gaining victory through gaining power isn’t the goal, then the goal is merely to influence those who already are in power to do our reformist bidding for us. Either way, the focus is on power in a top down formation, as domination, gaining hegemony, winning through popularity. In this sense, our stories and narratives serve as pedagogical tools in that they help to popularize a certain interpretation or version of things, which will hopefully then lead to some kind of social action. They teach people which version of things they should accept and which reforms they should want, they educate a desire for a certain product or result, but they often fail to develop critical capacities beyond that. The problem with these strategies is that they tend not to be piegogical—that is, they tend not to prepare folks to make a path by walking it. To teach acceptance of an idea or a version events so that a reform is desirable is not the same as to teach one to take up the task of creating their own power from below, so that whether those in power are with us or not no longer matters, as we are making our own realities in our day to day lives in a way that loosens their control over us and builds our capacity for autonomy or collective self-determination. This is not to say that there is actually a binary of reality where one can exist completely outside of systems of domination and oppression, but that making space to do so would be more advantageous than to merely reinforce the hierarchical construction of our current reality. This dilemma of whether we are reproducing a power-over situation, or making power from below and building the capacity for autonomy, is perhaps best explained by taking a look at our media work. The trouble with our media work is that the mainstream media are run by neoliberalism, and this means that our news and the mainstream work of journalism is to read and know the world through the logics of neoliberalism. To be newsworthy to mainstream media, something must be new, novel, a crisis of the present moment, which is detached from both the past and the future, although it can raise triggers of the traumas and hauntings of the past, and stimulate fears and aspirations for the future. So the mainstream media, like the logics of the consumer market in late capitalism, are in the business of whetting demand through manufacturing temporary crises, fads, hype, urgency, and conformist trends, and producing in us, the audience, the insatiable desire for the new. We have to keep up with today’s news, because the issue of the day will change tomorrow as a crisis pops up in yet another obscure 192

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location. And yet, similar to how candy companies approach the coming year through a series of holidays to which they will market season-specific packaging (a chocolate Santa or a chocolate bunny? It’s really the same product with a different shape and wrapper), the mainstream media deals in proven marketing cycles that rarely actually ever change. So there is a recipe for ratings and sales that media outlets have learned to follow, a little violence, elections, endless war, the weather, traffic, entertainment, something quaint and local, the standard issues, whatever the state says is important, something with a human-interest angle, something unexpected, and so on. Memory is not part of the recipe. Nor is complexity, nor the sense of relating that binds us into the social fabric of society or to the long past of our ancestors and the long future of our potential descendants. We are trained to be passive spectators/consumers of information, who often don’t know the broader historical and sociopolitical context of the violent events on the news. The sound bite and the crisis reign, and our opinions on what to do about the issues become contradictory and manipulatable. Unfortunately, activist media work is increasingly tailored to fit into the needs of the marketplace of mainstream media because our approach to narratives and ideas is also that of a marketplace. We turn our stories, the immense phenomena of sharing our words, feelings, and wisdom with another human being, thus constructing a relationship of meaning across the distance between our individual bodies, into memes and sound bites. We reduce our little story, (that is really the entirety of our ability to connect with another person and all of creation), into a product to be selected by the consumer in the shopping aisle of ideas. We want brand loyalty because we imagine that will bring us success, when everyone buys the version of truth we are selling, we will be able to get the changes we want. But is this really how social justice is won? Consider, for example, the 2012 Chilean film No, a fictitious drama loosely based on the television marketing campaign of 1988 plebiscite against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The film centers on a young, formerly exiled advertising executive who accepts the task of creating TV commercials for the campaign against the dictatorship, which represents a wide coalition of the opposition. The film focuses narrowly on the tension between the ‘no’ and ‘yes TV campaigns and avoids delving into other aspects of the plebiscite, such as the massive voter registration drive, grassroots organizing, and international solidarity organized by Chilean exile communities that went into developing a national and international movement powerful enough to counter the dictatorship. The film avoids the complex history of the dictatorship and paints a vague and confusing sense of who the opposition is, blurring the tensions and contradictions between the diverse tendencies. (When questioned as to whether the campaign is being funded by the communists, Christian democrats, or socialists, the main character, René Saavedra, simply responds, “No, it’s everybody.”) The film attempts to portray the struggle of the campaign strategy as a tension between the need to tell the pain of those who have been silenced by the dictatorship, exposing the hidden violence of it (torture, disappearances, exiles, 193

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censorship), and the need to present a television media product that will ‘win.’ Challenged with this moral and strategic task, the advertising team decides to rely on what they know of the media and how it is consumed, with the lead character arguing throughout the film that they need to sell democracy as a happy product that inspires hope, in order to counter the fear of voting, which is represented in the film as the fear of state repression and the fear of poverty. René, the central character, watches the montage of archival footage of the brutality of the dictatorship—manifestations against disappearances, the violent overthrow of Allende’s government by the U.S.-backed coup—and merely responds that it’s too heavy. He asks for something different, lighter, more happy. He says the truth of the past moves him but it doesn’t sell. It won’t win. The voters are too different, too individualistic and fragmented, their interests are too unique, national unity is too difficult to achieve. To which the coalition members initially respond that the objective is to open the eyes of those who don’t want to vote, expose the violence of the dictatorship and the fact that Chile’s so-called economic growth is constructed by keeping 40% of the population below the poverty line. Throughout the film the coalition members and advertising team argue over whether they want to win the campaign or whether they want to transform Chile in a profound way. One activist mentions, “we haven’t talked about what defines us as an opposition, regarding human rights, exile, injustice, arbitrary arrests, torture, disappearances, all the pain we’ve lived through all these years. We haven’t approached it at all. And it has to be included”. To which René responds, “it has no place in the campaign. It’s too dark. We can’t bombard people with more fear.” The message his character promotes is that in order to end injustice and violence, we have to find a product or a concept that’s pleasant, happy. Thus the work of the campaign in the film is to attempt to reclaim democracy, a term that the dictatorship had appropriated, by considering how to make it fun and happy, to sell the audience an abstraction of hope and optimism that the plebiscite could represent. The action of the film centers then on the struggle by René and his advertising team to gain social reform through selling the brand of No. The pain of the entire story of the Chilean dictatorship, how to respect it, be respectful with it, how to share it, becomes the challenge that the film presents as a losing cause. The tension between this pain that wants to be dealt with and the need to break through the fear that keeps voters from participating leads to the decision to sell the abstraction of hope and happiness instead of real, substantial political change. The fact that the campaign is based on a meaningless abstraction is represented through scenes of René, repeating the same tired sales pitch to everyone and every project he encounters in the film, whether he is charged with selling a commercial for a soft drink, a commercial for an idiotic novella, or a political campaign to overthrow the dictatorship: what you are going to see is in line with the current social context. We believe that the country is prepared for a communication of this nature. We must not forget that the citizens have raised their demands 194

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in regard to the truth in regard to what they like. Let’s be honest. Today, Chile is thinking of its future. The fact that the same sales pitch can be interchanged between media products illustrates how the logics of commercial advertising commit violence against the stories of those who resisted the dictatorship. Because René relies on his media advertising savvy to create a ‘happy product’ of the ‘no’ campaign, at times literally reusing stock footage from soda commercials, the antidictatorship struggle in the film becomes one more cola commercial in a late-night marketplace of bad TV and cheap advertisements. René’s ex-wife, a communist activist problematically represented in the film as a sexy but unkempt and unfit parent, functions as the ghostly trace of René’s earlier life and more conscientious politics that had lead toward his hidden back story as a former exile. She tries to explain to René what he has done, “your film is just a copy of the copy of the copy of the copy … I don’t know what country you are imagining.” The two characters, René and his ex-wife, express a tension in the film about what kind of representations and imaginaries are required in order to win the battle of media campaigns within a rigged system controlled by the elite. The ‘no’ campaign in the film is portrayed as a historical moment when the media consumer’s capacity of political engagement with stories and the past takes a decisive turn away from critical documentary realism in favor of simplistic and white-washed capitalist fantasy. Within the film we see a juxtaposition between revolutionary third cinema, exemplified through the clips from the three-part underground early 1970s documentary The battle of Chile, which begins with coverage of the electoral strategies used by Allende’s Popular Unity coalition and continues through to record the consolidation of the right-wing violence of the coup and the soda-pop commercial format of René’s ideal political campaign to rebrand democracy as a happy product one can simply buy or sell. It is not just the raw cinema verité of The battle of Chile— footage of a journalist filming his own assassination, bombs exploding, disturbing parades of neo-Nazi coup supporters—that is challenged, but the narrative style of the documentary: a didactic, ideologizing, moralistic bombardment meant to shock the viewer into action through presenting the failure of the Popular Unity government as the strategic failure of non-violence and electoral strategies. No, on the other hand, is positioned as the celebration of an alternative method of campaigning and storytelling, where the non-political masses are pulled into supporting a revolution through vapid and abstract appeals to their emotional aspirations—humor, beauty, pleasure, and so on … No is the fairytale happy ending, when the people gather during the credits to eat the oranges from the patio of La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace. Whereas The battle of Chile ends in death and the call to revolution. A major problem with the film No, despite the subtlety of its critique and satire regarding our strategic uses of media in the realm of social justice, is that this simplistic juxtaposition between the moralizing ideological style of third cinema and the flashy, pop culture, commercial style of the younger generation fails as a true juxtaposition because at their core, are 195

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similarly propagandistic. Both attempt to convince the viewer to do something through the limiting pedagogical method discussed earlier in this essay. Both approaches distort and maim story craft in favor of ‘winning.’ While it may be quite easy to agree with René’s assessments that the third cinema style is “a drag,” what many activists who do media work these days don’t realize is that so is conforming your stories to mainstream commercial logics. What No illustrates is not what happened during the plebiscite in Chile; rather what this fictional movie shows us is when people’s tastes have been so disciplined by the manipulations of a commercial market that they no longer can confront their own memory. The film creates a context through which the fictionalized ‘no’ campaign ultimately must decide to sell its soul to the devil in order to achieve victory. The subtle question posed by the film then is, was it worth it? And is it worth it to us in our own contexts of resistance? The media crafters of the dictatorship (the ‘yes’ campaign) explain early on in the film the story they are selling: “scare them with the past.” The ‘yes’ campaign represents safety, order, economic progress, modernization, fear of poverty and instability, fear of violence, and raw self-interest. As one of the characters explains, “you have a system in which anyone can be rich. Careful, not everyone. Anyone. You can’t lose when everyone is betting on being that anyone.” This government believes that this dynamic of fear, individual competition, and impossible hope will fracture and shut down resistance. The No campaign then decides to avoid the past in order to steal the monopoly on impossible hope that the dictatorship had attempted to manufacture. But when René shows the ‘no’ campaign concept to the opposition coalition, one of the members, Ricardo, responds in disgust that “this is like coca cola commercial.” Then Ricardo describes how his brother was disappeared, his friends beheaded, and in frustration bluntly asserts, “this is a campaign of silence.” This scene returns us to the tension between the choice to refuse to present stories of pain and damage that undermine our abilities to generate power and the dangerous silencing of pain that functions as a continuation of violence against survivors. Caught in this difficult tension, Ricardo voices his desire to speak his truth. But ultimately, René and his vision of a happy product win the debate within the campaign and Ricardo’s position in favor of dealing with the pain of the past is in fact silenced. At the end of the film the ‘no’ campaign wins. But the pain of the past hasn’t been dealt with and René seems lost and unmoved through the celebrations. Pinochet is rejected, but the threat of the police state and the entire social order that upheld the dictatorship lingers. While everyone celebrates in the campaign headquarters, René is silent and withdrawn in a corner of the room. He leaves the party with an inscrutable expression, blank and pensive. His work with the campaign wasn’t successful in repairing his relationship with his ex-wife. The film ends with a return to the opening scenes: René skateboarding to work and then an almost exact replica of the first sales pitch meeting in the film. René and Lucho (his threatening boss who had worked on the ‘yes’ campaign) go back to being partners. It is business as usual; they use the same sales pitches as before, only now with Lucho promoting their 196

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firm based on René’s success with the ‘no’ campaign. It is unclear whether the objectives of the opposition have been won … whether the profound changes will arrive, whether the pain of the past will be brought to justice. During the credits, there is footage of the transition of power, and the cast and members of the original ‘no’ campaign eat the oranges from La Moneda’s gardens. But the circular ending suggests that not much aside from a change in presidents has occurred. Democracy remains an elusive abstraction. Taking state power changes nothing, the private orange trees are not removed nor opened to the world, their fruits are merely digested by a different group of people on the inside.

Story craft: You, me, and the ancestors we be A lot of new activist media projects describe themselves as utilizing story-based strategies and narrative approaches to honor alternative histories, to counter oppression, and create win-able situations for activist campaigns and struggles. However, what most of these projects really do is not actually Research Justice— it is commercial branding. They create media packages where experiences and desires of resistance are cheapened, flattened, made accessible and legible to power, domination, and a domesticated, desensitized mainstream. These commercial campaign approaches might seem useful, they might seem like a way to get our stories out there, they might even include us in fun, participatory, and selfempowering ways. But Research Justice is not about creating narratives disciplined to fit into the logics of capitalism through framing and savvy propaganda. Research Justice is wanting more than just the dictator’s oranges. Research Justice is using our stories as a ceremony to make an offering to our dead, to make sure their death results in a rebirth of fertile material, to tell stories about the dead and not dead stories, to walk in the path of desire and resistance, to bear witness instead of create silence. Research Justice historiography is not the vapid celebration of movement icons. It also isn’t staging the same action or march or protest we had last year. The struggle is not a funeral procession for the movement where we recall our history in order to bury it under a monument. Research Justice is making history now through rebellious action. We need to learn how to be bad ancestors and uncomfortable dead for our own future generations of rebelliousness. It is not justice to sell our stories for short-term and inconsequential changes. Stories that build narratives of our deficiency and dependence through capitulating to those in power to take pity on us and change their evil ways are not justice centered. Collecting data by and about communities in struggle is not Research Justice in and of itself. To be justice centered, stories must create horizontal power and autonomy among marginalized communities, they must expand our capacities for self-determination. This is one way of making ceremony with our stories. Just as commercials reduce the world to products to be bought and sold, research reduces the world into a text to decipher, a map to navigate, or a problem to solve. What Research Justice practitioners need to focus on is developing other ways of relating 197

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to the world and it’s challenges that we can create with our stories in order to build autonomy. What if we could relearn or honor ways of knowing that looked at the world like a plant, a child, a bad ancestor, a fickle rain cloud instead of a product to sell or a problem to classify? Can we re-learn story-craft ceremonies such as reciprocity, bearing witness, responsibility, and making offering? Can we create alternative systems of accountability with our stories that reweave the social fabric of our injured and fragmented communities? The past is not death, it is transformation. It is how we came to be. Justice-centered research of the past can be created as community building towards autonomy. We can create knowledges more collectively. Stories are the way we make sense of our lives and the complex experience of living. We tell stories to teach lessons, figure things out, connect to other people, heal, love, make joy and pleasure, find ourselves, and piece our worlds together. Sharing stories is a ceremony that recreates our aliveness in relation to places and others. Research Justice story craft demands that we develop strategies to use stories well, as tools to create the world we want and need, rather than as patterns of internalization that repeat the violence and injustices we have endured. My stories begin as my grandfathers’ stories do … with a mountain, a river, an island, or the sea that must be named and storied before we can ever get to the ancestors and the complicated lives of people. This story is as expansive as desire and it cannot fit in to a 30-second sound bite. It will not be televised. But it may bring you closer to me. And it may inspire us both to behave badly, indeed, even rebelliously. References Gordon, A.V., 2008, Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination, MN: University of Minnesota Press Lorde, A., 1984, Sister outsider, Berkeley, CA: The Crossing Press Marcos, S.C.I. and Taibo II, P.I., 2005, The uncomfortable dead (What’s missing is missing), NY: Akashic Books Marcos, S.C.I., 2013, Rewind 2: On death and other alibis, http://enlacezapatista. ezln.org.mx/2013/12/26/rewind-2-on-death-and-other-alibis/ Simpson, A. (2007). On ethnographic refusal: Indigeneity, “voice,” and colonial citizenship, Junctures, 9, 67–80 Tuhiwai Smith, L., 1999, Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples, London/Dunedin: Zed Books/University of Otago Press Wilson, S., 2008, Research is ceremony, Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing Vizenor, G., 1999, Manifest manners: Narratives on postindian survivance, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press

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Decolonizing knowledge: Toward a critical Research Justice praxis in the urban sphere1 Michelle Fine Transcription by Andrew Millspaugh Hello everyone! This is an awesome space. I’m not used to speaking in churches; much less churches that say ‘Freedom’ and ‘Equality’ and ‘Decolonizing Knowledge,’ and ‘Justice and Truth’. And I’m taken by not only the ancestors whom we’ve honored, but the struggles on whose shoulders we stand; the struggles that have probably been voiced in this very church. When I think of Oakland, I think of a community that has long been in struggle. A community that has fought back with power, strength, and resilience. I know that young people last year fought against the closing of schools. Were some of you involved in that? Yeah? And I know that this has been a community where educators, and activists, and young people have been fighting against the School to Prison Pipeline. So I am … I am really honored to be standing on the grounds that you have all carved for us. I am thrilled to be here with DataCenter to celebrate your 35th anniversary. I feel like I have moved into a sauna with Linda Tuhiwai Smith. We spent three days on the East Coast and now we have come to the West Coast. And working with her I’ve been just graced to be thinking about intellectual, spiritual, political, and ethical questions for Research Justice. So thank you for inviting me. And thank you Rachel, and Jill, and I’m going to leave people out … and Andrew, and Miho, and all of those people who wrote emails. Thank you! And now my time begins. To position myself, I am a faculty member at CUNY (City University of New York). I taught at the University of Pennsylvania for a long time before that. I’ve been an activist for mmm … a long time, decades and decades. The Public Science Project, which is at CUNY, is a coalition of educators, youth, and activists. Students in and out of schools, prisoners in, and formerly in prison. We

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work with lawyers. We work with public health officials. We work with policy makers. We work with organizers. And our task is to engage participatory work by communities with the recognition that people who have paid the highest price for injustice carry the most intimate knowledge about how to design research about that injustice. We stand to resist what I think of as the ‘Gated Community of Policy Researchers’ who are making decisions for young people, for educators, for homeless people, for incarcerated people, for immigrants, for working people. Our practice of Research Justice has a number of critical elements. One is that we believe expertise is widely distributed even if legitimacy is not. More particular, we believe that people who know in their bellies the pain, the resilience, and the strength of what it takes to live in injustice deserve the right to shape the research questions about and for their communities. Second, we are very interested in research that studies and exposes what we call Circuits of Dispossession and Resistance. That is when you are dispossessed from your high school by a high-stakes test. That has consequences not just for your education and your economic well-being. That has consequences for your housing, for your health, for your involvement in criminal justice; for the likelihood that you can stay in your home … That you will stay with your family. So we’re interested in documenting these circuits across sectors. We’re also interested in documenting the circuits that connect wealthy communities to poor communities. That is when wealthy communities get a better school; that money is coming out of poor communities! And those poor communities are not just watching their school close, but they are getting more cuts. And so we’re trying to understand the circuits that distribute opportunities and resources, but also solidarities. And I’ll return to that. The third is that we’re interested in research that speaks back to social movements. We’re interested in research that changes theory, that changes policy. But, much more profoundly, we are committed to research that feeds social movements. Largely, we’ve been working education justice and criminal justice—most recently, on ‘stop and frisk’ that, if you give me time, I’ll talk about. I am most seriously concerned about the ways in which pseudoscience is used to deploy a systematic dispossession of young people from their schools. The most particular example being high-stakes testing, which is done in places like New York. It’s not only stratifying young people by race, ethnicity, class, and educational opportunity; but then it’s evaluating their teachers, and then those same tests are being used to close their schools, a racial realignment like we haven’t seen in many decades. So we are interested in ‘occupying’ research. We are interested in research not only for its bloody exploitive history of what Thomas Teo would call ‘Epistemological Violence,’ but we are interested in research in the way Ignacio Martin Baro, the El Salvadorian Jesuit priest who was killed in El Salvador … He saw research as a tool of liberation. He saw research as an opportunity to expose the collective lies that were being told about communities. We see research as an opportunity not just to expose the collective lie but, in the language of Maxine Green, ‘to release the imagination,’ because we must use the research to go beyond critique 200

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and to imagine what could be. One of the saddest moments of this neoliberal moment is that people can’t imagine what a good school looks like. They can’t imagine what a safe community looks like. They can’t imagine what participatory governance looks like, and that too is our work! We are interested in research, in the language of Arundhati Roy, ‘that tells a different story than the one we are being brainwashed to believe.’ And we are interested in research, in the language of Gloria Anzaldua, ‘that builds nos otras,’ us others. These are indeed treacherous times in the public. We are haunted by swelling inequality gaps. Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, reminds us that the wealthiest 1% own at least 25% of privately held wealth. And Michelle Alexander in her book, The new Jim Crow, tells us that there are more black men in prison than were enslaved in 1850. While the Chronicle of Higher Ed continues to report that financial aid will not be available to poorer working-class students; and maybe a small group of dreamers will be lucky. But we are not satisfied with ‘Talented Tenth’ solutions even as we celebrate minor victories. British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett tell us that these gaps … Oh that’s really silly, we’re halfway. Okay. These gaps between wealthy and poor … Even more than how many people live in poverty, the gap between wealthy and poor is what predicts … um … poor health, poor education, crime … lack of safety, lack of housing. So the equality gap … and when you stack up countries you’ll find the United States way at the top of equality gaps. I’m gonna skip … I’m not even going to give time to the Koch Brothers, and the [word inaudible] foundation, and Walton, and Gates … There was a whole paragraph about them but we’re not doing it! At the dawn of the 1900s, W.E.B. Du Bois published Crisis, a magazine committed to chronicling the ongoing exploitation of the African-American community. He was a brilliant man. He understood that our country would not respond to what he called the ‘ongoing moans of the darker race’ until there was a profit to be made. We are at that moment. If he and Naomi Klein, who wrote Disaster capitalism, had a baby it would be the neoliberal movement. When we find the perverse braiding of poor people’s pain with corporate profit, which has become an American pastime inscribed in federal, state, and local policy. I wanna argue tonight that declarations of crisis have become an ideological foreplay to privatization, pitting us one against the others. In Detroit a few years ago, Shanendra Jones, a parent organizer demanded at a public forum that educators should be sentenced to prison in the event that they do not increase students’ test scores. I worry about this. I worry that we have been led to believe that test scores tell us whether or not our schools are doing well; and I worry that we have been led to believe that prison is the only way to hold people accountable. And I worry that we are losing a sense of solidarity. I’m gonna give you one example of solidarity that I kind of love and then three projects, and then that women’s gonna yell at me. So … Sylvia Kramer, she’s an evolutionary biologist, she studies the social life of ants. And what she finds … you know how those ants make those amazing colonies? 201

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And so what she finds is that if you inject one ant with smallpox … What do we do as humans when one person is ill or without housing or commits a crime? We banish them, we put them away; we send them far away. So um when she injects one ant with smallpox the entire colony licks that ant clean. And two things happen. One is that ant gets better. And the second is the collective immunity of the entire colony rises. That’s Research Justice! So I’m going to give you three examples, really quick ones … So at the Public Science Project we are really blessed to have amazing colleagues, activists, community organizers, and progressive policy makers who turn to us and with us, and say, “There’s a policy coming up and we need to know how the people who are living in these conditions, how they think about ‘stop and frisk.’” How they think about ‘policing with dignity,’ how they think about highstakes testing … How undocumented immigrant women … how they contend with domestic violence … So I’m going to give you three projects and we will go through the details later. In 1994, President Bill Clinton took Pell Grants out of prisons with the Violent Crime Act. And then, very very quickly, a group of women I was working with, including Kathy Boudin, Iris Bowen, Judith Clark, Donna Hylton, Migdalia Martinez, Missy, Rosemarie Roberts, Pam Smart, Maria Torre, Debora Upegui—particularly the women from Bedford—decided that college had to return to the prison. It was a maximum-security prison for women. They mobilized the community to bring college back. They asked us to document the impact of college. We said we would do it if we could do a participatory research project. So we created a research camp for a year and trained a number of women in prison to collect data with us. So we were a research team of eight of us from inside prison, and seven of us from outside prison documenting the impact of college on the women, their children, their post-release outcomes, and their activities … their contributions to society afterwards. We produced a report called Changing minds, which is available online at the Public Science Project. And it was a remarkable experience of working with a group of women inside prison who understood obviously a ton more than I did about prison, but also the passion and possibilities of college in prison. And when we interviewed their children and said, “What’s it like to have mother in college in prison?” The kids would say, “She’s such a pain now! All she wants to talk about is homework.” Or, “Now I tell my friends my mom’s upstate, she’s in college.” And when we interviewed the correction officers many of them loved, and many more of them hated, the program. They said … some of them said, “Well I really hated this program. I can’t afford college for myself or my kids and yet they’re getting it? But I know that at night the women are reading and not fighting. And I know they’re not coming back.” And so with that knowledge we then … two minutes … offered a set of courses where the correction officers could also take classes. And, at the end of that year, the women in prison who were researchers said we’ve gotta have a benefit for the children of women in prison, the children of murder victims, and the children of correction officers; because they understood that solidarity was at the core of this research project. 202

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Fast forward to the third research project, most recently we’ve been involved in the ‘stop and frisk’ catastrophe in New York City. We’ve been doing a systematic study right around … anybody know Yankee Stadium? Right around Yankee Stadium is one of the toughest police precincts in the city. Toughest, that is the most ‘stop and frisk,’ the most physical, the most handling, the most racial assaults on young people, the most arrests. And the one with the most innocent arrests, 90% of ‘stop and frisks’ are innocent arrests. Maria Torre and Brett Stoudt (went to the bronx)… They went up into the community and there was a huge outcry about ‘stop and frisk.’ Collaborating with community members and lawyers, they designed a project. We put together a research group of six young people; two older women who are scared of the police, but also scared of the young people, a bodega owner, a former correction officer … That’s the research team. They collected the data from 3,000 people in the community for the Justice Project about their interactions with the police. About four months ago, on a chilly fall night, maybe six months ago, we got the Illuminator, which is a van funded by Ben & Jerry’s in the middle of the Yankee Stadium community projecting data up on the side of an apartment building. And the youth researchers read the data. You can go online and watch the video. It was, “Dear NYPD …” like in that Robin and Batman kind of image. And there were like Dominican drummers and the community was sitting around us. “We surveyed 1,250 people. We learned last year that you made 3,702 stops in our community; 90% of these stops were innocent. We learned 42% of our young people were called racial names by you. Please don’t do that, these are our babies. Please don’t stop us when we are on the street, we live here! And we learned that you got eight guns for those 3,702 stops, and last week our local church had a gun buyback and in an hour they got 85.” It’s been an amazing project! I have some leaflets because we’ve now compared ‘stop and frisk’ in that district, district 44, and in the East Village. Anybody know who lives in the East Village? NYU students, all right, so there are very few ‘stop and frisks’ in that community. But there’s much more drugs found when they stop people, much more drunk behavior, many fewer innocent stops, much less frisking, much less throwing people on the ground, much less racial assault, much less young people … In the Bronx and throughout New York City, young people of color are growing up policed. So we are now bringing young people from the Bronx together with young people from Brooklyn, together with young hopefully from Oakland to build a kind of ‘cross-site solidarity’ using research that documents both the circuits of dispossession, but also the powerful circuits of resistance. Thank you!

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Decolonizing knowledge: Toward a critical indigenous Research Justice praxis1 Linda Tuhiwai Smith Transcription by Andrew Millspaugh Kia ora. Greetings in my own language. Let me acknowledge the elder who evoked at this event the ancestors that once walked this land; who had a relationship with this land. And who are still in this land. Thank you also to DataCenter and the funders of this event for inviting me here. I am also attending the American Education Research Association meeting, but tonight I would much rather be here with you. And thank you to all of those who organized this event. It’s a great honor for me to share a platform with Michelle Fine. I first met her 15 years ago, invited her to New Zealand, and she has been such an inspiration. To know that other people in the world think crazy things like I do has really been important. Let me position myself as well. I’m from New Zealand, that’s connected to California through the Pacific Ocean. My ancestors traveled that ocean over hundreds of years and eventually settled in New Zealand. These ancestors who had navigation knowledge beyond what our colonizers told us traveled the largest waterway in the world. It is our land as well as our waterway, and I acknowledge the Pacific Ocean here in this gathering as well. My work and what I write about has come out of my context; it has come out of New Zealand. It has come out of a story of my ancestors, Māori my tribal traditions, and comes out of my life. It comes out of a story of British imperialism; which also came out of European imperialism … Which also came out of the Enlightenment. I studied the Enlightenment as a history student. I had to … because I wasn’t taught my own history at the university. But I became very good on the Enlightenment story. I came to understand the interesting marriage of power, economic wealth, spiritual and moral superiority, and the oppression of millions of peoples in my part of the world; and in your part of the world. I don’t want to pretend that I have written anything other than what I have written about

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my experience and the experience of my people. But I thank all of you who have seen something in that story, something that resonates with your stories and with what you are interested in. If you ask me what my current research project is, or what my research program is, I think that I’ve come to the conclusion that I research, research. Now I could not have told you that 15 years ago. But I think now that I can tell you that I have really researched the institution we know as ‘research’,’ the institution that we know as ‘academic knowledge,’ the institution that we know as the ‘nexus of knowledge, research, and power.’ That is what I have thought about, not only over the past 15 years, but probably over the last 40 years as an educator as well. In the 1960s, I did actually attend secondary school in Illinois, and I was here in the U.S. when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Like many of my indigenous brothers and sisters, I was profoundly influenced … first by the civil rights movement, and then by the American Indian movement, and then by the feminist movement, and then by the gay liberation movement. And when I attended the university in the early 1970s, all those movements were active on campus. And, believe it or not, we did sit together. We did eat together and plot together. But as indigenous activists, we thought our story was somewhat special. We thought it was special because it was buried deep in our land. And that it was as much a part of who we were as a generation as it was about who our ancestors were, and about who our land was. And we thought that specialness and our radical politics gave us a different kind of voice … A powerful voice, a voice that had an alternative worldview and an alternative set of origin stories, alternative genealogies, an alternative language for talking about that. And we thought that was this amazing resource, it made us proud. It made us feel that … you could take away everything, but you couldn’t take away us. That we were intricately embedded in our land, and that was a very powerful voice. So I guess one of the critical questions that we have been asked to address tonight is how do you use concepts of Research Justice to create change in our world. And particularly in the world of public policy … And when I first saw this question I thought, ‘I have no idea!’ I have been trying to do that for the past 25 years and I am just befuddled! We’ve tried, we’ve thought about it. We’ve put out great research, you might have all the evidence you like. But in the powerful world of public policy you are also impacted by politics, by power, and by the common sense of society. So when I unpack that question a bit more, I think much of what we do in research and the kinds of research that I do has to be more than just documenting ‘the truth,’ or ‘our story,’ or ‘our truth.’ That’s one part of it. Part of it is about mobilizing others who believe that truth to be truthful. It is about mobilizing knowledge resources. It’s about mobilizing opinion, and experience, and leadership in the community. It’s about mobilizing language and discourse. It’s about having community leaders, it doesn’t matter whether they have read the research or not … having them stand up and support the researchers; having them stand up and support the activists. It’s about coming together despite huge 206

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differences in our community; about knowing technically when to sing like a wonderful choir, multiple voices but in harmony. Even though afterwards we might go out of the room and our disharmony might come through. So bridging the gap between Research Justice and public policy, I think, is a constant struggle. And it is something that researchers on our own cannot do. The researchers are one part. And in fact that researcher can be very inadequate in the communication of their research. Michelle is probably an example of someone who can communicate in a powerful way the power of research. But so many good researchers are not the best communicators, with great respect to those of you in the room. We think writing in our academic journals is communication enough! Or we think having our students write it for us is even better! So to speak up to the power of public policy takes a number of beyond-research strategies. It is not enough to have the evidence when those in power select which evidence matters. You can have 10 truths but if those in power understand only one truth, then even if you are into numbers, which I am not, 10 seems quite big, but if you’re up against a group who only sees one truth and only one version of that truth, then 10 is insufficient. And that sort of inequality in power relations or relations of power is an ongoing challenge. I think in my context, you know someone has asked, “Well how do you decolonize knowledge; what do you do?” I always find that a difficult question and, well, … First, in order to decolonize knowledge one has to have some understandings of knowledge … what it means to know, what it means to be known, what it means to come to know, what it means to understand what is known. How do those things, how do those ideas relate, then, to what does it mean to know and what does it mean to be? How is what we are, who we are, defined by what we know; and who tells us that? So, for me, growing up as an indigenous person, what we were told was that we didn’t count, we didn’t matter. We had no knowledge. Our ancestors were dumb. They sailed across the Pacific by accident. That’s what we were told. It’s really hard to get to New Zealand by accident, especially a group of men and women sailing by accident. Because if you know the Pacific, you don’t go out fishing as men and women together on a canoe; one gender does that job. So to wash up by accident in New Zealand without an appreciation of how to cross the Pacific, it was one of those kind of moments when you think, “Well that just cannot possibly be true!” And I think sometimes those insights tell you then that the knowledge that is in the common sense of the world, the knowledge that is in textbooks, the knowledge that is passed down in classrooms does a number of things. It tells particular versions of what particular groups of people want to tell. It invisibilizes others’ stories. It turns some people into heroes and heroines and discoverers who weren’t actually any of those things. It tells downright lies. It reshapes versions of stories. It obliterates peoples. It takes away from other peoples’ version of what might have happened. When you begin to understand that and you start to read; and you start to examine the curriculum in particular, then you are in the process of decolonizing knowledge. But it doesn’t just stop 207

Research Justice

with the official curriculum. It’s very much about what’s out in society: the myths about Native Americans, the myths about Pacific peoples, the myths about indigenous peoples worldwide. And the powerful use of discourse, the use of words like ‘savage,’ and ‘barbaric,’ and ‘illiterate,’ and the connection of those words to a particular sets of behavior; and, therefore, the fact that they need to be colonized, they need to be tamed, they need to be civilized, and they need to be Christianized. So just in summary, before we move on to the next part of this talk, one of these questions was how do we use research to transform. How do we use indigenous community and knowledge. And I really start from a simple base: every one of you has knowledge. Every member of a community knows something special. Every indigenous person has knowledge. That knowledge is important. It is important for you to believe that you have knowledge. It is important to believe that your knowledge is important and unique. It is important to value that you know, to understand what it means to know something. And then it is important to share what you know. Sometimes we tend to think what we know is so special that it’s sacred; perhaps it is. But sometimes its sacredness comes from putting the pieces of knowledge together collectively; that what makes that knowledge sacred is not that a few people know it, but that it is known by many. That’s where I would start. For a community to believe that what it knows about itself is unique, and is a story that needs to be told. But that it is a story that only they can tell. I think if a community believes that, then the next steps in terms of documenting, or the power of community knowledge, the power of indigenous knowledge, it actually becomes a really exciting project. And I’ve seen lots of examples where people go, “I know something, I know something! Get out of the way, let me tell my story!” It becomes its own momentum. But it is so important to believe that you know. That’s the first thing in many of the communities that I’ve worked with. You know something, value it. Believe that you know it. Think about what you know … go home one night and go, “wow, I know something really special! That’s fantastic! Let’s have a glass of wine over it! I’m going to tell my grandchildren … I know, I’m a knowing person. I know something about my experience, my world; and no one else knows that.” So that to me is the basis for building a picture of indigenous community knowledge. How does indigenous knowledge become data then? I think that’s the easy bit. The easy bit is how you label the data. You know, and often that’s the bit that’s most alien and strange to people. They want to tell their stories, and actually their process of storytelling is worth spending time on. It’s worth celebrating. It’s worth a public … um … well you used the word ceremony Andrew, but having those stories told publicly is worth an audience. Because that’s the other thing with telling a story and believing you know something, is to have others value your story … is to have an audience for that story. And a community audience is the best accountability you can have. All right? Because my communities, boy do they know bullshit when they hear it. Boy do they know when genealogies don’t connect; do they know when 208

Decolonizing knowledge: toward a critical indigenous Research Justice praxis

family histories have some significant gaps in them. All right? So communities are also the best accountability that keeps the knowledge robust and rigorous. Communities keep it coherent, communities keep it connected. So it’s not a fanciful story, it’s a layered story of shared knowledge.

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Index

Index

A abuse, and incarceration 86 academics from communities of color 3–4 dealing with oppression 106 Indigenous Peoples 3–4 responsibilities and obligations 57 understanding own position 2 access to digital technology 146–7 accessibility of information 106 accountability 131, 208–9 action research 125 activism archives as 52 formerly incarcerated women 88–9 self-image 187 activist media 193–7 addiction 86, 89–90 affective economies 99 ageism 143, 146 agenda setting 120–3 agents of change, college students 63, 77–9 Ahmed, S. 99 Alasia, Franco 176–7 Alexander, M. 83, 89, 201 All Of Us Or None 89 Antimafia Commission 176–7 ants 201–2 Anzaldúa, G. 140, 143–4 archives 43, 46, 50–4, 145–6 authenticity, contested 60 authoritarianism, effects of 21 authority, of knowledge 123–4 autonomy, of students 20 awareness building 171–2, 178, 180

B bad ancestors 186–8 Badillo, Joe 33 Ban the Box campaign 89 Baro, Ignacio Martin 200 Barone, G. 173, 174, 175, 176, 181 barriers, breaking down 128 Belice valley earthquake 177–8

beyond-research strategies 207 birthing 11 birthing justice 66–7 becoming co-researchers 128–30 choosing research method 124–5 context and overview 117 dissemination and use of research 125 importance of experiences 126 knowledge sharing 122–3, 136 medico-social context 118–20 participants 127 personal change 131–5, 136 personal experiences 121–2 pregnancy and neonatal loss 127 race and ethnicity 122 research agenda 120–3 researchers 117–18 summary and conclusions 135–6 value and visibility of knowledge 123–7 see also Black Women’s Birthing Justice (BWBJ) group; reproductive justice Black Women’s Birthing Justice (BWBJ) group 67 beyond research 132–3 demands on members 133–5 mission statement 123 multiple roles of members 136 visions for 123 see also birthing justice Blauner, R. 35 blogging, as bridging 146 book approach taken 5–6, 7–8 structure and outline 1–4, 5, 9–12, 64–8, 151–5 themes 12, 64 border militarization 14 branding 197 bridging 67, 140 blogging as 146 collective spirit 147 conceptualization 143–4 as methodology 142–7 toward new urban commons 148 buildings, preservation status 142

211

Research Justice Burton, S. 84, 88, 89–90 busing 18

C capitalism 15–16 caring labor, and gender 134–5 Carter, K. 87–8 Castro, Julián 140 Centre of Studies and Initiatives, Partinico 176 change creation of 206 individual responsibility 182–3 Changing minds report 202 childbirth 121–2, 126–7 children effects of parental incarceration 82–3, 86–7 pregnancy and neonatal loss 127 Churchill, Ward 22 Circuits of Dispossession and Resistance 154, 200 civil law suits 161–4, 167 civil liberties 14, 21–2 civil rights 15 civil society, relations of exploitation and domination 15 Clarke, L. 95 class inequality, and racism 15–18 clientelism 178, 179 co-researcher relationships 2–3, 9–10, 33–5, 36–7, 38 co-researchers, becoming 128–30 collaborative writing, as mode of inqueery 44 Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness (CCRR) 1, 7, 64, 152 collective communities 155 collective memory 124 Collective of Immigrant Resilience through Community Led Empowerment (CIRCLE) Project 112, 116 collective research 63–4, 65–6 college in prisons 202 college students, as agents of change 63, 77–9 see also students colonial research 188–9 colonialism, gentrification as 141 colorblindness 145 comfort zones 38–9 commercial branding 197 communication 207 communities of color, in academia 3–4 community audiences, and accountability 208–9 Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) 120–1 community leaders, role of 206 community mobilization 63 and criminal justice transformation 64 during disasters 65, 96

overview 63–8 Southern Hyogo prefecture earthquake, 1995 100–2 Trappeto 174–5 community radio 101 community self-analysis 174, 180 compensation, for research participants 36–7 connections and roles 57 connections, wealth and poverty 200–1 consent, medical research 120 consultation, urban renewal 141 ‘Corazones del West Side’ 140, 142–3 access to digital technology 146–7 archive creation 145–6 objective 144 corruption, Sicily 177–8 Criminal Justice (CCJ 4939) Special Topics: Qualitative Field Research on Wrongful Convictions 77–9 criminal justice, transformation 64 crisis of power 60 critical agency, acts of 44 critical education, for democratic schooling 20–1 critical pedagogy 9, 18–19 see also pedagogy of dissent cross-site solidarity networks 151 Crotzer, Alan 10, 63, 69–72 telephone interview 72–6 see also wrongful convictions cultural capital 49–50, 66 cultural disruption, Indigenous Peoples 58 cultural memories 153 culture of fear 21 culture of peace 171 culture of terror 18–19 curiosity, importance of 23

D DataCenter: Research for Justice (DCRJ) 5 Debbaut, P. 171 ‘Decade of Downtown’ 140 declarations of crisis 201 decolonization of knowledge 155, 199–203, 205–9 ‘Decolonizing knowledge: Toward a critical research justice praxis’ 12, 199–203, 205–9 deficit pathology model 2 deindustrialization 90 democracy need for dissent 23 non-violent reform 172 prerequisites 181 democratic participation, education for 19 democratic schooling 15, 20–1 democratization, of research 106 demystification 128 dialogue, value of 182

212

Index Diaz, D. 141 digital divide 11, 67 access to digital technology 146–7 archive creation 145–6 assumptions 144–5 bridging as methodology 142–7 bridging toward new urban commons 148 context and overview 139–40 researcher positioning 143 socio-political context of study 140–2 technology and intergenerational organizing 142–7 digital technology 142–7 Digitizing race (Nakamura) 145 direct participatory research 11 disaster justice 64–5 case studies 99–105 community mobilization 99–102 context and overview 95–6 definition 96 Great Eastern Japan earthquake, 2011 102–5 non-conventional research 104–5 proposal for 105–7 and Research Justice 106 scope 106–7 Southern Hyogo prefecture earthquake, 1995 99–102 disaster nationalism 65, 96–9 Great Eastern Japan earthquake, 2011 102 Great Kanto Earthquake 97 Hiroshima 98 Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park 98 Nagasaki 98 disasters categorization 95 effects of structural inequality 105–6 preparation for 106 responding to 105–6 and social inequality 95–6 discrimination, prisoners and former prisoners 89 disempowerment, during childbirth 122 dissent 21–5 documents, destruction of 85 Dodson, Lisa 28 doing what needs to be done 163 Dolci, Danilo 11, 151, 152 biography and history 173–8 community mobilization and development 174–5 context and overview 171–3 on domination 179 government response to 174, 175 maieutic education 179–82 non-violent tactics 174, 175–6, 177 popular support 175–6 prosecution 177 research and publications 172

right to life 172 solidarity 177–8 spread of influence 178 strike in reverse 176 summary and conclusions 182–3 domination, Dolci on 179 Douglas, F. 13 Dream Summer 109–10 drug offenses, incarceration 82 dual enrollment program, North South University 161–2 DuBois, W.E.B. 164, 201

E Eclipse Rising 102–4 economic capital 66 economic inequality, US promotion of 14 economic restructuring, effects of 89–90 education for democratic participation 19 maieutic 179–82 political nature 22–3 educational equity see North South University elite knowledge control 123–4 embodied knowledge 124, 133 embodied politic 47–8 embodied researchers 131 emotional labor 133 emotions 99 employment formerly incarcerated women 87–8 hiring practices 89 empowerment effects of strategies 167–8 Facebook and social media 164–5 Healthy California Survey Project 110, 111–12 informal strategies 164–7 legal strategies 161–4 protests 166–7 empowerment framework 89 En Aquellos Tiempos (‘In Those Times’) 142 Enlightenment 205–6 enunciative actions 44 epistemological violence 200 Esperanza Peace and Justice Center 62, 139, 142 ethics ethnography 35 medical research 120 ethnic erasure 67 ethnography 9–10 building relationships 36–40 conflicting aims 40 context and overview 33–4 ethics 35 friendship 33–4, 38, 39 halfway house environment 38–9 interview settings 37

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Research Justice interviewing 37–8 interviews 34 learning opportunities 40 payments to participants 36–7 as Research Justice strategy 40, 41 research location 34–5 role conflict 39 role within research location 39 social boundaries 34–6 successes 40–1 evidence based policies 19–20 exclusionary urban renewal 141–2 experience, and expertise 9–10 experiential knowledge 124, 133 expertise distribution of 154, 200 and experience 9–10 exploitation, in research 38

Great Kanto Earthquake 97 Green, M. 200 Greene, M. 23 group consensus, community mobilization 65

H Hart, J. 24 Harvey, D. 148 health justice 66 see also Healthy California Survey Project Healthy California Survey Project 65–6 context and overview 109–10 convening research team 111 developing from 113 empowerment 110, 111–12 ethos 111–12 gallery walk through data 112 health advancement 113 insider analysis 112–13 personal reflections 114–16 report 113–14 research justice lens 110 research process 109–10, 111 HeLa cells 118 hierarchy, social and racial 141 high-stakes testing 200 Hiroshima 98 Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park 98 Historically Black Colleges or Universities (HBCUs) 159, 160 historiography 197 Hogan, Mél 43, 44 conversation with Andrea Zaffiro 45–54 Homeland Security 14 Honoring Our Losses circle 127 Hotline Chamae 104 human promotion 179 humility 24 Hurricane Katrina 11, 96, 151 see also North South University

F Facebook and social media 164–5, 167–8 Feagin, J.R. 157 feminism 47–8 filibustering 166 Fine, M. 199–203 formerly incarcerated men 2–3, 9–10, 37, 63–4 formerly incarcerated women 10–11, 64 activism 88–9 addiction 86 context and overview 81 cycle of incarceration 91–2 destruction of documents 85 employment 87–8 histories of abuse 86 literature 83–4 release from prison 84–6 research method 83 reunion with children and families 86–7 safety 85 significance of research 81 summary and conclusions 90–2 support for 85 Freire, P. 17, 23, 24 friendship co-researcher relationships 33–4, 38 with research participants 39

I

G Gated Community of Policy Researchers 200 gatekeeping 153–4 gender, and caring labor 134–5 gentrification 67, 139, 141 good community 141 Good People (Lindsay-Abair) 31–2 Graeber, D. 147 Grande, S. 60 Great Eastern Japan earthquake, 2011 102–5

identities claiming 60 marginal 3 ideologies in disasters 99 effects of 18 racist 144 imagination 21–5, 201 imprisonment 201 incarceration effects of 82–3 increase in 22 international context 90 literature 83–4 numbers 82 pervasiveness 89–90

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Index release from prison 84–6 indigenous activism 206 indigenous knowledge, as data 208 Indigenous methodology 60–1 Indigenous Peoples 10 in academia 3–4, 59 colonial attitudes to 207 Crow Nation 58–9 cultural disruption 58 economic and cultural capital 66 experiences 57–8 legitimacy 60 reclaiming stories 61–2 research history 59–60 roles and connections 57 Indigenous research, biography and history 57–9, 61 Indigenous research paradigm 57 individual responsibility, for social change 182–3 inequality 14, 16, 201 informal strategies for empowerment 164–7 information, accessibility and transparency 106 information and communication technology, as socially equalizing 145 Innocence Project of Florida 63, 69, 77 integrity, of students 20 intergenerational knowledge 124 intergenerational organizing 142–7 interviewing, as academic technique 28–9 Inventare il futuro (Dolci) 183

J Jackson, Christopher 162–3 Japan disaster nationalism 96–9 expansionism 97 massacre of Koreans 97–8 Japan Multicultural Relief Fund (JMRF) 103–4 Japan Pacific Resource Network (JPRN) 103 Jato river dam 175, 176 Jim Crow segregation 158 Johnson, Rachel Hart 163–4 Jolivétte, A. 8 Jones, R. 88 Jones, Shanendra 201 justice denied 69, 71, 77–8 justifications 188–91

K Kaufman, N. 142 keynote lectures 199–203, 205–9 King Jr, Martin Luther 18, 168, 206 Klein, N. 201 knowledge construction 9, 10, 20

control of 20 decolonization 155, 199–203, 205–9 everyone has 208 marginalized communities 124 neoliberal influence 188–9 power of 208 selection and bias 207–8 value and visibility 123–7 knowledge elites 123–4 knowledge inqueery 44–5 knowledge production forms of 5–6, 6 Indigenous Peoples 59 and power 6 knowledge sharing 104–5, 122–3, 136 Kobe 99–102 Kobe Foreigners Friendship Center (KFC) 101 Korea, colonization 97 Koreans massacre of 97–8 Southern Hyogo prefecture earthquake, 1995 99–100 victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 98 Kramer, Sylvia 201–2

L La Casa de la Memoria Indómita 185 labeling, effects of 30 Lacks, Henrietta 118 legal strategies for empowerment 161–4 legitimacy distribution of 200 of knowledge 123–4, 154 mixed heritage 60 of non-’expert’ research 125 Lennon, John 21 LGBTQI, marginalization 3 living archives 145 Locke, A. 117 Lorde, A. 135 love 24–5

M MacPhee, M.-C. 43, 44 macro discrimination 163 Mafia 175, 176–7, 178 maieutic approach 151, 152–3 maieutic education 179–82 maieutic group 175 making the invisible visible 52–3 Mangano, A. 177, 179, 181, 182, 184 Marcos, S.C.I. 185, 187–8 marginal identities 3, 64 marginalized communities, knowledge 124 Marshall, B.K. 95 Marx, K. 24 Mate, G. 83

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Research Justice Maviglia, D. 152–3 McGill, K. 88–9 media 192–7 medical research consent 120 ethics reviews 120 exploitation 118–19 see also research Meiksins Wood, E. 15 memory, destruction of 21 methodologies, in context of the sacred 7 militant investigation 147 militarization, of borders 14 mixed heritage 60–1 mobilization 11, 206 morality 24–5 Morgante, T.R. 182, 183 multi-organizational research strategies 65 multiculturalism 18 mutual respect 1–2 mystification 124 myths 208

N Nagasaki 98 Nakamura, L. 145 narratives construction of 30 of pain 190 see also resistance narratives nationalist ideologies, in disasters 99 neoliberalism as context of dissent 14–15 effects of 21–2 gentrification 139, 141 influence on research 188–9 New Orleans 11 new urban colonialism 141 9/11, socio-political effects of 13–14 No Child Left Behind 19 No (Larraín) 193–7 No More Potlucks (NMP) 9–10 activist forces 48–9 activist potential 53 approach taken 43–4 background narrative 46 background to study 44–5 community 50 content 50 context and overview 43–4 costs and funding 49 defining feminism 47–8 foundational queeries 45–54 knowledge inqueery 44–5 as platform 53 as queer archive 43, 46, 50–4 queer as enacted 48 queer method 53–4 queer positionality 46–7

and Research Justice 43 self-identification 54 sustainability 49 technology 45–6 trajectories 45–6 value 49–50 visibility 52–3 volunteering 49–50 website 45–6 Nomadelfia 173–4 non-violence 151–2, 171 see also Dolci, Danilo North South University 158 civil law suits 161–4, 167 conditions on campus 165 context and overview 157 dual enrollment program 161–2 effects of Hurricane Katrina 160 effects of strategies 167–8 Facebook and social media 164–5, 167–8 history 159–60 informal strategies for empowerment 164–7 legal strategies for empowerment 161–4 macro discrimination 163 negative publicity 166–7 protests 166–7, 168 research method 159 shaming 167–8 Student Government Association (SGA) President 162–3 students and transparency 163–4 summary and conclusions 168 whistle blowing 161–3 NPO Woori Hakkyo 104

O O’Brien, P. 84, 89 Office of Historic Preservation (OHP) 142 official public transcript 21 online archives 43, 46, 50–4 open-mindedness 24 oral tradition 11, 153 see also resistance narratives Orfield, G. 16 organic intellectuals 157, 165 Orleans Parish jail 162–3

P pain narratives 190 Palpitare di nessi (Dolci) 179 participation, as sustaining 50 Participatory Action Research (PAR) 120, 128 Pastor, M. 158 Patriot Act 22 payments, to research participants 36–7 peace, as involvement 183 pedagogy of dissent 1–2, 9

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Index context and overview 13 in context of inequality 14–15 imagination and dissent 21–5 moves towards 15 racism and class inequality 15–18 and societal change 18–21 Pell Grants 202 people of color, economic and cultural capital 66 perpetual marginality 85 personal change 131–5, 136 Pickett, K. 201 Picou, J.S. 95 piegogia 188 policy reform 11 political interests, racialized 17 positionality 60–1 postmodernism, Research Justice 10 poverty and wealth, connections 200–1 power as aim 192 crisis of 60 and knowledge production 6 power relationships 33–4, 35–6, 110–11, 128, 155, 207 powerlessness, educators’ sense of 19 pregnancy and neonatal loss 127 preservation status, of buildings 142 pride 206 prison industrial complex 2–3, 90, 91 prison system, impact of 63–4 prisons, college in 202 privatization, public space 140–1 protection of research participants 65 protests, North South University 166–7, 168 public policy 206–7 public–private partnerships, urban development 140–1 Public Science Project 199–200, 202–3 public space, privatization 140–1

Q queer archive 43, 46, 50–4 queer feminism see No More Potlucks (NMP) queer-feminist zines 53 queer method 53–4 queer positionality 46–7 queering, as enacted 48

R race, as destiny 17 race relations paradigm 15–16, 17 Race to the Top 19 racialization 16–17 racism 15–18 racist ideologies 144 radical love 7, 8, 151 reciprocal relationships 7

reflections, Healthy California Survey Project 114–16 reflexivity 29, 131 Reich, Robert 201 reindustrialization 90 relational perspective 95 relationality 57 relationship building 36–40, 57 release from prison 84–6 see also Crotzer, Alan reproductive justice 67, 131–2, 135–6 see also birthing justice research benefits to researchers 35–6 boundaries 31 in collective context 63–4 colonial 188–9 comfort zones 38–9 damage 59–60 democratization 106 domination and violence 188–9 exploitation 38, 118–19 for liberation 200 neoliberal influence 188–9 occupying 200 power relationships 33–4, 35–6, 110–11, 128, 155 silence 131 social boundaries 34–6 for transformation 208 use by marginalized people 8 victims 119 see also medical research research agendas 120–3 Research Justice definition 5, 188, 189–90, 197 functions 7–8 goal 8 postmodernism 10 and public policy 206–7 Research Justice: Methodologies for social change see book Research Justice paradigm 121 research participants, protection of 65 research refusal 189–90, 191 researcher–researched dyad 128 researchers embodied 131 identifying as 128–30, 154 as outsiders 35 positioning 60–1, 143, 199–200, 205 power relationships 110–11 responsibilities and obligations 9, 157 role of 129–30 as scholars and activists 157–8 visibility 131 researching research 206 resistance narratives bad ancestors 186–8

217

Research Justice as ceremony 197–8 context and overview 185 historiography 197 media 192–7 rebellious ancestors 186 uncomfortable dead 186–8 use of stories 191–7 Riessman, C.K. 29, 30 right to life, Dolci’s perspective 172 role conflict, ethnography 39 roles and connections 57

S sacred knowledge 124 sacred methodologies 7, 8 sacred space 133 Saltini, Fr Zeno 173–4 San Antonio, urban development 139–41 Sanchez Bailey, Timotea 161–2 Sandoval, C. 145 Sansa Café 104 scapegoating 14 Scheer, Robert 22 schooling, fragmented approach 19–20 schools, racialization and segregation 16–17 second disasters 158 segregation, schools 16 self-awareness 63 self-belief 208 self-definition 2 self-determination 2, 9, 10, 67 self-identification, No More Potlucks (NMP) 54 shaming 167–8 sharing circles 125, 126, 127, 128, 133 sharing identity 2 Shukaitis, S. 147 Sicily 174 earthquake 177–8 silence, within research 131 silencing 164 Sims, J.M. 119 single mothers as agents of change 2, 9 author experiences 27–32 backgrounds 29–30 circumstances 30 construction of narratives 30 context and overview 27 interviewing 29 sharing experiences and support 29, 31 stereotypes 30–1 stigmatization 30–1 theater trip 31–2 slaves, used for medical research 119 Smith, D. 31 social and policy change, overview 151–5 social boundaries, in research 34–6 social conditioning 13–14

social enhancement 180 social inequality, and disasters 95–6 social justice, redefining 14 social media empowerment 164–5 as means of protest 167–8 social transformation 11 socialization, effects of 20 sociological imagination 151 solidarity 201 Solidarity Network with Migrants Japan (SMJ) 104 Southern Hyogo prefecture earthquake, 1995 99–102 Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) 162 Spagnoletti, G. 174, 175, 178, 182 spatial knowledge 124 speaking truth to power 207 specialness 206 Steinberg, Michael 22 Stel, M. 85 stereotypes, single mothers 30–1 stigmatization, single mothers 30–1 stop and frisk 200, 203 stories, loss of meaning 189 storytelling 11, 153, 208 as ceremony 197–8 learning from 186 in Research Justice context 189 use of stories 191–7 see also resistance narratives strategies for empowerment informal 164–7 legal 161–4 strike in reverse 176 structural inequality, in disasters 105–6 Student Government Association (SGA) President, North South University 162–3 students autonomy 20 curiosity and imagination 23–4 see also college students, as agents of change success, measures of 20 surveillance 22 sustainability, through participation 50

T Takatori Community Center (TCC) 100–1 technology 11, 145 Teo, T. 200 The battle of Chile (Guzman) 195–6 The new Jim Crow (Alexander) 83 Tolbert-Mosley, Linda 161–2 Training Centre for Organic Planning 178 transformation criminal justice 64 research for 208 of society 151 transformative justice 2, 3

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Index transparency of information 106 North South University 163–4 Trappeto 174–5, 178 Tuck, E. 190 Tuhiwai Smith, L. 106, 205–9 Tuskegee Syphilis Study 118–19 Twitter 165

U uncomfortable dead 186–8 ‘Undocumented and uninsured: a five-part report on immigrant youth and the struggle to access healthcare in California’ 113–14 undocumented communities 65–6, 109 Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act 2001 22 Univision building, demolition 139 urban renewal 140, 141–2 urban revitalization 67

V value of knowledge 123–7 Vera, H. 157 Verso un mondo nuovo (Dolci) 176 Vietnam in Kobe 101 Vietnamese people, Southern Hyogo prefecture earthquake,1995 100–1 vigilantism 22 violence 171 visibility of knowledge 123–7 No More Potlucks (NMP) 52–3 of researchers 131 voice 206 volunteering 49–50 vulnerability, and radical love 8

W Wacquant, L. 85 war on drugs 82, 89 wealth and poverty, connections 200–1 wealth distribution, polarity 18 wealth gap 201 Weissinger, S. 151 Wellman, D. 35 whistle blowing 161–3 White, M.M. 144–5 Wilkinson, R. 201 Wilson, S. 57, 106 women’s imprisonment 82–3 Woodson, C.G. 159 wrongful convictions 10, 77–9 see also Crotzer, Alan

X xenophobia 13

Y Yang, K.W. 190 young people, racialization 16–17

Z Zainichi Koreans 11, 99–100, 102–4 Zavella, P. 28–9 Zeffiro, A. 44 conversation with Mél Hogan 45–54 zines 53 Zinn, H. 13

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“As a long-time Community-Based Participatory Research practitioner, I loved how Research Justice reappropriates research as a space for love, reflexivity, cultural revitalization, community voice and power, and social transformation. Our imaginations are indeed inspired!” Nina Wallerstein, University of New Mexico, USA

Research Justice is a strategic framework and methodological intervention that seeks to transform structural inequities in research. Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change builds on the methodological frameworks developed by the national non-profit organization DataCenter: Research for Justice and is the first book to take a radical approach to socially just, community-centered research. Challenging traditional models for conducting social science research within marginalized populations, it examines the relationships and intersections between research, knowledge construction, and political power/legitimacy in society. Presenting a new and highly innovative concept of Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness, it envisions equal political power and legitimacy for different forms of knowledge including the cultural, spiritual and experiential. The book examines how the coexistence of these various forms of knowledge can lead to greater equality in public policies and laws that rely on data and research to produce social change. Offering a much-needed analysis of the intersections between research methods, public policy, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology this unique book will be of wide interest to researchers and students in a variety of disciplines. ANDREW J. JOLIVÉTTE is Professor and Chair in American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, where he is an affiliated faculty member in the Graduate Program in Sexuality Studies, the Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership, and in the Race and Resistance Studies Program. He is the author or editor of several books including Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority (Policy Press, 2012). Jolivétte is an international lecturer and public speaker with SpeakOut— The Institute for Democratic Education and Culture.

RESEARCH JUSTICE • Edited by Andrew J. Jolivétte

“Exquisite, contemplative and urgent examination of the ways we can implement more equitable, communityoriented research methodologies that amplify the voices and experiences of the historically marginalized and disenfranchised.” Bonnie Duran, University of Washington, USA

METHODOLOGIES FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

RESEARCH METHODS / SOCIOLOGY

ISBN 978-1-4473-2463-8

www.policypress.co.uk PolicyPress

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