Silences, Neglected Feelings, and Blind-Spots in Research Practice 1003208568, 9781003208563

Citation preview

SILENCES, NEGLECTED FEELINGS, AND BLIND-SPOTS IN RESEARCH PRACTICE

This book addresses wide ranging dilemmas that social researchers may face as a result of silences, neglected feelings, and blind spots in their research. In every research endeavor, thoughts, intuitions, biases, feelings or sensations may be left aside as the researcher attempts to come to terms with the complexities of material and figure out what the ‘main issue’ is. Researchers may pay attention to their own emotional responses during the interview, but often only in their field notes. Rarely do feelings of shock, irritation, boredom or, for that matter, amusement, excitement and delight find their way into the analysis itself. In addition, researchers are all susceptible to blind spots, often unaware of what is being avoided in research or omitted from it. However, reflection about precisely these gaps or silences may prove essential for developing new and interesting questions as well as comprehensive, responsive, and responsible research practices. In this volume, an international, cross disciplinary cohort of researchers think critically about the silences, neglected feelings, and blind spots in their own work, and offer insights for enhancing research practices. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in research methods and methodology. Kathy Davis is Senior Research Fellow in the Sociology Department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is the author of Reshaping the Female Body, Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences, The Making of Our Bodies, Our selves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders and Dancing Tango: Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World. Janice Irvine is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. She is the author of Marginal People in Deviant Places: Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism, Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States and Disorders of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Modern American Sexology.

ROUTLEDGE ADVANCES IN RESEARCH METHODS

Diagramming the Social Relational Method in Research Russell Dudley Smith and Natasha Whiteman Participatory Case Study Work Approaches, Authenticity and Application in Ageing Studies Edited by Sion Williams and John Keady Social Causation and Biographical Research Philosophical, Theoretical and Methodological Arguments Georgios Tsiolis and Michalis Christodoulou Beyond Disciplinarity Historical Evolutions of Research Epistemology Catherine Hayes, John Fulton and Andrew Livingstone with Claire Todd, Stephen Capper and Peter Smith Concept Analysis in Nursing A New Approach John Paley Algorithm Audit: Why, What and How? Biagio Aragona The Meaning of Contemplation for Social Qualitative Research: Applications and Examples Krzysztof Konecki Silences, Neglected Feelings, and Blind-Spots in Research Practice Edited by Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routle dge Advances in Research Methods/book series/RARM

SILENCES, NEGLECTED FEELINGS, AND BLINDSPOTS IN RESEARCH PRACTICE

Edited by Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine

Cover image: © grafner, 123RF.com First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. 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 has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-032-07342-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-07733-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-20856-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

List of contributors Introduction Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine

vii 1

PART I

Silences 1 Gold is Silence: On Money in Field Relationships Sealing Cheng

15 17

2 Keeping Quiet: Doing Research When You’re Woman, Feminist and Black madeleine kennedy-macfoy

32

3 Navigating Race: Expectations Before, During, and After Research Jonathan R. Wynn

47

4 Do Lawsuits Silence? Legal Harassment in Corporate Crime Research Willem de Haan

61

vi Contents

PART II

Neglected Feelings

73

5 “Bad Feelings”: Reflections on Research, Disciplines, and Critical Methodologies Ghassan Moussawi and Jyoti Puri

75

6 The Shamefulness of Boredom: Are Good Researchers Allowed to be Bored? Kathy Davis

91

7 In Praise of Suspicion Oyman Bas¸aran

105

8 Affective Ecologies and the Botanical Sublime Banu Subramaniam

117

PART III

Blind-spots 9 Coming to Terms with the Present: Difficult Feelings in Post Shoah Germany Ina Schaum 10 “We Will Sue You If You Publish Our Pictures!”: Blind spots in Research on Sex Workers Ida Sabelis and Lorraine Nencel 11 From Myopia to Clarity: Biases in International Field Research David A. Cort

137 139

155 168

PART IV

Concluding Conversations

179

12 Studying Those Who Hate Us: Fear, Anxiety and Blind spots in Researching the Right Janice Irvine and Arlene Stein

181

Index

192

CONTRIBUTORS

Oyman Bas¸aran is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Bowdoin College. He is a qualitative researcher working in the fields of gender and sexuality, medicine, and science. He is currently completing a book about the medicalization of male circumcision in Turkey. Sealing Cheng is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research is at the intersection of migration, sexuality, and human rights. Her first book, On the Move for Love: Migrant Enter tainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) received the Distinguished Book Award of the Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association in 2012. Towards the end of her PhD, Cheng pledged to write about money in fieldwork, frustrated at the blaring silence of the subject in academia. Thanks to Janice and Kathy, this piece is a fulfilment of that pledge. David Cort is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His scholarly interests are in comparative social inequality, global health, and social epidemiology. In his future work, he will examine group differences in spatial assimilation outcomes in South Africa. Kathy Davis has worked in the field of gender studies for many years and is currently senior research fellow in the Sociology Department at the VU University in Amster dam, the Netherlands. She has written and co edited many books, including Reshaping the Female Body (Routledge, 1995), Embodied Practices. Feminist Perspectives on the Body (Sage, 1997), Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Handbook for Gender and Women’s Studies (Sage, 2006, with M. Evans and J. Lorber), The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders (Duke, 2007), Transatlantic Conversations (Ashgate, 2011 with M. Evans), Dancing Tango: Passionate

viii List of contributors

Encounters in a Globalizing World (NYU Press, 2015), and Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies (Emerald, 2018, with H. Ghorashi and P. Smets). Willem de Haan (MA University of Groningen, PhD University of Utrecht) is Professor Emeritus of Criminology at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Currently, he is Senior Research Fellow at the VU University in Amsterdam. He formerly held positions at the universities of Utrecht and Bielefeld (Germany) and as a guest lecturer at the universities of Oslo (Norway) and Wales (Cardiff). He is the author of The Politics of Redress: Crime, Punishment and Penal Abolition (London, Unwin Hyman, 1990). His current research is in the fields of Holocaust studies and the criminology of international crimes and international criminal justice. Currently, he is writing a book on The Holocaust and the Tango of Death. Janice Irvine is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of several books, including Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States, and Disorders of Desire: Sex and Gender in Modern American Sexology, as well as numerous articles about sexuality, culture, and politics. Her most recent book is, Marginal People in Deviant Places: Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism (University of Michigan Press). madeleine kennedy-macfoy works on research, policy and advocacy for Education International (EI), the global federation of education unions. She is co editor of the European Journal of Women’s Studies. Ghassan Moussawi is Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He works and teaches in the areas of transnational gender and sexuality studies, feminist theories and methods, queer theory, urban studies, and affect. His book Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut (Temple University Press, 2020) focuses on everyday life disruptions and violence, and queer formations in post war Beirut. Lorraine Nencel is Associate Professor at the department of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research passions take her to critically analyze feminist epistemology, particularly the taken for granted assumptions on which it is foun ded. She has been researching sex work globally for more than 25 years. Her newest contribution to this subject is a co edited volume with M. Skilbrei and J. Bjønness, Reconfiguring Stigma in Studies of Sex for Sale (London, Routledge, 2022). Jyoti Puri is Hazel Dick Leonard Chair and Professor of Sociology at Simmons University. She writes and teaches at the crossroads of sociology, sexuality studies, death studies, and postcolonial feminist theory. Her most abiding interests relate to issues of sexuality, gender, race, nation, and state from a transnational/postcolonial feminist lens. She is currently working on a project on death and migration.

List of contributors ix

Ida Sabelis is Associate Professor of Organization Studies at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and Extraordinary Professor (Education and Human Rights) at North West University, South Africa. She works with international journals, Gender, Work & Organization; Time & Society; Kronoscope, and Transformation in Higher Education. With a PhD in Organizational Anthropology at VU Amsterdam, she is currently writing a biography of artist and “bush wife” Nola Steele and her husband Nick Steele, who worked as KwaZulu Natal conservationists. Ina Schaum is a sociologist based in Frankfurt/Main. Currently, she is working on her dissertation, which is biographical study about young Jewish adults' experiences with love and intimate relationships in contemporary Germany. She is a fellow of Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk and co founder of the working group “Love, Emotions, and Intimacies” at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her book Being Jewish (and) in Love: Two and A Half Stories About Jews, Germans and Love was published by Hentrich & Hentrich in 2020. Arlene Stein is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, where she directs the Institute for Research on Women. She is the author of books on LGBTQ identities and social movements, Holocaust memory, and public sociology. Banu Subramaniam is Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the Uni versity of Massachusetts, Amherst. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology. Author of Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019) and Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014), Banu’s current work focuses on decolonizing botany and the relationship of science and religious nationalism in India. Jonathan Wynn is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts. He wrote The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York (University of Chicago Press, Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries Series, 2011) and Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport (University of Chicago Press, 2015). In addition to articles published in scholarly journals, he has also written public sociology in The Guardian, Salon, and The Washington Post.

INTRODUCTION Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine

This edited volume addresses wide ranging dilemmas social researchers may face as a result of silences, neglected feelings, and blind spots. Silences can beset research on many levels. Some topics may seem unspeakable because of politics or cultural taboos. Publishers can silence unfashionable topics by refusing publication. Neglected or denied feelings can also produce silences in researchers. For example, in every research endeavor, certain thoughts, intuitions, biases, feelings or sensations may be left aside as we attempt to come to terms with the complexities of our material and figure out what the “main issue” is. Researchers may pay attention to their own emotional responses during the interview, but usually this occurs only in their field notes. Rarely do feelings of shock, irritation, fear, boredom or, for that matter, amusement, excitement and delight find their way into the analysis itself. At best, we put aside the bits and pieces that we left out for later scrutiny. At worst, neglected feelings may distort our interpretations, or fester in ways that hinder our work. Sometimes we forget about them altogether. In addition, we are all susceptible to blind spots, so that we may not even be aware of what we are omitting or avoiding in our research. For example, our research standpoints can easily produce tunnel vision and myopia. Our social location may obstruct our research in ways of which we are unaware. Normative or political commitments sensitize us to how power and injustice work in everyday social life, but they can also close our eyes to those aspects that do not “fit” our view of the world. By definition, these blind spots are difficult to bring into awareness. However, reflection about precisely these gaps and difficult feelings may prove essential for developing new and interesting questions as well as comprehensive, responsive, and responsible research practices. For many critical researchers, part of the research endeavor involves raising issues that have not been raised before or exploring areas which have been under researched. Disciplines like gender studies, critical race studies, queer theory, and postcolonial theory all emerged through a DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 1

2 Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine

critique of mainstream science which had erased the voices and experiences of anyone except white heterosexual men (see, for example, Ramazanoglu and Holland, 2002; Harding, 2008; Seidman, 1996; Gunaratnam, 2003; Jackson and Weidman, 2006). Reading between the lines and looking for the topics and perspectives that were being avoided became the sine qua non of what doing cri tical inquiry was all about. More recently with the “reflexive turn,” researchers have begun to situate themselves and critically interrogate the ways their own social position shapes the questions they ask, how they conduct their research, and the kinds of explanations they find satisfactory (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1990; Hertz, 1997; Foley, 2002). This often painful process has been important for uncovering the power dynamics involved in most research situa tions and in producing situated and accountable knowledge (Haraway, 1988). In this volume, we have asked researchers from different disciplines, geographical locations, and stages of their academic careers to think critically about the silences, neglected feelings, and myopias in their own work. As editors, we bring our long histories of having encountered these dilemmas in our own research, as well as our experiences of teaching methodology courses and supervising graduate research. It is with our own stories that we begin.

Kathy’s Story I never intended to become a researcher. After studying clinical psychology, I planned to become a therapist, as nothing in my studies in psychology had con vinced me that doing research could be interesting. As luck would have it, I encountered ethnomethodology and conversation analysis in an article called “K is mentally ill”, written by the feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith (1978). This was one of those life changing experiences because I realized you could actually do research without questionnaires and statistics. Smith showed that you could use a single case, analyzing it line by line, and, as a result, say something eye opening about how people get labelled “mentally ill.” After reading this article, I never looked back. I wrote both my MA thesis and PhD dissertation using these same methods of single case analysis to study medical interaction. What I most loved about this kind of research was the sensation that a text was full of secrets and that if I looked hard enough, going back and re examining the transcriptions of consultations, it would reveal something I could never have imagined at the beginning. Later I worked with other qualitative methodologies like ethnography, biographical and discourse analysis that all had in common that they allowed me to look for hidden secrets, whether in a life story or a sub culture or a political debate. My basic research orientation became trying to understand what I had merely sensed at the beginning of an inquiry, but couldn’t quite put my finger on, something I called the “I smell a rat” feeling. This may seem the obvious reason for doing any research, but I have often observed that social scientists today seem to know the results of their research before they even get started. What this tells me is that they may well be avoiding anything

Introduction 3

that contradicts or unsettles their previously held beliefs or could force them to draw controversial conclusions (see, for example, Ryan Flood and Gill, 2010). While I have always liked the activity of unearthing secrets, I have had many uncomfortable moments in the process. This was most often because what I dis covered was at odds with my normative convictions as a critical feminist scholar. For example, when doing research on consultations between male physicians and female patients, I had difficulties with the “nice” doctor who did not fit my belief that women’s problems were continually being trivialized or overly medicalized by male doctors (Davis, 1993). In a later study on cosmetic surgery and the beauty system, I grappled with women’s eager determination to undergo practices which were painful, dangerous and—at least to my feminist eyes—demeaning (Davis, 1995). I had difficulties reconciling their fervent desire to have their bodies altered surgically with my feminist commitment to criticize cosmetic surgery and the ideologies of feminine inferiority which it reproduces. This kind of ideological dilemma returned many years later in my research on tango as a global dance cul ture (Davis, 2015a). How could late modern, emancipated women (and men) participate in a dance whose music and culture are so full of heteronormative and ethnocentric stereotypes? How to make sense of feminist women who longed to abandon themselves in the arms of a stranger (Davis, 2015b)? Even more at odds with my normative convictions as a critical feminist scholar were the interactions between affluent tango tourists and Argentinian dancers which both supported and defied the postcolonial feminist critique of cultural imperialism, exploitation, and exoticization of the Latin “other.” What these different research projects have in common is that the methodologies I used often resulted in a clash between my normative/theoretical commitments and what I was discovering in the process of doing the research. I often felt I had wandered onto dangerous ground and risked the criticisms of being too liberal or even—in some cases—for becoming “a danger to feminism” (see, for example, Bordo, 1997: 35–57). My worries about not being critical enough were compounded by the anxiety that I would be seen as theoretically unsophisticated—for example, not sufficiently cogni zant of the latest developments in postcolonial studies or affect theory. In either case, I experienced the discomfort of not toeing the line and of not belonging to the field, discipline or theoretical school to which I wanted to be a part of. But there were other, equally problematic episodes that emerged in the course of looking for secrets. One of the most painful of these episodes was not finding anything of interest at all. This is when the practice of digging just a little deeper simply meant hitting a rock. I remember doing a project for which I had received a prestigious fellowship to interview a famous group of the activists who wrote Our Bodies, Ourselves, the feminist classic on women and their health, and spend time in the archives investigating their work. After months of going through the archives and interviewing the activists, I realized that all I had come up with was the feel good history that everyone already knew. There didn’t seem to be anything I could get my teeth into as a researcher. The thought of spending years working on this kind of book filled me with dread. It was this experience of being bored and being stuck

4 Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine

(which I analyze later in this volume) that ultimately propelled me into another approach. I began to consider what was being left out of the “feel good story” and to think about how my own perspective might be preventing me from writing it in a different way (Davis, 2007). I decided that, rather than approaching the history of this group and their project as one of US feminism, I needed to dismantle the ubiquitous centrism of feminism as a US creation and focus on the project’s impact outside the US. Ultimately, this change of perspective morphed into a study of how feminism travels, is taken up and reworked. This new approach led me into many unfamiliar terrains: translation studies, traveling theory, and transnational feminism. The story I ended up telling became for me, and hopefully for my readers, a more unusual story and perhaps also a story that could unsettle some previously held notions about what constitutes feminist knowledge and practice in different parts of the world. What I have learned from all of this is that research inevitably involves the uncertainty and excitement of going places you didn’t know existed. It evokes a whole series of emotions, some pleasant, but many decidedly unpleasant. And it can mean confronting ideas about the kind of person and researcher you are which are sometimes deeply disturbing. These are not things we talk about at conferences or discuss in seminars or analyze in our writing, and yet they play a significant role in what, how and why we do the research.

Janice’s Story My intellectual passions have always been entangled with my political commitments. I was a young political activist, and I thought it was cool that sociology had all those social movements courses. So I spent five years in a sociology graduate program, during which time I also got arrested several times for civil disobedience, went to countless protests, and wrote for political newspapers, such as Gay Community News and the feminist paper, Sojourner. Those first experiences of visibility when my writing was published were scary and thrilling, and gave me the courage to venture into academic publishing later. I feel lucky to have been in graduate school during such a vibrant moment of feminist, queer, and lefty activism. My activist student colleagues and I definitely wanted our social research to have a political impact in the world. We hoped to break silences. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the sociology graduate program at Brandeis University emphasized field research—it was dubbed “the second Chicago School” (Fine, 1995)—and had produced a number of prominent, feminist scholars such as Barrie Thorne, Judith Stacey, and Nancy Chodorow. As budding ethnographers, students were sent to “the field” to produce social knowledge and new kinds of stories. In a recent reflection on their Brandeis experience, former students described being sent out to nearby communities—Dorchester, Cambridge, Watertown— with the simple instruction from faculty, as one former student reflected, to take “copious field notes.” One noted, “We didn’t read books. We went out and collected information.” For those of us who saw ourselves on the

Introduction 5

academic margins by virtue of class, gender, race, or sexuality, the (mostly male) professors’ laissez faire attitudes afforded us the space to explore topics and methods outside the sociological mainstream. I understand all this only in retrospect. Despite the Brandeis emphasis on field research, I eventually found my way to what became my signature research mix of sociological analysis and historical inquiry. With any topic I find myself asking, “What happened before this?” I fell in love with the pleasures of working in an archive, and pulling open a collection of papers, photographs, and other materials that transport me into another life at another time. Most of my research involves interviewing, participant observation, and archival work (for example, Irvine, 1990; Irvine, 2002). An experience in the 1990s of being stymied in the middle of a research project taught me to pay attention to neglected feelings and use them to advance my analysis. At the time, however, it felt more harrowing than instructive. In the midst of a study on the culture wars over sex education that were raging across the US (see Irvine, 2002; and Chapter 9 in this volume), I became thoroughly bored. As part of my fieldwork, I had been observing many volatile public meetings in the Northeast, some of which devolved into shouting matches and, at least once, a punch thrown. It was exciting stuff, and yet I found that I could not bear going to more meetings and, more generally, couldn’t stand the very topic itself. It was boredom on steroids. This period stretched for a painfully long time of self criticism and futile attempts to get myself unstuck. I started reconciling myself to the prospect of simply abandoning the project. I remembered a conversation I had once had with a psy chotherapist friend, when I asked her if she got bored listening to her clients drone on (my words) all day long. She replied that mostly she did not, but if she did get bored, she took it as a sign to explore something going on with herself or the therapeutic relationship. Boredom, then, might be a clue, not an affliction. I began to explore my own boredom. It was perplexing—why was I bored when there was so much adrenaline flowing through these debates? Eventually, (and here I fast forward through a process of self reflection, with a dash of critical analysis) I realized that, despite their drama, these conflictual meetings all seemed the same. Like an old married couple having the same fight, the actors in these meetings used the same arguments, even the same words, over and over across geographic locations. Even the fights seemed staged! I was bored because it was boring, and it was boring because the broader public conversation had devolved into formulaic soundbites. This eventually led me to my arguments about the dis cursive and emotional scripts of the culture wars, and the performative aspect of feelings in political debates. Sadly, we still see these static scripts in our political culture today. The sex education project could have gone in many different directions; I wonder where it might have gone if I hadn’t gotten bored and had to push through being stuck. One important exception to my historical and qualitative work was a quirky foray into survey research sometime around 2011. I had written extensively about the stigma associated with early pioneers of sexuality research, but there was silence in the literature about contemporary researchers. What were the research

6 Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine

experiences of sociologists currently working in sexuality studies? Although I had never done a survey, this seemed like the best method by which to approach this question, and I remember thinking, “How hard can it be?” It turned out to be very hard, and I am still endlessly grateful for the help I received from my survey researcher colleagues. I had begun this project as a bit of a lark, but quickly discovered I had tapped into a deep reservoir of pain, anger, and anxiety. Scholars felt silenced in so many ways. They described not being able to discuss their research with colleagues, friends, and family for fear of being ridiculed or shamed. The stigma of sex seemed to stick to those who studied it. Beyond the open ended survey comments, sociologists, many of them newly entering academia, also began emailing me about the stigma they faced in conducting or publishing their research. The stories poured in, and, as they accumulated, they became an unexpected weight and responsibility. I hadn’t initially intended to publish from this survey, but realized that I would be perpetuating the silences about these institutional biases and stigmas by not doing so. I published three articles on the theme, “Is Sexuality Research Dirty Work?” (Irvine, 2014). The article, “Can’t Ask, Can’t Tell” (Irvine, 2012), which recounted the obstacles researchers faced with Institutional Review Boards won a best article award from the journal, Contexts, of the American Sociological Association. Ultimately, and completely unplanned, this study gave voice and visi bility to the important topic of academic stigma related to sexuality research. It was a lesson to me about undertaking projects with methods unfamiliar to me—go forward and take risks, because you just never know! In sum, our own stories have shown us that silences, neglected feelings, and blind spots can beset virtually all research areas. In this volume, we examine how myriad facets of research—from choice of topic all the way through the publication and reception process—can become unspeakable, whether because of cultural or individual anxieties, political commitments, institutional pressures, conventional research norms, and more. Silence often entangles with feelings such as fear, anger, shame, affecting both the research and the researcher. Yet ongoing conversations about these dynamics may move us forward in our research. They may foster new and creative research strategies for making sense of what, at first glance, feel like insurmountable obstacles regarding what can be said or not said (silences), emotions that we prefer to avoid when doing research (neglected feelings) and areas that we simply do not see (blind spots). In the next section, we review these obstacles, drawing upon the chapters in this volume.

Silences Research is as much about what is said as what is not said. Every research project is full of silences. Our interview partners do not always talk about the things we expect them to talk about, let alone what we want them to talk about with an eye to our own research agenda. Silences crop up around issues that are difficult to talk about or where people lack the language to speak about their experiences. In

Introduction 7

Chapter 1, Sealing Cheng provides a good example of this when she describes how the taboo topic of money, in particular regarding paying for research interviews, can result in painful silences between interviewers and interviewees. Yet breaking those silences can be awkward. One of the most common sources of despair for any interviewer is the sense at the end of the interview that what was most important about the interviewee’s experiences has been left unsaid. Qualitative methodologies are not always helpful here, being geared toward analyzing what is said rather than finding ways to make sense of what has been left out. But not all the silences come from our interview partners. In Chapter 2, madeleine kennedy macfoy explores how she silenced herself against her own political commitments while she was in graduate school after being subjected to a racist interaction with a colleague. She uses her own silence as a way to understand how micro aggressions work to silence people of color in academic settings. Sometimes researchers refrain from addressing topics for fear of seeming naïve, uninformed, or simply on the wrong side of some theoretical fence. Perhaps these topics have fallen from grace due to a particular theoretical or methodological “turn” in one’s discipline. Or there may be normative or ideological “no go” areas that make them seem inappropriate or “politically incorrect.” For example, among contemporary critical scholars, anti Semitism is not a popular topic given the opposition to Zionism and the politics of the Israeli government. For many years, women’s complicities with oppressive practices like cosmetic surgery or starvation or the pleasures of dangerous or risky activities were taboo topics within feminist scholarship. Following poststructuralism, it was risky to talk about “experience” when everything was being treated as textually mediated, while now with the “new materialism” in vogue with sensation and affect becoming the new buzzwords and with “discourse” relegated to the unfashionable past. Many qualitative researchers would argue that silences are precisely what we need to address if we are to make sense of our informants’ experiences. Methodologies have been developed for “listening” for silences and analyzing them (see, Billig, 1999; Poland and Pedersen, 1998; Kawabata and Gastaldo, 2015). Others have argued that in the interests of researcher accountability, it is important to be aware of your own silences and ask yourself which areas of experience you leave out of your research or even avoid when they crop up in interviews with your informants. Yet this is often easier said than done. Sociologist Jonathan Wynn identifies a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” conundrum that can lead to silence by white scholars related to racial dynamics in research design and interview practices (Chapter 3). He explores how he as a white, male researcher grapples with the challenges involved in doing racially sensitive ethnography that neither silences nor exploits communities of color. The question is, of course, whether these silences should always and everywhere be addressed. Some silences may be necessary for the informant and the researcher and may even facilitate the research itself. Doing ethnographical research often depends on the researcher being silent about her identity or motives. Being completely above board about one’s motives can even lead to punitive actions, as Willem de Haan argues in Chapter 4, based on his research experience in the field of corporate crime.

8 Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine

In short, the issue of silence in critical research is clearly more complex than first meets the eye. There can be good reasons to be silent. Research ethics often deal with the importance of protecting the identities of our informants or respecting their wishes not to talk about certain aspects of their lives or not have everything they talked about included in the analysis. Biographies of famous people (scientists, authors, celebrities) are notorious for revealing embarrassing or potentially damaging information about their subjects, often without having gotten permission in advance. The biography of the well known author and philosopher Iris Murdoch by her husband John Bayley (1999), with its posthumous description of her descent into Alzheimer’s disease, is a case in point of the ethical issues that arise when authors reveal discrediting information about their research subjects without their permission. It could be argued that silence is sometimes not only the more pragmatic, but also the more appropriate stance for an ethically responsible inquiry.

Neglected Feelings Intense feelings—both painful and pleasurable—can emerge during research. This is the case for both the researcher and her informants. These can arise, for the researcher, while choosing a research topic, during an interview or participant observation, while analyzing the material, in the process of disseminating the results, or even later, during public reception of the research. Research topics themselves can provoke complicated emotions. Sometimes we may choose or avoid a research topic because, on the periphery of our awareness, it triggers particular feelings. We might choose a particular topic anticipating that the research will be pleasurable, or with the intention to confront painful emotions, only to discover that our feelings are much more unpredictable than we had anticipated. The political culture can shape feelings about our topic before, during, and after research. We might avoid (or even embrace!) topics that seem politically radioactive in the particular historical moment. Fear of political attack can shape our analysis, making us unwilling to present findings that seem unpopular, as many of the authors in this volume have shown. There is by now a voluminous literature on the role of emotions in research (Katz, 1999; Ahmed, 2004; Turner and Stets, 2005; Greco and Stenner, 2008). In this volume, we focus on feelings that researchers tend to avoid, overlook, or ignore. In our own experiences as well as those of our colleagues and students, we have found that researchers easily, and often unwittingly, neglect feelings that emerge in the process of doing research. Emotions can be neglected during the research process for several reasons. Despite a current embrace of emotions in some disciplines, many of us have been trained to bracket our feelings, lest they bias or somehow contaminate our research. Anger, embarrassment, disgust, sexual attraction and shame are just a few examples of feelings that many researchers prefer, or have been trained, to ignore. Feelings are sometimes fleeting. For example, unease might quickly transform into fear or anger, or simply dissipate. These transient feelings may be difficult to

Introduction 9

recognize or even remember, but they can still haunt the research process, analysis, and writing. By contrast, researchers may avoid very intense emotions that arise during a project, such as terror, because they seem potentially threatening or over powering. Ghassan Moussawi and Jyoti Puri engage in a conversation in Chapter 5 about how lingering traumatic pain from war and conflict situations in which researchers are involved may not only seriously affect their overall well being, but may shape interpretation, analysis, and even the willingness to conduct future research, in some cases making it impossible to complete the research at all. Other feelings can escape attention because they are not considered a topic for serious research, or they are considered inappropriate. For example, boredom, despite being a common feeling, both in and outside the research context, falls in this category. As we have seen in Janice’s story above, and in Kathy Davis’s Chapter 6 in which she shows how the interrogation of research boredom can be painful for a researcher who believes she should not only be interested in her interview partner, but able to find something relevant or interesting in the subject she is investigating. Many social researchers have strong political commitments underpinning their research. We usually want our research to inform policy or public conversations about important social issues. Yet in some circumstances, our political passions may prove tricky to negotiate, and therefore easy to ignore. We can find ourselves angry at informants who have beliefs we find offensive or dangerous. It can be uncomfortable to find ourselves disliking informants when we think we should be on their side, or liking informants of whom we feel we should be critical. We might interview informants who make ugly, discriminatory comments that touch on our own social identities. In these circumstances, unacknowledged feelings of anger or hurt can seep into the analytic process. Conversely, in some cases, we might intentionally acknowledge, but then “neglect” such feelings in the interest of furthering the production of social knowledge about bigotry. In a similar vein, Oyman Bas¸aran writes about the issue of suspicion as an inevitable problem in interviews, arguing—much against the grain of qualitative inquiry—that it can sometimes lead to a much deeper analysis of the context in which the research occurs (Chapter 7). Importantly, while some feelings may prove challenging, even painful, others may inspire our research, even filling us with wonder and joy. Passion in research is an essential, yet often undertheorized topic in sociology. In her biographical and— at times—poetic reflection in Chapter 8, Banu Subramanian describes how she finally recognized the importance of what she calls the sublime, a process that not only shaped her botanical research, but broadened her view of the colonialist underpinnings of western science. In conclusion, the authors in this volume show that paying attention to and analysing our feelings—even or particularly the most painful ones—throughout the research process may open new angles of exploration, encourage deeper analytic questions, help us move through stuck places, and deepen our understanding of our projects and ourselves as researchers. This, in turn, can open up surprising avenues of inquiry which have been previously neglected or ignored.

10 Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine

Blind-spots As researchers, we all have blind spots that make it difficult to perceive what is under our noses or prevent us from understanding our research. Despite their pervasiveness, there are no methodologies available for finding blind spots, let alone making sense of them. Indeed, our methodologies and theories often get in the way of us understanding the phenomena we are investigating. Theories sometimes produce no go areas, causing us to avoid topics or perspectives that might open up productive avenues of approach. Methodologies determine what is acceptable; i.e. “scientific” practice, rather than encouraging us to find creative ways to find answers to our questions. Blind spots have multiple causes. They can be produced by indifference. Modern science has often mistakenly prided itself on its universal applicability due to its failure to pay attention to knowledge produced outside the western world (Harding, 2008). Our theoretical, methodological and normative assumptions sometimes induce a tunnel vision which blinkers us for what does not fit neatly into our pre existing frameworks. But sometimes they are induced by myopia regarding our complicities in national or cultural histories involving racism, colonialism or ethnic conflict. We may be blind to these histories despite our best intentions. Ina Schaum’s thoughtful exploration of her own blind spots as a non Jewish German investi gating contemporary Jewish German youth is a case in point (Chapter 9). But even a strong commitment to reflexivity and accountable research may not be enough when it comes to blind spots. As several authors in this volume have demonstrated, feeling empathy for our informants does not prevent short sightedness or failures to understand. While most social scientists are adept at debunking or deconstructing the blind spots of others, we are much less able to uncover our own. In fact, most of us discover our blind spots the hard way; i.e. because something goes terribly wrong in the research. In Chapter 10, Ida Sabelis and Lorraine Nencel show how their assumptions about their relationship to the sex workers who were their informants were off mark, culminating in a failed research project. They analyze their painful process of discovery, after the fact, providing insight into how they gradually became aware of and learned from what they had previously been unable to see. Quantitative researchers are perhaps less inclined to examine their hidden assumptions or question ways that their blind spots might negatively influence what they are able to discover. Nevertheless, they, too, will draw upon social theories that may actually prevent us from understanding the context they are investigating. Feminists scholars with their focus on structures and practices which are oppressive to women have sometimes turned a blind eye to the pleasures of femininity, particularly in regard to practices considered demeaning for women. As David Cort demonstrates in Chapter 11, his notions of rationality rooted in Wes tern social theory also made it difficult for him to take his African informants’ behavior seriously because he could not see it as rational behavior. Inevitably, the social location of the researcher shapes the choices that are made, what seems relevant or uninteresting, and how research is interpreted and findings explained.

Introduction 11

In her classic essay “Situated Knowledges,” the feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) has argued that no one can have perfect knowledge. She calls the illusion that such a thing exists no less than “a god’s eye view.” All knowledge is, in fact, partial and situated. The best we can do is to be accountable for how we know what we know. We should always be prepared to entertain the possibility that we have fallen short. In addition to helping researchers become more accountable and responsible for the knowledge they produce, explorations like those of Schaum, Sabelis and Nencel and Cort provide a model which can encourage other scholars to excavate their own—inevitable—blind spots. After all, uncovering myopias begins with acknowledging that they exist, followed by a willingness to do the hard and painful work of unravelling how and why we were unable to see what was right there before our eyes.

Conclusion In the academic world, research is too often portrayed as a straightforward process which, with the help of a good method or a suitable theory, will proceed with out a snag. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, the reality of doing research is different. This is particularly true in the field of qualitative social research, where researchers engage in field work, conduct interviews, grapple with ambiguous findings, and are regularly confronted with their own partisan involvement with their subject. The contributions in this volume show how researchers negotiate the silences and no go areas in their research. They openly and bravely explore the complicated, confusing, and sometimes painful feelings that emerge in the process of doing research. And they take a hard and critical look at their own blind spots and biases. In different ways, these essays open up discussions about topics that are frequently ignored in academic settings. We have concluded this volume with a conversation between Janice Irvine and Arlene Stein about the risks that critical social scientists, feminist, queer, and anti racist scholars ongoingly face in the course of doing research and—retrospectively—how much they have benefitted from being able to talk about their experiences. While talking about silences, feelings, and blind spots is not a panacea, we are convinced that addressing and analyzing them ultimately produces better research. This process deepens our analyses by reminding us what we have left out. It makes us take a critical look at ourselves and the context in which we do research with the result that we may become more accountable. Instead of struggling with self doubt or privately venting our frustrations on the pages of our field notes, sharing such experiences can break down the isolation which is endemic in academic work. It allows us to learn from our failures and provide an environment where research is more collaborative and less torturous. We invite you, our readers, to join us on these journeys through the complicated research terrains of silences, neglected feelings, and blind spots.

12 Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine

References Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bayley, John (1999) Iris. A Memoir of Iris Murdoch. London: Abacus. Billig, Michael (1999) Freudian Repression. Conversation Creating the Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bordo, Susan. (1997) Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. Berke ley: University of California Press. Clifford, James and Marcus, George E. (1986) Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davis, Kathy (1993) “Nice Doctors and Invisible Patients: The Problem of Power in Feminist Common Sense,” in The Social Organization of Doctor-Patient Communication, 2nd edition. Ed. by S. Fisher and A.D. Todd. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Co, 243 265. Davis, Kathy (1995) Reshaping the Female Body. The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery. New York: Routledge. Davis, Kathy (2007) The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminist Knowledge Travels Across Borders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davis, Kathy (2015a) Dancing Tango: Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World. New York: New York University Press. Davis, Kathy (2015b) “Should a Feminist Dance Tango? The Experience and Politics of Passion,” Feminist Theory 16 (1): 3 21. Fine, Gary Alan (1995). A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foley, Douglas E. (2002) “Critical ethnography: The Reflexive Turn,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 15 (4): 469 490. Geertz, Clifford (1990) Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Greco, Monica and Stenner, Paul (2008) Emotions: A Social Science Reader. New York: Routledge. Gunaratnam, Yasmin (2003) Researching Race and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge and Power. London: Sage. Haraway, Donna (1988) “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575 599. Harding, Sandra (2008) Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Hertz, Rosanna (ed.) (1997) Reflexivity & Voice. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Irvine, Janice M. (1990) Disorders of Desire: Sex and Gender in Modern American Sexology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Irvine, Janice M. (2002) Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Irvine, Janice M. (2012) “Can’t Ask, Can’t Tell: How IRBs Keep Sex in the Closet,” Contexts 11: 28 33. Irvine, Janice M. (2014) “Is Sexuality Research ‘Dirty Work?’ Institutionalized Stigma in the Production of Sexual Knowledge” Sexualities 17 (5/6): 632 656. Jackson, John Jr. and Nadine Weidman (eds) (2006) Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Katz, Jack (1999) How Emotions Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kawabata, Makie and Gastaldo, Denise (2015) “The Less Said, the Better: Interpreting Silence in Qualitative Research,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 14 (4): 1 9.

Introduction 13

Poland, Blake and Pederson, Ann (1998) “Reading Between the Lines: Interpreting Silences in Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 4 (2): 293 312. Ramazanoglu, Caroline and Janet Holland (2002) Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Reinharz, Shulamit (1995) “The Chicago School of Sociology and the Founding of the Brandeis University Graduate Program in Sociology: A Case Study in Cultural Diffusion,” in A Second Chicago School? Ed. by Gary Alan Fine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 273 293. Ryan Flood, Róisín and Gill, Rosalind (2010) Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process. Feminist Reflections. London: Routledge. Seidman, Steven (ed.) (1996) Queer Theory/Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Smith, Dorothy (1978) “K. is Mentally Ill,” Sociology 12 (1): 23 54. Turner, Jonathan H. and Stets, Jan E. (2005) The Sociology of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART I

Silences

1 GOLD IS SILENCE: ON MONEY IN FIELD RELATIONSHIPS Sealing Cheng

Every researcher who has done fieldwork has a story of money to tell, but few write about it. The first time I paid someone in my fieldwork, it was a disaster. It was a cold winter evening in 1998, in a town near the largest US military base in South Korea. I was supposed to start my fieldwork on women “entertainers” in US military camp towns, together with three other Korean female research students. We were being accompanied by four US servicemen, whom I befriended while salsa dancing at a Latin American festival in downtown Seoul. The soldiers were doing me a favor—as our team was interested in migrant women from the Phi lippines and ex Soviet states working in clubs frequented by these US soldiers, who had been brought in as cheap labor to fill the vacancies left by Korean women. The NGO in the area, to our surprise, did not have any direct connections to the migrant women in the clubs, even though it had published reports identifying these women as “victims of sex trafficking” based on stories from Korean women in the clubs, who both pitied them and saw them as competition. The soldiers made our seren dipitous Plan B possible—of all things—by way of my salsa dancing. The plan was to divide into two teams: two male soldiers and two female researchers. The researchers would pay for everyone’s drinks, including those for the “entertainers,” and use the 20 minutes they spent with us to try and break the ice, thus kick starting the research. The Filipina who approached my team at the table was in her early 20s, or so she said. She sat on the sofa between the two women in our team, and sipped on her orange juice, as she politely answered our awkward questions while main taining a well rehearsed smile. We explained that we were not journalists but stu dents, and would like to understand her life in Korea. Her courteous demeanor however, failed to make up for the vacuity of the conversation. I still remember her absurdly long eyelashes and how they flapped up and down as she blinked. Between the disquieting silence and awkward laughs, she said she wasn’t fond of kimchi and DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 3

18 Sealing Cheng

other spicy Korean foods, but that she was happy in Korea because she got to see snow for the first time in her life. The 20 minutes passed and she walked away. The other team’s luck wasn’t much better. I was beginning to think that that was the end of my PhD. This epic failure serves as a reminder that using money to gain access in fieldwork research, specifically through partaking in hierarchical consumer service provider interactions, in my case, a suspicious brigade of researchers accompanied by U.S soldiers, was a guaranteed flop. Visiting her in her workplace and paying for her drink strictly contained the interaction within the market transaction. The woman’s company was nothing more than a commodity that we paid for. She knew we would not come back and become a regular customer, yet she still had to put up with our awkward presence because it was part of her job. Her vulnerability as a migrant woman worker was reinforced; no ice was broken, and no research could start. My research was thankfully rescued by an interpersonal connection: One of the soldiers who accompanied us to the clubs, a sergeant in his 40s who had left his home in Bolivia to join the US military in the 1980s, knew a guy on his squad who was dating a Filipina in one of the clubs. He introduced me to this young white man, who asked me questions about my research, disputed my use of the term “sex workers” in describing the Filipinas, and subsequently agreed to take me along to meet his girlfriend at the club. We sat down and chatted at a table one afternoon with all the lights on. Everyone was quite relaxed except for me. Some of the women who also worked in the club listened in. I felt vulnerable as a complete outsider. I explained the scope and aim of my research, and asked if she would be willing to talk to me. Leaning against her boyfriend, she casually said, “Sure,” and we arranged to meet a few days later on our own at a fried chicken restaurant. That restaurant, I found out, served as a kind of community center for all the Filipinas who were partial to fried chicken. My research took off from there. I would continue to pay for many more fried chicken meals at that restaurant. Money remained crucial to building relationships and expanding my networks, but in the form of meals, gifts, and donations of clothes and feminine products when a flood hit the camp town and forced the clubs to close. The flow of money was unidirectional, just as the flow of information about the gender and sexual dynamics in the clubs flowed in the reverse direction. A kind of reciprocity was taking place, all the same. During all my fieldwork in Korea, I never had to give out cash. The entertai ners’ main targets for eliciting financial assistance remained their American custo mers boyfriends (Cheng, 2010), so the student researcher was spared. But as my fieldwork turned transnational and took on a longitudinal approach over the years, things changed. It started as soon as I returned to England to prepare for writing my thesis. My Filipina informants had also returned to the Philippines, and their money began to run out. Some of them pleaded that they urgently needed money and asked if I could help. While I was to hear a similar version of this plea for help in the next two decades, at that point, I had never been asked for money before by

Gold is Silence: On Money in Field Relationships 19

people whom I considered my informants. I was worried because, as a PhD stu dent, I had never had any deep thoughts about the ethical implications of giving money to my informants. Yet there was an implicit assumption that we should not be giving money. It is not that we ever discussed this in our graduate training, but I recall hearing once or twice the contemptuous exclamation, “That’s paying for information!” Gifts, meals, and travel expenses were ok, but certainly not cash. Veena Das and Jonathan Parry (1983) were critical of ethnographers who received “information very largely through direct payment to selected respondents,” as they risked “spoil(ing) the field” by “hiring” respondents, thereby marginalizing the poorly funded. Linguistic skills, social acuity, cultural sensitivity, personal charm, and perseverance constitute our arsenal of tools to gain access to our informants’ worlds, not money. I believed that even if money did pass hands from researchers to informants, it should be a hushed event to avoid criticisms of buying informa tion or abuse of power. I felt very conflicted about sending money to my informants. Would I be crossing a line of no return that would change our relationship irrevocably? Would they, from the moment I agreed to help, see me as a source of money, and thereby undermine the rapport and understanding that I had cultivated for so long? Would I be reinforcing the structural inequalities between myself and the women? But they did need the money— should my doubts trump their needs? This dilemma led to the fateful conversation I had with my doctoral supervisor, a long term Africanist who had conducted fieldwork in East Africa for over three decades. After a polite exchange about coming back from fieldwork, I got up in a pretense of getting ready to go when in fact I was mustering the courage to ask the question I so desperately needed advice on. “So, have you ever given money to your informants?” I hesitantly asked. My supervisor, in the most blasé of tones, said, “Yes, of course.” I was shocked. “You have?” “Yes, of course. My career was built on the lives they shared with me. And if they need help with money, of course I would give it to them. I give them money all the time!” All the time? I left his office shocked and anxious: now I had to start grappling with even more difficult questions, for instance, how much and how often I should help my informants. Having just come back from the Philippines, where one of my informants took me to visit her cousin living in the slums, I remembered the contrast between the magnitude of their needs and my ability as a doctoral student and it was daunting. This article discusses some of the dilemmas around money in relationships between researchers and their socially and financially precarious research subjects. It is particularly pertinent for researchers who interact with their informants beyond a defined research setting (an interview room, a school, a hospital, for example), and beyond a specific time frame (research relationships that last for years if not decades). What kinds of assessment are appropriate in making decisions about money in these relationships? What are the limits for giving and receiving? How much is enough when financial needs are virtually unlimited for the marginalized groups that one works with? These pertinent issues are particularly complex for researchers who become enmeshed in local social and kinship ties in long term field research, as well as long term reciprocities and expectations well after fieldwork (Benthall et al., 1997:

20 Sealing Cheng

27). Instead of providing a uniform answer, my goal is to provoke discussion by harnessing my own struggles to speak about concerns of ethics, morality, debt and reciprocity within the “dense meanings deposited in money” (Martin, 1986).

The Meanings of Money in the Field Anthropologists have long acknowledged that researchers’ relationship with their informants constitute a gift economy, regulated by the norms of reciprocity (Smith and Kleinman, 2010; Glowczewski et al., 2013). It is through the circulation of gifts, the sharing of food, time, and stories that make our relationships in the field mean ingful, from whence we learn about our research subjects’ worldviews and experi ences. Rarely talked about is the circulation or flow of money in the field. Having done research first with migrant sex workers and then asylum seekers and refugees in the last 20 years, I have had ample opportunities to not only ask questions but make decisions about the role money should play in maintaining relations with, sustaining lives, and fulfilling aspirations of people in my research. What kind of relationships are appropriate in the field, what should we do with the power that money garners (or not), and what kind of economic morality is being enacted, violated, or transformed? Money takes different forms in fashioning research relations: buying a meal, gifting, providing medical supplies, giving a loan or direct payment constitute the tem porary reciprocity part and parcel to gaining access to informants’ time, space, and lives. These acts may feel very different for both the researcher and the researched, but they nonetheless constitute a continuum of monetized exchange. How the form of exchange is understood, however, depends on local understanding of money, relations, and morality; as well as the interpersonal relations that are being forged and maintained between the giver and the recipient. There is a wide range of behaviors that could be scrutinized,1 however my focus here is on research informants’ direct or indirect request for financial help. In her four part Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures “The Meaning of Money in China and the United States” in 1986, Emily Martin (1986) dealt with the two paradoxes concerning “money’s socially (integrating) function” and its “socially (disintegrating) function,” using her ethnographic experiences in rural Taiwan and a Methodist sect in the urban US respectively to illuminate the differences. While money could play both roles at the same time—as Simmel (1978: 345) said: “Money simultaneously exerts both a disintegrating and a unifying effect”– these paradoxes shape how we conduct and write about fieldwork research in academia. On the one hand, postcolonial and feminist scholars have highlighted the hierarchical relationship in conventional research methods, and subsequently advocate for the importance of reciprocity and the ideal of equality in feminist research (Stacey, 1988 Abu Lughod, 1990; DeVault, 1996; Irwin, 2006 Huisman, 2008). Their work has instilled a sensibility and consciousness about how researchers are “doing structure” in the research process, and urged reflexivity as well as development of innovative research methods that could mitigate the possibly exploitative nature of research.2 These critical reflections have also

Gold is Silence: On Money in Field Relationships 21

impacted protocols on research ethics outside feminist scholarship. For example, the “Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice” of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth (2011: 6) state that there should be a “fair return for assistance:” “there should be no economic exploitation of indivi dual informants, translators, groups and research participants or cultural or biological materials; fair return should be made for their help and services.”3 The big question is of course, what constitutes “fair return”, and what form such return should take. At what point does a relationship of “balanced reciprocity” (exchange within a specific time frame) change into “generalized reciprocity” (without expectation of immediate return)? Finding their lives described, or even prominently featured, in a thesis or a book as the AAA advocates may mean nothing to our informants. On the other hand, and with much stronger moral intensity, money remains a taboo in many considerations of research methodologies and ethics. There is an undercurrent of belief that modern money is dehumanizing and homogenizing (see discussion about the depersonalizing effects of money as a Western folk theory in Bloch and Parry, 2010). None of the feminist works quoted above, for instance, discussed the subject of money and how money shaped their interactions in the field, despite meticulous accounts of other forms of trust, intimacy, and reciprocity. An exception was Latin America researchers Cajas and Perez (2017: 143) who discussed their “guilt” from using money in the field as a “technique to establish, to keep, to build and to rebuild relationships with research subjects,” and their observation that colleagues may condemn the use of incentives, compensations or rewards to approach research subjects, but nevertheless use them. Fernández (2003) asserted that there is a taboo against talking about economic compensation for research subjects, despite the fact that in Latin America, “offering money to people according to their social rank is also a sign of respect and prestige” (Fernández, 2003, quoted in Cajas and Perez, 2017: 145). Certainly, fixed sum research pay ments in one off or short term research projects as compensation are considered reasonable and commonplace, especially in experimental research. But researchers whose intellectual projects are rooted in long term fieldwork and developing intimate bonds and empathy for their research subjects have been evasive in writing about the meanings of money in fieldwork. It is understandable that one should be careful to avoid accusations of bribery, purchasing information, and reproducing unequal relations. Yet it is exactly in this kind of long term research that money, as part of the gift economy, inevitably circulates between researchers and the community they study—in an array of directions. As Cajas and Perez (2017: 145) succinctly summarized, there is a distinction between experimental research that “work on human beings (emphasis original),” and social sciences research that “work with them.” In the next section, I reflect further on some of my own dilemmas involving money, morality, and friendship with my research informants across different sites and at different stages of my own personal and professional life. I further retrieve some of my own feelings of guilt, desire, disappointment, and contentment to illuminate the truncated yet interwoven lifeworlds (Smith and Kleinman, 2010: 1) I cohabit with my informants over the last two decades.

22 Sealing Cheng

More than Research Subjects, Less Than Friends Marshall Sahlins (1972: 182–3) stated that “every exchange, as it embodies some coefficient of sociability, cannot be understood in its material terms apart from its social terms.” To understand and evaluate how money flows in the field, we need to understand the reciprocal relationships within a particular time frame. In the context of my research, I was the researcher, and the people I interacted with were technically my “subjects of research” or “informants;” but in long term fieldwork, such relationships often evolve in complexity. Depending on our gender, age, family roles, as well as the time we got to spend with each other, the relationships could develop, break down, and be rekindled over time. In these shifting reciprocal relations, the meanings of money may vary, accordingly. We enter the field as researchers first and foremost. The intensity of our motivation in learning about our research subjects will almost always exceed any reciprocal interest of theirs in our lives. Long term relationships further generate a default mode of interactions in which we share a lot less about our lives than they do. Researchers feeling disappointed or surprised by the expectation of material support from people they felt close to in the field is not unheard of: Paul Rabinow (1977: 29) lamented, “basically, I had been conceiving of him as a friend because of the seeming personal relationship we had established. But Ibrahim, a lot less confusedly, had basically con ceptualized me as a resource.” Even Esther Hermitte (Fernández, 2003, quoted in Cajas and Perez, 2017) from her fieldwork experience in Latin America, where offering money to people according to their social rank is a sign of respect and prestige, bemoaned that one of her informants treated her as “the bank of Mexico par excel lence.” The unequal access to resources between the researcher and the researched made the mutuality that tends to be idealized in friendship difficult if not impossible. There have been times where I have developed a stronger bond with some informants, people I would consider as friends—the kind of relationship defined by mutual knowledge, care, and concern. There were also times where I assumed the role of an elder and/or mother figure because of age and generational differences. These bonds, however, do not dismiss the reality that the relationships were formed, at the outset, for the purpose of research. And I at times forgot this crucial premise, allowing an excess of desire for reciprocity that could only remain unfulfilled. I met Grace, an asylum seeker from East Africa, in Hong Kong in 2012. She was an outgoing and charismatic woman in her early 30s. The first time we met in the office of an NGO, Grace invited me to her graduation exhibition hosted by an arts school for refugees. Over the years, we had grown close. I learned about why she fled her home, the children she left behind, and her family feuds spread across Europe and East Africa. She was “Auntie Grace” to my children, and had visited my home a handful of times. I had helped her get access to second hand computers and electronics, while she would tell me about her struggles, as well as gossip and stories of other asylum seekers. I was there when she was struggling to get out of an abusive relationship; I provided her with small sums of money to make it through each month, and we celebrated her birthday every year. But there were

Gold is Silence: On Money in Field Relationships 23

occasions when I said I was not able to help. Sometimes she would complain, “How come you can’t find me an iPad/a fridge/a bed now?” I once responded, “I am not an ATM machine. I can’t whip an iPad out of thin air.” We once stopped talking to each other for three months after she got mad at me for not picking up the phone when she was lost searching for my home. Despite my awareness of our social and economic discrepancies, I did not want to coddle or infantilize Grace. I did not hide my frustrations and neither did Grace. This was the only way if we were to sustain this relationship long term. One day, we were hanging out in Grace’s impeccably clean 80 square foot home (“kitchen” and bathroom inclusive). She told me about a researcher from my university who wanted to interview her. “I asked her ‘What’s in it for me?’” The answer was a $100 supermarket coupon. “Ha! I am not going there just for a $100 coupon!” “How much do you think would be worth your while?” I asked. “At least $200.” I suggested that Grace should let the researcher know. She shook her head, “These people, they want to give us $100 and expect us to tell them everything. Ha, we are not beggars. I am not going.” Grace was well aware of her value to researchers after multiple requests for interviews. Participating in the research was a transaction for Grace, and a $100 coupon was not considered “balanced reciprocity” for her contribution, but rather an act of charity fit only for “beggars.” Sitting at one end of Grace’s bed, sipping tea she had prepared for me in “traditional” East African fashion, while she was dismissing a fellow researcher on the other end felt surreal. I was relieved to know that I was more than just a researcher to her, but was I a friend? I once arranged with Grace to shop for groceries with her government issued food card, upon which I would pay her the amount spent, giving her some access to much needed cash. But I had to reschedule at the last minute as I needed to take my mother to the hospital, and texted her to say so. She was understandably disappointed, as the money she cashed in with her food card would go to her rent, and some of the small luxuries she liked to consume. After my mother turned out to be fine, I texted Grace to meet up that same afternoon. I fully expected her to ask about my mother when we met, but she never did. We shopped; I gave her the money, and we parted. I was disappointed and, if truth be told, hurt. Yet I had to remind myself that a key part of my importance to Grace was primarily access to material and financial support in her enforced destitution. I emphasized “primarily” because I was certain that we shared some genuine connection, however transient and episodic. Two hours later, Grace texted me, “Oh, I forgot to ask you about your mother. How is she?” I duly let her know that my mother was alright and thanked her, albeit hiding my disappointment. I discovered through my own disillusionment that I had the unrealistic expecta tion for Grace to be both a friend and a research subject. My emotional concern and material support for Grace was an integral part of my engagement as a researcher of asylum seekers in my home city of Hong Kong. And I have become an important part of Grace’s life as a resourceful local connection who is more than a researcher. In other words, Grace and I have become a part of each other’s life worlds in

24 Sealing Cheng

different ways—just as we could get disappointed by and frustrated with each other for different reasons. While engagement is necessary for research, however, it is not necessarily mutual.

Trust and Moral Responsibility in Giving Money Conducting research with people who are consistently living in destitution throws into relief the structural violence that we are party to. This is particularly the case for university researchers like myself who receive support from our institutions to conduct research. We are able to travel abroad to conferences and gain academic recognition primarily because our research subjects have allowed us to participate in their lives. The generalized reciprocity, marked by altruism, that we sometimes lay claim to may in fact be a way to redeem ourselves for being perpetrators, witnesses, and reporters of their suffering. Nevertheless, reciprocal relations are about long term exchange, and gift giving always incurs a debt (Mauss, 2002). What kind of debt does giving money incur? And what kind of power and responsibility does one garner in the act of passing on cash? What other impacts may the passing of money have on a relationship? I met Gene when he arrived in Hong Kong from Latin America as a 14 year old along with his parents and younger brother as asylum seekers. Five years later, his father returned home due to a family emergency, but Gene remained in Hong Kong with his brother and mother. Gene was a sensitive, respectful, and thoughtful young man. He left school before he turned 18 as it became too stressful for him. He felt a sense of familial obligation: that he should be the man of the household, and take care of his mother in his father’s place; but he was not allowed to work. He spends most of his days making music, hanging out with his friends, getting drunk, and smoking weed. He was explicit however, that he would not touch hard drugs, as he had seen the harm they had caused on his peers. He shared how, if he had stayed home, he would have been married already and would be starting his own family at the age of 19. The persistent destitution and uncertainty of life for asylum seekers is erosive of one’s spirits. In 2016, Gene joined a musical band that I had co founded with other asylum seekers. All band members received a share of the irregular and infrequent donations that the band receives for performances, I would also give a small sum at each rehearsal for their transportation expenses, and buy them meals. For these men between the ages of 20 and 45 from Latin America and Africa, I was an older woman and a mother, at the same time occupying a prestigious social status as a professor. Receiving money from me was not just a source of support, but an appropriate affirmation of our relative age and rank. One morning, Gene abruptly asked my research assistant for HK$800 (around USD $100), stating that his mother needed the money, but he was too embarrassed to ask me directly. There was no food at home, and they had to borrow eggs from their neighbor upstairs. The family clearly needed the money. Asking my research assistant, who was much closer in age to Gene and bonded with him, was Gene’s way of asking me. He needed the money that afternoon, and the urgency was a bit unusual. When

Gold is Silence: On Money in Field Relationships 25

relaying Gene’s request, my research assistant also stated that the amount was exactly the cost of a portion of weed. We then debated whether we should give Gene the money. Was he lying to us? We certainly did not want to be paying for his weed; but we also knew that it was entirely credible that the family needed the money. Trust in fieldwork is often discussed as that which researchers need to “gain” from their research subjects, such that they would feel comfortable to share their thoughts and details of their lives with the researcher. Less often is trust discussed in assessing the accounts research subjects provide, more often it is framed in terms of “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 1988), or how different meanings are possible (Wolf, 2003). Even less visible in research writing is a researcher’s explicit discussion of whether s/he “trusted” a research subject’s reason for requesting financial support. Based on the long term interactions I had with Gene and his mother I decided to give Gene the benefit of the doubt. It seemed that the money did go to Gene’s mother after all, but this episode pushed my research assistant and me to question the power and moral responsibility of giving money. For example, I knew that Gene, at least on a few occasions, would spend the money he received after a performance on alcohol, or “splur ging” on his friends. This was of course not the “rational” way for him to spend the money—withholding the possible contribution to the domestic economy would loop back to the monthly financial shortage the family would ultimately experience. Yet as an anthropologist who was well aware of the symbolic meanings of money and consumption, I also recognized Gene’s desire for tem porary relief from the habitual financial stress he experienced. Rather than having to “beg” for eggs, and stand in line at a church for a $30 (USD$4) transportation allowance, it was important both personally and socially for him to express himself and feel: “I am living the life I want!” What concerned me in addition to the issue of trust was whether the dependence on substance for relief would adversely affect Gene’s health. Would I be responsible for contributing to his demise if that happened? While I know plenty of people who use weed, most of them were not living in enforced destitution with little hope for a future in the city they were living in. What moral responsibility comes with the giving of money? My research assistant raised an interesting question on this subject at a panel during which we discussed the flow of money in the field. Her point was that when we paid to consume the music of famous rock stars, we knew that they would be spending some of that money on drugs and other illegal substances, but we never hesitated to transfer the money. Were we assuming a kind of moral authority on asylum seekers that we would not normally assume on other adults? Her question did give me pause. In addition, a senior scholar on the panel said, “You gave him the money that he asked for. If he happened to die of an overdose, it’s not on you.” Rationally, I understood the concept of autonomy in liberal theory that this scholar was using to delimit my responsibility. But emotionally, the affective entanglements that I have developed for Gene made it difficult to distance myself in this manner. I had known him for seven years—witnessing how he matured into a young man, feeling disappointed at his failure to pursue the various education opportunities we

26 Sealing Cheng

had labored to help him access at his request, being proud of him as he developed into a charismatic artist performer, and feeling humbled by some of his insights on Hong Kong. (He said in 2016: “I see that Hong Kong people are prisoners. Like they’re prisoners of the states, of rules, of political parties. Of the stupid people that are trying to control them. And I can see that there’s hunger for freedom.”) I wanted to see him thrive. In 2019, Gene decided to leave Hong Kong for good, embarking on a circui tous journey through Southeast Asia to his destination, hoping for a better life. He asked for my help, and we met and chatted. He was visibly reluctant to leave behind all his friends, and the reputation he had built in Hong Kong as a musician; but being an illegal for more than a decade was no doubt bad for one’s soul. Unlike my usual way of pressing money into his palm (to avoid others seeing and to downplay the amount given), I instead put the money in an envelope, both because it was a large sum, and because I saw it as a farewell gift. “Wow, you even put it in an envelope!” He exclaimed. He was excited. He looked like a kid again, and he gave me a big, long hug. I was relieved to learn that Gene reached his destination safely two months later and to this day I still catch up with his musical creations on Facebook. Providing financial help does not grant one moral authority over the reci pient, but neither does it exempt one from feeling morally responsible, for money is just one part of the exchange in the relationships we forge in research. Furthermore, just as the envelop embodied a subtle dignity for Gene, how one invests the money with meaning may sometimes be more important than the cash itself.

What Price a Moral Good Should Bear? Ira and I first met in South Korea in 1999. She just arrived in South Korea on a one year “entertainer” visa, working in one of the clubs serving US soldiers around military bases. She eventually became my primary informant and a key figure in my book on migrant Filipina entertainers in South Korea (Cheng, 2010). When anti trafficking laws made it impossible for her to return to Korea after she finished her one year contract, a diplomat friend of mine helped Ira migrate to Europe as a domestic helper in 2003, where she has settled down since then. I have accom panied Ira on her return visits to the Philippines twice, and have met her parents, siblings, and children. But one day in 2007, while I was working in the US, Ira called from Europe to tell me that her father was suffering from kidney failure, and needed weekly dialysis to stay alive. Dialysis was a costly procedure. And no one in her family was in a position to foot the bills. Ira was the only one working overseas at that moment, but she was already deep in debts. Despite having worked overseas for almost a decade, her entire family relied on her for both regular expenses and emergencies. She was considering selling the lot of land in her hometown that she had bought with all her savings from the years of working overseas. But even doing that could pay for only a year of her father’s treatment.

Gold is Silence: On Money in Field Relationships 27

Having witnessed the hardships Ira went through as a migrant woman through the years, I did not want all her hard work to be for naught. At least she should have some time before making such a big decision. Therefore, I asked Ira, “How much do you need?” And that was when she said, “I don’t wanna say about the price (sic) so I leave it to you, then I will pay you monthly but slowly… .” Communicating her distress without making a demand, or giving me a precise figure, Ira was careful not to turn the loan into an entitlement, but she also left the moral weight of making such a decision entirely to me. It was daunting for me to think that a person’s life was on the balance. There were various reasons for giving Ira money: it was partly because of her that I was able to become a tenure track professor at a prestigious liberal arts college in the US. Besides, I was a single woman with no family burdens and paying the money for Ira’s father’s dialysis every month would not break my bank account. That was for sure. But I also did not think that I should shoulder the responsibility for Ira’s father’s dialysis in the long run, not to mention that doing it long term would ingratiate Ira to me disproportionately. How could one put a price on a man’s life? I panicked for days wondering what I should do—I was not his daughter, nor a millionaire with unlimited funds, and I felt no obligation towards the man except through my relationship with Ira. How much of my money should I give to sustain this man’s life? I was pulling my hair out, and the few friends I talked to sympathized but could not help with the question of “how much.” After a tormenting few days, as I dug into my experi ences with the death of my own loved ones, I realized the question should not be about the money per se, but about what meanings the money can acquire. I resorted to considering how much time a person would reasonably need to make a decision in Ira’s situation—between her father’s life and her future with her three children as a single mother. Ultimately, I decided on two months. This might sound rather random, but the decision was informed by my experience a few years earlier with my father’s death from stage IV cancer—approximately the time it took to overcome the shock and get ready for the inevitable (if one could ever be ready for such a thing). This served as a reference point, as each father daughter relationship was obviously different and unique. With this rationale, I contacted Ira to inform her that I would contribute to two months of dialysis treatment for her father. The money bought time for Ira to express her love for her father on the phone, compose her emotions, and plan for the future. By the end of the two months, Ira’s father was not doing too well even with the dialysis. Ira realized that she was doing all that she could, and she was ready to let go. Her father passed away another two months later. Ira could not afford to return home for the fun eral, as she had no available leave. I felt dearly for her loss, but I also knew that I had done what I felt comfortable doing. Ira never paid me back, and I never expected her to. When I first decided to provide financial help to people I met in fieldwork, I pretty much made up my mind that I should not have the expectation that they would return the favor, regardless of what they said. While it would be delightful if they could repay the

28 Sealing Cheng

money as promised, I did not want the anticipation for repayment to unduly affect our relationship. For Ira, pledging to pay back the loan was a matter of asserting her dignity. Practically, at least in the years that I have known her since 1999, Ira had not been in a position to pay back the loan until possibly 2019. Every time she thought she was approaching something akin to financial security, one crisis or another in her family sapped her savings. She was planning a wed ding with her childhood sweetheart in the Philippines in 2014, and invited me to be her bridesmaid. The wedding was ultimately cancelled two months ahead of time as the funds were redirected to yet another family emergency. After helping her husband to move to Europe and to establish his career as a chef, Ira made sure that he would contribute the majority of his income to building their own lives, and not to his previous marriage. Ira finally found stability in her life. In 2019, they had a stable double income household with her as a domestic worker supplementing her income with endlessly baking and cooking Filipino food. When I visited them that summer, Ira was getting ready to move into a new home with a garden, and was excited about buying a car so that her husband could make more money on the side. They invited me to a fancy Japanese res taurant in the major European capital city that had now become their home. For the first time, I did not leave Ira a small sum of cash before my departure. Ira was proud to show me the life she had built for herself in this foreign land. She wrote me via social media after my visit, “Thank you for visiting me, Sealing. It means a lot to me.” For me, her newfound stability and security was more rewarding than the repayment of any loan. The moral quandaries that the financial needs of Ira (and her extended family) over the years put me through have been valuable lessons about the meanings of money and human relationships. Our long term relationship and rapport have allowed us to understand the money I gave her as a sentimental and empathetic gift, and a display of the intimate knowledge that I have of Ira and her relationships (Zelizer, 2017: 114). The small sums of money I provided along the way served to relieve only some of her stress, but allowed me both anthropological and emotional insights into a migrant woman’s life that I would otherwise not be privy to. For 15 years, I experienced vicariously the experience of a migrant woman who had to deal with constant financial, familial, and immigration crises. She had always dreamt of a life where she could stop worrying about money and have her own home and business. Ultimately, it was her own drive and will that made it possible for her new life in 2019. Since 2020, her weekly Facebook posts were filled with photos of freshly baked goods and delicacies to solicit customers from the local Filipino community. From struggling with the stigma of sex work in Korea in 1999, to being disgusted with having to wash other people’s toilet bowls in Europe in 2003, to crying over her children’s teen pregnancies at home while stuck in a limbo as an undocumented migrant, to establishing a comfortable life overseas, Ira has come a very long way. I feel privileged to be able to follow her two decades long transnational journey.

Gold is Silence: On Money in Field Relationships 29

Unpacking Dilemmas as a Feminism of Uncertainty The stories of money in the field I present here are nothing extraordinary. It is the act of retelling them in academic writing that is unusual. It is important to point out that the ability to stay silent on the subject of money is a reflection of privilege. It means that one can afford to keep one’s mind off food, water, electricity bills, rent, transportation, etc. for a sustained period of time in order to discuss lofty ideas such as reciprocity and moral responsibility. But instead of being immobilized by such privilege or allowing such dilemmas to push me into silence, I have decided to openly discuss my own “blundering into darkness” in the spirit of what the late feminist scholar activist Ann Snitow (2015) called “the feminism of uncertainty.” She treated uncertainty as “a temperament, a political aesthetic, a counterweight to var ious forms of rigidity, false closures, or too perfect dreams of unity or order”; rather than “anything goes,” uncertainty “puts extra stress on the need to define—in each situation—what one is doing” (Snitow, 2015: 308). I would like to end by recalling a previous discussion of money in the field I made. In recounting my departure after spending an extended period of time with sex workers in a red light district in Seoul, I described my experience of receiving money from them: When I left in late April 2000, I was sent off with lavish gifts, including as much as (US)$200 cash and a dressy jacket of equivalent worth. I was touched and stunned by the generosity. But deep down, I was abhorred by my knowledge of the number of clients they had to take in order to give me these gifts. The very idea that they had sex with men for me made me very uncomfortable; but there was also no way I could reject their gifts without inflicting insult. As Marcel Mauss (2002 [1954]: 12) so clearly articulated, “to make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of oneself.” I needed to see the gift as the giver saw it—as a gesture of goodwill and care from one independent woman capable of expressing such emotions in material terms to another, younger woman, creating a social relationship that is also an exchange of indebtedness. By entering their social world, I acquired the obligation to receive and, therefore, to reciprocate.” (Cheng, 2012: 40) It was only years later, after I got a job as a professor in the US, that I had the opportunities to reciprocate. The woman who gave me the cash unfortunately had cancer, and had to stop working; I visited her and gave her some money before she left the red light district. The other woman who gave me the jacket left the red light district to live with a former customer, but life was difficult, as she had to stop working and became dependent on the man. I wired her money regularly for a few years before we eventually lost contact. Certainly, they were not part of my research by then, but I was still in their social world. Being a part of the social world of our research subjects effectively means blurring the line between our roles as researcher,

30 Sealing Cheng

acquaintance, friend, parental figure, family member, etc. Our sympathetic understanding comes with being embedded in their social worlds and symbolic webs of meaning and obligations, including but not exclusive to the use of money as one of the many roads to human exchange. This naturally applies to both the receiving and giving of money. As Emily Martin (2014 [1986]) observed three decades ago, money has the ability “to be many things at once that, in and of itself, does not necessarily enhance and create or diminish and destroy human relationships.” In the long term relationships that make field research possible, and that often last beyond the actual research, the entrance of money into the relationships already rich in reciprocity is not going to undermine the relation ships. It is not the money, but the persisting inequalities between researchers and the researched that will ensure a whole range of moral questions, dilemmas, uncertainties waiting for us to unpack.

Notes 1 Previous discussions by anthropologists included questions such as whether anthro pologists should pay their respondents who are knowledge specialists (Srivastava, 1992); or how informants may expect or benefit from a share of the proceeds from researchers’ publications in long term reciprocity (Gottlieb and Graham, 1999). I could add a number of questions that could attenuate the paucity of considerations about money in fieldwork research, for example: Under what circumstances does money change hands between the researcher and the researched? How do researchers utilize and negotiate with the impact money may have on hierarchies of gender, ethnicity, age, and status? How do researchers engage with the ways money is thought about and calculated in the field? What are the taboos and rituals associated with money that they partake in, and sometimes violate? 2 Such awareness and commitment, however, do not eliminate the many ethical dilemmas in conducting research. DeVault concluded that “moral purity” in feminist qualitative research was “simply unattainable” (DeVault, 1996: 39). 3 The American Anthropological Association, the European Association of Social Anthro pologists, and the World Council of Anthropological Associations do not have similar guidelines on compensation or “fair return” for informants as of August 2020. The AAA does have a clause on giving due credit in publications: “Anthropologists should appropriately acknowledge all contributions to their research, writing, and other related activities, and compensate contributors justly for any assistance they provide. They are obligated to give students and employees appropriate credit for the authorship of their ideas, and encourage the publication of worthy student and employee work” (2012). Any form of material or monetary compensation is kept silent while textual recognition is promoted.

References Abu Lughod, Lila (1990) “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?,” Women and Performance 5: 7 27. American Anthropological Association (AAA) (2012) “Principles of Professional Responsi bility.” https://ethics.americananthro.org/category/statement/. Benthall, Jonathan, Alma Gottlieb, and Sean Kingston (1997) “Gift Relationships between Ethnographers and Their Hosts,” Anthropology Today 13 (6): 27. Bloch, Maurice and Jonathan Parry (2010) Money and The Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gold is Silence: On Money in Field Relationships 31

Cajas, Juan and Yolinliztli Perez (2017) “Anthropologist, Economic Retribution and Informants: Notes about Ethics in Social Research,” Agathos 8 (1): 143 154. Cheng, Sealing (2010) On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers in U.S. Military Camp Towns in South Korea. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cheng, Sealing (2012) “Private Lives of Public Women: Photos of Sex Workers (minus the sex) in South Korea,” Sexualities 16 (1/2): 30 42. Das, Veena and Jonathan Parry (1983) “Fieldwork in South Asia,” Man 18: 790 791. DeVault, Marjorie L. (1996) “Talking Back to Sociology: Distinctive Contributions of Feminist Methodology,” Annual Review of Sociology 22: 29 50. Enslin, Elizabeth (1994) “Beyond Writing: Feminist Practice and the Limitations of Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology 9: 537 568. Fernández, Nuria (2003) “A propósito de las actitudes y roles del antropólogo en su trabajo de campo,” Revista de Dialectologia y Tradiciones Populares 58(1): 153 170. Glowczewski, Barbara, Rosita Henry and Ton Otto (2013) “Relations and Products: Dilemmas of Reciprocity in Fieldwork,” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 14 (2): 113 125. Gottlieb, Alma and Philip Graham (1999) “Revising the Text, Revisioning the Field: Reciprocity over the Long Term,” Anthropology & Humanism 24 (2):117 128. Haraway, Donna (1988) “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575 599. Huisman, Kimberley (2008) “‘Does This Mean You’re Not Going to Come Visit Me Anymore?’:An Inquiry into an Ethics of Reciprocity and Positionality in Feminist Eth nographic Research,” Sociological Inquiry 78 (3): 372 396. Irwin, Katherine (2006) “Into the Dark Heart of Ethnography: The Lived Ethics and Inequality of Intimate Field Relationships,” Qualitative Sociology 29: 155 175. Jacobs, Janet Liebman (2004) “Women, Genocide, and Memory: The Ethics of Feminist Ethnography in Holocaust Research,” Gender and Society 18: 223 238. Martin, Emily (2014) [1986] “The Meaning of Money in China and the United States,” The HAU-Morgan Lecture Initiative, Vol. 1. Chicago: HAU Press. www.haujournal.org/ha unet/Martin LHM Lectures/01martin.html. Mauss, Marcel (2002) [1954]The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchanges in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge. Rabinow, Paul (1977) Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sahlins, Marshall (1972) Stone Age Economics. London: Routledge. Simmel, Georg (2004) [1978] The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge. Smith, Lindsay, and Arthur Kleinman (2010) “Emotional Engagements: Acknowledgement, Advocacy, and Direct Action,” in James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer (eds) Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Snitow, Ann (2015) The Feminism of Uncertainty: A Gender Diary. Durham: Duke University Press. Stacey, Judith (1988) “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?,” Women’s Studies International Forum 11 (1): 21 27. Srivastava, Vinay Kumar (1992) “Should Anthropologists Pay Their Respondents?,” Anthropology Today 8 (6): 16 20. Wolf, Margery (2003) A Thrice-told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility. California: Stanford University Press. Zelizer, Viviana (2017) The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

2 KEEPING QUIET: DOING RESEARCH WHEN YOU'RE WOMAN, FEMINIST AND BLACK madeleine kennedy-macfoy

Feminist theorists have shown, time and again, that the mind/body dichotomy is a fallacy; that rationality and emotion (affect) are not separate or distinct dimensions of human life. One critical purpose of this work has been to show that “our actions are guided not just by what we think but also by how we feel and our bodily response to feelings” (Gorton, 2007: 345). Moreover, emotion/affect is political (Lorde, 1984; Ahmed, 2004) and emerges within feminist theory as a critical site of the relationship between ontology and epistemology (Hemmings, 2012). Many would agree with Åhäll’s assertion that: “There is no feminism without affect…[because]…affect gen erates feminist questions” (Åhäll, 2018: 38). Feminist approaches to methodology signal a departure from positivist/androcentric approaches to social research, which tend to be defined by a number of key characteristics, including: the expectation that the researcher is to distance herself from her research and objectively study the “object” of research; that emotions, ethics and values are inappropriate “objects” of research and should be absent from the research process; and that only arguments that can withstand the greatest adversarial intellectual assault are worthy of being labelled as “Truth” (Hill Collins, 1990: 205). My doctoral research was on perceptions and lived experiences of British and French citizenship amongst minoritized school students living in inner city areas of London and in a Paris banlieue. In this chapter, I re trace my research footsteps to reflect on an incident that took place during the course of conducting this research. I revisit this incident here because I have never forgotten it. Although more than 15 years have passed since it happened, every now and then I imagine what I could have said, instead of remaining silent; I wonder why I remained silent and who I could have turned to, to discuss the feelings the incident elicited in me. My aim here is to reflect on how far the feminist approaches to research methodology that I aimed to apply in my research were able to take me in dealing with this type of research experience, and to explain why they could not take me “all the way” through the research journey. DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 4

Keeping Quiet: Doing Research When You're Woman, Feminist and Black 33

Following feminist theorizations of affect/emotions, and the role they play in the research process, I think it is safe to say that separating mind and body never did anyone any good…and yet. Even for a researcher undertaking research using feminist methodologies, who is expected to challenge this entrenched dichotomy, the false mind/body dichotomy is not so easily cast aside. Meaningfully putting the whole self into the research process from conception to completion requires consistent reflection and vigilance by the researcher. I suggest here that this is all the harder to accomplish without an enabling research environment in which the Black female feminist self can feel wholly at ease and not compelled to remain silent.

In My Feelings Anecdote During the second year of my undergraduate law degree, I sat, riveted, in a lecture on civil liberties. The lecturer mentioned, in passing, that Catharine Mackinnon was a proponent of the view that pornography should be legally banned in the United States; he said hers was a “feminist” legal argument. I sat up, curious. After the lecture, I went straight to the library, where I asked for “books by feminists.” Among the pile of books that the librarian helped me to find, was Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks. I rushed to my favorite corner of the library and started to read. I could hardly believe my eyes. Here, at last, were the words to explain so much of what I had always known—but could not name—about being a Black girl living with my mother and two brothers, growing up in societies in which people like me were racialized and minoritized. Later on, when I found The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (Bryan, Dadzie and Scarfe, 1985), which spoke even more directly to my lived experiences in European contexts, I felt sheer relief. I decided there and then that I would do more studying, so I could learn more about feminism as a social, economic and political project. As a young adult, my feelings compelled me to seek more knowledge and under standing. I wanted to be well enough equipped to contribute, in whatever small way, to identifying, naming and challenging the many injustices that I saw, read, and heard about. It seemed with each passing year that took me further into adulthood, that there were more and more injustices to discover and to feel enraged by. Read ing and listening to feminists—especially African, African American, Black British feminists and racialized feminists from other parts of the world—never failed to bring me comfort, hope, relief, inspiration and motivation. Their work showed me that societies ridden by deeply entrenched social injustice were not necessarily human ity’s manifest destiny. In Black British feminist author and activist Lola Olufemi’s words: “Feminism is a political project about what could be” (Olufemi, 2020: 1, emphasis in the original). Olufemi insists that “feminist work is justice work,” the doing of which requires that: “We refuse to remain silent about how our lives are limited by heterosexist, racist, capitalist patriarchy” (Olufemi, 2020: 6). This is not a new call. Already in the 1940s and 50s, Claudia Jones, a prominent Black communist activist in the United States and in the UK was highlighting “the triply oppressed

34 madeleine kennedy macfoy

status” of Black women (Boyce Davies, 2007: 40). Angela Y. Davis also ana lyzed Women, Class and Race at the start of the 1980s, and most famously (within feminist histories and beyond), Kimberle Crenshaw introduced the concept of intersectionality at the end of that decade. Advice on how to do this specific kind of activist feminist work had come in the form of the seminal statement by the Combahee River Collective, who stated that “the most pro found and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity” (1978). Within the academy in the United States, Patricia Hill Collins (1990) developed an authoritative overview of “Black feminist thought,” and Heidi Safia Mirza’s edited collection—Black British Feminism: A Reader (1997)— made visible a body of scholarship within which this kind of academic feminist work had taken shape in the UK. Starting during adolescence, I have been engaged in conscious and deliberate processes of identifying/dis identifying with the multiple local and national land scapes in which I was located and situated. I constantly had to negotiate other people’s expectations and official discourses about where, within which, and to which polity/nation within Europe “someone like me” could or could not claim “belonging or membership.” I do not think it an exaggeration to say that I have spent years of my life undertaking the emotional labour required to claim (and maintain) a personal space and sense of identity in which “being different” in European contexts does not feel like a constantly precarious state. After my undergraduate law degree, I moved into the social sciences (gender studies and sociology) in search of the theoretical concepts and approaches that I hoped would help me to make sense of my multiple social and economic positionalities. I was motivated to embark on my doctoral research project because I wanted to get some sense of how similarly positioned young people located in European contexts negotiated the thin and shifting line between normative and experiential identities and identifications. The background to my doctoral research was a resurgent interest among British and French policymakers during the early 2000s to (re)assert a sense of “national identity” among young people through citizenship education. I wanted to know what could be understood when British and French educational policies relating to citizenship education were juxtaposed with lived experiences of citizenship among marginalized young people in London and Paris (kennedy macfoy, 2008). Citizenship is not only about legal rights and obligations. It is also about con testations over who belongs and who does not belong within a given polity, nation state, region, community. My research was theoretically informed by powerful feminist critiques of liberal (British) and republican (French) con ceptualizations of citizenship, which show its deeply gendered and exclusionary conceptualization and application (Young, 1989; Yuval Davies and Werbner, 1999). My own experiences of differentiated and marginalized citizenship as a girl child born in London to West African parents and brought up in continental Europe, led me to think about and formulate some of the questions later posed and addressed in my doctoral thesis.

Keeping Quiet: Doing Research When You're Woman, Feminist and Black 35

Keeping Quiet To recognise somebody as a stranger is an affective judgement: a stranger is the one who seems suspicious; the one who lurks…some bodies are “in an instant” judged… (Ahmed, 2014: 211)

My identity proved to be a source of some confusion at the Collège1 in Paris where I conducted my research: I was ambivalently positioned as an “outsider” with “insider” credentials. I was a linguistic “insider” because of my fluency in the French language, but an “outsider” because I was not French, nor had I lived in France. A large part of my formative years was spent living in Brussels, Belgium (from the age of seven) and I am a bilingual English: French speaker, with mother tongue fluency in both languages. Some of my interlocutors at the Collège were thrown by the fact that I did not sound like a second language French speaker. On one occasion, one of the teachers expressed surprise that I answered yes, when he asked me whether it was true that I was British. He remarked: “Oh really? But you don’t look British!” (“Ah bon? Mais tu ne ressembles pas à une Anglaise!”).2 I said nothing in response. I looked straight at him and raised an eyebrow; he made a hurried and embarrassed clarification: “I mean, you wouldn’t think so, to hear you speak” (“Je veux dire qu’on n’en a pas l’impression à t’entendre parler”). This exchange took place during the first week I spent at the school. The teacher made this remark in the staff room, surrounded by his (white) colleagues who were all listening to this exchange. One of those colleagues was a friend of mine, through whom I had gained access to the school. I made a split second decision not to say anything in response: I knew I should not do anything to jeopardize my access to the research site because it would be difficult to gain access to another school in a Paris banlieue—the fact that my friend was a teacher in this school was an invaluable advan tage. I also had no desire to embarrass or cause any problems for my friend by expres sing the anger I felt about her colleague’s remark. She and I had discussed “race” and racism numerous times and I knew she found those to be difficult topics, even when it was just the two of us talking. I also knew she would be mortified to be the colleague whose friend—a stranger—came into the staff room and got angry with a member of staff. All of these thoughts ran through my mind in an instant. I was angry and very much wanted to make explicit what was not so subtly implied in the teacher’s com ment (discussed below); but I did not want to embarrass my friend. So, I stayed quiet. Sara Ahmed has argued that the immediacy of bodily reactions is mediated by histories that come before subjects, and which are at stake in how the very arrival of some bodies is noticeable in the first place (Ahmed, 2014: 212). A national survey on diversity in France—Trajectoire et Origines (TeO): Enquête sur la diversité des populations de France—was sent to 22,000 people between September 2008 and February 2009 by the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) and the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). The aim of the survey was to understand the extent to which “migratory origin” was a factor in experiences of discrimination and inequality in different aspects of social life,

36 madeleine kennedy macfoy

including housing, education, work, social services and health care. The survey sought to compare the experiences of first and second generation French citizens (referred to as “immigrants” and “descendants of immigrants,” respectively) and those of French citizens from French overseas territories,3 with the experiences of the numerically majority French population. One of the questions posed in the survey was: “How often are you asked about your origins in your everyday life?” (“Dans la vie de tous les jours, à quelle fréquence vous demande t on vos origines?”). Only five to six percent of respondents of African or south east Asian descent responded that they had never been asked this question (Dumitru, 2015). The findings of the survey confirmed that such experiences of what can be described as a “racial micro aggression” is common amongst Black and racialized people in France. Racial microaggressions tell us something about the context in which they occur (Johnson and Joseph Salisbury, 2018: 147). It may seem that I am making much of one experience of racial micro aggression, however, it is on record (based on similar lived experiences of many, many other Black and racialized people across regions) that “micro aggressions are “only micro in name” and given their incessancy, produce a cumulative threat to the wellbeing of people of colour” (Johnson and Joseph Salisbury, 2018: 146). Grada Kilomba suggests that when white people question Black people about their “origins,” it is “not only an exercise of curiosity or of interest, but also an exercise in confirming dominant fantasies around “race” and “territoriality” (Kilomba, 2010: 64). This kind of questioning is part and parcel of “everyday racism,” which includes vocabularies, discourses, images, gestures and actions, which position Black people and people of color as Other (Kilomba, 2010: 43–44, emphasis added). Philomena Essed has argued that “racism is more than structure and ideology. As a process it is routinely created and reinforced through everyday practices…the concept of ‘everyday racism’ connects structural forces of racism with routine situations in everyday life” (Essed, 1991: 2). Everyday racism is thus neither a single nor discrete event, but “a constellation of life experiences…that repeats itself incessantly…in the bus, at the supermarket, at a party, at a dinner, in the family” (Kilomba, 2010: 45). Or in a staff room during the process of conducting doctoral research. In Essed’s terms, everyday racism “involves racist practices that infiltrate everyday life and become part of what is seen as ‘normal’ by the dominant group” (Essed, 1991: 288). Reflecting on how the “where are you (really) from?” question is experienced by Black people in France, Ndiaye defines it as a racial micro aggression—“so small that perpetrators never notice them, but they hurt” (“…si petites que les auteurs ne les perçoivent jamais, mais qui blessent” (in Bernard, 2020). I kept quiet when this incident happened and, once back at my university in London, I continued to keep quiet about it because, as put simply by Heidi Safia Mirza: “The task of being an embodied raced and gendered researcher is not easy” (Mirza, 2018: 176). I knew from past experiences that trying to discuss this kind of racial micro aggression with a white person—almost everyone around me in the Paris research setting was white, as were most of the people at my university department in London—would necessitate further emotional labor that would most likely compound my anger. I would need to explain and justify

Keeping Quiet: Doing Research When You're Woman, Feminist and Black 37

why I understood what I experienced to be a racial micro aggression and produce evidence for why I was sure the comment made was meant in the way I had perceived it. In other words, I knew I would most likely be faced with some form of racial gaslighting (Davis and Ernst, 2017)—when non Black people question, make excuses for, deny or dismiss a Black or racialized person’s experience of racism. Racial gaslighting is something that racialized people often face whenever we speak up about experiences of racism. Racial gaslighting makes a racialized person doubt their own experiences and question whether they really have experienced racism, or whether they are just being “sensitive.” Back at my university in London, although there was a handful of Black people in my department, my main supervisor and most of my fellow PhD students were white. I could have taken a chance and brought the incident up with my supervisor or other students. However, I had no reason to expect a different outcome from other times when I had tried to talk to white people about experien cing racism. In the 2014 blog she later expanded into her seminal book—Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race—Reni Eddo Lodge outlined the frustrating communication gap that would open whenever she spoke to white people about “race.” She stated, “I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display, when a person of colour articulates their experience” (Eddo Lodge, 2014; 2017). Past experiences had taught me that the likelihood I would meet a similar “emotional disconnect” if I recounted my experience to any of the white people around me either in the research setting or at my university, was very high. So, I chose to remain silent.

How Far Can Feminist Approaches Take (Some of) Us Through the Research Journey? I should not have been surprised by this interaction in the staff room in Paris. I cannot count the number of times white people—in a range of different countries and contexts—have asked me where I’m really from—especially when I open my mouth to speak. Questioning where a racialized person is “really from” and where they “belong” is central to processes of Othering, through which racialized people are marginalized within, or excluded from full citizenship in European contexts. The incident discussed here shows how processes of exclusion operate at an interpersonal level. I was subjected to an experience of exclusion, even as I sought to research the extent to which similarly positioned school students perceived and experienced inclusion within or exclusion from French citizenship. These were (and are) struc tural issues within longstanding and ongoing debates about British, French, European citizenship and belonging (see Ifekunigwe, 1999; Lewis, 2006; Hirsch, 2018). It was a case of life imitating theory. I wanted and needed to be able to talk about the anger I felt when this incident took place—the way that the reality of what I was researching among my young research participants also structured and constrained my own lived reality as a young Black woman. I wanted to follow Simmonds’ example, and put “the rela tionship between my embodied reality and my sociological practice “at the very

38 madeleine kennedy macfoy

core of how I do sociology” (Simmonds, 1997: 236). I thought a feminist approach to research methodology gave me the tools to do just that. And it did, insofar as I was able to write about some of the issues related to ethnicity, race and power that arose during the research process (see kennedy macfoy and Nielsen, 2012 and kennedy macfoy, 2013). But that was not enough. I had “bags full” of feminist methodological tools to draw on to help make sense of this exchange within the parameters of the research I was conducting. But, beyond trying to turn it into “proper academic” writing of some kind, I found myself lacking in academic tools for what to do with the feelings this exchange elicited—an intense anger. I felt unable to write about it; the anger I felt was too raw. I also felt pow erless; confronted by what Gail Lewis has referred to as the “thick, suffocating fog of whiteness” (Lewis and Hemmings, 2019: 411), which has no borders and is perpetually busy policing the bodies/identities/identifications of racialized Others. A white Frenchman felt perfectly at ease and within his rights/entitled to question my Britishness. Referencing Fanon, Lewis also notes “the fact that we are as black colonial subjects produced in the place of the look of the other [means] [y]ou always arrive too late into a place of subjecthood… as a black woman or man, you always arrive too late” (Lewis and Hemmings, 2019: 417). I knew (and still know) this. As Ndiaye has argued: “To be French is still to be white; to be non white is to be from elsewhere. Consequently, micro aggressions reveal white French people’s difficulty in “conceiving of being French independently of skin colour.”4 This is not only true in France, the denial of full citizenship and belonging to Black and racialized citizens has been documented across continental Europe, and beyond (see Balogun, 2020 on Poland; Hirsch, 2018 on the UK; Young, 2017 on Canada; Wekker, 2016 on the Netherlands; kennedy macfoy, 2014 on Norway; Hatoss, 2012 on Australia; Kilomba, 2010 on Germany). Experiencing racial micro aggression in the research setting reinforced my own outsider/insider (Hill Collins, 1990), subject/object positionality, not only vis à vis the research participants, but also vis à vis the research setting and the research environment that comprised my university. Applying a feminist approach to methodology in my research enabled me to ask specific kinds of research questions and equipped me with theoretical and conceptual tools to undertake the research with an understanding of the importance of reflexivity, of power relations between researcher and researched, of the central place that affect and emotions occupy in human relations, and of the situatedness of all claims to knowledge. However, a feminist methodological approach could not tell me how to deal with how I felt after experiencing racial micro aggression whilst conducting research—beyond theorizing it. I did not want what I had experienced to be viewed as “data to be mined”(ibid.). It did not feel like “data.” I found myself lacking in methodological tools to help me deal with an experience the majority of the people in my research setting could not engage with. I was not the only one to remain silent when the incident happened. All of the white people around me did likewise. This was a powerful indication that in all likelihood, they had “never had to think about what it means, in power terms, to be white” (Eddo Lodge, 2014). Nothing in my

Keeping Quiet: Doing Research When You're Woman, Feminist and Black 39

methodological toolbox could help me to deal with my own feelings of anger. I was angry at the ease with which my interlocutor’s off the cuff remark could instantly exclude and Other me. I was angry that day (as I am everyday) at how whiteness can so casually destabilize a Black person’s positionality and call being into question, while remaining secure in its entitlement and power to do so. As Eddo Lodge explains in her blog, “The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings” (Eddo Lodge, 2014). In my case, the choice to remain silent ultimately prioritized the feelings of the white friend who had helped me gain access to the school where I conducted my research, since I did not want to embarrass her by speaking up. I was also angry about that. Obviously, feminist research methodology cannot be all things to all people, much as we may want it to be! Nor can it function as an all encompassing research tool, and I do not think my inability to give voice to this experience necessarily reveals a failing of my chosen methodological approach. Although this experience of racial micro aggression did not take place within the walls of my university, for me, it was one of “the profound experiences you have when moving between ‘worlds’ of difference [whilst acquiring] higher education” (Mirza, 2015: 2). I felt academically supported to undertake my research at my university, but not to speak about experiencing racism while I undertook the research. As Simmonds posited: “For us [Black academics and students], the habitus of academia is as dangerous as society at large, because we are not ‘fish in water’” (Simmonds, 1997: 237).

Feeling Out of Place A growing body of research has shown the alarming extent to which Black women academics experience racial micro aggressions within higher education institutions in the UK (see for example: Tate, 2017; Mirza, 2015; Rollock, 2011). Black female faculty and students experiences bear some similarity, especially when aca demia is understood as a space dominated by whiteness and patriarchy, where women of color must develop strategies to survive and thrive amidst raced and gendered discrimination (Gabriel, 2017: 2). Studies exploring the experiences of Black women academics have shown the extent to which they feel isolated, invi sible/invisibilized and “out of place” within UK academia (Jones, 2001; Housee, 2001; Mirza, 2006; Wright et al., 2007; Shilliam, 2015; Gabriel and Tate, 2017). In 2018, only 25 out of 19,000 professors in British universities were Black women (Rollock, 2019). There were even fewer when I was undertaking my research in the mid 2000s. Rollock’s report on Black women professors’ experiences and their efforts to reach the professorial level, tells a depressing story. Twenty out of the 25 Black female professors in 2018 spoke of excessive workloads, and of experiencing explicit and passive bullying, racial stereotyping and racial micro aggressions, lack of career progression and lack of solidarity from white women academics, including those identifying as feminists (Rollock, 2019: 5). Continuing institutional racism within higher education in the UK means “there is limited support and mentoring

40 madeleine kennedy macfoy

available for academics of colour/difference which works to exclude them from the system” (Sian, 2017: 17). Even white women who occupy leadership or managerial roles within UK academia and who are feminists “must grapple with dilemmas of simultaneously being the embodiment of institutional authority with power and responsibility…as well as a source of oppositional knowledge” (Mackay, 2020: 90). When this is the status quo within higher education in the UK two decades into the twenty first century, I think it is no wonder I retreated into silence some 15 years ago, keenly feeling the “out of placeness” of my experience as a young, Black feminist doctoral student. I found myself in a paradoxical position. I was trying to apply a feminist approach in my research, ergo as my fully embodied and situated self, however, I felt unable to express and give voice to some of what I experienced during the course of conducting the research. Feminist methodological tools helped me to make sense of the experience of racial micro aggression intellectually but not emotionally; the mind/body dichotomy remained untroubled. In the research setting where the incident took place, breaking my silence was not an option because I did not want to jeopardize access to the research site or my friendship with the person who had facilitated that access. Once back at my university, I still felt unable to break my silence because I did not wish to be subjected to any racial gaslighting. Reflecting on all of this now, I can see that this experience was, in many ways, characteristic of my wider research experience. I kept my anger to myself because I felt I had to “distance [myself] from [my] personal experience of racialization and mimic unmarked (i.e., white) knowledge producers” in a research environment (Johnson and Joseph Salisbury, 2018: 153).

Concluding Thoughts 1 Perhaps it was a good thing that I had this experience right at the start of the period I spent conducting research in the Paris school. I got a small taste of the kinds of interactions that underpin the structural exclusion of Black and racialized people from citizenship and belonging in France; the very exclusion that was the subject of my research, and which surfaced during the interviews I later conducted with students in the school. Having lived in London, I had prior experiential knowledge and understanding of what the students in the London school told me about. This experience during my first week at the Paris school was a “baptism by fire,” which allowed me to gain a similar—albeit more limited—type of experiential understanding of some of the Paris students’ lived experiences of “living while Black” in France. I was not able to share or express the anger I felt during the short exchange in the staff room; I held it in the place where I have stored (since I was a young child) my feelings of outrage at injustices—especially those faced by Black and racialized people in European contexts, and elsewhere. The tactical use of emotions was a recurring theme in Audre Lorde’s body of work and in her iconic role as a public academic, advocate and activist. In a 1981 speech entitled “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Lorde suggested that “Anger is an appropriate response to racist attitudes” (Lorde, 1984:

Keeping Quiet: Doing Research When You're Woman, Feminist and Black 41

129), arguing that because it is “loaded with information and energy” (1984: 127), its usefulness and generative potential should be recognized within feminist and women’s movements that seek to be truly inclusive of the diversity of women’s lived experiences. She outlined why women in general should not fear anger, and why white women in particular should not fear Black women’s anger about racism, suggesting that: “Every woman has a well stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being” (Lorde, 1984: 127). The incident discussed here added to my own “well stocked arsenal of anger” about racism. That arsenal also sustained me and reinforced the confidence I needed to continue on my research path, even in moments when my very being and presence was being questioned. Audre Lorde’s analysis powerfully affirms what so many minoritized Black and racialized women “feel in their gut” but may struggle to articulate. Experiencing racial micro aggression as I conducted my doctoral research made me very angry. Feminist methodological approaches to research provided me with the tools to recognize, inter alia that my emotions should not be excluded from the research process. Finding the work of Black feminist intellectuals and activists like Audre Lorde, which centralize the specificities of my kind of lived experience in white dominant societies, helped me to survive and complete the research journey with my sense of self intact. But what about Black (female, male, non binary) researchers who may not know or find Audre Lorde’s work or the work of any other Black feminist thinker?

Concluding Thoughts 2 In a 2017 special issue of the journal Race Ethnicity Education, articles based on experiences from a range of countries, including the UK, focused on how to advance efforts to dismantle institutional racism within higher education institu tions. The articles emerged from a conference of the same title, which interrogated why there had been “institutional gains followed by their attrition in some cases and fundamental institutional inertia in others” and why “Both of these responses to addressing institutional racism worked against organizational change even as equality and diversity policies aimed at changing the face of universities were instituted” (Tate and Bagguley, 2017: 289). In this context, it makes sense to ask: “How are [Black and racialized] students to negotiate a sector that has historically preferred to objectify black and brown bodies, rather than to hear black and brown voices?” (Warmington, 2018: ix). In response, over the last five years, Black and racialized student activists in the UK have been putting their own powerful questions on the table, including “why is my curriculum white?”5 and “why isn’t my professor black?”.6 Black student led campaigns in England have also made assertions such as #IamtooOxford7 and, inspired by Black students in South Africa, made demands about which historical figures are prominently represented in the décor of their UK universities

42 madeleine kennedy macfoy

(#Rhodesmustfall).8 These examples of activism by Black and racialized students show a determination to challenge the status quo within UK academia by asserting their presence and demanding critical changes, which will make Black and racialized students feel acknowledged, valued and safe to be their authentic selves in UK universities. This is, undoubtedly, a mammoth task. Established in 2016, Leading Routes is as a Black led initiative, which—as stated on their website9—acknowledges “that much work needs to be done within the [UK academic] sector to improve the outcomes and experiences of Black students and staff” and has “also begun an open and honest dialogue with institutions in the sector about how higher education can drive real and sustainable change.” Their ultimate aim is to be “an organisation that works collaboratively to reshape ideol ogies and institutions in higher education to create environments where Black students belong and thrive.” Transformation of institutions of higher education, then, is the order of the day. Feminist methodological approaches to research are revolutionary tools that have made invaluable contributions within higher education (and beyond). They can, however, not be expected to be all things to all women, men and non binary people! Nor should it be incumbent on Black and racialized students to go in search of tools—that may be beyond their academic interests and disciplines—to help them navigate experiences of racism during the research process. Organizations like Leading Routes are playing a critical role in the struggle to create higher education spaces in which Black and racialized students feel empowered and supported to speak up, when necessary, rather than compelled to remain silent. It is a long overdue unpicking of the tapestry of UK academia as it was previously woven, to create a new image in which all minds and bodies—student and staff alike—are authentically and equally represented.

Notes 1 In the French education system, students spend four of their secondary school years (from age 12 to 16) at the Collège and the last two years at the Lycée. My doctoral research was an interview study with ethnographic components, made up of a period of participant observation over two terms in one school in “inner city” London and in another school in a Paris banlieue. After the period of participant observation, I conducted semi struc tured interviews with students who volunteered to be interviewed. 2 The literal translation of “Anglaise” is “English,” however, in colloquial French “Anglaise” is more commonly used to mean “British”; in more formal language, “British” is “Brit annique” in French. There is, of course, a lot to say about the extent to which Black British people are (i.e. perceive of themselves and are perceived by others) also “English” (see for example, Hirsch, 2018). However, that is not the main focus here. 3 The Départements et Territoires d’Outre Mer (commonly referred to “les Dom Tom”) in the Car ibbean and Indian Ocean continue to be semi autonomous colonies belonging to the French Republic. Recognized as integral parts of the Republic, Dom Tom citizens are represented in the French National Assembly, Senate and Economic Social Council; elect their own Member of the European Parliament (MEP); and also use the Euro as their national currency. 4 Ibid. “Être français, c’est encore être blanc; être non-blanc, c’est être d’ailleurs.” Ainsi, les micro agressions révéleraient notre difficulté à “penser le fait d”être français indépendamment de la couleur de la peau.” See also Ndiaye, 2019. 5 www.nus.org.uk/en/news/why is my curriculum white/.

Keeping Quiet: Doing Research When You're Woman, Feminist and Black 43

6 7 8 9

www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/isnt professor black reflection/. https://itooamoxford.tumblr.com/. www.theguardian.com/uk news/2016/mar/16/the real meaning of rhodes must fall. www.leadingroutes.org.

References Åhäll, L. (2018) “Affect as Methodology: Feminism and the Politics of Emotion,” International Political Sociology 12 (1): 36 52. Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ahmed, S. (2007) “The Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8 (2): 149 168. Ahmed, S. (2014) “Afterword: Emotions and their Objects,” in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 204 233. Arday, J. and Mirza, H.S. (2018) (eds) Dismantling Race in Higher Education. Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Balogun, B. (2020) “Race and Racism in Poland: Theorising and Contextualising ‘Polish centrism’,” Sociological Review 68 (6): 1196 1211. Bernard, P. (2020) “Comment les microagressions instillent en France un racisme inconscient, mais ravageur,” Le Monde, July 20, 2020 [“How microaggressions instill unconscious but devastating racism in France”], available at www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2020/07/20/ comment les micro agressions instillent en france un racisme inconscient mais ravageur 6046691 3224.html, last accessed April 20, 2021. Boyce Davies, C. (2007) Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bryan, B., Dadzie, S. and Scarfe, S. (1985) The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain. London: Virago. Combahee River Collective (1978) https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/ Keyword%20Coalition Readings.pdf. Crenshaw, K. (1997) “Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Learning from Violence Against Women of Color,” in M. Lyndon and U. Narayan (eds) Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity. Davis, A.M. and Ernst, R. (2017) “‘Racial gaslighting’, Politics, Groups, and Identities,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 7 (4): 761 774. Davis, A.Y. (1981) Women, Class and Race. New York: Vintage Books. Dumitru, S. (2015) “De quelle origine êtes vous? Banalisation du nationalisme méthodolo gique,” Terrains/Théories 3, available online at: https://journals.openedition.org/teth/ 567#authors, last accessed April 21, 2021. Eddo Lodge, R. (2014) “Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People about Race,” blog available at https://renieddolodge.co.uk/why im no longer talking to white people a bout race/, accessed July 3, 2021. Eddo Lodge, R. (2017) Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Essed, P. (1991) Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory. Newbury Park: Sage Publications. Gabriel, D. and Tate, S.A. (2017) (eds) Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of Women of Colour Surviving and Thriving in British Academia. London: Trentham. Gorton, K. (2007) “Theorizing Emotion and Affect: Feminist Engagements,” Feminist Theory 8 (3): 333 348.

44 madeleine kennedy macfoy

Hatoss, Aniko (2012) “Where Are You From? Identity Construction and Experiences of 'Othering' in the Narratives of Sudanese refugee Background Australians,” Discourse & Society 23 (1):47 68. Hemmings, C. (2012) “Affective Solidarity: Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transforma tion,” Feminist Theory 13 (2): 147 161. Hill Collins, P. (1990) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. London: HarperCollins Academic. Hirsch, A. (2018) Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. London: Jonathan Cape. hooks, b. (1984) Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South End Press. Housee, S. (2001) “Insiders and/or Outsiders: Black Female Voices from the Academy,” in P. Anderson and J. Williams (eds) Identity and Difference within Higher Education: Outsiders Within. Aldershot: Ashgate, 79 92. Ifekunigwe, J.O. (1999) Scattered Belongings Cultural Paradoxes of Race, Nation and Gender. London: Routledge. Johnson, A. and Joseph Salisbury, R. (2018) “‘Are You Supposed to Be in Here?’ Racial Microaggressions and Knowledge Production in Higher Education,” in H.S. Mirza and J. Arday (eds) Dismantling Race in Higher Education. Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy. London: Routledge, 143 160. Jones, C. (2001) “Black Women in Ivory Towers: Racism and Sexism in the Academy,” in P. Anderson and J. Williams (eds) Identity and Difference within Higher Education: Outsiders Within. Aldershot: Ashgate. kennedy macfoy, m. (2008) “‘The Citizen Thingy’: Becoming Diaspora Citizens in Inner City London and in a Paris banlieue.” Unpublished doctoral thesis. London: Goldsmiths University of London. kennedy macfoy, m. (2013) “‘It’s Important for the Students to Meet Someone Like You:’ How Perceptions of the Researcher Can Affect Gaining Access, Building Rapport, and Securing Cooperation in School Based Research,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 16 (6): 491 502. kennedy macfoy, m. (2014) “Queendom: On Being, Black, Feminist, Norwegian Women,” in M. McEachrane (ed.) Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe. London: Routledge. kennedy macfoy, m. and Pristed Nielsen, H. (2012) “‘We Need to Talk about What Race Feels Like:’ Using Feminist Memory Work to Analyse the Production of Race and Eth nicity in Research Encounters,” Special Issue Qualitative Studies 3 (2): 133 149. Kilomba, G. (2010) Plantation Memories. Episodes of Everyday Racism. Munster: UNRAST Verlag. Klein, R.D. (1983) “How to Do What We Want to Do: Thoughts about Feminist Metho dology” in G. Bowles and R.D. Klein (eds) Theories of Women’s Studies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lewis, G. (2006) “Journeying Toward the Nation(al): Cultural Difference at the Crossroads of Old and New Globalisations,” Mobilities 1 (3): 333 352. Lewis, G. and Hemmings, C. (2019) “‘Where Might We Go if We Dare:' Moving Beyond the 'Thick, Suffocating Fog of Whiteness' in Feminism,” Feminist Review 20 (4): 405 421. Lorde, A. (1984) “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” in SisterOutsider. California: The Crossing Press. Mackay, F. (2020) “Dilemmas of an Academic Feminist as Manager in the Neoliberal Academy: Negotiating Institutional Authority, Oppositional Knowledge and Change,” Political Studies Review 19 (1): 75 95. Maynard, M. and Purvis, J. (eds) (1994) Researching Women’s Lives from a Feminist Perspective. London: Taylor & Francis.

Keeping Quiet: Doing Research When You're Woman, Feminist and Black 45

Mirza, H.S. (2006) “Transcendence over Diversity: Black Women in the Academy,” Policy Futures in Education 4 (2): 101 113. Mirza, H.S. (2015) “Decolonizing Higher Education: Black Feminism and the Intersectionality of Race and Gender,” Journal of a Feminist Scholarship 7: 1 12. Mirza, H.S. (2018) “Black Bodies ‘Out of Place’ in Academic Spaces: Gender, Race, Faith and Culture in Post Race Times” in H. Mirza and J. Arday (eds) Dismantling race in Higher education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 175 195. Morisson, T. (1975) “Black Studies Center Public Dialogue”. Pt 2, Portland State, available at https://soundcloud.com/portland state library/portland state black studies 1?mc cid 7a 27cfd978&mc eid e2efbcffa9, accessed July 3, 2021. Narayanswamy, L. (2002) “Who Am I? The Challenge of Reflexivity in the Contiguously Dominant and Subversive Self” in The Feminist Epistemologies Collective (eds) Marginal Research: Reflections on Location and Representation. London: London School of Economics, Gender Institute. National Union of Students (2011) Race for Equality, available at www.nusconnect.org.uk/ resources/race for equality a report on the experiences of black students in further a nd higher education 2011, accessed April 23, 2021. Ndiaye, P. (2019) Rapport sur la lutte contre le racisme, antisémitisme, xénophobie. Focus: Lutter contre le racisme anti-noirs. Paris: Commission nationale consultative des droits de l”homme. Ngai, S. (2005) Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Olufemi, L. (2020) Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power. London: Pluto Press. Phoenix, A. (1994) “Practising Feminist Research: The Intersection of Gender and ‘Race’ in the Research Process,” in M. Maynard and J. Purvis (eds) Researching Women’s Lives from a Feminist Perspective. London: Taylor & Francis. Probyn, E. (2005) Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rollock, N. (2011) “Unspoken Rules of Engagement: Navigating Racial Microaggressions in the Academic Terrain,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 25 (5): 517 532. Rollock, N. (2019) Staying Power The Career Experiences and Strategies of UK Black Women Professors, available at www.ucu.org.uk/media/10075/Staying Power/pdf/UCU Roll ock February 2019.pdf, accessed April 2021. Shilliam, R. (2015) “Black Academia: The Doors Have Been Opened but the Architecture Remains the Same,” in C. Alexander and J. Arday (eds) Aiming higher: Race inequality and diversity in the academy. London: Runnymede Trust, 32 35. Sian, K. (2017) “Being Black in a White World: Understanding Racism in British universities,” International Journal on Collective Identity Research 176 (2): 1 26. Simmonds, F.N. (1997) “My Body Myself: How Does a Black Woman Do Sociology?,” in Mirza, H.S. (ed.) Black British Feminism: A Reader, 226 239. Tate, S.A. (2017) “How Do You Feel? ‘Well being’ as a Deracinated Strategic Goal in UK Universities,” in D. Gabriel and S.A. Tate (eds) Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of women of colour surviving and thriving in British academia. London: Trentham, 54 67. Tate, S.A. and Bagguley, P. (2017) “Building the Anti Racist University: Next Steps,” Race Ethnicity and Education 20 (3): 289 299. Warmington, P. (2018) “Foreword” in J. Arday and H.S. Mirza (eds) Dismantling Race in Higher Education. Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy. London: Palgrave Mac millan, v ix. Wekker, G. (2016) White Innocence Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham: Duke Uni versity Press. Wright, C., Thompson, S. and Channer, Y. (2007) “Out of Place: Black Women Aca demics in British Universities,” Women’s History Review 16 (2): 145 162.

46 madeleine kennedy macfoy

Young, I.M. (1989) “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship,” Ethics 99 (2): 250 274. Young, T. (2017) “A Journey into Anti racism,” in A. Abdulle and A.N. Obeyesekere (eds) New Framings on Anti-Racism and Resistance. Volume 1 Anti-Racism and Transgressive Pedagogies. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 83 107. Yuval Davis, N. and Werbner, P. (1999) “Introduction: Women and the New Discourse of Citizenship,” in N. Yuval Davis and P. Werbner (eds) Women, Citizenship and Difference. London: Zed Books.

3 NAVIGATING RACE: EXPECTATIONS BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER RESEARCH Jonathan R. Wynn

In the field and on the page, being white affords an array of privileges: from being able to facilitate access with authorities in a field site (Twine and Warren, 2000) to having the cultural capital to negotiate complex Institutional Review Board and other administrative processes on campus (Stark, 2011; DeLuca and Maddox, 2016). With some exceptions (Desmond, 2016), these choices and challenges rarely appear in our ethnographic monographs. And yet, such advantages should compel scholars like myself to identify and contend with the uncomfortable dilemmas and pitfalls we face to move our discipline toward greater reflexivity on the racial dynamics shaping many aspects of our research. My particular corner of academia, ethnographic urban sociology, comes with a number of challenges and dilemmas around race. My research centers on urban culture and, as a white cisgender male scholar, I have rarely been confronted about my positionality in the field or in academic settings. I wrote two books on tourism and music festivals, which afford me a wonderful career so far. I stand by this work, but I also recognize the themes and topics I address do not sit at the center of my subfield. The reasons I avoided topics at the heart of urban sociology are complex and unspoken—there are few spaces, such as this volume, to discuss these dilemmas. Broadly, urban sociology is a genre that tacks toward and generously rewards monographs with rich stories of the lives of the urban poor. For some, the depic tions of the plights, hopes, and promise of under resourced persons of color deployed in urban sociology are humanizing calls to action. More recently, urban ethnographers have received significant scrutiny. As Mario Small (2015) notes, urban ethnographies can be exoticizing and lurid portrayals veering toward exploitation while Victor Rios (2015a) notes that it remains a “white space.” Over the last ten years a wave of critique emerged, criticizing how qualitative research perpetuates the marginalization of communities of color through the lens of white scholarship. Kimberly Hoang’s Dealing in Desire (2015: 21–22) declined to answer DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 5

48 Jonathan R. Wynn

how much she took part in her research site on global sex workers—refusing to objectify herself to titillated readers—while also questioning the ethnographic tra dition and valorization of a cohort of mostly male researchers “‘studying down’ to poorer communities.” Hoang echoes Randol Contreras’ (2013: 26–27) term for this approach, which he calls “cowboy ethnography:” “researchers who are thought to glorify themselves at the expense of the study participants […] They project themselves as bravely risking life and limb, as tight roping dangerous race and class lines—and making it back to tell the tale.” In Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, Victor Rios (2011: 14) put a fine point on it. He proposed the idea of “Jungle Book trope,” noting that, as white researchers head out into the lifeworld of “the other,” they risk reproducing a “familiar colonial fairy tale narrative.” This was the basis upon which Dwayne Betts (2014) criticized Alice Goffman’s 2014 book, On the Run, based on years of fieldwork in and among a small group of Black youth as they try to navigate constant police and institutional surveillance. Betts wrote that Goffman reproduces the trope in a “self aggrandizing fairy tale, in which an innocent white person gets lost in the wild, is taken in by the wild people, survives, and returns to society with a story to tell.” Betts’ critique wasn’t the only one. While luminaries like Cornel West, Malcolm Gladwell, and Alex Kotlowitz championed Goffman’s book, a second wave of critics in the academic and popular press piled on (Campos 2015; Lewis Kraus 2016; Rios 2015b; Singal 2016), damaging her reputation enough to, seemingly, push her out of academia. And yet, critics could have levied these arguments against many urban ethnographies and ethnographers. Professor of English Literature and Black Studies, Christina Sharpe (2014), noted the Goffman book as only the “latest installment in a sociological tradition that subjects Black life to scholarly scrutiny.” These debates have disciplinary roots. They also helped me reflect on my own research, as a white, cisgendered male scholar. The concerns raised by Black and brown scholars like Contreras, Hoang, and Rios (and others, like Nikki Jones), provide guidance for reflection on any researchers’ positionality and work. The debate over methodological ethics establishes a dilemma for researchers of any dominant race, gender, or other demographic metric. When it comes to being a white researcher, how can we conduct our work in a way that neither exploits research subjects and positions one’s self as an expert, nor marginalizes race alto gether to appear blind to the way race works in the field? What considerations should white qualitative scholars make when planning their research projects, par ticularly around navigating–and potentially navigating around—racial lines? How should authors describe the decisions they make around this dilemma in the methodological appendixes? To better understand this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dilemma, this essay takes a holistic approach, drawing upon my experience through three aspects of research: mentorship and graduate school training, conducing fieldwork and publishing, and the resultant benefits and challenges that come from the common scholarly experience of using research as basis of expertise. All three

Navigating Race: Expectations Before, During, and After Research 49

phases are distinct but clearly intertwine: graduate school training informs how one conducts research, which builds the foundation from which one draws their expertise. While the overarching theme of this collection is about research practices, the dilem mas arising in research practices are not wholly separate from the phases that precede and follow fieldwork. Over a career, they are parts of an iterative process.

On Training: Learning from Mentorship and Navigating Graduate School I began my dissertation in 2000 and was primarily interested in the stories people told about New York City’s culture and history. After September 11th, I grew more interested in how stories were told in a city longing to understand itself. With a rising importance of the city’s tourism industry, I focused on tour guides as public intellectuals using public spaces. In the early stages of my research, some of the field’s top scholars unleashed a series of high profile articles debating the ethics of urban ethnography, the racial dynamics of method, and the hidden values lying behind them. First there was Löic Wacquant’s (2002) jolting broadside on Elijah Anderson, Katherine Newman, and Mitchell Duneier in the American Journal of Ethnography, entitled “Scrutinizing The Street: Poverty, Morality, and the Pitfalls of Urban Ethnography.” Within, Wac quant judged these scholars as naïve “neo romantic” moralists who ignore social class and the state’s multi faceted role in American poverty and racism. Then came their full throated responses, which defend their work and counter punched by turning Wacquant’s critique against his own scholarship (Anderson, 2002; Duneier, 2002; Newman 2002). Next, Duneier published a critique of Eric Klinenberg’s (1994) portrayal of Black folks in his book Heat Wave, which explicitly played off of the title of Wacquant’s article—“Scrutinizing the Heat” (2004)—followed by Klinenberg’s (2004) response, cheekily called “Overheated.” The fiery debate put ice in my veins, particularly since one protagonist in this drama, Duneier, was one of my mentors. Of course, many New York area grad uate students worked with these professors. So, students from CUNY, NYU, Columbia, the New School, and Princeton, dissected the flurry of articles over drinks and in seminars, with the distinct feeling of needing to speak in hushed tones while our parents fought in the other room. These weren’t the only debates we studied, of course. Besides “the Wacquant Debate,” we discussed the usual topics of entrée and building rapport in methods and ethnography graduate seminars. I fretted over balancing of intimacy and ethics with the uncertainty and impostor syndrome shared (unequally) with other students. We read Clifford and Marcus’ Writing Culture (1986). From a feminist perspective I read Behar and Gordon’s Women Writing Culture (1995) as well as Oakley’s case for “no intimacy without reciprocity” (1981: 40) alongside Stacey’s rejoinder to Oakley on the “inauthenticity, dissimilitude, and potential, perhaps inevitable, betrayal” by the researcher (1988: 25; see also Parvez, 2018; Clough, 1994; and, for an overview, Irwin, 2006 and Visweswaran, 1994).

50 Jonathan R. Wynn

It all felt like the moral underground of ethnographic research was both shifting underfoot and being dragged into the sunlight. The debate was an invitation for more ethical scholarship, and a warning for those whose work did not live up to these expectations. Between debates with classmates, I developed my dissertation. By focusing on tour guides, cities, and culture, I focused on constructing a social type. Using Georg Simmel (1950, 1965) and his fellow travelers, I sought to identify an urban character, along the same lines as The Hobo (Anderson, 1923), The Saleslady (Donovan, 1929), The Jack Roller (Shaw, 1930), and The Professional Thief (Suther land, 1937), and was carried on through Hughes (1958), who illustrated the dilemmas of the 1950s workplace through a series of character types. I was on a journey into the work produced by (mostly) white men from the University of Chicago that, only in retrospect, thanks to Aldon Morris’ The Scholar Denied (2017), do I now see as generating a significant blind spot to the traditions of DuBois and others—a history of scholarship repressed through a form of institu tional/disciplinary racism. And so, because of some combination of my personal and disciplinary blind spots, and an interest in constructing a broad social type as a part of my dissertation work, when faculty encouraged me to narrow my focus I shrugged it off with a kind of bravado shared (unequally) by many students. The recommendation was also to become more engaged with what my faculty felt were the major debates in urban sociology; predominantly inequality and race. Specifically, they pushed me to confine my research agenda to the lives and experiences of Black tour guides. What are their experiences? Are they marginalized and confined to specific racially coded neighbor hoods (e.g., Harlem)? How do the predominantly white tour groups interact with Black guides? I resisted. However, I realize now that I was, unconsciously, refusing to center the experiences of Black guides. I struggled with this advice. My process was knotted and reflecting on it I see many issues I did not feel comfortable voicing to my faculty mentors, and to myself. Like most students, I craved affirmation and sought my mentors’ counsel. Not taking their advice could influence the dissertation team’s recommendations, which has job market consequences. Narrowing my focus would have limited what I wanted to accomplish and yet, rejecting mentoring advice risked my mentoring relationship. Practically, this advice made sense for both fine tuning a manageable research project and yet, it would set me on course for building a career as a white male studying Black folks—a proven path toward a career in sociology, as any literature review of ethnographic urban sociology attests. In retrospect, and given the critique levied upon Alice Goffman—whose dis sertation chair was also my dissertation co chair—the language of the “Jungle Book trope” makes sense. I struggled to feel comfortable with questions of my positionality in what some would now call a “self aggrandizing fairy tale.” Am I the person to study this world and in this way? I struggled with my own ambitions: Could I build my career on the backs of persons of color in this way? These were thorny and relatively unspoken issues.

Navigating Race: Expectations Before, During, and After Research 51

There were other complications. Duneier was only one of my mentors. My other co chair was Patricia Clough. Clough (1998) made a name for herself by critiquing the realism of the Chicago School, including Howard Becker, Herbert Blumer, and Erving Goffman. On gender I felt more confident: My readings in gender and “women writing culture,” informed my embrace of partiality, lived experiences, and the non careerist nature of the guiding world. Practically, I wanted to learn from both mentors—one hyper realist, the other a postmodern feminist. Emotionally, I often felt pulled in two directions. I felt a dual and increased responsibility to both, while they, in mirror image, felt less ownership of me and my project. Being in the in between, left me somewhat orphaned, unclaimed, and like a child of divorced parents. Meanwhile, I saw my classmates conducting quantitative methods, avoiding the same concerns over race, gender, and their own dominant positionality as researchers. Or, more accurately, no one raised issues of exploitation. They didn’t need to face the people they built their careers on, nor weigh the same challenges on the back end of the research. If quantitative scholars have become the object of such debate, I have not heard of it, even though their work could be given the same critique. The abstraction of peoples’ lives into quantification shouldn’t lessen a consideration on issues of how race plays out for white scholars, even if the data is once or twice removed. And yet, ethnographers and qualitative researchers continue to be exposed, all too vulnerable to critiques of exploitation and exoticization in their research. These were and remain, the concerns of interactional and interpersonal methods.

On Fieldwork: How Race Moved to the Center In the end, I kept my research broadly focused on The Tour Guide. I studied guiding in terms of types, styles, and geographies of tours, not by tour guides’ demographics. While I interviewed forty three guides overall (along with two dozen tourists and a dozen folks in and around the industry), each dissertation chapter profiled one guide and one neighborhood. Five women. Four men. Only one person of color was highlighted, a Black man. At least three LGBT guides. The field itself skewed white and female, and LGBT guides appeared to be over represented in the field. Rather than sampling on race, gender, or sexuality expli citly, I let the geography and tour characteristics and work drive the selection profiled in each chapter. These neighborhoods included Spanish (East) Harlem, Manhattanville (West Harlem), Central Park, Chinatown, SoHo, East Village, Midtown, Grand Central Terminal, and the Tenement Museum. Topics included radical politics, public space advocacy, transportation, and cultural history. I did not avoid race altogether. It was an important facet in NYC tour guiding. I discovered something similar to what David Grazian saw in studying Chicago blues clubs. Just as he found how white audiences assumed a kind of “Black and tan fantasy”—using Duke Ellington’s song to evoke the phenomenon of white tourists enjoying “the forbidden pleasures of black music and entertainment”

52 Jonathan R. Wynn

(2003: 29)—tourists expected a kind of demographic harmony between tour topics and their guides. In the terms of historical walking tours, Black tour guides believed that tourists and school groups wanted their tour guides to be Black if they were giving a tour of a racially coded neighborhood like Harlem. I found, however, that other guides reported feeling demographic pressures shaping their work in similar ways. Tourists assumed guides giving Greenwich Village and Chelsea tours were LGBT. Many guides felt they had to bend to the tour participants’ own fantasies. Another guide recalled a Jewish Lower East Side tour she gave, wherein the group turned on her when their assumption of her Jewish heritage turned out to be untrue: They taunted her, speaking about her in Hebrew and asking her to read signs they knew she couldn’t read. When their ethnic fantasies of who their guide could and should be were unfounded, the group grew hostile. In reviewing my interview with one of the Black guides, race wasn’t in the formal interview instrument. I truly cannot remember why not. Perhaps I didn’t know how to ask the right set of questions, but I think I wanted to ask, generally, about guiding content and identity. But in my first interview with an African American guide, he did not discuss race in his answers. Conversation did veer toward race in my second interview with an African American guide, however. He directed our conversation toward his own identity, and I felt comfortable asking: “Do you feel you get some sort of authority being an African American doing tours of Manhattanville or West Harlem?” He answered: I can assume it to some degree, I know I’ve been asked to do tours because it is assumed as an African American I can do Harlem tours. I mean, they weren’t the first tours I gave. And I’ve been African American long enough to know how that works [laughs]. Before moving on, he speculated that a Jewish guide would receive an inordinate about of requests to do Lower East Side tours than other tours that may interest her or him before adding that he doesn’t strongly link racial characteristics to tours, even if he feels tourists might: “I’ve taken tours of Central Harlem that are given by white tour guides, who are not from the neighborhood. I would certainly not not take that tour. That definitely would not determine if I would take that tour.” I did, however, ask white tour guides about their experiences leading tours in historically and predominantly Black communities. One guide responded: “Can you speak for this community? I think you can. But [when you’re] on the street giving a tour, you will get heckled.” Another guide answered: It comes back to [the question]: what’s your source as a professor or as a tea cher? What legitimacy do you have? Interestingly, with the Jewish population, you could be a secular Jew versus a PhD in religious studies who’s Catholic. And the secular Jew, somehow, is going to somehow come out on top [in the minds of the tour participants].

Navigating Race: Expectations Before, During, and After Research 53

These ethnic fantasies were similar to what Grazian found, which was something I explored in the dissertation. How race, gender, and sexuality came up in relation to spaces and neighborhoods fascinated me, I thought it was an interesting way of understanding how traditional foci of urban research. But it did not drive the narrative of the book, nor did I try to transform the book into “How Race, Gender, and Sexuality Shape Tourism.” These themes were tertiary to place and culture. As facets of the overall story, I missed an opportunity to be more analytical, and make an imprint on scholarly conversations about race, gender, and sexuality in tourism. Still, after publishing my book with the University of Chicago Press, I felt I achieved my goal of creating a careful portrayal of a known urban character in their unconventional workplace, explicitly carrying the tradition of the Chicago School’s early interest in urban characters. By not addressing race explicitly and systematically in the research, I also left myself open to being “read” as ignorant, racist, or worst: non sociological. In light of the aforementioned research of Aldon Morris, my monograph also carries with it the tradition of failing to center the experiences of Black folks. After my dissertation defense, I went on different kinds of tours, both of which shaped my career. I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at two schools for six years and had to navigate a brutal job market in and after the 2008 economic crash. The second tour was more enjoyable. My girlfriend invited me to play bass in her backing band during the summer touring season, and I happily agreed. The experience opened my eyes to a novel way of looking at urban culture. From those experiences, I launched a new research project on how music festivals exploit and reinforce a city’s social, symbolic, physical, and economic resources. As I looked across the US for potential research sites, I considered how I could better incorporate race into the project. A unique challenge emerged. Researchers had already studied a few of the more promising options. Grazian’s Blue Chicago did a fantastic job examining the racial dynamics on and off the stage around Chicago’s blues scene. I crossed Chicago off my list. I considered the legendary New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, but a fantastic book on New Orleans culture was just published: Kevin Fox Gotham’s Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy (2007). I crossed off The Big Easy. I considered the underground techno festivals going on in Detroit, or EDM (“Electronic Dance Music”) festivals in Miami, but couldn’t confirm contacts in either city. The research sites I had the greatest access to were predominantly but not exclusively white places: Receiving modest research funds to be at Vanderbilt University for Nashville’s Country Music Association festival, performing on stage at Austin’s South by Southwest, and being within driving distance to Rhode Island’s Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals (events produced by the team behind the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival). Ease of entrée, while working as a Visiting Assistant Professor with limited resources during and after the economic recession, shaped my decisions. Somewhat humorously, the Newport Jazz Festival could have been an excellent target for a variety of

54 Jonathan R. Wynn

reasons, including that their lineups were highly diverse—but over successive years our annual sociology conference was scheduled on the same weekend. Without a permanent tenure track job, I could not miss the conference in favor of a festival. Eventually, I selected fairly white spaces: the Newport Folk Festival, Nashville’s Country Music Association Festival, and Austin’s South by Southwest. I rationalized this in lots of different ways (e.g., besides access, all three locations were also in similarly sized Metropolitan Statistical Areas). Race, then and again, was implicitly present in the overt whiteness of these foci. Bringing a racialized perspective into these settings was possible—the field of critical white studies is built upon the very idea (see Bonnett, 1996)—but at the time I did not even consider it as an option. I wrote of the festivals in a historical context that often touched upon racial tensions and social movements. For example, several local interviewees noted how performers’ political activism on and off the stage (many of whom were African American), helped to symbolically link the festivals with civil rights—leading to a chilly relationship between the elite harbor vacation town and their famous musical events. Asking a local music critic about this dynamic, he told me the jazz festival was well established in arts and music communities but, citing the historic row of Gilded Age mansions he told me, “There was some resistance on Bellevue Avenue. They didn’t like all the traffic, they didn’t like all the commotion. I’m sure that there was a hidden racial component to it.” Grammy Award winning Carolina Chocolate Drops member Dom Flemons offered me encyclopedic knowledge of African American folk music and its relationship with the current folk genre racialized the history of old time music—I even learned how to play the bones and the spoons from them as a part of the research. And I flagged when I saw non white performers in these predominantly white spaces (e.g., Earl Greyhound’s Black bass player and singer at South by Southwest or pointing to the rarity of seeing Black folks on stage at the major country music event). Still, in perusing my fieldnotes, one would be more likely to find country crooner “Clint Black” or Indie rock band “Black Keys” or SXSW music festival founder Louis Black than any sustained conversation about race. For my third book, however, my co authors and I center communities of color. Our research has much greater contact with folks who are “on the ground,” and organized around and against one of the most powerful city institutions in the US: urban public hospitals. The driving force behind the project is that these anchor institutions are in communities with poor health outcomes, low incomes, and are predominantly non white populations. We call this the “paradox of the health poor medically overserved community.” It is also a project with a much wider scope: a three city comparative study. The benefit of greater generalizability comes with costs. While my ethnographic dis sertation and first book offered intimate and humanizing portrayals of (primarily but not exclusively white) tour guides, and my second book evoked the lived experiences of the (primarily but not exclusively white) festivalgoers, musicians, and policymakers, a book that spans three cities, a dozen neighborhoods, and 250

Navigating Race: Expectations Before, During, and After Research 55

interviewees cannot easily humanize (primarily but not exclusively persons of color) respondents. We did not “immerse” ourselves, nor did we try to understand their lived experiences in a way that ethnographic work does. And yet, as the book steps further away from the field, and away from reproducing the Jungle Book trope, there are costs. Paradoxically, this third project will be my strongest contribution to our understandings of race and inequality in urban sociology to date, and yet, it is the least humanizing project on my CV.

On Research Expertise: How This Dilemma Shapes Building Reputations and Careers Research exists outside of design, administration, and analysis. Research design and implementation decisions influence an academic’s career, shaping expertise, reputa tion, and professional relationships. Research is the primary basis of hiring, and it can be the foundation of decades of mentorship and teaching. Scholars’ work can be well received or ignored, and their academic identity can be pigeon holed for what they study. (One of my grad school friends was, literally, nicknamed “The Pigeon Guy” for studying how city dwellers interact with animals, specifically pigeons.) It is important to note how research dilemmas have many downstream effects. One of the most significant ways research builds expertise is through the publication of journal articles and published reviews of published books. Once research is completed it should go through a rigorous peer review process and, upon publication either in a journal or book, reviewers publish their critiques, usually in academic journals. I expected criticisms in article reviews that never came. “It is highly problematic,” my imagined reviewers would write, “that the author refuses to address race.” Once my books were published, I waited for negative reviews, but they didn’t arrive. The critique, instead, came in the form of silence. Underscoring how urban research that does not address race, poverty, and inequality is undervalued in urban sociology, and sociology broadly, both books were reviewed in only a handful of places. Tellingly, the top urban sociology journal, City and Community, reviewed neither book. The critique came, rather, in a small way. In a blog post written by a disgruntled interviewee for The Tour Guide—available for anyone to read, to this day—one guide pointed to a particular ethnographic vignette wherein I describe an unhoused man who had tailed the tour as the only non white member of the group. This, the respondent says, is an example of my “quaint racism.” Only indirectly addressing race by pointing to the whiteness of the tour group, and avoiding the topic of race as a major theme more broadly in the book itself, I left myself susceptible to an interpretation of my work that embarrasses me to this day. These decisions, I recognize, made for missed opportunities on and off the page. If I had made a stronger effort to center the experiences of Black and brown folks in my research, my work could have been more representative, been more central to the discipline’s present (rather than its past), and had a wider impact. By aiming for a more “general experience” in my book on NYC tourism, however, I set a

56 Jonathan R. Wynn

stage for more refined research on the topic. There’s been a modest set of studies that use that book—from examinations of tourism on the Yucatan peninsula (Azcárate, 2020), gay touristic practices (Hartal, 2020) and study abroad programs (Tanoos, 2019), art museum programs for people with Alzheimer’s disease (Mangione, 2013). While I felt a kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dilemma in my research, the absence of an explicit racial analysis has had some unintended downstream benefits, including allowing for race to emerge in different ways in experiences with graduate and undergraduate students, as I train them for their own academic journeys. Most instructors in higher education, for example, draw upon their own research expertise for their classes. It is an expectation of the job and is a norm for lots of good reasons as it is both good pedagogy and makes practical sense. Draw ing upon a well known body of literature bolstered by intimate insights into the research process makes for informed classroom discussions. I am no different when classes touch upon cities and culture—I rely a lot on my research. My research areas, however, only represent a narrow band of the topics I teach. Instead, I do the work of reading widely to learn as much as I can about a wide range of sociology, which I love. I can see grounding my professorial authority outside of research on race has some pedagogical benefits. Almost every other year I teach a course for a group of students called the “Emerging Scholars” (a program designed to address diversity shortfalls in our campus’ Honors College). In these classes, I am the only white person in the room and negotiate different perils—from diversity in the syllabus and having frank conversations about race to curbing the white savior complex— and face another dilemma: how to be knowledgeable about scholarship on race while also bracketing my expertise in order to leave room for students’ own per spectives. When I introduce myself, I talk about my research trajectory similarly to how I write about it here. It’s uncomfortable, as it potentially undermines my authority in the classroom. But it is an opportunity to decenter myself, and make space for the research of others and for the students’ experiences. Students certainly appear to be relieved to know that I would not try to present myself as an expert on issues of race, and that I would in many ways be learning alongside them. I tell them we’re going to read a ton about race, and talk about it a lot as a group, and I’ll do my best to be a tour guide through the work. These decisions also affect how I work with graduate students in a diverse department. For graduate students who ask, I try to explain these decisions the best I can. For the majority with whom I don’t have these conversations, I likely and understandably generate some skepticism because of the conspicuous lack of racial analysis in my work. Another unintended benefit, however, is that it is yet another opportunity for space to be ceded for graduate students to share or take authority. Currently, for example, a Black graduate student and I are co authoring a paper wherein we include a reflexive section on our experiences conducting fieldwork in racially coded spaces (Prince and Wynn, forthcoming). We find that race is only one category respondents used to interpret a researcher’s obligations: commitment

Navigating Race: Expectations Before, During, and After Research 57

to social values and cultural norms, in our cases, mattered a great deal in how participants engaged with us as researchers. Importantly, for the white graduate students I work with, it has been important to talk about this dilemma, as I have experienced it. I struggle with mentoring advice, however. And this is where this essay will conclude.

On Moving On: The Dilemma Going Forward There are no easy conclusions from this meditation on race and research, no easily packaged answers on offer. Instead, this essay ends on mentoring ethnographic and qualitatively inclined graduate students. Poetically, as the debates over Alice Goffman’s work circulated, they also inter sected with a growing sense of inequity among the graduate students of color in my department. The dilemmas over studying race and struggles over how scholars engage with communities of color that I debated in graduate school return, this time as a faculty member. Goffman gave a talk to our department in 2014, and the high profile debate around her work attracted a good sized audience. Much like I had closely attended to the debates in the field 12 years prior, our graduate students avidly followed the story. As my colleague Fareen Parvez made her introductions to the packed assembly, she deftly reframed the debate to highlight how accusations of exploitation seem to be leveled at ethnographers like Goffman more than other methodologists—noting that few could recall conversations or publications accusing demographers or network analysts of exploitation. Parvez echoed many of the challenges fieldworkers face: ethnographers and their accounts, with the “intimate familiarity” of their portrayals (Lofland and Lofland, 1995) and personal narratives, are open to a critique of exploitation or exo ticization in a way that quantitative work does not. While Goffman’s presentation and the Q&A that followed remained civil, the students (particularly students of color) questioned why our department would give a platform to a scholar whose work, in their minds, was unethical. Founded or not, the event confirmed many students’ suspicions about our departments’ commitments to racial justice, a sentiment that lingers years later. The students wanted to know: should our department valorize the work of white researchers, like Goffman, studying communities of color? Whose side are we on? 43 years after Howie Becker asked sociology “Whose Side Are We On?” in his presidential address for the Society for the Study of Social Problems (1967), Nikki Jones’ (2010: 164; see also Ostrander, 1993) appendix to Between Good and Ghetto reflected on her ability to “code switch” between being an expertly trained and highly skilled academic fieldworker and her Black and working class respondents seeing her as firmly being “on their side.” She notes that, as a Black woman, she was “with and on the Black community—an amorphous, diverse, and sometimes divided community” she herself felt a part of, putting the discipline and white scholars who study similar groups on notice, positing, implicitly: how do “out siders” commit to the groups they study?

58 Jonathan R. Wynn

When mentoring graduate students, I think of Rios’ “Jungle Book trope” as a good opening for reflecting on the many stages of research as a fieldworker engages with issues of race, but there are lots of lines to be crossed and problems with commitments toward the communities we research. I have pointed students to Jones’ methodologi cal appendix, reflecting on her own position of power as a Black academic researcher in relation to the young African American girls she studied. I have also, however, flagged Jennifer Robertson’s (2002) cautionary essay on ethnographers being careful not to “narrowcast” our reflexivity to a single or double demographic dimension. Such efforts, according to Robertson, lend themselves to a form of “self stereotyping” and severely limit our understanding of how researchers’ positionality shapes fieldwork (see also May, 2014; Reyes, 2020; and Young, 2004). The dilemma described here—the choice between addressing race but not exploiting it and minimally engaging with it—occurs along research boundaries of class, sexuality, and gender as well, with similar downstream effects. Qualitative researchers with any privilege are in the position where there is both a demand that we address diversity and inequity in our research while also balancing exploitation and appropriation. The lack of answers does not absolve anyone from the respon sibility of being more open and reflexive in facing these issues in research. It’s an invitation to be more aware of as many of these dynamics as possible.

References Anderson, Elijiah (2002) “The Ideologically Driven Critique,” American Journal of Sociology. 107 (6): 1533 1550. Anderson, Nels (1923) The Hobo. University of Chicago Press. Azcárate, Matilde Córdoba (2020)Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary Yucatan. University of California Press. Becker, Howard S. (1967) “Whose Side Are We On?,” Social Problems 14 (3): 239 247. Behar, Ruth and Deborah A. Gordon (eds) (1995) Women Writing Culture. University of California Press. Betts, Dwayne (2014) “The Stoop Isn’t the Jungle.” July 10. https://slate.com/news and p olitics/2014/07/alice goffmans on the run she is wrong about black urban life.html, accessed May 6, 2021. Bonnett, Alastair (1996) “‘White Studies:’ The Problems and Projects of a New Research Agenda,” Theory, Culture & Society 13 (2): 145 155. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press. Campos, Paul F. (2015) “Alice Goffman’s Implausible Ethnography,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 21. www.chronicle.com/article/alice goffmans implausible ethnograp hy/, accessed May 19, 2021. Clough, Patricia Ticino (1994) Feminist thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse. Blackwell. Clough, Patricia Ticino (1998) The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (2nd Edition). Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers. Contreras, Randol (2013) The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream. University of California Press. DeLuca, Jamie R., Callie Batts Maddox (2016) “Tales from the Ethnographic Field: Navigating Feelings of Guilt and Privilege in the Research Process,” Field Methods 28 (3): 284 299.

Navigating Race: Expectations Before, During, and After Research 59

Desmond, Matthew (2016) Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Crown Publishers. Donovan, Francis (1929) The Saleslady. University of Chicago Press. Duneier, Mitchell (2002) “What Kind of Combat Sport Is Sociology?,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (6): 1551 1576. Duneier, Mitchell (2004) “Scrutinizing the Heat: On Ethnic Myths and the Importance of Shoe Leather,” Contemporary Sociology 33 (2): 139 150. Goffman, Alice (2014) On the Run. University of Chicago Press. Gotham, Kevin Fox (2007) Authentic New Orleans. New York University Press. Grams, Diane (2010) Producing Local Color. University of Chicago Press. Grazian, David (2003) Blue Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Hartal, Gilly (2020) “Touring and Obscuring: How Sensual, Embodied and Haptic Gay Touristic Practices Construct the Geopolitics of Pinkwashing,” Social & Cultural Geography, doi:10.1080/14649365.2020.1821391. Hoang, Kimberly K. (2015) Dealing in Desire. University of California Press. Hughes, Everett C. (1958) Men and Their Work. The Free Press. Irwin, Katherine (2006) “Into the Dark Heart of Ethnography: The Lived Ethics and Inequality of Intimate Field Relationships,” Qualitative Sociology 29: 155 175. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11133 006 9011 3. Jones, Nikki (2010) Between Good and Ghetto. Rutgers University Press. Klinenberg, Eric (1994) Heat Wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Klinenberg, Eric (2004) “Overheated,” Contemporary Sociology 33 (5): 521 528. Lewis Kraus, Gideon (2016) “The Trials of Alice Goffman,” The New York Times MagazineJanuary 12. www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/the trials of alice goffman.htm l, accessed May 19, 2021. Lofland, John and Lyn H. Lofland (1995) Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis. Wadsworth. Mangione, Gemma (2013) “Access to What?: Alzheimer's Disease and Esthetic Sense Making in the Contemporary Art Museum,” Poetics 41 (1): 27 47. May, Reuben A. Buford (2014) “When the Methodological Shoe is on the Other Foot: African American Interviewer and White Interviewees,” Qualitative Sociology 37: 117 136. Morris, Aldon (2017) The Scholar Denied. University of California Press. Newman, Katherine (2002) “No Shame: The View from the Left Bank,” American Journal of Sociology, 107 (6): 1577 1599. Oakley, Ann (1981) “Interviewing Women: A contradiction in terms,” in Roberts, Helen (ed.) Doing feminist research. Routledge, 30 61. Ostrander, Susan A. (1993) “Surely You’re Not in This Just to be Helpful: Access, Rapport and Interviews in Three Elite Studies,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 22 (1): 7 27. Parvez, Z. Fareen (2018) “The Sorrow of Parting: Ethnographic Depth and the Role of Emotions,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 47 (4): 454 483. Prince, Chanel and Jonathan R. Wynn (forthcoming) “Fun in Games, Games in Fun,” Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa (Ethnography and Qualitative Research), Special Issue for Goffman’s 100th Anniversary. Reyes, Victoria (2020) “Ethnographic Toolkit: Strategic Positionality and Researchers’ Visible and Invisible Tools in Field Research,” Ethnography 21 (2): 220 240. Rios, Victor (2011) Punished: Policing the lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York University Press. Rios, Victor (2015a) “Decolonizing the White Space in Urban Ethnography,” City & Community 14 (3): 258 261. Rios, Victor (2015b) “Book Review On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, by Alice Goffman,” American Journal of Sociology 121 (1): 306 308.

60 Jonathan R. Wynn

Robertson, Jennifer (2002) “Reflexivity Redux: A Pithy Polemic on ‘Positionality’,” Anthropological Quarterly 75 (4): 785 792. Sharpe, Christina (2014) “Black Life, Annotated,” The New Inquiry, August 8. https://the newinquiry.com/black life annotated/, accessed May 19, 2021. Shaw, Clifford R. (1930) The Jack-Roller. University of Chicago Press. Simmel, Georg (1950) “The Stranger,” in K.H. Wolff (ed.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 402 409. Simmel, Georg (1965) “The Poor,” Social Problems 13: 118 139. Singal, Jesse (2016) “3 Lingering Questions From the Alice Goffman Controversy,” The CutJanuary 15. www.thecut.com/2016/01/3 lingering questions about alice goffman. html, accessed May 19, 2021. Small, Mario (2015) “De Exoticizing Ghetto Poverty: On the Ethics of Representation in Urban Ethnography,” City and Community 14 (4): 352 358. Stacey, Judith (1988) “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?,” Women’s Studies International Forum 11: 21 27. Stark, Laura (2011) Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the making of ethical research. University of Chicago Press. Stuart, Forrest (2020) Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy. Princeton University Press. Sutherland, Edwin H. (1937) The Professional Thief. University of Chicago Press. Tanoos, James J. (2019) “Impact of Tour Guides on Student Immersions During a Short Term Study Abroad Experience,” Journal of Global Tourism Research 4 (2): 81 84. Twine, Frances Winddance and Jonathan W. Warren (2000) Racing Research, Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies. New York University Press. Visweswaran, Kamala (1994) Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. University of Minnesota Press. Wacquant, Löic (2002) “Scrutinizing the Street: Poverty, morality and the Pitfalls of Urban Ethnography,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (6): 1468 1532. Young, Jr.Alford (2004) The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances. Princeton University Press.

4 DO LAWSUITS SILENCE? LEGAL HARASSMENT IN CORPORATE CRIME RESEARCH Willem de Haan

Introduction It is not uncommon for researchers to be the bearers of unwelcome messages. It is also not unusual that efforts are made to censure the publication of their research. Censorship is a frequent state response to unwelcome results of government funded research.1 But especially precarious are the efforts to silence researchers in the field of state corporate, corporate and white collar crime.2 In this multi disciplinary field at the intersection of business history, criminology, law, social and political science, researchers have to deal with mutually reinforcing processes limiting their ability “to subject the powerful to critical academic scrutiny” (Tombs and Whyte, 2007: 139). To begin with, research on corporate and white collar crime requires access to data which, usually, are in possession and under control of business corporations. This means that the documents which companies are making available are subject to all kinds of corporate control and filtering (Tweedale, 2003: 104). And even if a researcher can negotiate access to them, the use of these data may be restricted. Researchers may have to sign contracts requiring them to guarantee confidentiality and, should they not fully comply, threatening them with a law suit for libel or defamation.3 Actually, for researchers investigating “crimes of the powerful” it should not come as a surprise that the powerful use their power to force researchers to adjust or withhold unwanted results. The fact of the matter is that in order to disclose and report harmful, immoral or illegal corporate activities, researchers will often have to face a dilemma in which the freedom to investigate may be at stake. Will they let themselves be silenced by corporations possibly or actually threating them with a lawsuit that could financially ruin them? Or will they bravely or rashly, depend ing on one’s perspective, ignore or resist such legal harassment and publish whatever it takes? DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 6

62 Willem de Haan

There is a longer history to this dilemma. Edwin Sutherland (1983–1950), a pioneer in this field, faced it with the publication of his book White Collar Crime (1949), “a devastating documentation of crimes perpetrated by America’s 70 largest private companies and 15 public utility corporations” (Braithwaite, 1985: 2). The manuscript of White Collar Crime was accepted by Dryden Press in 1949. However, its legal counsel asserted that the publisher would be liable for damages because the manuscript included citations to court rulings and regulatory commission findings, thereby identifying prominent corporations as “criminals.” The publisher, there fore, insisted that the names of the companies be removed from the book. At the same time, there was pressure from the administration of Indiana University to delete the names of the corporations. Sutherland who believed that the university feared alienating some of its wealthy business contributors agonized over the dilemma of whether to publish or rather be on the safe side and censure the manuscript. After discussing the issue with students and colleagues he finally accepted the publisher’s condition for publication and removed the names of the companies from his book (Geis and Goff, 1983: x–xi). In the Preface to the first version of White Collar Crime (1949) Sutherland explained his decision but it is not clear whether he acceded to the publisher’s and university’s caution regarding legal action or whether he feared being held personally liable for damages the risk of which he must at least have been aware.4 Donald Cressey, a student of Sutherland, remembered a discussion with him about the issue. Had the original manuscript been published and had a libel suit been initiated, then Sutherland’s contention that the listed offenses are in fact crimes might have been tested in a court of law – a corporation might have argued that the statement is libelous because its behavior is not a crime, with Sutherland giving the arguments presented in his book. However, my idealistic desire to see a scientific principle tested in a court of law was not tempered by any practical consideration such as having money riding on the legal validity of the scientific principle. This was not the case with either the publisher or Professor Sutherland. (Cressey, 1961: vii) Finally, the “Uncut Version” of White Collar Crime (Sutherland 1983) was published with the names of the corporations, many of which are well known, even today.5 The Australian criminologist John Braithwaite, winner of the Edwin H. Sutherland Award6 of the American Society of Criminology in 2004, recalled that his book, Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry (Braithwaite, 1984), which disclosed a wide variety of types of corporate crime within the pharmaceutical industry, was held up for four years by the publisher. Braithwaite had conducted formal interviews with high rank executives from leading pharmaceutical compa nies.7 The publisher’s legal counsel raised hundreds of objections to formulations that might provide causes of defamation and claims that could be raised in court.

Do Lawsuits Silence? Legal Harassment in Corporate Crime Research 63

(Tombs and Whyte, 2007: 139) When the book was finally published, the Phar maceutical Manufacturers Association sent a letter to its members urging them to report any statements that were “false.”8 More recently, I myself have been threatened with a civil lawsuit for defamation. A multinational tried to prevent the publication of an article I wrote on their complicity in crimes against humanity during the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983).9 In the article, I presented evidence that the multinational had been involved through its local affiliate in the forceful disappearance of workers and their relatives and that the vice president of the board of directors as well as business representatives of the multinational knew what was happening, yet did not take action. I concluded that, in hindsight and by current standards, it could be argued that by failing to raise questions about the crimes against humanity that were known to have been committed in Argentina and, more specifically, in and around its local affiliate, the business representatives had rendered their multinational cor poration “silently complicit” in what would later turn out to be the worst tragedy in 20th century Argentinian history. Initially, I had been given written permission to submit the article to a journal on the sole condition that I would let the company know when it was going to be pub lished.10 Given that the article dealt with management responsibilities of former executives, it was considered important to be able to respond in a timely and adequate manner to possible questions and reactions that might result from the article. When I submitted the article, the publisher’s legal counsel estimated that, not withstanding the written permission given by the corporate council, a “substantial risk” remained that former directors of the multinational might wish to challenge these statements, regardless of the stance of the multinational itself. The publisher did not allow the journal Editor to send the article out for peer review until I had met the publisher’s concerns about possible legal complications by way of toning down a number of phrases and sentences which were potentially problematic from a legal perspective. However, I was warned that even then nothing would be guaranteed yet. I felt it would be proper for me to inform Senior Corporate Counsel of the multinational that I would have to make changes in the text of the article to meet concerns about possible legal complications and resubmit the revised text for peer review. With this courtesy I “woke a sleeping dog.” The Head of Compliance of the multinational wrote to me that the article did not give an accurate picture of what happened at the time and the role of management in it and that therefore the permission to publish the article was revoked. I was invited for an in house meeting with the Head of Compliance and the Head of Communications. In this meeting I was told by the compliance officer that the company was concerned about civil litigation and reputational damage. They explained to me how costly it would be to defend the company against civil claims and how difficult to counter negative perceptions. The permission I had been given for publication was con sidered an error. Soon after the meeting, I received a letter from the Head of Compliance saying that the amendments I made in the text did not meet the

64 Willem de Haan

fundamental objections to the article and that, therefore, there was no reason to reconsider withdrawal of the approval to publish. Publication of such unsubstantiated allegations, which also affect individuals, would be careless and unlawful. As the researcher, I would, therefore, be held liable for the damages the multinational would suffer as a result. After reading this letter, I was in shock. Would I have to inform the publisher and would the journal still be able to publish the article which I had devoted so much effort and time in researching? Could I as a researcher ignore the threat of a civil lawsuit which could ruin me and my family financially? I must admit that I lost sleep over the dilemma to publish or give up and withdraw the article from the journal but after some consideration with the university lawyer, the Executive Board of the university decided to unconditionally support publication of the article.11 Unlike in the case of Sutherland’s book, White Collar Crime, the university offered the support and security which allowed me to publish the article regardless of the corporate efforts to silence me. I was so grateful to the university for their support that I wanted everybody to know. The university lawyer, however, advised me against this. The university wanted to avoid a confrontation with the multinational. In the publicity, the focus should be solely on the conflict between researcher and multinational. Initially, I feared that the university was backtracking. But, then, I realized that the university was defending the freedom of research and supporting the publication on principle, not on substance. And, I wholeheartedly agreed. I had always been strongly convinced that the multinational would never go to court because this would only raise the publicity that it was trying to prevent. And, indeed, nothing happened. Not even a letter in answer to the Rector was ever received. So, in the end, the liability claim for the damages the multinational would suffer as a result of the publication was designed to silence me by intimidation, threatening litigation costs I could not possibly afford. Triggered by this personal experience, I became interested in to what extent other criminologists in the field of white collar and corporate crime have been or are being confronted with this type of legal harassment. What are the repercus sions? What is the emotional impact of legal harassment and to what extent does the experience influence their research? In short, how are they dealing with such efforts to silence them?

Silencing Researchers I wrote to a number of well known researchers in the field of white collar and corporate crime whom I suspected might have had personal experience with this issue and be willing to tell me about it. I wrote to researchers in Europe and the United States, Australia and the UK all looking at and writing about harmful, immoral or illegal corporate activities and their impact on society, human rights or the environment. I asked them if they had been or were being confronted with (the threat of) lawsuits and how they had dealt or were dealing with such an effort to silence or censure them. I assured them that any information they would pass on

Do Lawsuits Silence? Legal Harassment in Corporate Crime Research 65

to me would be handled with discretion and that, if they wished, anonymity would be guaranteed. While waiting for their response I searched the literature for examples of what may have happened to researchers who in their publications had disclosed harmful, immoral or illegal corporate conduct. Somewhat to my surprise most articles and chapters in the field of white collar and corporate crime are based on the work of investigative journalists or NGOs rather than on original case studies conducted by the authors themselves. An exception is Maurice Punch (1996), who noted that because of “legal issues,” his book Dirty Business: Exploring Corporate Misconduct was held up for a year and not published before he made “many incisions and dele tions” (Punch, 2000: 247). These changes were clearly demanded to prevent legal issues because Punch notes that especially “in Great Britain you must be most careful in suggesting direct and conscious links between management and harm because it can land you in court on libel charges” (ibid., 2000: 247).12 Like publishers, universities also take preemptive actions in anticipation of legal issues. Ever since the enforced self censorship demanded by Sutherland’s own uni versity, which was unprepared to defend his academic freedom against the threat of libel action, corporate crime researchers continue to be plagued by preemptive actions taken by universities in anticipation of legal issues (or simply to avoid upsetting cor porate sponsors) (Tombs and Whyte, 2007: 138). As an example, Tombs and Whyte refer to a case of research into a major asbestos producer. In this case the researcher “found his manuscript vetted by his university department – who then, supported the legal advice that, despite the successful conviction of [the corporation] for health and safety crimes, this phenomenon should be described neither as murder or crime” (Tombs and Whyte, 2007: 139). Since the university was uneasy about a project as controversial as the asbestos industry, the manuscript was once again carefully vetted by a lawyer in London who recommended that all “prejudicial language” be removed. All defamatory references to living individuals were earmarked for emendation or deletion like any reference to corporate crime, even though the corporation had been convicted for health and safety violations.13 While to the author most of these emendations seemed unnecessary or repugnant, if they had not been made, the publishers, the university, and the insurers would have withdrawn their support (Tweedale, 2003: 108).

Researchers Talk In answer to my question – had they been or were they being confronted with (the threat of) lawsuits and how did they deal or are dealing with such an effort to silence or censure them researchers to whom I wrote responded differently. One said that this was not something that had ever happened to her. Another explained that he had “always been ultra careful because the UK is a libel plaintiff friendly country.” He added that as news organizations have been sued, sometimes successfully in the UK, no one should be surprised when major companies put pressure on what they may regard as soft targets among academics.

66 Willem de Haan

Most researchers to whom I wrote had indeed been confronted with corporate efforts to silence them like the criminologist John Braithwaite who in the course of his long career in the field of corporate and white collar crime received formal letters with lawsuits for defamation from two major multinational corporations and verbal threats from various others.14 One researcher wrote more specifically about how he, as the editor of a social scientific journal, had been threatened with a lawsuit for defamation by an international auction house in an effort to prevent the publication of a paper on trade in stolen antiquities. In this case, neither the publisher of the journal nor the university where the editor was employed offered him any support. The pub lisher wrote him a letter saying that it was up him to publish or withdraw the paper. The university provided him no support other than sending him a list of lawyers to whom he could go to. Editors of other journals suggested that he should drop the article, warning that the threat of a legal action could bankrupt him. The matter which lasted several months and he had to handle on his own, gave the editor significant grief. Ultimately, he decided to publish the paper after offering the auction house the chance to write a reply to which the author of the paper would have a chance to respond. He promised that the reply and response would be published together in the earliest possible issue of the journal. The auction house did not respond. Interestingly, after his decision to publish the paper had been announced at a conference one of the participants wrote to congratulate the editor for standing his ground. At the end of it all, he at least felt some moral satisfaction. Another researcher told about how he and his colleague were to give a talk about harmful activities of a local plant, when two letters were received. In a letter addressed to them the corporation complained about its being depicted “as a cor rupt company where employees are routinely and knowingly exposed to danger and degradation” and threatened that they would “not tolerate such serious attacks on the company’s reputation.” In an accompanying letter to the Chancellor of the university, the corporation threatened that they were taking “legal advice on what further action to take in respect of this matter.” Only after the researchers assured the Dean that they could support their claims with evidence, did they receive the “go ahead.” On the evening of the presentation, a smartly dressed woman came into the room after they started speaking. She sat at the back, took copious notes and left the room as soon as the researchers had finished. The researchers assumed that the woman had been sent by the corporation but never heard anything. Yet another researcher was about to publish an article in a peer reviewed scientific journal, when he received an e mail from the editors concerning the risk of being sued for defamation by the global companies that were mentioned in the data on which the article was based. The editors had been advised by the publisher’s lawyers to review this risk. Since the editors suggested that this was something the university might also have to consider, the author talked to the university’s chief legal officer.15

Do Lawsuits Silence? Legal Harassment in Corporate Crime Research 67

After discussions back and forth an effort was made to deal with the issue in a way that would be transparent and respectful of the scientific integrity of the research. The suggestion was made to remove the names of the companies but the legal expert argued that this could make the situation worse since then all major companies in the industry might be offended. Thereupon the author contacted the companies of which the names were mentioned in the article and invited them to come forward with their view on the matter which would then be included in an appendix to the article. Three out of eight companies responded and their views were attached to the article online. While, not surprisingly, these companies denied their responsibility, they did not actually threaten to sue the author for what he had written. Nonetheless, the researcher continued to live in fear of a law suit since the legal experts had warned him that even if he made changes to the article, he would still run a risk of being sued for a period of one year after publication. Even though the chance of a company winning a defamation case against a researcher is quite small, if the financial responsibility for the litigation process lies with the individual researcher, the costs of litigation could financially ruin her or him. This means that in this case the author will be taking a risk by publishing the article if the university adminis tration does not guarantee to cover the legal costs in case a lawsuit for defamation would occur. It was, therefore, that he felt a great sense of relief when, finally, the date of one year after publication had passed. The impact of legal action can be considerably increased by media attention as in the example of a researcher of white collar crime who was sued for libel by an individual professional. In this case the research was commissioned and the researcher fully covered for the potential costs of litigation. Yet for the researcher it was “unbelievably hard” to be the object of media attention and to find himself in a predicament which had seemed “inconceivable.”

Discussion Both the research literature and the responses of researchers show that in the course of publishing the results of research on harmful, immoral or illegal corporate activities in peer reviewed scientific journals researchers might be confronted with legal threats of being sued for libel or defamation. As there is reason to believe that what has been explored in this chapter is no more than the proverbial tip of the iceberg, it is important that more stories of legal harassment become available in order to get a better grasp of what issues are at stake. The current state of affairs raises some pertinent questions about the freedom of research and the chances that researchers are being silenced by legal means. Can researchers prevent lawsuits for libel or defamation without compromising the integrity of their research? Should they even try when their publishers require them to do so? At least one of the large international publishers of scientific journals gives instructions to the editors of its journals to be aware of libel risks when reviewing

68 Willem de Haan

content for publication suggesting that the risks of lawsuits “can be reduced sig nificantly through careful language sub editing, in consultation with the author, at the submission stage.”16 But, as we have seen, even when authors follow the advice to make legally significant changes in their texts, there always remains a risk of being sued within a period of time after publication. Occasionally, it seems possible to tone down “accusations” and make changes in an article without necessarily compromising the freedom and integrity of research. However, this applies more to research on business history than contemporary criminological research, the very purpose of which is precisely to show that harmful corporate activities, from a legal perspective may be lawful within the letter of the law yet are morally “awful” and deserve to be called “criminal” (Passas, 2005). In these cases, preventing lawsuits for libel or defamation seems hardly possible without compro mising the integrity of the research. Legal advice that harmful corporate activities should never be described as “crime,” notwithstanding lawful convictions for these activities and regardless of their multiple adverse social consequences, does not seem to solve the problem. Legally any scientific article in the field of corporate and white collar crime tends to be read as if the text is to present legal proof rather than scientific evidence for the claims that are being made. Researchers may assume that they can avoid legal problems by ensuring that their statements are factual and true. But in practice it turns out that it often is the very fact that their claims are true which causes them legal problems (Tweedale, 2003: 107). It seems counter intuitive that unwelcome results of scientific research in the field of cor porate crime and white collar crime are more vulnerable to legal action precisely because they are carefully documented and published in peer reviewed scientific journals. It is as if the freedom of scientific research is less protected against legal action than the freedom of expression on which journalists can call when they need to defend themselves against law suits for libel or defamation. Maybe this is because the freedom of research is not a universal right like the freedom of expression but a right which is restricted to academic researchers within the specific area of expertise that they can legitimately claim (Hammersley, 2016: 117). It might, perhaps, be argued that publication of scientific research in the field of corporate and white collar crime is a contribution to a general public debate and, therefore, ought to be protected by the right of free expression. This is an issue which others might want to explore. What should researchers do when they are threatened with lawsuits before they publish the results of their research? As we have seen, legal threats with lawsuits for libel and defamation are seldom if ever followed by actual legal action. This makes sense to the extent that business lawyers representing the interests of multinationals will be aware that by pressing charges and going to court they would only raise the negative publicity that they are supposed to prevent with a loss of reputation as a result. Yet, the individual researcher who is being threatened with a law suit for libel or defamation cannot afford to gamble with the risk of being ruined finan cially for the sake of academic freedom and the moral obligation to make research findings public (Hammersley, 2016: 116–117). As this exploration has made clear,

Do Lawsuits Silence? Legal Harassment in Corporate Crime Research 69

for individual researchers the fear of such a lawsuit creates a mental burden that, I argue, they should not have to bear. As long as they are doing their job in a careful and professional way, they should not be harassed by corporate legal threats. This raises the question whether universities have a responsibility to protect their research staff. Universities tend to be cautious about controversial research and some universities have required that their legal advisers make sure that all “prejudicial language” and potentially defamatory claims are emendated. But, as we have seen, adapting articles in peer reviewed scientific journals to the satisfaction of business lawyers cannot be the solution. Fortunately, there are also exceptions. There are universities that consider it their moral obligation to protect the freedom of research and defend their employees when researchers are being threatened by or confronted with a lawsuit for libel or defamation. Yet, this laudable approach offers a solution to what should never have been a problem. The problem should not be how to avoid lawsuits for libel or defamation or to defend researchers against legal actions should they occur, but how to hold corporations accountable for their infringement of academic freedom and obstruction of research in the field of corporate and white collar crime. In terms of business ethics, corporate response to unwelcome results of scientific research should not be dependent solely on the outcome of a cost benefit analysis, whereby the costs to the enterprise of losing its reputation are weighed against the costs of pressing charges against researchers for libel or defamation. Rather than trying to silence researchers by legally harassing them, business corporations should opt for a different way of managing their reputation. Corporate social responsibility requires that they be more open and transparent than defensive and resistant in response to exposure of harmful, immoral or illegal business activities by means of scientific research. In order to conduct their business operations in a socially responsible way, business corporations should integrate their respect for the freedom and integrity of scientific research in their compliance based business ethics. Rather than just pay lip service, business corporations could state their commitment to support academic freedom and refrain from legal action against scientists investigating the impact of their business operations. This could be integrated in their commitment to embrace socially responsible (and sustainable) policies and report on their implementation.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Chrisje Brants and Wim Huisman for their helpful suggestions and support.

Notes 1 Interviews with researchers from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and the United States (Walters, 2003) have showed that researchers encounter restrictions in pub lishing their research and even in presenting preliminary results at conferences and seminars. On independence of researchers in The Netherlands, see Boone and De Haan, 2011.

70 Willem de Haan

2 “Corporate crime” is a form of crime committed by [business] organizations and people working on behalf of those organizations (Clinard and Quinney, 1973: 188). “White collar crime” is a form of crime “committed by persons of high social status and respectability in the course of their occupation” (Sutherland, 1949: 9). Crime committed on behalf and for the benefit of business corporations by individuals in high rank positions within these organizations can, therefore, be considered as either or both corporate and white collar crime (Van Erp and Huisman, 2017: 248). 3 Defamation is the action of damaging the good reputation of someone, i.e. a business corporation. If a defamatory statement is written, the action is considered as libel. 4 The publisher’s attorneys had advised Sutherland that a corporation might sue the author on the ground that calling its behavior “criminal” is libelous (Cressey, 1961: vii). 5 American Tobacco, Anaconda Copper, Bethlehem Steel, Chrysler, Dupont, Eastman Kodak, Firestone, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Goodrich, Goodyear, Para mount, Proctor & Gamble, Union Carbide and Carbon, United Fruit, U.S. Rubber, U.S. Steel, Warner Brothers, Westinghouse Electric and Woolworth, a.o. 6 The ASC awarded him with the Michael J. Hindelang Award in 1991 and the Sellin Glueck Award in 1992. 7 Bayer, Glaxo, Hoechst, Hoffman La Roche, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Sandoz, Schering, and SmithKline a.o. 8 In spite of recurrent requests for copies, the book went “unusually quickly” out of print. It was not reprinted until it was revived as an e book in 2013 (Braithwaite, 2013). John Braithwaite, personal communication. 9 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00076791.2018.1523393. 10 Strictly speaking, I only needed permission to quote a few documents from the com pany archive. I was allowed to inspect confidential files from the corporate archive company files after signing a declaration concerning historical documents. According to the terms of this agreement permission for publication of this information would require permission which, however, could not be refused on “unreasonable grounds.” 11 In a letter the Rector informed the CEO that the university considered the actions of the multinational an unacceptable infringement on the freedom of scientific research. 12 It has been noted that “English libel law is notoriously favorable to plaintiffs. Any unduly critical statement can be interpreted as defamatory, and that is all that is required to start a legal action. At this point the burden is entirely on the defendant to prove the truth of the comments. There is neither a right to free speech nor any public interest defense (as in America); the plaintiff does not even need to be named (provided he can be identified from the text); and there is no legal aid. Libel law is tailored for business people and for companies, which can also sue for their injured reputation. Criticizing a company or an executive for criminal activity can therefore be a risky affair” (Tweedale, 2003: 106). 13 A reference to corporate “murder” was also marked for deletion, even though this word appeared in a quotation from someone else. 14 Some of these threats were in relation to his collaborations with the Australian criminologist Brent Fisse. John Braithwaite, personal communication. 15 As the journal was British, help was sought of a British law firm with expertise in defamation lawsuits. 16 https://editorresources.taylorandfrancis.com/welcome to tf/policies guidelines/defamation/.

References Boone, Miranda and De Haan, Willem (2011) “It’s Not That Bad, Is It?: On the Indepen dence of Researchers in Dutch Criminology,” Tijdschrift voor Criminologie 53 (1): 55 59. Braithwaite, John (1984) Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Do Lawsuits Silence? Legal Harassment in Corporate Crime Research 71

Braithwaite, John (1985) “White collar Crime,” Annual Review of Sociology 11: 1 25. Braithwaite, John (2013) Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry. London: Routledge Revivals. Clinard, Marshall B. and Richard Quinney (1973) Criminal Behavior Systems: A Typology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Cressey, Donald R. (1961) “Preface,” in Edwin H. Sutherland White-collar Crime. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Geis, Gilbert and Goff, Colin (1983) “Introduction,” in Edwin H. Sutherland White-collar Crime. New Haven: Yale University Press, ix xxxiii. Hammersley, Martyn (2016) “Can Academic Freedom be Justified? Reflections on the Arguments of Robert Post and Stanley Fish,” Higher Education Quarterly 70 (2): 108 126. Passas, Nikos (2005) “Lawful but Awful: ‘Legal Corporate Crimes’,” The Journal of SocioEconomics 34 (6): 771 786. Punch, Maurice (2000) “Suite Violence; Why Managers Manage and Corporations Kill,” Crime, Law and Social Change 33: 243 280. Sutherland, Edwin H. (1983) [1949] White-collar Crime. New Haven: Yale University Press. Walters, Reece (2003) Deviant knowledge. Devon: Willan Publishing. Tombs, Steve and David Whyte (eds) (2003) Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful: Scrutinizing States & Corporations. New York: Peter Lang. Tombs, Steve and David Whyte (2007) “Researching Corporate and White Collar Crime in an Era of Neo Liberalism,” in Henry N. Pontell and Gilbert L. Geis (eds) International Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime. New York: Springer, 125 147. Tweedale, G. (2003) “Researching Corporate Crime: A Business Historian's Perspective,” in S. Tombs and D. White (eds) Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful: Scrutinizing States & Corporations. New York: Peter Lang. Van Erp, Judith and Wim Huisman (2017) “Corporate Crime,” in Routledge Companion to Criminological Theory and Concepts, edited by Avi Brisman, Eamonn Carrabine and Nigel South. Abingdon: Routledge, 248 252.

PART II

Neglected Feelings

5 “BAD FEELINGS”: REFLECTIONS ON RESEARCH, DISCIPLINES, AND CRITICAL METHODOLOGIES Ghassan Moussawi and Jyoti Puri

Brought together by their shared interests in transnational approaches to gender and sexuality, postcolonial feminisms, and queer theory, Ghassan Moussawi, an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, and Jyoti Puri, a Professor of Sociology at Simmons Uni versity, converse about the role of affect in research, writing, and the discipline of sociology in this chapter. This conversation is inspired by Moussawi’s interest in exploring what it means to feel and acknowledge anxiety, fear, and shame, and to relive traumatic incidents while in the field. Moussawi has recently published his book Disruptive Situations (2020) on queer formations and strategies of survival amidst everyday life disruptions and violence in Beirut. He conducted the bulk of his fieldwork in Beirut in 2013–14, at the height of terrorist attacks and suicide bombings by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). As he was writing the book and looking back on his field notes, he was reminded of the distressing and traumatic experiences he had in the field. He assumed that trauma, fear, anxiety, shame, and guilt were feelings that he ought to ignore or keep to himself, fearing that academically unpacking these feelings would distract from his main research questions about queer formations in Beirut, and the contributions he sought to make. However, receiving Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine’s call for this volume gave Moussawi an opportunity and a platform to revisit and think through his over looked field notes about his neglected feelings and experiences in the field. He turned to performance studies scholar and queer theorist Jose Esteban Muñoz’s (2006: 676) “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” where Muñoz defines “feeling Brown” as “a certain ethics of the self that is utilized and deployed by people of color and other minoritarian subjects who don’t feel quite right within the proto cols of normative affect and comportment.” While feelings are important to how we conduct research, they do not yet prominently figure into sociological methods DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 8

76 Ghassan Moussawi and Jyoti Puri

or guidelines about how to write about them. Interested in pursuing issues of feelings in research and writing, their limited place in sociology, and the ways that these issues are exacerbated for scholars of color, Moussawi sought out Puri as someone who also works on the Global South and contends with questions of disciplines and institutions. Her body of work on the regulation of gender and sexuality in South Asia, state governance and police violence, postcolonial nationalisms, as well as transnational discourses on bodies, subjectivity and desire made her a suitable partner in this dialog. For her, it was a welcome opportunity to reflect on the place of affect across her body of work and in her current project, and the conversational format was particularly appealing to consider Moussawi’s prompts related to feeling badly. Emotions associated with feeling badly, such as discomfort, doubt, fears of failure, among others, might reflect common conditions that researchers experience. However, they are amplified for some researchers and in particular contexts. While these emotions are hard to capture in words, they feel uneasy and are uncomfortable. They are usually kept to oneself, dissociated as much as possible from the recording of data or its analysis. The ensuing conversation between Moussawi and Puri pushes against the implicit personalization and pathologization of these feelings and the assumptions that we need to manage these feelings alone. Opening up to such discussions makes us vulnerable and while talking and writing about these feelings is not easy, it is nevertheless all the more necessary. It becomes an opportunity to reflect together, thereby exploring the sources of the discomfort, their historical and institutional underpinnings, and what might be done about them. As our conversation progresses, it became increasingly important for us to distinguish the notions of feeling badly from “bad feelings.” What is required is an analytical tool/lens through which to incorporate the social conditions and inequalities that heighten feeling badly, that exposes some more than others to the ongoing threat of physical violence, emotional harm, racial and gender inequalities, economic precarity, war, strife, sexual and gender harassment, right wing nationalisms, among others. “Bad feelings” becomes a means of raising questions about the struc tural, institutional and disciplinary conditions that feel “not quite right,” while also calling attention to the need to theorize the complexities of feelings produced through scholarly research and knowledge production that are typically supposed to be kept to oneself to clear the way for “academic rigor” and “professionalism.” While the con versation began with the question of how each of us conceive of feelings in the research field and why we often neglect them, what emerged are the number of ways that attending to and paying attention to feelings—particularly those that don’t feel good—can orient us to larger structural and disciplinary constraints beyond the self. Speaking through Skype, we recorded the conversation, taking time to dwell together on and sharing our experiences of feeling badly during research. We began our conversation with Moussawi sharing his own experiences of doing fieldwork in Beirut, and why he has long hesitated to write about the unease, discomfort, and the reliving of trauma, in both conducting and analyzing research. Approaching with curiosity and thinking together of what these feelings do in the world and in our own work made for a rich conversation, where the feelings

“Bad Feelings”: Reflections on Research 77

themselves are the starting point. We revisited the conversation, revising and editing it, through a process of engaged collaboration. The conversation touches upon several issues: First, what does it mean to feel badly in the field and how do these feelings arise during field research? Given that we both are US based researchers who study India and Lebanon, sites that were once “home,” the conversation begins with what it means to study sites/fields that are familiar and what feelings arise when one’s home becomes de familiarized. We discuss how our transnational journeys have led us to changed meanings of home as a place of disruption and dislocation as opposed to feeling safe or belonging. Second, the discussion touches upon the writing process and the issues of intellig ibility, accountability, and mediation that we both have had to grapple with when addressing a Euro American audience. In the process, we reflect on what it means to be perceived as doing “me research,” locating the affective self in the field, and how this is mediated by larger disciplinary and institutional contexts. Third, we discuss the methodological and theoretical limits of our sociological training that assumes dis embodied white researchers. Turning to women of color feminisms and transnational feminist theory has led us to a framework that better captures our experiences of fieldwork and helps to acknowledge our feelings as central resources of knowledge for our research. Reflecting back on fieldwork and our current writing projects, we identify the generative possibilities of “bad feelings” as a critical conceptual tool, rather than the descriptive dimensions of feeling badly, thereby creating the potential of illuminating new objects/subjects of inquiry.

The Conversation Ghassan Moussawi (GM): We both have studied places that we’re from, parti cularly in the Global South. I want to invite us to think and talk about feelings during our fieldwork, something that our disciplinary training in sociology does not necessarily encourage. I want to ask you, what feelings does it conjure when you go back to the field that is or was home? Jyoti Puri (JP): To begin with, thank you for inviting me to this conversation. My feelings about going back home as site of research have changed quite sig nificantly. For me, going back to India, or more precisely Mumbai, the city where I grew up, used to be about a sense of coming home. Doing fieldwork among middle class ciswomen in Mumbai and New Delhi on issues of sexuality and gender for my first project was about studying what is familiar to me through an academic lens, or critically defamiliarizing the familiar. I was studying my cohort of middle class urban women who were not represented in social and anthropological literature (focused on rural women), even though we were supposed to be the standard bearers of Indianness and national modernity. It was also an avenue for me to stay connected to home, take up pressing questions, and remain involved. However, over the course of the years, this relationship to home changed and the return feels quite different. Now it is about going to a place that is increasingly unfamiliar, a place that is riven by right wing Hindu nationalism, neoliberal

78 Ghassan Moussawi and Jyoti Puri

policies that are having ruinous effects on the lives of millions, and increasing state repression, and it is about returning to a place I don’t understand. This makes me think of what Kamala Visweswaran (1994) has said, home is a place to which we’ve never been before. GM: What you’re saying resonates a lot. I’ve been living in the United States for over a decade and initially, studying “home” began as a way of wanting to make myself intelligible, as well as staying connected to Beirut. My interest in studying Beirut as a city as opposed to Lebanon as a country reflected my yearning to keep it alive in me. I was born in the civil war, of which I still have vivid memories, and lived through numerous other wars and Syrian and Israeli military occupations of Lebanon, in the 1990s and 2000s. Though the civil war ended, life in Lebanon was always uncertain and like people living in Lebanon, I normalized everyday life disruptions, economic collapses, and violence as part of a normative state of living in Beirut. I got my Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Sociology in Beirut. While getting my MA, I was first studying the different valuation of lives, especially as it relates to evacuations during wars. However, my research shifted to studying compulsory heterosexuality and non heterosexual masculinities in Beirut. I conducted fieldwork in 2007–8, among non heterosexual Lebanese men and the ways that they conceive of and manage their masculinities. Having lived all my life in Beirut, I had normalized the constant instability of life in the city, or what people (including myself) referred to as “the situation” of life in Beirut (Moussawi, 2020). This had the unintended consequence of making me overlook the emotion work that I and others performed on a daily basis. After moving to the US, and upon my several returns, I was quickly reminded of the unstable conditions of everyday life and the ways they are normalized. I realized, with every visit, that I needed to quickly make an adjustment to accept the conditions of life in Beirut. The process of having to normalize everyday dis ruptions, violence, and instability, is not an easy one. The more time I spent away, and upon every return, I’m reminded of what Martin Manalansan (2003: 136) calls the “shock of the familiar,” which started taking a new emotional toll on me. I had to work on accepting the unsettling conditions that brought back traumatic memories, primarily by ignoring the memories or keeping the feelings to myself. For example, I felt heightened anxiety and the fear of failing to live under these conditions, that I was used to before moving to the US. I kept the feelings to myself as I was embarrassed to show that I might have somehow forgotten how to manage life in Beirut, and the privilege that comes with my position (as someone who seemingly could distance themselves from “the situation”). During research visits for my dissertation, I sought the familiarity and intellig ibility I yearned for, but I realized I was only familiar with my imagined relation ship to Beirut. This is not to say that it didn’t feel good to communicate with people in Arabic or to hear my name being pronounced/said correctly, but the “familiar” now felt shocking. Beirut no longer felt like “home,” but I tried to hold on to making it feel like “home.” This was an impossible task and thus, I found myself approaching the city with ambivalence: both as a strategy of coping and, in

“Bad Feelings”: Reflections on Research 79

a way, of letting go of what I define as an anchor or home. When “home” starts feeling more and more unfamiliar, I had to let go of the sense of comfort and give up forcing myself to feel “good” while there. Another aspect that I have grappled with while doing research in Beirut, is having to always explain why I am studying this site and that I’m not just navel gazing or doing “me research,” which is what a lot of people think about ethnographers who research places that are supposed to be home. During my ethnographic research, I seldom felt comfortable or safe. These feelings primarily came from memories of wars and violence, and the reliving of trauma. These feelings made me want to write about the process and wanting to have this conversation. JP: A few things come to mind as you raise questions of how we feel about home in all its complexities and what it means to do research there. Your point about not feeling safe is an important reminder about the fact that home can be a place of such disruption, exclusion and dislocation. People like you and me come to places such as the US for higher education and we are, in a sense, fleeing home, except that we can’t talk about it as such, for it gets appropriated in nationalist narratives about the US being a beacon for the world, and the Global South gets normalized as places to escape from. But, in fact, I think our temporary or per manent flight is about chasing the promise that the feelings of dislocation or dis possession won’t be as painful as when we are at home. We don’t expect to belong here (US) because we know that we don’t want to or won’t be allowed to. I think about this in terms of the gendered and sexual violence I experienced growing up in an urban middle class context in Mumbai. It left a formative impact on me, and your experiences in Beirut make me remember something that at some level I want to forget. For years after I arrived to the US, I was going through PTSD from that harassment and violence and its not to say that things are better here, but rather they are different. In fact, initially I would misread interactions here because of the residues and traces that I was carrying with me. But I was not positioned or vulnerable in the same way as I was in India, despite the sexual transgressions I experienced here as a graduate student and assistant professor. I needed to make sense of what my cohort and I had gone through and were going through and that’s what I did in my dissertation—make sense of home and the familiar by researching and systematically scrutinizing it. You raise another important issue—whether the fields we choose are about navel gazing and “me research.” It’s an issue that I, too, had to get over early on, because it felt as if to study home or to research “your own” is not academically rigorous, that it’s a kind of intellectual sleight. But this is where feminisms, parti cularly feminisms of color, have been so influential—in reversing the wisdom to show why studying one’s own is important and exacting work. Particularly when we recognize that there is a disconnect between what we have experienced and known and the dominant knowledge that circulates about these places. I have yet to come across a white scholar who is defensive about studying the US, for example, but we feel the need to account for why we need to study home and we

80 Ghassan Moussawi and Jyoti Puri

fight to make space to understand these homes of the Global South in their com plexities and contradictions. GM: You have written about your experiences about being a scholar in the US teaching postcolonial theory and postcolonial sociology (Puri, 2015) but have you written about feelings during fieldwork? Even when you discuss your methodol ogy for Sexual States (2016) there was a lot of affect, but not the affect that the researcher experiences. So, I am interested in actually hearing more about how you felt during the research and why there is a hesitation to write about it. You were documenting some horrendous incidents that were happening. How did you feel while conducting research and writing about it? JP: How we feel in the field and how we express those feelings are mediated by several things. For me, at heart, the question is what is the story that needs to be told and to what extent should it be about yourself. In a piece that was a critique of Dennis Altman’s (1997) notion of the global gay, I felt the need to locate myself and my feelings more directly because part of what I was writing against are our complicities as researchers in producing discourses of homogenized cosmopolitan global gayness. I write (Puri, 2008) about how I was asked to judge a fashion contest in Mumbai and how at this one moment I end up feeling incredibly uncomfortable. My discomfort was about not knowing how to feel as a young person starts to perform for me as a judge while holding my gaze and, as I describe in the chapter, my face locks in and I feel strangely devoid of emotion. So how could I not reflect on that strange feeling of no feeling and not consider the ways my emotions were shaped by issues of power and its unequal distribution in the field. Some moments and one’s affects become absolutely pivotal in opening up crucial insights, issues of power inequities, ways of knowing, and ways of theoriz ing something. It seems to me that our projects are quite frequently affective and emotional responses to an issue, a problem, a question. In Encountering Nationalism (2004), I poured my heart out especially in the introduction to the book while I was writing in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, but not in a personalized way. I think there has to be a place for our feelings as researchers, or I think here of the feminist mode of locating our subject positions, that do not always or only express themselves in the capital “I.” So, for instance, Sexual States is an archive of feelings and experiences—from my interactions with state officials, to police constables and supervisors, and individuals and groups who were centrally involved in the struggle to decrimi nalize homosexuality in India. The chapter on my attempts to get data about crime records related to the anti sodomy law reflects on how each state official responds to me and my feelings of frustration as I chase the data through the various offices. What I am saying is that affect and emotions are threaded through the chapters of this book, the people I came into contact with as well as mine, but it’s a project that didn’t demand that I give my feelings a more central place in the story. If anything, that would have detracted from the feelings of others— their concerns, hope, elation, and so on.

“Bad Feelings”: Reflections on Research 81

The project I am working on now—on death and migration—stems directly from my feelings and emotions but it is emerging in a different way from my other books, for even the writing feels differently. I saw a photograph from 1907 of what was described as the first Sikh cremation in North America and it had an indelible impact on me. It’s because these emotions and the memories of these emotions would not go away that I needed to pursue these questions of death, migration, and funerals as a research project. The “I” is coming in and out of the writing and the research, and that’s because there’s no way for me to proceed with this work without thinking of my own history as a Brown, non Christian migrant, the anxieties of what it would mean to live out one’s life in the US and possibly die here. GM: That makes complete sense and again, it resonates so much. When I was working on my dissertation, I was repeatedly told that there was so much anxiety, in my writing, that I am not explicitly addressing. I never understood what that meant. People asked me to put it up front and not be ashamed or embarrassed to write what I felt when I was conducting fieldwork in the middle of ISIL bombings, and the memories of traumatic incidents from the civil war. But, being trained in sociological methods, no one taught me how to write about or even acknowledge such feelings in the field. Though we might have discussed feelings that arise during interviews or doing field work, I had not been trained on what to do with feelings of unsafety or doing research amidst everyday life violence. I individualized these feelings, with the unintended con sequence of treating them as pathological. I had two sets of field notes. One that was a set of field notes and observations of queer lives in Beirut and the second about my feelings of unsafety and fear, which I thought were meant to remain personal. These insights never made it into the dissertation. As you said, I had to prove that I was doing rigorous work, which from my understanding was neglecting my feelings. Feelings, after all, are not only racialized—as Brown and Black people are seen as less rational and more emotional—but also gendered. I feared that I would be seen as a queer Brown man who wants to write about his feelings. Upon writing the book, I went back to my field notes and began thinking of a new theoretical framework. Without acknowledging painful feelings of anxiety, worries of failure, and the embarrassment that I felt for not being able to “properly” deal with everyday violence and instability in the field, the story remained incomplete. However, I worried whether writing about fear and anxiety might have the unintended effect of me instilling these emotions onto my interlocutors or the city. But at some point, I felt if this is the experience of doing research, then it is only by acknowledging it and making myself more vulnerable, that I was able to really develop a theoretical framework that enables a more complete story of my research and my experiences of the field. JP: Some projects are asking for those feelings to be told, as you’ve beautifully articulated, and it seems to me that how we insert those feelings in the writing and theorizing is not always the same. Different projects ask for different kinds of affective insertions or affective strategies. Feelings are there whether we acknowledge them or not, but some projects demand that we contend with those feelings, make them transparent, and ignoring them would be to diminish what we can learn from the field.

82 Ghassan Moussawi and Jyoti Puri

One is continually making judgments about when and where to disclose our feelings and this is mediated by a couple of things—our disciplinary and metho dological frameworks. The discipline is geared toward empirical evidence. You submit a paper to a sociology journal and one of the first questions reviewers will typically ask is not how you are framing the research, why it’s important, or what is the conceptual well from which you are drawing, but where is the evidence? This is hardly to say that evidence does not matter but there is a disciplinary will to proof and even objectivity. Some sociologists, especially those of us whose work is interdisciplinary, seek to push the limits of the discipline but it is a set of issues that has to be continually negotiated. My feelings, be they elation or profound dis comfort, will they be legible within sociology and all that comes with such legibility? The second thing is related to our capacity as outsiders who work in the US. We are mediators of content and we are producers of knowledge. We are part of the wider geopolitical context in which we are constantly proving and being asked to prove that as Brown and Black people, we are capable of producing knowledge. That is, we are capable of thinking and of theorizing. The book by Kishore Mah bubani (2001) Can Asians Think? or Hamid Dabashi’s (2015) Can Non Europeans Think? take up these questions by asking critical questions about the marginalization of thought and knowledge from outside the European or Euro centric universes. It is the other filter of being Brown thinkers through which we are constantly making judgements about if, when, and where we can talk about feelings. GM: In sociology, feelings during fieldwork and the writing process get very downplayed. We get trained that “we must have the research puzzle, and that we are looking for knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” But for us, there is more at stake. Moving on, how you define bad feelings? You know I am really interested in bad feelings. JP: For me, bad feelings are when something doesn’t feel right. You can feel somewhat uneasy, uncomfortable, and sometimes you feel it more intensely and deeply. But, when something doesn’t feel right, it’s also an opportunity to rethink things, isn’t it? We can rush past our feelings without reflecting on them or step back at some point and reconsider what doesn’t feel right and why. Recently, a chapter from my current project on death and migration was up for discussion during my stint as a fellow at the Harvard Divinity School. One of the interlocutors made the point that death in the US is seen as transgressive, it’s a kind of social taboo. Something about that made me uncomfortable, made me feel uneasy, but I couldn’t quite articulate it at the time stuck as I was in the nitty gritties of the chapter. Sitting with that feeling of unease and discomfort after the discussion made me realize that it depends on the perspective. Perhaps this is the case for white middle class people in the US, but there is such a terrible intimacy with death that shapes the experiences of people of color, particularly Black and Indigenous communities that were at the time confronting the disproportionate toll of the Covid 19 pandemic, or the Muslim communities who have to struggle to secure cemeteries that align with Islamic doctrine. And, within weeks of this

“Bad Feelings”: Reflections on Research 83

discussion, the urgencies of Black death exploded on the national and international scenes in the summer of 2020. So, in the US, death is not a social taboo for marginalized communities. At the other end of the spectrum, one person, an older man, gave me the most memorable dressing down when I was doing the research for Sexual States because he felt that I had ignored his group even though they were the ones who initiated the first legal challenge against the anti sodomy law in 1994. The word on the streets was that the group was defunct, but it turned out that a couple of them were still around. I was left feeling miserable after his diatribe but what also didn’t feel right—its patriarchal source (the other group member, a woman who does much of the work, sat there the entire time without saying a word while this man spoke for more than an hour without pause), and his complete lack of concern about why street based activism for queer identified people felt so risky in the early 2000s (even as he seemed to present as heterosexual). At the same time, these and other experiences of feeling badly in the field or related to the writing process can inspire insights and understandings but they can also help us be reflexive about our own authority, our arrogance and the power that we sometimes wield. There’s something important about bad feelings in that they are indications about what is not right, and they are also sources of tre mendous inspiration and generativity. It occurs to me that a difference is emerging, one that is worth underscoring. We are talking about what it means to feel badly in the process of research or writing, but our conversation is also pointing to how “bad feelings,” to use your fruitful phrase, are more than just what and why we feel what we feel as individual researchers. Rather, “bad feelings” is a kind of analytic that points to its capacity to call into question our disciplines, methods courses, the kind of research that is recognized and rewarded by institutions, published in journals, and so on. I think “bad feelings” goes beyond the negative emotions produced in the field to put the spotlight on the affective dissonances in the research and the writing that are the result of academic training and academic expectations that shape our professional careers. In that sense, “bad feelings” has a critical diagnostic quality and can help turn the light back on academic and institutional formations. GM: Absolutely! I love how you put it and I totally agree. It is important to distinguish between feeling badly and “bad feelings,” which is as an analytical lens or tool that better captures the realities of conducting research in a place rife with violence and everyday instability, and the tensions that arise while writing about it, especially within our disciplinary training. It’s a lens that uncovers the invisible workings of power in a number of contexts, including: methodology, notions of rigor, and what counts as “proper” academic writing. It took me time to first acknowledge and reflect on feeling badly in numerous contexts. However, once I did that, “bad feelings,” became a tool to approach and unpack the research process and one’s experiences in multiple contexts. Feeling badly is always relational. It is relational to the field we are in—in relation to the interlocutors, institutions, dis ciplinary expectations, among others.

84 Ghassan Moussawi and Jyoti Puri

JP: They are also profoundly contextual. It is not only about our relationships to people, but also about situations. I think here of writing under the conditions of the Covid 19 pandemic, at a time when there is widespread suffering, a daily tally of the dead, economic deprivation, emotional stress, and isolation, even as racial violence and police killings of Black people have not abated (Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, George Floyd). It’s been difficult writing about death when one continually feels the despair of the circumstances, the extent of the anguish in the world, but also the failures of government which have amplified and exacerbated the impact of the pandemic. All of this is about feeling badly, about feeling miserable even as I continue to research and write, for that feels more urgent than ever. It’s also a way of channeling these feelings into something that perhaps will serve as documentation and critique. GM: Thank you for bringing this up. I feel very similarly, especially as I con tinue to write about feeling badly in relation to the global pandemic, systemic racism, and the murders of Brown and Black people on a daily basis in the US. When it comes to my research in Beirut, feeling badly is also relationally contextual with regards to landscapes and architecture. For example, seeing buildings that are still standing from the civil war, with the remnants of bullets and destruction, always take me back to traumatic experiences of wars. However, as I said previously, they are feelings I assumed I needed to conceal or have under control during fieldwork. I experienced raw feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, and shame, but I kept them to myself, because again, we are supposed to be “objective” social scientific researchers. For example, I felt fear and lack of safety due to the numerous bombings happening during fieldwork. Such feelings are crippling and led me to leave the field earlier, numerous times, and returning to the US feeling embarrassed that I didn’t conduct “enough” fieldwork, and ashamed and guilty that I couldn’t endure “the situation.” Something you said that also resonates a lot is the fact that it was only until after I acknowledged my bad feelings and I made myself more vulnerable as a researcher and as a person, was I able to get into new questions or objects of analysis. Acknowledging bad feelings leads me to better understand the numerous contexts I was in, and also to new subjects of analysis. So, “bad feelings” are not bad in of themselves, they feel bad, they don’t sit well but, in many ways, they tell us something…they are questions that are begging to be answered. JP: So right! GM: That’s what I understood when you said they were generative. Attending to these feelings is asking what is this fear, anxiety or shame that I feel in my body? And once I turned it around, I actually shifted the subject of analysis from LGBT people to strategies of survival. It’s not necessarily making it about me, but it made me attentive to things that I had taken for granted about the field. For example, I assumed that everyone was experiencing what I was and therefore, I didn’t need to probe or analyze everyday life disruptions, since they were so normalized. JP: These bad feelings arrive in so many ways and at so many different points in research as well as writing. This is what critical feminist methodologies at their best have reminded us—that these feelings of what is not right are quite frequently

“Bad Feelings”: Reflections on Research 85

about power differences and indications of the questions we are not asking. They are indications of the work that needs to be done, that we need to dive deeper, we need to go beyond the surface of what we already know. GM: When I reflect on bad feelings—a lot of the times it is also in relation to institutions. One of the things I kept feeling bad or scared about was the possibility that my project was falling apart. When you’re doing research in a war zone and not getting enough interviews, the institution and disciplinary boundaries also make you feel bad. One can feel bad for not being enough or being “too much” or not being rigorous, however sociology defines rigor. And then that made me think of whose feelings matter—there are, as you mentioned, feminist methodol ogies which taught us—I’m thinking of Sara Ahmed (2004) and other texts—to acknowledge feelings. What bad feelings are usually considered legitimate? Whose bad feelings are taken seriously? This is something I have been thinking a lot about, since feelings as you and I have been talking are raced and gendered. They got particularly heigh tened for me as a young academic who was scared of “failure” for not properly producing “rigorous” work. JP: What we’re talking about is that bad feelings are not just limited to the field, or somehow the field is not clearly separable from institutional, disciplinary, or geopolitical influences. They are related to disciplines, institutions, and our posi tioning as researchers of color who are working in the belly of the beast. At some level, it becomes difficult to disentangle field sites, disciplines, institutional requirements of tenure, promotion, productivity, and such. I find Sara Ahmed’s (2004) approach to feelings as cultural and social practices most useful because it helps me consider the question you are raising about which feelings and whose feelings are considered legitimate under what circumstances. When we consider feelings in terms of social and cultural effects, I believe it deepens our understanding of what and who is taken seriously. I think here of the numerous offline conversations about how the feelings of cisgender men, especially but not only straight white men, seem to occupy so much space in academic contexts such as department and faculty meetings, in committee meetings, and such. GM: Yes! I want to go back to the call that Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine put out. One of the things they state is that “during the research process, the researcher often ignores certain feelings that they feel so that they can focus on their main research project or what they see as the issue at hand.” I would like us to talk a little bit about this. We are in different places in our careers. As you have described, you are at a place where you can see that some projects, as your current project on death and migration, starts with affect and acknowledging feelings versus others that do not tell that kind of story. For me, it is very different because I am much earlier in my career and I felt that I had to ignore my feelings of personal vulnerability that arose in relation to concrete risks and threats, in addition to witnessing the death and destruction around me—so I could gather “adequate data.” Even though I was not physically harmed during these bombings, I had family members who were at the

86 Ghassan Moussawi and Jyoti Puri

sites of bombings and almost died. Instead of grappling with feelings of grief and mourning for all those who died and were physically harmed, I blocked these emotions. Blocking these feelings becomes very detrimental to the research that we are producing and also to who we are as people and also detrimental to the ways that one ought to be accountable to our research fields. In hindsight, I did feel and still feel survivor’s guilt, as I had witnessed these tragic deaths and started becoming numb. After all, I could get out of Beirut by going back to the US, but I left behind family, friends, and my interlocutors who had no choice but to endure life in the city. Though I left Beirut, my feelings of fear, guilt, and anxiety did not leave me—they shaped how I wrote about my research and how I conceived of my own life in the US. JP: That is a lot to go through and continue to live with! I appreciate the point that Kathy Davis and Janice Irvine are making in terms of how we ignore certain feelings so that we can focus on what we think we should focus on or what we are told to focus on. And, as you have so noted that to do so is in fact to miss the story that needs to be told about war, disruption, the difficulties of doing research, the emotional impact on the researcher and insights that emerge if one pays attention to these feelings and experiences. We’ve been talking about how bad feelings can be generative even though they may be awful and immiserating. I also think that feelings are not always so easy to characterize as good and bad, how being in the field can be an emotional roller coaster, how one can feel elated and anxious at the same time. Sometimes one can feel a sense of rush in the field, too. Or, even when you’re analyzing and writing, there is this incredible surge that you feel of excitement that carries you because you feel like you are onto some thing (which may feel quite different a day later). You feel like you have tapped into something that is important, something that needs to be said. So, all to say, that emotions are much wider in scope and go beyond the feeling of discomfort, anxiety, and trauma. We have to talk about feelings that are difficult to characterize or are “positive,” for we get our energy and excitement from there. We get our ability to sustain ourselves from there, too. Our own resistance when we’re writing against the grain, when we’re producing counter knowledges as people of color. Talk about Audre Lorde’s (1984) notion of the erotic—especially for us scholars who work in the field of sexuality and gender—how can we not pay attention to its beauty and generativity! GM: This is interesting because I wanted to focus on bad feelings but at the same time, you’re making me think or feel otherwise. Thinking of the excitement or the rush that you’re describing—I am focusing too much on bad feelings because that was my only way of entering this discussion and it was the only way of making the book have a coherent narrative. I don’t think bad feelings are detri mental for the research process, on the contrary. I love what you said, because as ethnographers – thick description for me is capturing the feeling of what it’s like to conduct research in an unstable place and how you write about it. That takes me back to the point about intelligibility—I was not able to under stand or acknowledge how I felt in these moments. It is not to project on my

“Bad Feelings”: Reflections on Research 87

interlocutors that they are also feeling anxiety and fear etc., but the thick descrip tion was precisely getting at affect or what Dian Million (2009), the indigenous decolonial feminist calls, “felt knowledge or felt research.” Some of us have been taught that our feelings don’t matter for knowledge production. I am also thinking about how we conceive of accountability in relation to our “field.” So, you are starting with the question of, what did this photo of the Sikh cremation do to me? How did it make me feel? For you to be accountable to your whole project—you are starting with what it did to you. What it made you feel and what captures that feeling. In my experience, acknowledging my feelings came towards the end—and I thought—what do I want these bad feelings to convey and how essential are they to the project? Since I decided to focus on everyday life disruptions and their effects on people, I wanted the audience to feel uncomfor table—to also feel disrupted and to also feel lost. You are working on death and migration and you are accountable to your field and feelings of mourning and grief that come with death and possibly other emo tions that might not be just grief and mourning, but also your feelings as a researcher working on this topic. Can you tell me a little bit about where your feelings direct you to go and how you can be accountable to the people or the histories of people you are writing about? JP: As I was alluding to earlier, the project came directly out of the emotional impact that a photograph had on me and how it stayed with me, and I am feeling my way through every step of this project—continually checking to see if this feels right. And that is important for me because it makes me step back and question when something feels forced or not quite right. I’ve had to also consider whether I am becoming “overly” attached to this project in a way that is clouding what I can say. So, in a sense, bad and good feelings become entangled in the research and writing and so does feeling and thinking. This manuscript in process begins with the story of a six year old Sikh girl who died in June 2019 in the process of crossing the southern border into the US. Why she becomes the person with whom I would like to open this book has to do with how her story brings together some of the central themes of this project—trans national migration, death, mourning, funerals, state policies and practices, settler colonialisms, legacies of slavery, white supremacy, nationalisms, racisms, and more. But it also has much to do with how I felt and continue to feel about her com pletely preventable loss and the loss of thousands of others. Writing about her and the themes of the project is emotional work, regardless of the extent to which it becomes obvious to the reader. But letting our feelings serve as guides doesn’t necessarily make us accountable, for what can feel right to the researcher may be quite at odds with what feels right to people who are part of the communities that are being studied or how they feel about the issues that are being explored. For me it’s necessary to be reflexive about whose feelings are influencing the directions that we take and it seems to me that there needs to be ample space for considering the feelings of those who are being studied even if they don’t align with our own.

88 Ghassan Moussawi and Jyoti Puri

And then there’s the question of accountability to academic communities. I think our accountability is to the people, issues, and histories that we are writing about, rather than our disciplines or our colleagues at our institutions. But I am interested in being accountable to the critical epistemologies and methodologies that have been formative for me. So, as much as I consult people in the Euro centric scholarly canon on death, I want to be in conversation with the work of scholars such as Karla Holloway (2002), Saidiya Hartman (2008), and Vincent Brown (2008). That’s another kind of accountability. GM: Are you more able to do it now because you’re a full professor, you have tenure, and you have published three books? JP: Yes… it has to do with the fact that I am a full professor, and therefore less precarious. What also matters is that I am at a place like Simmons, which unlike other more prestigious institutions, is not invested in guarding the boundaries of disciplines and areas of inquiry. That brings another kind of academic freedom. In the meanwhile, feminist affect studies have exploded, giving us so much more to draw upon and also exposing neglects and omissions. GM: You bring up a really important point about exposing what is neglected and/or omitted. I think of exposing omissions as a way of being accountable to our “field.” At the same time, I wonder how you balance being accountable to the field and intelligible to your intended audiences? JP: Here is my problem with the imperative to make things intelligible. In order to make things intelligible to our readers, our audiences—that often times are going to be either in the United States or in Western Europe—we get oriented toward certain analytical or academic frameworks. We do that because we think that is going to be more effective, we do that because we are obligated to do that by the constraints of publishing, getting tenure, promotion, and such. But I go back to the point I made earlier that we are also producers of knowledge and we are also theorists. For example, I found myself gravitating toward Avery Gordon’s (2008) work, which I love and admire, but as I thought about it from the angle of migrant death, funerals and mourning, it took some doing to recognize that haunting is not necessarily the lens through which I can do justice to the communities that I am studying. Their histories and practices are pointing toward different modes of understanding, which is where my accountability comes in. I think of this as mediating between intelligibility and accountability. GM: That makes complete sense. Thank you so much for agreeing to have this illuminating conversation with me.

Concluding Notes This conversation and reflection begin with feeling badly in the field but go on to articulate “bad feelings” as a critical tool. We share our experiences of conducting fieldwork in Lebanon and India and how we first mistook the feelings evoked in the field as personal problems or pathologies. That is, we assumed that these feel ings need to be concealed or kept “under control,” as they are not always relevant

“Bad Feelings”: Reflections on Research 89

to the research at hand. But as the conversation progresses, we discuss how “bad feel ings” are always relational and contextual (people, situations, institutions, disciplinary expectations), and that they are generative. That is, acknowledging them can orient us toward invisible and taken for granted aspects of our research, and thus generate novel research questions, subjects of study, and methods of collecting “data.” Even as the lines between when we feel badly and when we start to feel their critical potential, what we call “bad feelings,” is not always distinct, the conversation also underscores that feelings are not always easy to categorize as bad (or good). Using thick description of capturing feelings of unrest, unease, and even possibly elation, changes the nature of the research and processes of knowledge production, and opens up debates that are often silenced and taken for granted. In the process, “bad feelings” emerges as a conceptual tool through which to consider critical questions of disciplines and academic institutions and the ways that their limits can be addressed. Opening up the discussion of disciplinary constraints means empha sizing the need for sociology and sociological methods to grapple with questions of emotions and what it means to do research in contexts of the Global South. It is a call for the discipline to open up to critical affective studies and critical feminist methodologies, including the work of feminist sociologists who have contributed to the sociology of emotions. Sociological methodology courses do not train stu dents about the importance of affect in the field, rather, they focus on traditional models on gathering data, understood as different or even in opposition to feelings. If feelings come up, they are bracketed as part of the “personal realm” of the researcher, unconnected to the project. The above conversation illustrates how “bad feelings” can be a generative tool for speaking and writing about affect in the research and writing processes. Bad feelings, however slippery they might be to describe and categorize, are important sources of knowledge that can orient us towards new objects of study and make us more accountable to our research questions, projects, and our field. They are a reminder that as researchers and writers we need to come to grips with the vul nerabilities inherent to the process of knowledge production even as we turn our critical lenses onto the very conditions that make us vulnerable in the first place.

References Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York City: Routledge. Altman, Dennis (1997) “Global Gaze/Global Gays.” GLQ, 3 (4): 417 436. Brown, Vincent (2008) The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. Dabashi, Hamid (2015) Can Non-Europeans Think?London, UK: Zed Books. Gordon, Avery (2008) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hartman, Saidiya (2008) “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26, 12 (2): 1 14. Holloway, Karla (2002) Passed On: African American Mourning Stories. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Lorde, Audre (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Crossing Press.

90 Ghassan Moussawi and Jyoti Puri

Mahbubani, Kishore (2001) Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West. Toronto: Key Porter Books. Manalansan, Martin (2003) Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press. Million, Diann (2009) “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” Wicazo Sa Review 24 (2): 53 76. Moussawi, Ghassan (2020) Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban (2006) “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs 31 (3): 675 688. Puri, Jyoti (2004) Encountering Nationalism. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Puri, Jyoti (2008) “Gay Sexualities and Complicities: Rethinking the Global Gay,” in Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific, Kathy Ferguson and Monique Mironesco (eds). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Puri, Jyoti (2015) “Postcolonial Feminisms and Introducing Sociology and the Imperium,” Radical Teacher 101 (Winter): 63 70. Puri, Jyoti (2016) Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle Over the Antisodomy Law in India. Durham: Duke University Press. Visweswaran, Kamala (1994) Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

6 THE SHAMEFULNESS OF BOREDOM Are Good Researchers Allowed to be Bored? Kathy Davis

Introduction Being bored is an anathema for the sociological researcher. While nearly every academic is well acquainted with boredom, boredom is shameful; it goes against the very idea of what social scientific inquiry should be. Any researcher worth her salt is supposed to have a strong inner desire for knowledge. She should be curious and interested in discovering something new.1 And yet many researchers are compelled to do research under conditions that discourage curiosity and adven turous research. They are often obliged to investigate topics that someone else thought up and which don’t particularly interest them. As many of us can attest, research funders notoriously expect answers to our questions before we have even started our research, thereby killing the drive to uncover something unexpected. The activity of theorizing has been reduced to providing boring summaries of other people’s theories for an audience already more than familiar with them.2 Mainstream methodologies are often required that stifle researchers’ creativity and confine them to the safe middle ground of the unsurprising, the expected, what everyone already knows. Even researchers who are working on topics near and dear to their hearts and enjoy the freedom of doing research in the way they like, will occasionally have to struggle with boredom. In my own case, I have been fortunate to do research in fields that value and even demand creative approaches and yet this has not been a remedy for the feeling of boredom. More often than not, I have had to struggle to find an “angle” i.e. something surprising or unfamiliar that will make my research worth doing and, consequently, worth reading about. As I wrote in our introduc tion of this volume (p. 3 4), the absence of an angle can make even the worthiest research project boring for a researcher who longs to feel curious, to be inspired and excited. To make matters even worse, boredom is often not limited to a DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 9

92 Kathy Davis

temporary moment of discomfort; these boring moments may stretch out into long periods during which nothing seems interesting or worth investigating. This can feel very much like existential despair (“What am I doing here?” “What is the point?”), making the line between boredom and depression, at times, a very fine one. Most academics would probably agree that the experience of boredom in research undermines our inspiration, dulls our senses, saps our motivation, and may even damage our identities as competent scholars and researchers.3 As Baghdadchi (2005) provocatively puts it, it is all well and good to decry things that are boring and to claim that being interesting is what counts, but, in fact, the “real business” of academic work has little to do with “being interesting.” Rather it is about constructing arguments that can withstand attack in an antagonistic environment. Most contemporary scholars rightly believe that their audiences will be more cri tical of a lack of rigour in their work than the fact that it is boring. Indeed, bore dom is something we have all come to expect. Therefore, one could say that the ubiquity of boredom in the academy should be seen—at least for those of us who still believe that research should be interesting and even exciting—as a “sign that our system is not functioning the way we think it is” (Baghdadchi, 2005: 324). Both its ubiquity and its negative effects on scholars should be reason enough to take the experience of boredom in research seriously. One way of doing this is to explore the moments when we become bored by asking questions like: what are the contexts and circumstances in which we describe ourselves as being bored? What kinds of perceptions and emotions accompany the experience of boredom? What kinds of objects, activities, ideas or people bore us? This kind of self inter rogation may seem like old hat for many qualitative researchers who are accus tomed to think reflexively about their research. However, as Giardina and Newman (2011: 525) have argued, even qualitative researchers rarely explore how they become entangled in and positioned by a whole range of emotional experi ences like pain, suffering, and love. In their view, researchers need to do more than intellectually reflect on their position and the ways they are complicit with the problems they are trying to address. They need to “inhabit” the research situation and explore how it impacts on their body. This means finding ways to write about research experiences that include bodily sensations, emotions, feelings of unease and excitement and making them an integral part of the analysis itself. In this chapter, I will attempt to “inhabit” the experience of being bored in the context of doing research using one of my own research experiences as a case in point. I begin by arguing why boredom should not be viewed as a non issue or an embarrassment to be quickly forgotten, nor dismissed as a universal existential condition or inescapable artefact of modernity. Instead I suggest that becoming aware of boredom creates an uncomfortable moment which can tell us something important about ourselves as researchers, the research situation we are involved in, and the topics we are investigating. In what follows, I will dive in and explore in the most embodied way possible what it is like to be bored in research. Before I do this, however, a few words are in order about what has been written on the subject of boredom.

The Shamefulness of Boredom 93

Theorizing boredom The subject of boredom has primarily been left to philosophers, historians, and psychoanalysts who have treated it, respectively, as an existential condition from which everyone suffers (Popova, 2015), an emotional state that takes on different forms and names through history (Peters, 1975; Dalle Pezze and Salzani, 2008) or an intrapsychic conflict that can be exploited by the enterprising therapist (Wangh, 1975; Phillips, 1993). Boredom is viewed as an emotional or affective experience in which “the world, and the individuals that populate it, appear to be dull and banal, without interest, meaning or purpose” (Gardiner, 2012: 40).4 Being bored is a “blasé attitude” (Simmel, 1997, cited in Gardiner, p. 42) where the new distrac tions of modern life fail to excite us. Boredom feels like a “warm, grey cloth” of emotional flatness and an indifference that envelops and benumbs us (Benjamin, 1968, cited in Gardiner, p. 49). It insulates us from the uncertainties of the modern world, but at the cost of curiosity, commitment, and passion. Boredom is a feeling of “emptiness” and hunger for stimuli, accompanied by the passive expectation that the outside world will somehow supply satisfaction (Greenson, 1953). It is simultaneously a state of longing and an inability to indicate the object of one’s longing. Boredom alters our sense of temporality whereby time seems to stand still, becoming an endless waiting for nothing that suffuses and dominates our consciousness (Kingwell, 2019). Time turns into an interminable flow of neutral, indifferent moments that seem to disappear “in an instant that is already passed” without being embedded in a meaningful experience (Lefebvre, 1995: 166). A bored person is dissatisfied and impatient, fidgety and yet too lethargic to take action to change the situation. The co existence between the seemingly incom patible tendencies of restlessness and apathy are the crux of what being bored is all about (Bernstein, 1975: 516). For some, boredom is the cause of terrible suffering, creative paralysis, and even one of life’s greatest tortures. As the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1955: 181) put it, “If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored.” For others, boredom has something soft and cozy about it. This is, for example, how the philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1995) recalls Sun days with the family in his childhood: as life that was “lived in slow motion … was lived there” (Lefebvre, 1995: 118). With unmistakable nostalgia, he regarded such experiences as valuable for providing moments of reverie, little “half dreams” that could provide a glimpse of alternative ways of living and being. Some have attempted to find something positive in the experience of being bored. Taking up the Russian writer Leon Tolstoy’s famous adage from Anna Karenina that boredom is the “desire for desires,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (1993) calls boredom “the state of suspended anticipation in which things are star ted and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire” (p. 71). In his memories of the “great ennui of childhood,” he sees boredom as the child not knowing what it is waiting for or even that it is waiting. It is the “half hearted search for something to

94 Kathy Davis

do that will make a difference,” transforming boredom into surprise, interest, and maybe even outright desire (p. 75). From a psychoanalytic perspective, childhood boredom is a preparation for, as well as the search for, something about which the child is presently unaware, but longs to be able to discover. Boredom has been a neglected feeling in sociology. Sociologists are more con cerned with the “big” issues like social inequality, discrimination and unemploy ment than with something as seemingly trivial as boredom. Those sociologists, who have turned their attention to boredom, have been primarily concerned with it as an artefact of modernity (Gardiner, 2012).5 Boredom is regarded as a typically modern experience in an era in which people have become addicted to hyper sti mulation and to fleeting sensations that are repetitive and empty and that, there fore, quickly become boring. The modern subject has become unable to find meaning in the endless stream of images and “information” which have been robbed of all the metaphysical anchors formerly provided by the natural world or religiously inspired rituals and celebrations (Lefebvre, 1995; Goodstein, 2005). From a sociological perspective, boredom is a kind of alienation produced by modernity—“an estrangement from the formerly stable moral and socio cultural foundations of acting and thinking” (Gardiner, 2012: 42). While much of the sociology of boredom has been devoted to exploring the link between boredom and modernity, the actual experience of boredom has received considerably less attention. A notable exception is the sociologist Jack Barbalet (1999) who examines how boredom manifests itself in everyday social life. Transposing the psychoanalytic reading of childhood boredom into an adult experience, he argues that boredom is, first and foremost, a defence against meaninglessness. Meaning is what makes something subjectively understandable and worth getting involved in. It is what makes something matter to a person (p. 632). Without meaning, therefore, social life would be impossible. Thus, when individuals feel that their actions or circumstances are without meaning, they will react with anxiety precisely because the situation holds no significance for them. As affective experience, boredom alerts a person to mean inglessness and, therefore, provides the impetus needed to look for meaning (Barbalet, 1999: 633).6 Herein lies a potentially positive aspect of what, at first glance, seems to be only an uncomfortable and negative experience. Boredom produces a restless feel ing which initiates a search for meaning—a process leading to “curiosity, invention, and associated activities in which not merely variety and novelty but meaningfulness in activity and circumstance are sought” (Barbalet, 1999: 641). After this brief foray into what has been written about boredom, I now turn to a concrete example of being bored taken from my own research on passion as an everyday phenomenon. As part of this research, I not only interviewed people involved in an ardent love affair (which is perhaps the most orthodox under standing of passion) but also people with a passion for anything from scuba diving, to tango dancing, to watching birds or collecting rocks, and even a passion for doing research. My assumption was that passion is part of how people try to make their lives meaningful and, therefore, worth living. Given this assumption, I did not expect to encounter boredom in my informants’ stories about their passions, nor

The Shamefulness of Boredom 95

did I anticipate feeling bored listening to them. I turned out to be wrong on both counts. I now take a look at an incident in one of my interviews in which I experienced boredom first hand and discovered that, contrary to my previous assumption, boredom and passion are anything but antithetical.

Example: “Give me that pen” The interview in question was with a person who had been referred to me by another informant as a “woman with a mission.” I arrived for the interview to find a pleasant faced, middle aged woman who, after supplying me with a cup of herbal tea, launched into a story about her fascination for a new pedagogy directed at educating infants. During the interview, I sat across from her with my pen and notebook in hand, taking notes and making listening noises at the appropriate moments. Her story unfolded slowly with all the usual elements—her first discovery of the pedagogy, why it captivated her, how she decided to learn it herself, and, finally, her experi ences promoting it in her home town. All of this was rendered in a monotone and none of it was terribly exciting. Try as I might, I couldn’t find anything of interest and my thoughts began to wander. I felt restless and began to surreptitiously glance at my watch. How much longer will this go on? Is there anything I can ask to liven things up a bit? I was clearly bored, yet as a researcher I knew that I was not supposed to be bored by my informant. I was assailed by a sinking, anxious and slightly panicky feeling that something was seriously wrong. If I was already bored with my informant’s story, how could I possibly transform it into something that other people might become enthusiastic about? Obviously, this did not bode well for my research. As if reading my thoughts, the informant suddenly changed the subject and asked me whether I had children. I jerked to attention and admitted, somewhat shame facedly, that I did not. However, before I could don the penitential robe, she stood up and walked over to me, abruptly grabbed my pen and said: “This is how parents communicate with their babies. They say: ‘Give me this pen. It’s dangerous’.” She then looked me in the eye and extended her hand, saying softly: “Please give me the pen.” She then began gently wiggling the end of the pen, all the time looking me in the eye and asking me to give it to her. I felt my fingers loosen automatically and I handed over the pen without further ado. She laughed delightedly. “See,” she explained, “that’s how to do it. You see, it works.” She proceeded to explain that the problem with very young children is more that the parents want the child to become independent (but not now) than that the child is not willing to cooperate. By communicating with infants directly, their autonomy is respected and they are enabled to become compliant. Remembering this interview still evokes embarrassment. I remember how exposed I felt. I was caught out in something that put me in a very bad light. Not only had I failed as a woman who is bored by babies, but I had also failed as a biographical researcher, who was bored by my informant’s story. Worst of all, my

96 Kathy Davis

informant was on to me. She must have sensed that I was not particularly interested in her story and it was she, the informant—not me, the researcher—who found a way to—literally—pull me, pen and all, back into her story. And, indeed, I was suddenly listening, if not with avid interest, at least without the painful sensation of being paralyzed by boredom. As the interview progressed, my informant explained that she had considered calling off our appointment because she felt she probably wasn’t the right person for an interview about passion. She went on to tell me that she had initially gotten into her work with infants because she wanted to have something she could be passionate about, something separate from her family, something that was all her own. However, she had recently come to the realization that she had lost her initial enthusiasm. She was uncertain about whether she even still wanted to be involved in it. “It all just feels like a heavy backpack now,” she said. I wish I could say that her admission of her own boredom with her former passion led to a deeper conversation about her present crisis, but it did not. After further desultory talk, the interview ground to an uneventful close. What I had hoped would be an animated exchange about passion became its polar opposite: a monotonous narrative about something both of us apparently found uninteresting, tedious—and yes—boring. While this may not seem like a Eureka moment with flashing lights and exciting revelations, it, nevertheless, stuck in my mind and I found myself returning to it again and again, wanting to understand it and hoping to get something out of it. In short, I needed for it to have some meaning.7 To this end, I decided to go back to the interview experience and see whether an exploration of how I became bored by my informant could provide something of more general interest concerning the experience of boredom in research.

Making sense of boredom The interview experience described above niggled at me for many months after it happened. It was not only decidedly unpleasant at the time, but even thinking about it after the fact evoked a kind of restless unease which was disagreeable and not some thing I was eager to pursue. It not only made me uncomfortable about myself as an interviewer (for example, why hadn’t I facilitated the interview in a way that would have enabled my informant to explore her current life crisis?), but it also made me question the assumptions I had been making about everyday passion being an interesting sociological topic. Perhaps I was on the wrong track altogether. If people’s stories about their passions could bore me, how could I possibly make a case for the importance of passion in everyday life? I felt stuck and, as a result, found myself running away from the feelings I had had during the interview. Boredom was an emotional experience that I had no desire to think about, and yet that continued to haunt me. It was only when I decided to tackle my boredom head on, that I made several unexpected discoveries—about myself as researcher, about the relationship between interviewer and interview partner, about boredom as a process, and about the difference between things that bore us and things that we are curious about.

The Shamefulness of Boredom 97

The bored researcher I embarked on this interview expecting to be interested in what my interview partner would be telling me about her life. As a researcher who specializes in doing biographical interviews, listening to people’s life stories is what I most like to do. Like most of my colleagues, I assume that any person’s life is interesting and that it will invariably offer possibilities for sociological analysis. I have been trained to establish rapport with my interview partners and know how to express interest and do everything I can to help them tell their story. I have learned to listen carefully and I try to put myself in their shoes, imagining what the experience might feel like for my interview partner. And, finally, as a researcher I am always (meta ) listening for ways to connect my informants’ stories about their lives to the sociological questions that are driving my research. Given this background, it is not surprising that I became extremely uncomfortable when I was unable to perform properly as a qualitative researcher. Not being able to find something interesting in my interview partner’s story made me feel ashamed. It did not occur to me at first that her story might just be boring or that she herself was bored by having to tell it. Instead I was assailed by self doubt. It seemed inexcusable for me as interviewer to be bored in an interview. I experienced it as a profound personal failure. The shame that the failure to connect with my interview partner raised the spectre of not being able to transform our interview into something poten tial readers could find interesting or worthwhile. Yet, as Elsbeth Probyn (2005: 162) has pointed out in Blush, her insightful book on shame, it is precisely this spectre of not being interesting that is enough to send a shiver down the spine of any writer and, therefore, can provide the much needed motivation to find ways to do better. I began looking for support from other scholars who had had similar experiences, but found that surprisingly little had been written about boredom as it occurs in research situations. The notable exception is Baghdadchi (2005) who links what he calls academic boredom to practices that are held in place by the institutions in which we work. In his view, treating boredom as a personal failure that no one wants to admit stands in the way of understanding what it is about the situation that makes us unable to find anything of interest for ourselves. There is nothing inherently boring about pedagogy for babies. My interview partner’s story might have been interesting and even inspiring for someone else. It was simply that I had difficulty finding some thing meaningful in what she was saying, let alone imagining how it might be of value to my current research. What had made me anxious and even panicky, wanting to get away as fast as I could, had less to do with the listless sensation of boredom itself than with the shame I felt at having failed as a “good” interviewer and competent social scientist. It became clear to me that the silence in the field about the problem of boredom in research was allowing me to define boredom as my personal failure rather than an intrinsic part of most research. More importantly, this silence precluded viewing boredom as something that could teach me something valuable about my research. In other words, boredom ought to be treated as a resource and analysed rather than regarded as a source of shame to be avoided.

98 Kathy Davis

Boring informants Being bored is not the individual failure of the interviewer or the informant, but rather a relational, mutually produced process. While it feels inner directed and even self absorbed, it is triggered by a loss of connection—in my case, with my interview partner and her story. Barbalet (1999) calls it the “feeling of not being involved in or engaged by events or activities” (p. 634). My restless and irritable discomfort and torturous inner monologue of self doubt signaled a lack of recep tivity to my interview partner. In her attempt to retrieve shame as a potentially positive emotional experience, Probyn (2005) argues that individual feelings of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior should be seen as a productive and relational process. Shame emerges through an interest in and a connection with another person. If I had not felt I should be interested in my interview partner, I could not have felt ashamed when I was bored by her story. This lack of interest and foiled relationship results in the desire to re evaluate oneself and re establish a connection with the other. In the interview, my boredom was interrupted when my interview partner took charge of the situation. She startled me out of my apathy by suddenly jumping up, coming over to me and touching me. It is so unexpected for interview partners, especially when they are strangers, as we were, to physically touch. Indeed, my interview partner risked my displeasure by confronting me with my presumed lack of relevant knowledge (“Do you have children?”) and disrupted the interview situation by physically taking my pen out of my hand. Lefebvre (2005: 95) argues that doing something risky is a typical way to shatter the monotony of everyday life and open up the possibility that something new, different, and maybe even exciting can happen. My interview partner’s action “shattered” the boredom I experienced, pulled me out of the “banality of self absorption” and re established a connection between us. The interview could move forward on a different footing. One of the effects of my informant’s intervention was that I began to see that my boredom was not simply a matter of my individual failing, but that we were both, to some extent, embroiled in the same experience of being bored. She could tell me that she was no longer particularly interested in what had previously been her passion and that it had become a “heavy back pack.” Since she herself was bored by her own story, it is not surprising that she did not tell it in a way that would have allowed me to vicariously enter into her experience. Nor did she reflect on what her disenchantment might mean in terms of her life and sense of self, something that would have grabbed my interest as biographical researcher. Instead she produced a narrative about her “calling” that she had probably told many times before, a canned version recited mechanically with little enthusiasm. However, when she noticed that I was not paying attention (my glazed over eyes probably gave me away), her own boredom was momentarily disrupted, whether by surprise or irritation at not being able to get her message across. By jumping up and grabbing my pen, she not only interrupted her own narrative that was boring her, but she disrupted the interview that was boring us both. Her eyes flashed and

The Shamefulness of Boredom 99

she spoke with excitement, making it possible for me to imagine, at least in that moment, what her passion had originally been about. While this did not “save” the interview itself, the connection between us was reinstated and with it the possibility, at least, for a meaningful reflection about herself, her work, and her present situation. Boredom in an interview situation like the one described above operates much the same way as it would in a psychotherapeutic encounter. Psychotherapists have described their experiences of boredom in therapy as a form of counter transference in which client and the therapist have mutually “checked out” of the interaction in order to avoid confronting potentially painful material (Scott, 2017). The therapist Daniel Sonkin (2020) observes that when his patients engage in small talk rather than addressing the issues that are important for them, he finds himself becoming bored. His boredom signals that the client has become disconnected from the real business of therapy, thereby activating his desire to drift away from what the client is saying. In counter transference, it is not just the client who is avoiding painful subjects, however. When therapists feel trapped and unable to connect with their client, boredom provides an escape from the aggressive fantasies that emerge from feeling “narcissistically depleted” for not being able to do the job they have been trained to do (Flannery, 1995: 538). Thus, the therapist’s boredom staves off tensions arising from negative feelings like irritation and frustration. If made conscious, however, it can become a helpmeet for the therapist in understanding the client’s present state of mind as well as the dynamics in a specific therapeutic encounter. Thinking about boredom in an interview as a form of counter transference makes it possible to explore it as a relational phenomenon instead of a private experience or interactional failure. It forced me to stop in my tracks and reflect about what was happening in the interview to make me feel disconnected from my informant. It marked not the end, but the beginning of a search for meaning.

The necessity of being bored The philosopher Bertrand Russell (1930) called boredom “fruitful monotony”— something which he believed was essential not only in everyday life, but also in scholarly endeavours. The moments when you “do nothing with nobody all alone by yourself” force you to wait8, to appreciate the slow processes of nature. Boredom allows the mind to wander and provides an occasion for daydreaming. Russell believed that constant excitement—something which has become a condition of late modernity—ultimately dulls the palate and becomes itself boring. Russell, therefore, makes a case for learning to endure monotony. It is only in this space that a person will be forced to exert some effort and imaginativeness in order to extract something interesting from her environment. As a qualitative researcher, I know that the moments of unease in research can be valuable resources, alerting me that here is something that I need to explore. Why should boredom be any different? I began to ask myself why I could not become interested in my informant’s story. Was it her lacklustre presentation that was putting me to sleep? Or was the absence of any reflection on what her work

100 Kathy Davis

meant in terms of her biography that was causing my interest to flag? Or was I picking up her own disenchantment with the subject matter of her story without being aware that I was doing so? Once I began to reflect on why I had become bored, I remembered that really hearing what informants tell you in an interview often involves more than listening to their words. It requires listening to their silences as well—the things that they are not saying. My informant was telling me less about her passion for working with babies, as it turned out, than about her own boredom with having to tell a story about something that no longer interested her. Thinking about what she was avoiding—her disillusionment with her former passion and her despair at not having anything in her life that really excited her— would have been potentially a much more interesting subject for her because it was relevant to her present circumstances. It also would have interested me as a researcher who has a vested interest in discovering how people make sense of their lives, negotiate difficulties, and try to find ways to make their lives meaningful. More importantly, however, thinking about why I became bored opened up a surprising new avenue for thinking about the topic of my research. I realized that I had mistakenly assumed that any story about a person’s passion, no matter how far from my own experience, would automatically be interesting. This assumption was based on the idea that passion is presumably the anti thesis of boredom. If boredom is about lack of interest or indifference, passion must be about enthusiasm and excitement. If boredom is about restless dissatisfaction, pas sion has to be about the desire to pounce on what’s in front of us with all our energy. Passion is what makes a person, object, event, idea or even life itself meaningful (Hall, 2005). It is experienced as what is most important to the person, essential to whom s/he is and what makes life worth living. My experience of boredom in research has made me question this dichotomy and wonder whether passion and boredom are really such polar opposites after all. My interview experience suggests that passion and boredom may be more entangled and interdependent than we might think. A person can speak eloquently about her own passion, but if the audience does not share her enthusiasm, the narrative may incite boredom rather than excitement. Her passion does not reso nate with the audience. If you cannot “feel” it, it becomes flat, evoking a yawn rather than a vicarious thrill. A passion, just like anything else, needs to be made meaningful for the listener so that she can connect it to something that makes sense to her. In many of my other interviews with people about their passions, I could “get” the point of a story about their passion even if it was outside my own experience. For example, when my interlocutors talked about their passions in a vivid way, I found it easy to imagine myself in the situation.9 Other times the “hook” had nothing to do with the narrative itself, but with the way the person reflected on it after the fact by, for example, drawing upon a shared experience or value (“Without this, I don’t know what my life means any more”; “I’m terrified that this will be the last time I will ever be in love.”). The experience remained unfamiliar to me, yet its significance for the person was easy to understand. A passion, like any other experience, needs to be made meaningful.

The Shamefulness of Boredom 101

My experience of being bored in an interview enabled me to interrogate my initial assumptions about passion and reframe my research question to encompass passion and boredom as mutually constitutive and, indeed, as two sides of the same coin. Passion is an escape from the everyday routines of our lives and liven things up. A life without passion is boring. In this sense, passion can be seen as a way to overcome what Barbalet (1999) calls the “feeling of not being involved in or engaged by events or activities” (p. 634). For example, individuals who are bored with their work or don’t know what to do with themselves or have no direction in their lives, are often advised to “find their passion.” One could say that hovering at the edge of every passion is the experience of meaninglessness. But perhaps passion is more than an antidote to boredom and a solution to lack of meaning. Being bored may be an opportunity to start looking for something that will capture our attention and make us curious. It may even be essential to the experience of passion itself. If passion is a moment of intensity—and, indeed, everyone seems to agree that passion is never a permanent state; it comes and goes—maybe being aroused from one’s boredom (as I was) is crucial to getting a glimpse of something that could—at least potentially—be interesting. Boredom provides the impetus for a push toward finding something meaningful and with it, the glorious possibility of passion.

Conclusion Research is not always exciting. As researchers, we are not always curious about what our informants have to tell us. Sometimes we fail to find something mean ingful despite all of our sociological training and efforts. It simply does not interest us. But becoming bored may also tell us that we are not in the right mood for the interview or that this particular informant simply fails to interest us. It might mean that the topic of our research is not as interesting as we originally thought it would be. Perhaps the project itself is too conventional or too tied to what we already know. Maybe we don’t really care about the topic after all. Finding ourselves bored in and by our research can be considered an example of what Koobak (2014) has called being caught in a “stuck place.” Based on her analysis of her own experience of getting stuck in her research, she argues that “getting stuck” is not a bad thing. It initiates a kind of reflexivity that can become coupled with the stub born desire to keep moving (p. 206). By reflecting on the context in which we are being bored in our research, analysing the kinds of interactions between our informants and ourselves, and deciding what makes the research object itself inter esting or not, we can begin to get ourselves “un stuck.” Getting unstuck may lead us to the conclusion that we need to let go of a topic and find a new project. It may be the sign that it is time to look elsewhere. On the other hand, it might indicate that we need to return to our original data or analysis and see whether we have overlooked something interesting and worth pursuing. In my own case, being bored allowed me to explore a “stuck place” in my own project on passion and, in the process of getting unstuck, I came to a deeper understanding of my topic.

102 Kathy Davis

In conclusion, we need to come out of the closet about our experiences of boredom in research. Rather than ignoring or repressing the shame and discomfort of being bored, we should embrace it as a vehicle for understanding our interview partners, the situations in which we do research, the topics we are investigating, and, last but least, ourselves as researchers.

Notes 1 Of course, curious people are not always welcome in universities where researchers are expected to adapt themselves to output driven research management and professionalized disciplinary structures. They may not be encouraged and may even be kept down or kept out (Ball, 2012). See, also, Phillips (2015) for an excellent overview of recent books on curiosity a topic, which, like boredom, has not been treated as a subject that merits serious sociological attention. 2 I say this as someone who cannot read another synopsis of Foucault’s work and has come to approach theoretical overviews with a big yawn. See Davis (2014) for a critical dis cussion of the failure within the academy to engage with theories rather than merely replicating them. 3 Baghdadchi (2005) sums academic boredom up nicely as “the sense that the seminar is never going to end, that the speaker will never get to the point, that the articles one is reading are proceeding at a glacial pace, that one simply cannot get into a discussion, that one dreads getting into it in the first place” (p. 319). 4 Some scholars make a distinction between responsive and chronic boredom. The former is a response to external circumstances (a rainy day, a tedious task, a mind numbing lecture), while the latter resembles the malaise of a clinical depression (Bernstein, 1975: 513 517). In this chapter, I will be focussing more on the former, although these areas can overlap, as an academic who has gone through an existential crisis concerning her research can attest. 5 See, for example, Lefebvre (1995; 2002; 2005); Barbalet (1999); Benjamin (1968); Goodstein (2005); Dalle Pezze and Salzani, eds (2008), Ehn and Löfgren (2010) and, for an excellent overview of the sociology of boredom, Gardiner (2012). 6 It is this dynamic which differentiates boredom from alienation, for example. Alienation is also the absence of meaning, but the focus, at least in the Marxian sense of the word, is on the structural determinants, making it a much more static concept. 7 I had a similar experience with a failed research project in which I had invested much time and effort. After much agonizing and avoidance, I decided that my only option was to write about the failure itself. See Davis and Gremmen (1998). 8 See Ehn and Löfgren (2010) for a delightful ethnography of the art of “doing nothing,” including waiting, engaging in mindless routines, and daydreaming. This resembles the “empty time” of boredom which also belongs to the “backyard of modernity” where such activities are treated negatively as a waste of time. 9 An example is an informant’s story about her passion for scuba diving. She managed to portray the colours and soundlessness of the strange world underwater, the amazing creatures and plants, the tactile sensations of touching a squid, or the fright at a shark passing close by.

References Baghdadchi, Amir (2005) “On Academic Boredom,” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 4 (3): 319 324. Ball, Phillip (2012) Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. London: Random House.

The Shamefulness of Boredom 103

Barbalet, Jack M. (1999) “Boredom and Social Meaning,” British Journal of Sociology 50 (4): 631 646. Benjamin, Walter (1968) Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. Bernstein, Haskell E. (1975) “Boredom and the Ready Made Life,” Social Research 42 (3): 512 537. Dalle Pezze, B. and C. Salzani (eds) (2008) Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Davis, Kathy (2014) “Making Theories Work,” in Nina Lykke (ed.) Writing Academic Texts Differently. 172 179. New York: Routledge. Davis, Kathy and Gremmen, Ine (1998) “In Search of Heroines: Some Reflections on Normativity in Feminist Research,” Feminism & Psychology 8 (2): 133 153. Ehn, Billy and Orvar Löfgren (2010) The Secret World of Doing Nothing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Flannery, Jean (1995) “Boredom in the Therapist: Countertransference Issues,” British Journal of Psychotherapy 11 (4): 536 544. Fromm, Erich (1955) The Dogma of Christ. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Gardiner, Michael E. (2012) “Henri Lefebvre and the ‘Sociology of Boredom’,” Theory, Culture & Society 29 (2): 37 62. Gaylin, Willard (1979) Feelings: Our Vital Signs. New York: Ballantine Books. Giardina, Michael D. and Joshua I.Newman (2011) “Physical Cultural Studies and Embodied Research Acts,” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 11 (6): 523 534. Goodstein, Elisabeth S. (2005) Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Greenson, Ralph R. (1953) “On Boredom,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association I: 7 21. Hall, Cheryl (2005) The Trouble With Passion. Political Theory Beyond the Reign of Reason. New York: Routledge. Kingwell, Mark (2019) Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface. Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press. Koobak, Redi (2014) “Writing in Stuck Places,” in Nina Lykke (ed.) Writing Academic Texts Differently. 194 207. New York: Routledge. Lefebvre, Henri (1995) Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes, September 1959-May 1961. London: Verso. Lefebvre, Henri (2002) “Critique of Everyday Life”, Vol. 2, Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. London: Verso. Lefebvre, Henri (2005) “Critique of Everyday Life”, Vol. 3, From Modernity to Modernism. London: Verso. Peters, Edward (1975) “Notes Toward an Archaeology of Boredom,” Social Research 42 (3): 493 511. Phillips, Adam (1993) On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. London: Faber and Faber. Phillips, Richard (2015) “Curiosity: Care, Virtue and Pleasure in Uncovering the New,” Theory, Culture & Society 32 (3): 149 161. Popova, Maria (2015) “In Defense of Boredom: 200 Years of Ideas on the Virtues of Not Doing from Some of Humanities Greatest Minds,” Brainpickings, www.brainpickings.org/ 2015/03/16/boredom/. Probyn, Elspeth (2005) Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Scott, Nicole (2017) “Boredom in The Countertransference: Mutual Dissociation in the Therapeutic Encounter,” Contemporary Psychotherapy 9 (1), www.contemporarypsycho therapy.org/volume 9 no 1 summer 2017/boredom in the countertransference mutua l dissociation in the therapeutic encounter/.

104 Kathy Davis

Simmel, Georg (1997) “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. London: Sage, 174 185. Sonkin, Daniel Jay (2020) “Tired or Bored: When Your Therapist Yawns,” blog MentalHelp.Net, www.mentalhelp.net/blogs/tired or bored when your therapist yawns/. Wacquant, Loïc (2004) Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. New York: Oxford University Press. Wacquant, Loïc (2014) “Hominus in Extremis: What Fighting Scholars Teach Us about Habitus,” Body & Society 20(2): 3 17. Wacquant, Loïc (2015) “For a Sociology of Flesh and Blood,” Qualitative Sociology 38: 1 11. Wangh, Martin (1975) “Boredom in Psychoanalytic Perspective,” Social Research 42 (3): 538 550.

7 IN PRAISE OF SUSPICION Oyman Bas¸aran

Qualitative researchers in social sciences tend to see informants’ suspicions about their researches as a cause of worry, a matter of trust and access, and a barrier to overcome. Given that research cannot be isolated from power relations, histories of violence, and structures of domination within society, informants can become suspicious about researchers’ motivations, goals, and intentions. In response, researchers typically seek to address such suspicions by correcting what they see as misunderstandings about their research and building trust with informants, hoping that they will let their guards down and open themselves up to interviews and inquiries. Of course, one can also adopt a more nuanced approach that sees the research process as a gray zone rather than a zero sum game between suspicion and trust. This approach would rightly claim that suspicion in research is inevitable and trust is always provisional and is under negotiation. Indeed, if all human relations are suffused with ambivalences (love and hate, attraction and repulsion, closeness and distance), then it would be too naïve to expect otherwise in researcher informant interactions. An investigator should therefore, one might suggest, develop a more measured attitude toward her research without hoping for a suspicion free research space. This chapter aims to push this approach a bit further, moving beyond treating suspicion as an unfortunate, yet unavoidable feature of qualitative investigation. It rather explores the idea of viewing suspicion as an object of critical reflection and experiment. Suspicion is a neglected feeling in research partly because its existence is often seen as a disturbing sign of a flaw or a problem in research design and process, and is strongly and, I would argue, unfairly associated with mistrust. This chapter refrains from casting suspicion in a negative light and instead calls for regarding it as a crucial window into the affective dynamics of the research process. It explores the merits of a strategy where researchers let suspicion unfold between themselves and informants without compromising research ethics, as a research strategy which can potentially help them develop a better understanding of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 10

106 Oyman Bas¸aran

informants’ worlds. Suspicion can be viewed as generating a fundamental interactional question between social actors: what do others want from me? Suspicion is driven by curiosity and wonder regarding others. It can feel as much life affirming and invigor ating as debilitating and frustrating. It can indicate weakness in research, but also, this chapter claims, help uncover what would otherwise remain invisible. To elaborate on my claim, I will reflect on methodological and the theore tical significance of suspicion in my own research on the medicalization of male circumcision in Turkey. My ethnographic and historical study of male cir cumcision in Turkey examines the medicalization of the practice through the lens of practitioners over more than a century. Male circumcision is widely performed on young boys in Muslim majority Turkey for mainly religious reasons. It involves ceremonies such as communal celebrations, gift giving, and special outfits of clothing. Given the absence of an equivalent practice for girls, it marks gender as well as religious boundaries. The circumcision age usually ranges from three to 11 (though infant circumcisions are on the rise). The goal of my research was to understand the changes in the subjectivities of circumcisers who have initiated, carried out, and expanded the process of medicalizing circumcision. My research data consists of archives, interviews with circumcisers and families, and participant observation at circumcisions. In this chapter, I will show that my con cerns regarding accessing participants, sample size, and collecting accurate data, at times, pushed me to view the emergent suspicion between me and my informants as an obstacle to be overcome. However, at other times, I took suspicion on its own terms: as an object of critical thought and of experiment. This view provided me with valuable knowledge about what it means to be a circumciser in Turkey.

Suspicion beyond (dis)trust Qualitative researchers understandably become worried when informants get suspi cious about their research activities. Suspicion about researchers’ goals, intentions, and motivations can be alarming if it erodes trust and prevents access to valid and reliable information that scholars need (Welter and Alex, 2015). Both trust and suspicion are socially constructed and context dependent phenomena and trust and suspicion in a social scientific investigation are embedded within histories and structures of domina tion, violence, and exploitation. Take the example of informed consent. Qualitative researchers who are researching what are typically called “vulnerable populations” are very much aware that participants can, for example, view “consent forms with suspi cion and fear because of histories of colonial or political exploitation involving written forms” (Wynn, 2018: 251). In the case of politically sensitive contexts where partici pants live under the threat of state authorities, asking for signatures “would not only have diminished data availability, but it would also have raised suspicions that the interviewer was a police officer or an informer” (Shefner and McKenney, 2018: 222). Or in the case of disadvantaged and discriminated groups (such as people with dis abilities and disability rights advocates), informants can be suspicious of researchers’

In Praise of Suspicion 107

intentions and view their research interests as more to do with “personal and profes sional advancement” than about improving the lives of these groups (Sin, 2018: 328). Qualitative researchers have developed various strategies of overcoming participants’ suspicions and establishing rapport with them. They can draw on (or familiarize themselves with) common cultural understandings and identities in their interactions with participants, rely on trusted intermediaries within communities who can introduce them to participants, avoid using certain research tools (such as tape recorders) and standard research procedures (such as informed consent), ask about sensitive topics indirectly, and change their daily comportment among participants (Delamont and Atkinson, 2018; Goodall, 2015; Tillmar, 2015; Welter and Alex, 2015). All these strategies are meant to increase researchers’ access to participants and ensure the accuracy of data they would collect since suspicious participants can, as researchers are often worried, distort their answers to inquiries. Notwithstanding the methodological importance of such strategies, I would like to conceptualize suspicion on its own terms without casting it in a negative light as opposed to trust and associating it with distrust. While in the case of trust, the search for more information and curiosity about others dwindles, if not ceases, a suspicious person refuses to take the presence of others (such as their behaviors, words, and gestures) at face value. Suspicion sharpens the keenness of curiosity, demands alertness, and entails entertaining rival hypotheses about others’ motives and suspending the final judgement (Fein, 1996; Sinaceur, 2010). In suspicion, one thinks, feels, and acts as if the other person hides something. The hidden motive does not have to be a bad one though. One can get suspicious about her friends’ actions, thinking that they are planning to throw her a surprise birthday party. Unless she hates surprises, she would likely be thrilled at the possibility of a party. Suspicion, in other words, excites, incites, and stirs passions and interest. The feeling of suspicion is also often mutual. The organizer of a party can become suspicious of her friend being suspicious about her plan and can then strive to ward off her friend’s suspicions and improve the plan. Suspicion, thus, often stimulates creativity and ingenuity. Suspicion resides in an affective inter subjective space wherein emotions, sensa tions, and judgements reinforce, aggravate, and interrupt each other and fill the air with suspense. It denotes a particular configuration of proximity and remoteness; prompting self reflection in relation to others and opening a space of complex play of identifications, attachments, and desires between social actors. My contention is that qualitative researchers should take this space between themselves and partici pants seriously because it can act not only as an obstacle in the research process, but also as a distinct locus for producing new forms of knowledge that would other wise not come into existence. If researchers and their informants are part of rela tions of domination, hierarchies, and exclusion and research is always an ongoing endeavor, then the emergence of this space is inevitable and reflecting on it can, in turn, help us better understand those relations of domination, hierarchies, and exclusion themselves. More importantly, I would suggest that researchers should

108 Oyman Bas¸aran

entertain the idea of letting or even facilitating the emergence of this space during the research process before rushing to overcome or minimize it. Therefore, this chapter intends to enrich qualitative researchers’ strategies in dealing with issues of trust, distrust, and suspicion by rethinking the possibilities embedded within the space of suspicion. I elaborate on my claim by discussing how I positioned myself vis à vis the mutual feelings of suspicion that emerged during my research: not only my infor mants’ suspicions about me and my research, but also my own suspicions about my informants. My work investigates the medicalization of male circumcision from the 1920s until the present in Turkey. Besides archival research and participating in circumcision events and operations, I travelled to 25 cities and some of their out lying towns and villages and interviewed three groups of practitioners: itinerant circumcisers, health officers, and physicians. This chapter primarily draws on the interviews I conducted with the first two groups since the space of suspicion appeared as a key element in those interviews and interactions. This space was mediated by two institutions: the state that monopolizes coercion and the market that regulates competition and allocates resources. My informants became suspi cious of me and my research because they regarded me as either a representative of the state or a potential rival who was trying to learn the practice or both. The rest of the chapter first explains how the modern Turkish state in the early twentieth century replaced kinship as an institution that controlled who could perform male circumcision, setting the conditions for the rise of medical authority in male circumcision starting in the 1960s. I then discuss how these developments shaped the space of suspicion that arose between me and my informants and my strategies to navigate this space. These strategies involved not only those that qua litative researchers typically use, but also a strategy that treats suspicion as an opportunity for knowledge production.

The medicalization of male circumcision With the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, new Turkish ruling elites (military officers, politicians, bureaucrats, and internationally trained doctors) sought to reorganize social, political, and economic structures inherited from the Ottoman empire. Influenced by the Western imaginary, the elites intervened in male cir cumcision as well and brought it under the purview of medical professionals. Under CHP’s single party rule,1 a new law called the Law on the Application of Medicine and its . Branches (Tababet ve S¸uabatı San’atlarının Tarzı Icrasına Dair Kanun) was issued in 1928. The law decreed that only those who graduated from the Turkish faculties of medicine and those with equivalent degrees approved by the Ministry of Health and Social Aid could practice medicine, including circumcision. With this law, the state redefined male circumcision as a medical operation that should be done only by practitioners with medical degrees and licenses. The law also stated that unlicensed practitioners be sentenced to between six months and two years of prison time for causing a risk to children’s health. The legitimacy of medical professionals was backed

In Praise of Suspicion 109

by the threat of state violence against potential non compliant practitioners. Although the law allowed non professional practitioners to receive permission on the condition that they could prove to have had at least ten years’ experience in circumcision, just a handful of itinerant circumcisers were able to benefit from this exception. The goal of the new law was to replace itinerant circumcisers with state authorized medical professionals. Itinerant circumcisers and their practices were embedded within what feminist scholar Deniz Kandiyoti (1988) calls “classic patriarchy.” The co habitation of three generations, age based patterns of deference, distinct male and female hierarchies, and relative separation of their spheres of activity constituted the main organizational characteristics of this patriarchy. The patriarch (senior father or grandfather) appropriated young boys’ and young women’s labor (whether they be daughters or brides). While the land was the main source of livelihood for families and of power for men, circumcision also proved to be rewarding both economically and symbolically (prestige and honor). As in the case of land, girls/women were excluded from accessing knowledge and skills in male circumcision. This was because male circumcision was mainly (and still is) considered as a men’s affair in Turkey. The institution of kinship played a large role in regulating and controlling the transmission of circumcision skills, knowledge, and the associated prestige over generations. Starting as young as the age of eight, apprentices/sons shadowed (grand)fathers to circumcisions, carried their tool bags, and held boys down during the operations, if necessary. When their turn came (a decision that was usually made by masters), apprentices began to perform circumcisions on their own and later with the help of their sons. This master apprentice relationship was fused with concern about maintaining control over the flow of techniques, skills, and knowledge. Fathers/masters tried to ensure that the trade would remain within the family (thus, some, for instance, kept secret the recipes for herbal medicine for pain management). By codifying male circumcision as a medical operation to be done only by those with medical education, the Turkish state attempted to appropriate “the power of nomina tion” (Bourdieu, 2018) from masters, institute modern medical education as the orga nizing principle of reproducing circumcisers, and re establish the conditions of the entry into the field. The new law, in other words, aimed to not only medicalize the practice, but also redefine who had the right to perform medicalized male circumcision. In doing so, it paved the way for the unification and standardization of the field of male cir cumcision under the medical authority that promised to sustain the well being of boys who undergo male circumcision. However, due to the inadequate healthcare infrastructure and the lack of trained health professionals, the new law’s impact on practitioners and families remained limited until the World War II. With the implementation of a large scale health care network in the 1960s, itinerant circumcisers faced a serious challenge from health officers, state authorized low ranked health professionals (underneath phy sicians and equivalent to nurses), who initiated the medicalization of male cir cumcision by introducing new surgical techniques (local anesthesia and suture), skills, and knowledge. Some itinerant circumcisers were interrogated by the police, others were jailed for a couple of weeks, and still others paid a fine as a result of

110 Oyman Bas¸aran

health officers’ complaints to authorities. Yet, despite these challenges, many itin erant circumcisers continued performing circumcision illegally. All this points to a climate of suspicion, control, and coercion in the field of male circumcision: health officers viewed itinerant circumcisers as their competitors and itinerant circumcisers were suspicious of health officers who could not only drive them out of the field but also, as representatives of the state, get them into trouble. My research was not immune to the insidious effects of this climate.

The state, the researcher, and suspicion Considering the history of the tension and conflicts between itinerant circumcisers and the state actors and institutions such as health officers, security forces, and courts, it was no surprise that itinerant circumcisers treated me and my research with suspicion. As has been well established in the social sciences, the state is not an abstract entity that stands above society, but is produced and re produced through myriad everyday practices, discourses, and representations. A prominent characteristic of the modern state is its deployment of techniques (such as maps, bureaucratic documents, and surveys) that render the society “legible” for various purposes including taxation, military conscription, and prevention of rebellion (Scott, 1998). Similarly, research tools such as tape recorders and note taking can, in some contexts, also be viewed as techniques of legibility and thus can raise sus picion in those who faced violence and discrimination in the hands of local state authorities in the past. Itinerant circumcisers often perceived me not only as a “researcher” but also a representative of the “Turkish state,” and therefore under standably questioned my motivations and intentions. This explains partially why itinerant circumcisers—including those who were no longer performing circumcision—were hesitant to talk to me about their practices. Many of them who agreed to talk to me did not allow me to take notes during the interviews, let alone record them. For instance, I interviewed Selim, an unlicensed itinerant circumciser, in a village in western Turkey. I contacted him with the help of a senior relative of mine who also drove me to Selim’s village for the interview. My relative did not know Selim in person and had gotten Selim’s contact information from a friend of his, and then called him for permission for an interview. Selim, a soft spoken man in his sixties, was still performing circumcision at the time of the inter view. As we settled into our seats on his porch, I took out my recorder and asked him if I could record the interview. He turned his face away and waved his hand, gesturing “no.” My relative, so eager to help me but equally clueless about what I was doing as a researcher, interjected before I could speak, saying “Come on, why not? This is for his school. It is his homework.” Selim again shook his head and said “No. I do not have a license.” He turned to me and asked: “What are you going to do with that [the recorder]?” I said that the recorder was for my project, but I did not have to use it. We then proceeded with the interview without recording it. He went on to describe how he wanted to get a license for circumcision and yet public authorities declined his request on the grounds that health officers were the only legal practitioners.

In Praise of Suspicion 111

Like Selim, other itinerant circumcisers initially did not allow me to deploy my regular research tools. During the interviews, some of them changed their minds and, unprompted by me, gave me the permission to take notes, albeit not to use the recorder. Talking to itinerant circumcisers was crucial for my project since I knew that they would provide a unique perspective on the history of the medica lization of male circumcision. Health officers were generally willing to talk to me about their experiences, but left some important information in the dark (such as their roles in itinerant circumcisers’ troubles with public authorities). Thus for practical as well as ethical reasons, I agreed to itinerant circumcisers’ terms, hoping to put their minds at rest about my research and gain their trust. In other words, contacting itinerant circumcisers was merely a matter of access for me: accessing the much needed information for my research via the seemingly neutral medium of research instruments. My interactions with itinerant circumcisers gave me a sense of uneasiness, though. I felt like I wasn’t in control of my research as I became exposed to a set of projections that complicated my presence as a researcher in unpredictable ways. I realized that I had been naively assuming that state actors (such as bureaucrats and soldiers) and researchers constituted two bounded, distinct, and reified entities. One of my research interests was to understand itinerant circumcisers’ interactions with what I considered the “state” (health officers and security forces). Yet, their suspicion regarding my research made me realize that I was more than a “researcher” for them and my presence as a researcher and my research were implicated in power relations that I intended to examine. The realization that there was something else (i.e. the state) in me beyond my researcher selfshaped my vul nerability and anxiety. Moreover, my sense of urgency was exacerbated by an institutional pressure: I was conducting the project for my dissertation and doctoral degree. All this made my informants’ cooperation absolutely essential as I needed to achieve an accep table sample size within a limited period of time. Suspicion on the part of my informants, in other words, threatened to disrupt the timeline and progress of my research. I did not (at least initially) see their suspicion as a potential basis of critical reflection but only another barrier to completing my research. I approached their suspicion as a matter of (dis) trust and ensured them that I was “harmless.” In doing so, I also wanted to soothe my anxiety.

Competition and mutual suspicion The other force that helped foster the space of suspicion during my research was the market. Considering that the majority of the population in Turkey is Muslim and have their boys circumcised, performing circumcision was (and still is) a significant economic and symbolic resource for circumcisers. Prior to the appearance of health officers, itinerant circumcisers exercised caution not to encroach upon each other’s territories. They did not travel to remote places and usually stayed nearby their resi dential location (village, town, or city). Of course, this does not mean that no

112 Oyman Bas¸aran

conflict among itinerant circumcisers ever occurred. It sometimes did and when it did, itinerant circumcisers negotiated with each other to settle the issue. However, the increasing number of health officers who initiated the medicalization process starting in the 1960s heightened the competition among circumcisers including health officers and itinerant practitioners. Some of the young health officers observed the senior health officers’ circumcisions to improve their skills as circumcision training in medical schools was typically very limited. Yet, the same young health officers then tried to drive senior circumcisers out of the field. Moreover, many unlicensed itinerant circumcisers began to use surgical instru ments as well, which blurred the line between the two competing groups of practitioners. All this reinforced the widespread perception regarding performing male circumcision as a low skilled job that could be learned through observing and imitating others. And it exacerbated the feelings of insecurity and uncertainty on the part of circumcisers who wanted to protect their expertise from outsiders so that they could improve or sustain their position in the field. The pressure of competition in the field of male circumcision also shaped my interactions with circumcisers. What if, some of my informants speculated, I had a hidden motive to clandestinely learn the skills and then enter the field? In my interviews, I asked my informants about performing male circumcision down to its minor details: where and how much do you apply local anesthesia? How long do you wait before cutting off the foreskin? What instruments are you using? Why this specific instrument but not others? How do you stitch the incision closed? Is it possible for me to watch you perform circumcision? Initially, it did not occur to me that my questions could have a broader significance than merely collecting facts. I was treating my informants as a source of information about circumcision and my implicit assumption was that language simply acted as a tool for commu nication between me and my informants. This assumption was challenged when I interviewed Mehmet. Mehmet, a 62 year old, unlicensed itinerant circumciser, was living in a western town of Turkey. He had been performing circumcisions for four decades and when I asked his permission for an interview, he replied: “Why are you curious about cir cumcision? Are you trying to learn to perform circumcisions?” I was puzzled by the question since until then, I never thought that I would be (mis)taken for a potential circumciser. Once I assured him that that was not my intention, he agreed to talk to me, albeit with one condition: I could neither record the interview, nor take notes. That said, around half an hour into the interview, unprompted by me, Mehmet gave me permission to take notes. “But you can’t record it,” he added. He then asked me the same question: “Why are you curious about circumcision?” Like some of the other circumcisers, Mehmet was baffled by my interest in circumci sion: “It is just circumcision. We cut it and then it is done.” I told him that I was interested in knowing how he learned the practice from his father and his interactions with other itinerant circumcisers and health officers. My answer did not satisfy him: “So you are not a health professional [sag˘ lıkçı] and you don’t want to learn circumci sion?” he asked. After I said “no” again we resumed our conversation. I was very

In Praise of Suspicion 113

pleased with the outcome of my interview: my initial discomfort stemming from being interrogated about my intentions gave way to a sense of ease since I was able to get more information from Mehmet than some of the other itinerant circumcisers. I sometimes encountered similar reactions from health officers as well. In the affluent areas of Turkey, some health officers were able to accumulate a significant amount of economic capital from circumcision and were worried about potential rivals. The profession of circumciser enabled Murat, a 63 year old health officer who had been performing circumcision since his twenties, to buy properties. He added that he could not send his children to college without the additional income coming from circumcisions. We sat at a café near his home and I asked whether I could record the interview. After giving his permission, Murat also asked me if I was a sag˘lıkçı [health professional], I said “no” and told him that I was a sociologist who is interested in the “social” side of the practice. He asked: “What do you mean?” I answered: “I am interested in learning about how you started performing circumcision and your interactions with other practitioners and families.” “So you are not trying to learn how to perform circumcision, right?” As I was about to give an answer to his question, he interrupted: “Anyways, even if you are, you cannot do it. It is not easy.” He then told me that he taught young health officers in the past and added: “But it is tricky because you would not want them to be your competitors.” A striking aspect of our conversation was his emphasis on the difficulty of per forming circumcisions, which contradicted what he said later in the interview: “Circumcision is not a brain surgery. You just cut it.” He considered his expertise (skills, knowledge, and techniques) resistant to appropriation, adaptation, and imi tation while also presuming that others could learn it with some observation and practice, which made it not so easy to control and protect against potential inter lopers. More importantly, as mentioned above, Murat’s worry was not unfounded as many circumcisers did indeed learn to perform circumcisions after graduation merely by observing senior circumcisers. My informants’ suspicion regarding my intentions and research caught me by surprise. It was frustrating. It felt like I was losing control of my own research. Language turned out, after all, to be more than something I used for commu nicating with my informants. On the contrary, I was (as we all are) dependent on and, was used by, language as well. Their suspicion pointed beyond what was transpiring in our dyadic interactions—another scene populated by fears, desires, and concerns. In this intersubjective space, my informants and I were not two distinct and bounded entities “research subjects” and “researcher.” Instead, the selves were plural: I was a researcher and a circumciser/rival (and a state repre sentative) and they were research subjects/circumcisers/rivals. My informants’ sus picion regarding my research and intentions also activated my own suspicions about my informants: what if they were providing incomplete information as they were speculating that I might be their potential rival or get them into trouble with state authorities? What if my informants refrained from being fully transparent with me about their circumcision practices? If accumulating and diversifying information

114 Oyman Bas¸aran

about research subjects are a crucial component of the research process, how could I ease my own suspicions and feel like I was on the right track? None of these questions entertained the possibility that suspicion itself could be a source of knowledge. My initial reaction was to rectify the unbalanced situation immediately and gain control by acting proactively and developing a new etiquette for the next interview. Accordingly, as my next informant, another health officer, and I sat down for the interview, I promptly said: “I am not in the field of medicine and have no intention to learn to perform circumcision for myself.” The defensive tone of my voice was trying to force an imagined third party, namely “the competitor,” into our interac tion only to dismiss it. My introductory remarks brought me some sense of relief as I could highlight that I was no threat to him and there was no reason for him to be suspicious of me or my research. My informant chuckled dismissively, as if my message did not matter to him. Yet, I continued using the same strategy for the next few interviews and my frustration over any sign of suspicion on the part of my informants was evident in my interview with Faruk, a health officer in his sixties. I talked to him (a friend of his was also present during the conversation) right after my request for an interview was turned down by a circumciser. When I brought this up, Faruk said: Maybe he thought: “What if he [the researcher] tries to steal my job?” I thought that might be the case and that’s why I now tell people on the phone that I have no interest in doing the job. FARUK: Yes, but by the time you start doing it, I would be long retired. AUTHOR: Right? It’s not like I can start doing this in three days. HIS FRIEND: Well, maybe if you start now… FARUK: No, he can’t. AUTHOR: Yeah, I think at least one person said “no” to my request for an inter view for that reason. FARUK:

AUTHOR:

The idea that my informants could be suspicious about my intentions was indeed very unsettling to me as I automatically associated it with mistrust and harm (to my informants and my research). Hence, my new strategy. However, the same strategy also prevented me from dwelling in this space of suspicion as it reinforced the boundaries between myself as a researcher and my informants. The rigidity and boundedness of our identities was again restored (at least that’s what I thought). After having achieved confidence in my sample size, I stopped using the new etiquette and instead of foreclosing the space of suspicion preemptively and pre maturely, I let my informants speculate about my research and ask questions about my intentions and motivations, while continuing to respect their preferences as to how to conduct the interviews and giving honest answers to their questions about my research. Over time, I came to realize that the space of suspicion that was unfolding between me and them was one of a palpable enactment of what it means to be a circumciser in Turkey. This space of conflict, ambivalences, and ambiguities

In Praise of Suspicion 115

could reveal what was at stake for my informants working under competition in a tangible way. During the rest of the research, their suspicious attitudes toward me sometimes led not only to more stories about competition against other circumcisers and physicians at hospitals, but also triggered certain thoughts, feelings, and self reflection. They, for instance, began to talk about the nature of their job, its level of difficulty, as we saw in the case of circumciser Murat (“It is hard to learn…but not really”), and the attendant stress and insecurities. Granted, this space of suspicion itself can be anxiety producing for both parties, and yet being able to inhabit it without rushing to dismiss it can also be rewarding as it can lead to the production of new forms of knowledge that would otherwise remain in the dark.

Conclusion Qualitative researchers are typically advised to immerse themselves in informants’ socio symbolic worlds. Distance as a spatial metaphor is used by researchers to signify geographical, cultural, cognitive, and emotional gaps that should be bridged for methodological reasons. The concerns behind this advice are legitimate: one can gain others’ trust, acquire more grounded and complex knowledge about their worlds than how ideological (mis)representations portray them, and hopefully eliminate the risks of projecting biases on research subjects. However, I have suggested that this approach to the fieldwork as a research method can also be unproductive as it views distance and closeness, access and exclusion, and trust and distrust as mutually exclusive, self contained phenomena. The call for closing the gap with others in research can result in overlooking the crucial insight that “it is the distance of persons as distinct from one another that allows us to place ourselves within another’s experience” (Willerslev, 2007: 40). Proximity would, in other words, be impossible “in the absence of distance because then the experiencer and the experienced would conflate, would become one, thereby making experience of the other impossible” (Willerslev, 2007: 40). Thus, I suggested that the key question to ask is not whether we are too distant from, or too close to, our research subjects, but instead how we can reflect on the various configurations of proximity and distance vis a vis them. This chapter claimed that suspicion is one of these configurations. While insti tutional constraints and protocols regarding research encourage us to see suspicion as a stumbling block, an upsetting sign of distance and alienation between researchers and informants, and a distressing proof of mistrust or even harm, I have shown how dwelling in the space of suspicion can enable researchers to see what their research subjects hold dear, value, fear, worry, and hope, in a way that would not otherwise be possible. This perspective entails that suspicion is not associated with distrust or harm and something that needs to be overcome at all costs for the sake of research. The space of suspicion is rather where we see and reflect on ourselves through others who embody more than what they appear to represent. It is a space in flux and characterized by shifting positions. Attending to its unique dynamics can generate new insights and forms of knowledge.

116 Oyman Bas¸aran

Note 1 CHP (Republican People’s Party), the oldest political party, was founded by Ataturk the leader of the nationalist revolution. The party was the only party between 1923 and 1945.

References Bourdieu, P. (2018) On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989 1992. John Wiley & Sons. Delamont, S. and Atkinson, P. (2018) “The Ethics of Ethnography,” in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research Ethics. Sage, 248 263. Fein, S. (1996). “Effects of Suspicion on Attributional Thinking and the Correspondence Bias,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70 (6): 1164 1184. Goodall, C. (2015) “Working with Difficult to Reach Groups: A ‘Building Blocks’ Approach to Researching Trust in Communities,” in Handbook of Research Methods on Trust. Ed Award Elgar Publishing. Kandiyoti, D. (1988) “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender and Society 2 (3): 274 290. https:// doi.org/10.1177/089124388002003004. Scott, J.C. (1998) Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press. Shefner, J. and McKenney, Z. (2018) “Confronting Political Dilemmas in Ethnographic Fieldwork: Consent, Personal Safety and Triangulation,” in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research Ethics. Sage, 248 263. Sin, C.H. (2018) Researching Hate Crime Against Disabled People Working Through Ethical Considerations When the ‘Personal is Political’,” in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research Ethics. Sage, 248 263. Sinaceur, M. (2010) “Suspending Judgment to Create Value: Suspicion and Trust in Negotia tion,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (3): 543 550. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp. 2009.11.002. Tillmar, M. (2015) “Cross cultural Comparative Case Studies: A Means of Uncovering Dimensions of Trust,” in Handbook of Research Methods on Trust. Edward Elgar Publishing. Welter, F. and Alex, N. (2015) “Researching Trust in Different Cultures,” in Handbook of Research Methods on Trust. Edward Elgar Publishing. Willerslev, R. (2007) Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. University of California Press. Wynn, L.L. (2018) “When Ethics Review Boards Get Ethnographic Research Wrong,” in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research Ethics. Sage, 248 263.

8 AFFECTIVE ECOLOGIES AND THE BOTANICAL SUBLIME Banu Subramaniam

In recent years, I have devoted myself, once again, to the world of plants. My current fascination for plants is not as a botanist using the tools of botany I was taught in my biological education, nor about abandoning those tools in the name of some naïve sentimental plant love. Rather, I am trying to bring to bear the vast insights and tools of feminist, and postcolonial Science and Technology Studies (STS) to revitalize my fascination for the natural world and plants, in particular. In short, I am renewing my love of plants from a different vantage point. In this new work, I am attempting to re establish my love of plants through a cartography for decolonizing the field of botany. In preparation, I have immersed myself in the worlds of colonial plant biology, their histories and historiographies. My graduate biological education in the US promised me a world of botany as objective, dis passionate, and value free knowledge. I was taught that good scientists abandoned their emotions outside the doors of the laboratory or the field site. Growing up in postcolonial India, I came to believe that science, the scientific method and the sci entific revolution primarily emerged in the west. In independent India, science was the vehicle to enter the hallways of modernity and a brighter future. Neither of these core experiences prepared me for the histories I discovered. As I read anti colonial, postcolonial and indigenous histories of plants, I was outraged. The process has been thoroughly unexpected and disquieting—bringing up strong feelings of utter surprise, shock, awe, wonder, anger, disgust, contempt, joy, fear, pride, bewilderment, and especially the sublime. How is it possible—I had to contemplate—that I had learned none of this history in my postcolonial biology classrooms growing up in India, nor in my settler colonial biological education in the United States? How can I at once know so much, and yet so little about plants? In exploring the affective registers of my work, I focus on the idea of the “sublime” for two main reasons. First, I believe that the “sublime” and its associated values of transcendence, awe, beauty, glory and grandeur best captures academic affective DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 11

118 Banu Subramaniam

languages because it reveals the peculiar myths of the natural sciences. We “do” science not for the money or as a job, but for something loftier, the dogged, relentless, and supreme pursuit of wonder, passion, curiosity, and “truth.” In my interdisciplinary work, the vocabulary of the sublime has emerged repeatedly across various sites. Second, the sublime, I argue, has an entangled history with how “nature” and the role of the “human” in nature is theorized. The sublime evokes transcendence and immanence, something beyond the human, almost other worldly. As I will show, this idea of the sublime in the history of the natural sci ences has shaped not only the gendered and race(d) prototype of the scientist, but also theories in the natural sciences. It permeates the epistemological foundations of research and knowledge making practices.

A Botanical Journey: Three Tales In my biology classes both in India and the U.S, the history of botany was presented as an established and incontrovertible account. The history was also always of a “modern” botany and celebrated through the works of a long list of great white men—Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, John Ray, Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Asa Gray, Charles Edwin Bessey, George Bentham, Sir Joseph Hooker, Frederick Clements to name a few. But what if we put plants—not botany—at the center of analysis? That transforms our subject and allows us to understand how the “natural” world was theorized and systematized into what we call the modern science of botany. What was included and excluded in this science? Any systematic study of plants quickly leads us to the thoroughly entangled colonial worlds of plants and humans and their co evolved histories, an absent topic in most botany classes. Historians of science have documented that where colonists went, they transformed landscapes through colonial forestry, plantation crops, and spice trades (Grove, 1984; Crosby, 1986). Colonial histories are fundamentally about the exploitation of the labor of colonized peoples and plants (and other natural resources). For example, the histories of cotton and sugar cane cannot be told without a history of colonialism and slavery and indeed vice versa (Mintz, 1985; Beckert, 2014). The biologies of cotton and sugar cane shaped the labor policies and economic politics of plantations, knowledges that circulated and shaped colonial plantations across the globe. In such histories, it is impossible to extricate plants and plant agency as an abstract, universal, unique system, severed from the histories of other lives and the processes and practices of colonialism (Grove, 1984; Beinart and Hughes, 2007; Huggan and Tiffin, 2015). In short, new insights from postcolonial and indigenous scholars remind us that modern botany can be taught as an abstract esoteric science only because the his tories of colonization and slavery are excluded, as are the many exclusions of so many groups—black, indigenous, and people of color, queer and trans commu nities, colonized, and third world peoples, and women (except white women in the early years of botany who were later marginalized if not forgotten in this his tory) (Shteir, 1999) from the hallways of modern science. In putting plants at the center of analysis, we get a glimpse of how and why decolonizing projects in

Affective Ecologies and the Botanical Sublime 119

science are so enormously difficult, and complex. It is not a tweak here and there, but necessitates an epistemological and methodological revolution. As I immersed myself in these untold histories that have remained in the margins until recent years, I have come to reflect on my own botanical education. In hindsight, so much of my life and education makes sense now. I have come to understand that the profound disconnect and deep sense of alienation that befell me, and must indeed befall any student of botany from colonized and enslaved nations, were not about me at all. Understanding the profound consequences of this white washed history is critical if we are serious about questions of inclusion, equity and diversity. Until we learn to question the narratives we have been told about the past—to ask what these stories are, who these stories include and exclude, and why these emerged as the stories of botany— we cannot reckon with the violence of colonialism and its afterlives. Here I reflect on my own life and education as a case in point, one such journey narrated through three tales.

“Other” Botanical Imaginations I was born, and grew up in India and benefited from a postcolonial education from elementary school through to my undergraduate years. When I refer to a postcolonial education, I am primarily discussing the system in India (but one that is in fact pre valent across the former British colonies). Given the multiplicity of languages across India and the divisive politics of elevating any single Indian language as “the” national language, India has many official languages. English often emerges as a neutral choice. Most urban middle class schools like I attended had English as the primary language of instruction. Indian postcolonial education followed a British style education, which meant that we specialized early. The textbooks were also deeply Anglo centric. My textbooks in history, literature, poetry, geography, and certainly the natural and physical sciences, and mathematics mostly covered well accepted western theorists and disciplinary frameworks. While there was an occasional Indian scientist like the Nobel laureate physicist C. V. Raman or the famed mathematician Ramanujan, the intellectuals that featured in the textbooks were all from the West. Since childhood, I was fascinated with the natural world around me. So in high school, after tenth grade when I had to choose between the sciences, commerce, or the arts, I chose the sciences as my focus. After high school, when I had to pick a specialization in the sciences for my undergraduate years, I chose biology. I want to stress again how specialized this education was: During my under graduate years, other than a study of language, I had no courses in the social sciences or humanities in my curriculum. In my travels to the West, and through feminist and postcolonial studies, I have come to rethink and reexamine my early life. In India, one is immersed in a world of stories. My parents, grandparents, relatives and friends would tell and retell stories, especially from the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. In both epics there are innumerable characters, and over the centuries, stories have multiplied as each character becomes the center of a new story, completely transforming the

120 Banu Subramaniam

unfolding of the epic. As a result, story telling possibilities were endless. This was a magical, vibrant, colorful, and enchanted world. Western boundaries of life/non life, plant/animal, human/nonhuman, nature/culture, good/evil, sacred/profane were largely absent. Gods would descend onto earth in numerous avatars taking the shape of animal, human, and animal human hybrids. Humans could transform into animals, plants, and even rocks, and then be transformed back again. Plants would whisper to each other and other creatures around them. These imaginative possibilities played an active part in the plots of my childhood imagination. Plants—their roots, shoots, leaves and flowers—were woven into mythological and folk tales. In these fantastical stories, plants were never immobile, unintelligent beings, but rather active agents that built community and enabled narrative plots with the world around. Plants housed transmigrated souls of the divine, human and other sentient beings. For example, in these tales, the sweet fragrant jasmine emerged with the churning of the Ocean of Milk.1 The Tamarind tree, ever deli cious for its sour fruit, was always home for myriad spirits. Despite its considerable shade, one was advised not to rest under it. The Banana tree’s short life is entangled in tales of matrimony and children. The Banyan tree with its expansive aerial roots symbolizes all three gods of the Hindu trinity—Vishnu the bark, Brahma, the roots, and Shiva, the branches. Our childhood was enraptured with the stories of Vikram and Vetaal, King Vikramaditya and the ghost spirit Vetaal who lived in the banyan tree at the edge of a crematorium. In these stories, the ghostly spirit would continually outwit the king in clever and conniving plots. The sesame tree, we learned, emerged when Lord Vishnu’s sweat drops fell on Earth. The Kalpa vriksha, or the tree of life, was believed to grant your wishes. The peepal tree (sacred fig) and the banana tree are considered husband and wife if they grow together. The peepal leaf with its symmetrical heart shape made for delicate, yet hardy surface for painting. I have spent many a summer drying the leaf and waiting for its skeletal structure to emerge, and then painting on it. Most minor medical symptoms of discomfort were promptly attended to by home remedies of concoctions of herbs and spices. Plants were integrated into life—essential and ubiquitous: as digestives, for good health and ill health, as beauty remedies, as games, and musical instruments. I acquired this enchanted vision from these stories despite being raised as an urban child. What was striking to me as I look back, is that while I would call my childhood imagination magical and enchanted, it was never sublime, a concept I elaborate later in this essay. In short, there was nothing other worldly in these stories; all characters inhabited the same worlds. In my enchanted Indian imagination, gods, demons, plants, animals, humans and even inanimate objects like stones were all interconnected, with varying but shared agencies. They could communicate with each other, and indeed in some stories each could turn into another (such as in the Ramayana where Ahalya, a human is turned into stone and then back into a human). Gods and demons are also not the binary good/evil that populate the western imagination. Gods can be bad and do wrong, and demons can be pious and benevolent.2 In contrast to Adam and Eve who were banished into a harsh wilderness, Rama and Sita in the Ramayana were banished into an enchanted

Affective Ecologies and the Botanical Sublime 121

forest filled with talking animals and plants. They were at home and in harmony with the world. There is good and evil, but benevolence is not limited to the gods, nor sentience to the human. As I argue later, the sublime fundamentally implies the ability to transcend the human into an otherworldliness that was never in evidence in these mythological stories and indeed seems incommensurable. Once I entered school, we were inducted into a postcolonial education system where the legacies of the British still endure. As I grew up, my Indian upbringing was cast in a new light. Most significantly, distinctions between the real, fictional and the fantastical clearly came to be demarcated in my classrooms. I came to understand that the plant worlds I grew up with, are in reality only fictional stories, superstition and not “real” knowledge. With time, my botanical education disenchanted my enchan ted childhood imagination of “nature.” The scientific Latin names I had to learn by rote erased the luxurious and magical contexts of my childhood. They severed plants from the world I lived and knew. Common names that described plants as I saw it, were now transformed into alien creatures. The beautiful “flame of the forest” that put out brilliant orange flowers that made trees seem like they were on fire were now rendered Caesalpinia regia; the touch me not plant (the plant shriveled up if you tou ched it) was now Mimosa pudica; the banyan tree, the national tree of India was now Ficus benghalenssi; the peepal tree, the sacred fig, was now Ficus religiosa; and the tall, and lanky Asoka tree, was now Saraca indica, and so it went. Suddenly, the plant world turned into Latin! While the Indian names always described the plant—as aflame or not to be touched—the scientific names were completely alien. This added another layer of rote learning in an education that stressed it. I am sad to say that I was a rather compliant student, and took to learning this new terminology as another chore that needed to be endured. Since my family moved around a lot during my childhood, the transformation of language was never complete, and I continued to nimbly code switch between the vocabularies of my classes, my multilingual friends, and the local languages around. Thus, as students of botany, we had to juggle multiple vocabularies and worlds. Most of us could name plants in multiple languages, and we had to add Latin to the many other local forms. But learning the scientific term in Latin was enforced, and we were assured that because it was scientific, it was universal. Scientists across the world used the same terminology. This was poor comfort for a child who didn’t imagine traveling across the globe. Universality is most important to those who can travel, and have access to other lands and knowledge systems. In my Indian botanical education, did we learn about botany and the spice trade, the political economy of the East India Company, and centuries of British colonialism and how it devastated and (under)developed India? Of course not. Did we learn about colonial forestry and the ways in which it transformed Indian landscapes? Again no. Did we learn of plantation crops and how it transformed Indian agriculture? No! However, in our English classes, we were forced to recite poems like Wordsworth’s The Daffodils, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Shelley’s To a Skylark, Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. For a population that had never (and were unlikely to ever) see a daffodil, albatross, or skylark, a postcolonial education was an education in alienation, where life on the ground diverged from life in the textbooks. In our spare time,

122 Banu Subramaniam

childhood fiction was dominated with the world of a particular children’s book author, Enid Blyton. We read of snow, strawberries, scones, crumpets, freckles, and any number of objects alien to life on the ground in India and these consumed the poetry and prose of our literary worlds. No doubt, any good education should introduce new worlds and objects to students, but what is significant was that there was little from my lived experiences that entered my textbooks. As Robin Kimmerer (2013) poignantly notes of her experience as an indigenous botanist in the United States: In moving from a childhood in the woods to the university I had unknow ingly shifted between worldviews, from a natural history of experience, in which I knew plants as teachers and companions, to whom I was linked with mutual responsibility, into the realm of science. The questions scientists raised were not “Who are you?” But “What is it?” No one asked plants, “What can you tell us?” The primary question was, “How does it work?” The botany I was taught was reductionist, mechanistic, and strictly objective. Plants were reduced to objects; they were not subjects. The way botany was conceived and taught didn’t seem to leave much room for a person who thought the way I did. The only way I could make sense of it was to conclude that the things I had always believed about plants must not be true after all. (41–42) With time, life on the ground was a “third world” life filled with what seemed inconsequential, unimportant, and marginal, while the textbooks in our classes were the path forward to enlightenment, modernity and science. Jamaica Kincaid channels this alienation beautifully in her novel Lucy. Like me, Lucy was forced to learn and recite the poem “The Daffodils” and to learn to admire their beauty. After having now lived in a world with winters, I can appreciate the arrival of spring in ways I never could have in India. Daffodils herald the arrival of spring and the eruption of glorious landscapes of flowers and color. The poem is a joyous ode to the exhilaration that fields of daffodils fluttering and dancing in the breeze bring to the wearied winter soul. In India, where I grew up, we joked that there were three seasons—hot, hotter, hottest! The beauty of spring and daffodils were entirely lost on me. Lucy similarly grew up in the warm British West Indies and like me was forced to memorize the poem and came to despise it. Forced to learn things about other people’s joys that were completely alien to one’s own life was both alienating and annoying. In the book, Lucy hated the task immensely and resisted it and in a hilarious moment violently responds: I wanted to kill them. I wished that I had an enormous scythe; I would just walk down the path, dragging it alongside me, and I would cut these flowers down at the place where they emerged from the ground. (Kincaid, 1990: 29)

Affective Ecologies and the Botanical Sublime 123

Alas, in contrast, I was a dutiful postcolonial subject. It is only through feminist and postcolonial studies that I have come to understand and appreciate the violence of the legacies of colonialism, ones that still remain enshrined in our knowledge system. Decades later, my re education in the history of colonial science in India has evoked the outrage that Lucy feels and that Kincaid’s powerful work evokes.

Sublime Worlds of Science School in India was mostly enjoyable for me. In middle school in particular, I had two exceptional biology teachers, Mrs. Gowri Prasad and Mrs. Satyabhama who inspired a fascination for biology. If I asked them a question, they responded with several more. I read copiously and that fueled my imagination. I feel I owe these two wonderful teachers my love for the biological sciences. Our school was in a narrow urban space. A tall white building with multiple floors and a strip of sand where we could play games. There was little greenery that anyone could call nature. There was so little ground that for all sports the school had to rent a playground not far away. This is not atypical of urban schools. So, biological knowledge remained very much in the life of the mind. Television came late to India. I was well into high school before we could afford a television set. In the early years, television broadcasts were restricted to a few hours in the evenings. There was more television in the weekends. While there was some local content, many shows from the UK and the US also grew popular. Three shows in particular captured my young mind—Life on Earth, Cosmos, and Star Trek. Of the three, David Attenborough’s Life on Earth made the most indel ible impression on me and is the most relevant here. Sir David Attenborough (brother of the movie director Sir Richard Attenborough) is an English broadcaster who in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit was one of the early pioneers that presented natural history to a television audience (Barkham, 2019). Life on Earth, was just that he traveled to the far corners of the planet and showed us how life flourished in the most unlikely and uninhabitable places—bottom of oceans, tops of mountains, dry deserts, or salty marshes. The cinematography was stunning and his narration (he writes and presents his work) followed an easy and engaging storytelling style that coupled information with a friendly intimacy. His tone was passionate, infused with incredulity and reverence about a vast bountiful natural world we had inherited. It would not be an understatement to say he “transported” you to these parts and you felt you were with him, sharing in the awe and wonder of his discovery. Attenborough’s stories captured the inventiveness and wondrousness of the natural world. Highly popular, he has since produced nine natural history documentary series, Life on Earth being the first. Having become besotted by Charles Darwin and his Origin of Species, Attenborough arrived at just the right time into my life. Each week, he transported me to lands and spaces I had never seen or even imagined. Reading about plant adaptation is one thing, but watching the bizarre and beautiful innovations of plants and animals in vibrant color each week was incredible. In hind

124 Banu Subramaniam

sight, this might have been my first experience with the sublime. Attenborough modelled the sublime to perfection. As a naturalist who had traveled the globe and studied the complexities of biology, his voice mixed wonder and authority and compelled you to marvel at the marvelous adaptations of life on earth. While my everyday urban Indian life involved a very particular and mundane engagement with nature, he offered a profound sublimation with nature. Of course, I now realize that I was not alone. Attenborough spoke to a global audience of about 500 million where he re engaged urban populations across worlds with tales of natural environments that house most of the world’s non human inhabitants, lives that he brought from the corners of the globes into our living rooms (Anthony, 2011). I was enchanted and I was hooked. I have vivid memories of watching the show with my father and having arguments on whether variation by natural selection could produce the beautiful, intricate, bizarre, and monstrous diversity on earth that graced our screens each week. As a staunch Darwin lover, I feel I defended him ably! Attenborough also channeled the spirit of wilderness and the preservation and conservation of life on earth were central to the spirit of his shows. If he could com municate the perilousness of so many habitats of life on earth, perhaps he could move us all to follow a path of preserving our natural resources. His most recent series pre sents the urgency of climate change and the need for action. Attenborough in parti cular was prone to tell “just so stories,” a term in evolutionary biology that refers to untested teleological explanations for biological traits and behaviors. But Attenbor ough revealed a world of evolution in action—there was a reason for everything in the world. The bat echolocates because…, the orchid flower looks like a moth because… To my young mind these stories were powerful, cementing my conviction in the power of evolution by natural selection. Every odd or wondrous part of a plant was an adaptation. He often presented these in a tone of tremulous wonder. There was always order and wisdom in the universe and it was the job of scientists and naturalists to discover it. I was sold on the job! Carl Sagan did for the universe what Attenborough did for the planet. Each week he presented the complexities of the universe and with his infamous phrases such as “millions and millions” and “billions and billions,” he reinforced the utter insignificance of humans. Transported to the outer reaches of the galaxy and the planet, I was filled with wonder and awe. Both shows powerfully evoked the sublime and reinforced the insignificance of humanity in the face of the innova tions and resplendent diversity of life on earth. When I think back, I can still feel the youthful wonder and awe and the emotions of those days are still palpable, shaping my future direction in wanting to pursue a life in evolutionary biology. Of course, a life in science would change all that.

Deep in the Culture of “No Culture” I arrived from India to the United States for a PhD in evolutionary biology/ genetics.3 Having completed an undergraduate degree in India in a college with no

Affective Ecologies and the Botanical Sublime 125

experimental or research tradition, biology was largely the realm of text books and practica where we had to perform pre scripted activities like dissections, cataloguing organisms, identifying parts under a microscope, creating herbaria sheets and so on. None of this prepared me for graduate school. Even for a student with a research background, graduate school is a transformative experience—one enters as a student and leaves as a colleague of the faculty in the department. It is a profound transition to move from mentee to colleague. How one does that is by learning to move seamlessly within the culture of science. Indeed, graduate school is a critical site where students are “enculturated” into a life in science (Subramaniam and Wyer, 1998). For some it comes more easily than others. For those in the margins of sci ence, this is difficult and alienating. Fundamentally, this is because of assumptions of who make “ideal” scientists. Emerging as it does from a Christian clerical tradition, the prototype of the scientist has remained remarkably enduring (Noble, 1992). The famous “draw a scientist” exercise, where children are asked to draw a scientist, finds that children continue to represent scientists in very familiar tropes. The scientist is a man who wears a white coat and works in a laboratory. He is elderly or middle aged and wears glasses … he may wear a beard… he is sur rounded by equipment: test tubes, bunsen burners, flasks and bottles, a jungle gym of blown glass tubes and weird machines with dials …, he writes neatly in black notebooks … One day he may straighten up and shout: “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!” … Through his work people will have new and better pro ducts… he has to keep dangerous secrets … his work may be dangerous … he is always reading a book. (Chambers, 1983: 256) This archetype of the scientist resonates with my experience. While the archetype is modulated in individual disciplines, some aspects remain remarkably stable—the assumption of the scientist as male, white, older, unkempt, singularly devoted and passionate about his work, studious, arrogant, and bordering on the asocial. A critical mode to prove one’s mettle as a biologist is to enjoy endless hours of roaming and acutely observing the natural world. As a field biologist and ecologist, a love of nature and the natural world was paradigmatic. My postcolonial education and exclusively urban upbringing seemed to have ill prepared me for my graduate education. Nearly all my peers grew up deeply connected to nature. As children they had spent hours in the woods behind their house, their families went camping in national parks, they hiked regularly, they traveled cross country and sometimes went back packing across the world during their high school, or during a year off. It was safe to say that I had never roamed a forest in my life. There were no woods near my urban housing and the schools and colleges I went to had little resources for lengthy field trips. My love of nature came from books, television, and movies, not through personal and sensory encounters exploring the natural world. Ironically, it is my privilege as an urban middle class Indian that brought this alienation.4 But here in graduate school, and especially as an aspiring experimental field biologist, first hand knowledge of the

126 Banu Subramaniam

natural world was a critical asset. Field trips were ubiquitous and not knowing the plants around me, not understanding local ecological communities or forest succession in the US redoubled my growing insecurity. Deeply ensconced within a graduate program, I came to be convinced that such a love of nature must indeed be a funda mental criterion for being a good biologist. It seemed obvious! My insecurity grew as my mind translated this into inadequacy. It is only years after graduate school, as I have begun to read about the history of biology that I have come to recognize how central assumptions of gender, class, race, caste, nation, and urban/rural divides are in graduate school and how such assumptions are intimately knit into professional expectations and identities. As I grew increasingly alienated and inadequate, I considered leaving the sciences. I approached the Women’s Studies program and was introduced to feminist STS. It was a life saver! It is feminist scholarship that gave me the tools to understand and interpret scientific culture and through feminist STS, I began to understand what had happened and this profoundly shaped my academic trajectory. My entry into the world of fem inist STS was important and I began to deploy my new found knowledge along with some friends. Two examples are particularly illustrative. First, some of us in the department began a discussion group on life in graduate school. Subsequently, we did a survey of graduate students in the biology department (Subramaniam, Dunn and Broaddus, 1992). What we found was that while we had all learned to feign con fidence, deep within, everyone felt inadequate and like “imposters” who were going to be found out any minute! Peers who we thought were supremely confident turned out to be profoundly insecure. These sessions were mind blowing for so many of us. Emotions came pouring out. People talked about how alienating graduate culture was. What was especially salient was how much time everyone spent dealing with their insecurities, semi paralysis, difficulty with completing work, and writer’s block. The survey confirmed much of this. While the degree of insecurity was gendered (women reporting a much more precipitous drop in self confidence), nearly all graduate stu dents felt an erosion of self confidence in graduate school. For me this was immensely consoling. It wasn’t me, it was the culture I lived in. These insights allowed me to stay in science and finish my degree.5 I realized that I loved science and could be good at it, but it was the culture that felt so hostile. Now feminist STS had given me the tools to recognize it for what it was. The insights of feminist STS also helped me understand the teeming emotional undercurrents of scientific culture. One of the most trenchant analyses of scientific culture comes from the work of Sharon Traweek and her influential ethnography of high energy physicists called Beamtimes and Lifetimes (Traweek 1988). In this book, Traweek describes the culture of science in the memorable phrase as a “culture of no culture.” What would a culture that eschews emotions, and embraced the idea objective value free knowledge look like? What would a cul ture that denied culture existed look like? Traweek points to scientific culture as a singular example. Her work opened up the importance of recognizing that science had a culture and gave me the tools to begin exploring it. It allowed me to look beyond the bromides of meritocracy and objectivity that usually stifled discussions.

Affective Ecologies and the Botanical Sublime 127

This insight, leads to the second example which emerged in a project I worked on with my mentor and colleague Mary Wyer (Subramaniam and Wyer, 1998). During this National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project, we involved faculty and students in an exercise where we asked each to list the “unwritten rules” of graduate school. When students enter graduate school, they are given a handbook and a list of expectations. Were there any rules not written down but still enforced? While faculty had a great deal of trouble naming such rules, students came up with a copious list. In short, they argued that a primary rule was “be just like your advisor!” The pressures of graduate school were singularly about conformity—a pro ject of intellectual reproduction, indeed of replication! Students described great pres sure to conform and to fake it if they couldn’t. The culture was hierarchical and the system expected it to be maintained. The primary mode of interaction, students argued, were modes of competition and confrontation; confrontation, they argued implied competence. Indeed, our department was a singularly competitive and con frontational culture. The affective dimensions of scientific culture were particularly striking. For example, one of the rules was: “The following emotions, topics, and behaviors are not allowed: crying, insecurity, laughter, personal problems, compli menting others.” Another was that “helping others detracts from your personal achievements.” Again, students talked repeatedly about how more “feminine” emo tions and any evidence of a “home” life was frowned upon. Of course, students argued that they did not, or could not, always follow the rules and as a result they had developed various forms of dissembling behaviors. They were not in the lab at all odd hours, but they would make it “appear” like they were. It is not that they did not cry; they just learned to do it elsewhere. What emerged in this project reinforced that the overflowing emotional undercurrents in the culture of science could never be dis cussed. As Evelyn Fox Keller argues, the prototype of the scientist “poses a critical problem of identity: any scientist who is not a man walks a path bounded on one side by inauthenticity and on the other by subversion” (Keller, 1985: 174). If you were “yourself” and did not subscribe to the stereotype you were inauthentic, and if you faked it, you were subversive. There was no winning. Only a feminist project would reveal what lay below the surface! But there was more. I realized that feminist scholarship not only helped me under stand the culture of science, but indeed of knowledge making itself. During graduate school, I worked with morning glories in order to examine the mechanisms that main tained flower color variation.6 As with any experimental organism that one spends endless hours with, one cannot but develop an affective relationship with the plant. You do not start with expectations, but need to deal with the biology of the plant and the needs of your experiments. These come to shape the rhythms of your life and your everyday routines. As their name suggests, morning glories are glorious in the mornings and seeing them is always an incredible way to start the day. During my field season in the summer, I would wake up bleary eyed and drive to my field site. I can still remember the spectacular sight on a warm summer morning of splashes of purple, white, blues, and pinks in intense, dark, and light hues, all intertwined. The flowers were fresh, open, shimmering in the morning dew. The bees and insects buzzed around

128 Banu Subramaniam

them. By noon, the flowers withered under the blistering sun. Perhaps the bees had done their magic or perhaps the plants had fertilized themselves. By afternoon there was virtually no color in the field. By evening it was entirely a field of green. The following morning, another glorious vision. There were also annoying aspects to the plant. They were climbers and so their tendrils were apt to seek out and climb over neighboring structures and plant. Go away for a few days and you had an entangled morning glory mess! It would take hours to untangle the plants from each other and re train them onto their individual stakes. As an evolutionary biologist it was important for me to keep each plant separate, since I needed to measure each plant and keep track of its flowers and seeds. The activity of untangling taught me immense patience as I gently disentangled the delicate tips to train them around their stakes. The last thing I wanted was to damage the plant and lose a precious data point in my experiments! Fieldwork is incredibly solitary work. Most of the times, you are alone in your field site and cannot but develop complex affective relationships with field sites and model organisms. Despite the intense heat of southern summers and even after years of backbreaking and sometimes futile fieldwork, the morning vision of morning glories could always stop my heart. They made the mornings quite glor ious, indeed endlessly sublime. Such descriptions are ubiquitous in experimental biology. Spending hours and days with experimental organisms makes one develop in Evelyn Fox Keller’s words in her description of Barbara McClintock, “a feeling for the organism” (Keller, 1983). In her wonderful Braiding Sweetgrass, ecologist and indigenous scholar Robin Kimmerer writes: I’ve never met an ecologist who came to the field for the love of data or for the wonder of a p value … Science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observation of tradi tional knowledge elders. It can be a path to kinship. These too are my people …. Heart driven scientists whose notebooks, smudged with salt marsh mud and filled with columns of numbers, are love letters to salmon. In their own way, they are lighting the beacon for salmon, to call them back home. (Kimmerer, 2013: 252) The joys and passion for science that are ubiquitous in scientific memoirs, bio graphies, and hallway chatter are systematically erased from the scientific paper and record. This erasure helps the patina of objectivity that shrouds scientific work. The scientific paper remains a strictly proscribed genre with clearly demarcated sections— introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, conclusion—where the “doing” of science is limited to the materials and methods and little by way of the unexpected occurrences that often are the “real” story. So much of the “encultura tion” during graduate school was really an education in the social mores of scientific research. In a “culture of no culture,” where there is no vocabulary for the affective dimensions of science, it was difficult to process the joys and challenges of scientific research. The endless insecurity of whether you were good enough compounded

Affective Ecologies and the Botanical Sublime 129

the challenges of field work and the luck of cooperative research subjects and suc cessful experiments. Most importantly, experiments can fail through no fault of your own. For example, once during a particularly hot summer, the vast majority of my genetic crosses in the green house failed and so I did not have an adequate sample size for a robust experiment. The next year, I planted hundreds of morning glory plants in the field. I returned the next day to find that over half of them had been eaten by cutworms. The cutworms did not even chew through the plant, but merely snipped the plant an inch from the bottom, leaving a stub with the top left on the ground at the side. Processing the grief and fury of such frustrating moments is ubi quitous in experimental biology. I had spent a year in complex genetic crosses to produce the experimental plants and then, overnight, I had lost the entire year. Nothing prepares you for that. These are lessons that are learned on the job. The “doing” of science in a “culture of no culture” means that each generation of sci entists must learn the same lessons anew and learn to thrive, cope, or leave its demanding silences.

The Sublime: God, Nature, and Botany I ground this essay around the sublime because I find it a particularly poignant node in my experiences with the natural and scientific. Even though scientific culture may be a “culture of no culture” and as I hope I have demonstrated, affective dimensions of research are real and everywhere. It is only that we don’t talk about it. As Robin Kimmerer’s evocative quote above captures, the love of plants, appreciation of beauty, and the exuberance of the sublime are ubiquitous in science. I have also been struck by how my Indian childhood, while joyous and beauteous, was never sublime in the same sense of the word. It inhabited a differ ent conceptual schematic of nature and the sacred. Here I explore the idea of the sublime and its genealogy within western science. Understanding the sublime is a useful fulcrum in any project to decolonize botany. The sublime is derived from the Latin sublimaire, which links sub (up to) and limen (top of a door or threshold). The Merriam Webster dictionary defines it as (1) to elevate or exalt, especially in dignity or honor; 2) to render finer (as in purity or excellence); and 3) to convert (something inferior) into something of higher worth. The sublime is more than mere emotion; it transcends the prosaic and mundane of everyday life. It evokes the profound, something just beyond human comprehension, it captures something sacred and other worldly. As Philip Shaw explains, the sublime can be a whole range of items; a building or mountain may be sublime, as can thoughts, heroic deeds or modes of expression. A grand revo lution, noble ideals, and indeed the apocalypse may be associated with the sublime. Powerful words, music, aesthetics, or simply ideas like infinity can all seem beyond word, and can fill us with the sublime (Shaw, 2006). The effect of the sublime may be “crushing or engulfing, so powerful that we cannot resist it” (Shaw, 2006: 2). It marks the limits of reason and expression and gestures to what might lie beyond these very human limits. As Shaw astutely argues, sublimity refers to moments

130 Banu Subramaniam

when our ability to understand or express a thought or sensation is defeated. Indeed, it is through defeat that the mind apprehends that what lies beyond thought and language. The sublime itself has a long history and what is considered sublime has transformed with time as aesthetic, moral, cultural and political mores have shifted (Wood, 1972; Noggle, 2001; Costelloe, 2012). The sublime has been killed off and then resurrected (Kirkkopelto, 2014). The sublime at its etymological heart “carries the long history of the relationship between humans and those aspects of their world that excite in them particular emotions, powerful enough to evoke transcendence, shock, awe and terror” (Costelloe, 2012: 2). Nature is one prominent site in the history of the sublime (Brady, 2013). Indeed, the debate on the relationship between humans and nature has been foundational in western philosophical thought (Stoffle et al., 2013). The idea of a “pure” nature, untrammeled and unpolluted by the influence or presence of humans is captured in the essence of the idea of “wilderness.” In his iconic essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” environmental historian William Cronon traces the idea of wilderness in western thought. He argues that the feelings evoked by the wilderness are entirely a cultural invention. In tracing the history of wilderness, he contends that 250 years ago in American and European history, it was rare for anyone to travel to the remote corners of the planet to look for what we now understand as the “wilderness experience.” Indeed, as late as the eighteenth cen tury, the common use of “wilderness” was about landscapes that were seen as deserted, savage, desolate and barren, i.e., wastelands. When Adam and Eve were driven from the garden, they entered a wilderness, a place that one came to only against one’s will. However, by the end of the nineteenth century this had changed. In 1862 American naturalist and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau declared wildness to be the preservation of the world. John Muir in his travels in the Sierra Nevada in 1869 likened it to Heaven itself. The American environmental imagination began demarcating areas of wilderness as preservation lands such as Niagara Falls, the Catskills, the Adirondacks, Yosemite, Yellowstone. These early conservationists ushered in an era where “human development” was to be fought tooth and nail, while the idea of an untrammeled nature or wilderness was to be preserved. Cronon ascribes the sources of this transformation to two foundational ideas: the sublime and the frontier. He argues that of the two: the sublime is the older and more pervasive cultural construct, being one of the most important expressions of that broad transatlantic movement we today label as romanticism; the frontier is more peculiarly American, though it too had its European antecedents and parallels. (Cronon, 1995) By the eighteenth century he argues that the wilderness emerged as a landscape where the supernatural that “lay just beneath the surface was expressed in the doctrine of the sublime.” Sublime landscapes were those rare places where we

Affective Ecologies and the Botanical Sublime 131

might glimpse the face of God. “God was on the mountaintop, in the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud, in the rainbow, in the sunset.” In the work of romantics, the best proof that one had entered sublime landscapes, was the unequivocal emotions they evoked, “nothing less than a religious experi ence.” The legacy of famed naturalist John Muir and other conservationists transformed the once frightening wilderness, the place of Satanic temptation into a sacred temple, and as Cronon argues, this “continues to be for those who love it today.” In the second half of the nineteenth century the sublime awe of Henry Thoreau and William Wordsworth was domesticated through tourism. This is a very abbreviated summary of a vast literature on the history of the environmental and natural sciences. As philosopher Michael Marder argues, the development of western philosophy is transformed by the growth of a sublime botany, where “philosophy itself changes beyond recognition: philo sophia, the love of wisdom is brought in life with the help of phyto philia, the love of plants” (Marder, 2014: 1). Through these philosophies, we can trace the deep entanglements of our conceptions of nature, the human, humanity, and the religious and sacred. The idea of the sublime is key to capturing a long enduring and critical binary of nature and culture, human and non human, where humans and culture are seen as outside of nature. Conservation biology and its pursuit of a “pure nature” through preservation and anti development has cemented this binary as a foundational idea in the natural sciences. Indeed, it grounds academic distinctions between biological sciences (basic sciences) versus environmental sciences (applied sciences). Thoreau encapsulates this transformation in a simple sentence: “Once I was part and parcel of Nature; now I am observant of her” (Thoreau, 1852). Beyond the binary, Thoreau captures another important thread prevalent in feminist thought that notes that, like nation, nature is always rendered feminine, and, like race, always an object closer to nature, in need of mastery and control. The histories of colonialism teach us that botany is simultaneously a gendered and racialized project. Starting with Carolyn Merchant’s (1980) Death of Nature, feminist scholars have chronicled how much western colonial expansion, industrialization and development relied on unrestrained commercial exploitation of natural landscapes. Environmental historians have argued that we should understand imperialism as fundamentally an ecological project in which humans, plants and other species were shuffled around the earth in schemes for colonization and conservation (Grove, 1984; Crosby, 1986). The science behind the imperial ecological project is what emerges as the field of botany and con servation biology. The gendered logic of feminine nature is always racialized and also imbued with colonial logics. In the name of civilizing the native, not only can native lands be colonized and exploited, but so can native colonial peoples. More importantly, native knowledge and knowledge–making practices were delegitimized, if not erased. Given this history, it should come as no surprise that the science of botany emerged as big science and big business, critical to Europe’s ambition as a colonial trader. Colonialism, ushered a massive and “grand reshuffling” of global biota. One can and should understand the botanical sciences as a significant legacy in the

132 Banu Subramaniam

afterlives of empire. Colonialism fueled an extractive economy through the objectification, commodification of the colonized world, and destruction of local infrastructures and knowledges (Schiebinger and Swan, 2007). In its place, the colonial order installed the biological sciences as the universal, abstract and expert knowledge. Local ecologies were transformed by colonial logics. Colonial routes of plants included the famous spice routes, lumber resources, plantation crops, horticultural specialties, but also a trove of other agricultural plants and animals. Horticultural societies and gardens across the West cultivated the exotic and curious. Kew Gardens, the “mecca” of the natural sciences and other such sites became repositories of the world’s biota (Brockway, 2002). I have taken you through this brief excursion into the history and philosophy of the conceptual terrain of feminist STS, because it is critical to recognize why botanical theories and frameworks are not a mirror to the plant world, but rather a colonial conceptual apparatus for the justification of imperial conquest and expan sion. To decolonize botany is to dismantle this immense apparatus of western episte mology, methodology and methods. The sublime, in particular, reveals a crucial distinction between the modern and non modern at the heart of conceptual differ ences between the western, and non western. For western science, plants were a resource to be named, systematized, studied and then efficiently extracted for colonial wealth. In contrast, as I recounted my early life in postcolonial India, the binaries that frame western science were never prominent. In Indian mythologies and many non western cosmologies, objects are relational not hierarchical. Plants are not lesser than animals, humans, or the non living, but infinitely entangled and interchangeable. It is the binary formations of nature/culture, human/nonhuman, living/nonliving that ground the “sublime” of western theories of nature and allowed humans to feel the sacred and the divine.

Conclusion: the Entangled, Enchanted Worlds of Naturecultures The best moments of interdisciplinary revelations for me have been entirely fortuitous. It began in graduate school in evolutionary biology when Mary Wyer, a mentor and colleague in women’s studies asked me about my work on morning glories. She lis tened patiently as I described my work in understanding the evolutionary maintenance of flower color. When I finished, she looked at me with what seemed like perfect comprehension and remarked that yes, she understood that I worked on diversity! Until that moment, my work on “diversity” lay in gender studies, not in the fields of evolutionary biology. It was exhilarating to make the connection between biology and feminist studies and my research has never been the same. The ensuing book Ghost Stories for Darwin traces my growing recognition about how cultural ideas of diversity are intimately connected to the related theories of “variation” in evolutionary biology. Science is always conducted within cultural and political contexts and one can trace the circulations of theories across the worlds of nature and culture. Ever since, I have refused to false choice between botany and feminism. They are not separate, but always co constituted and coproduced. For me, working with one always means working with the other.

Affective Ecologies and the Botanical Sublime 133

Interdisciplinary work has been filled with such moments. Disciplinary silos teach us not only to see, but more significantly not to see. Interdisciplinary work involves learning and unlearning. In feminist STS, nature and culture are not ontologically or epistemologically different or distinct projects, but best understood in their imbricated histories as naturecultures (Haraway, 2000). There are no natures and cultures, only naturecultures. Ever since, my work has been in theorizing the tangles of natur ecultures. In my recent work on invasive species, for example, when I look at fields of plants, I do not see just plants. I see creatures whose social, historical and biological lives have shaped their evolutionary pasts and futures. Their entangled histories with humans have rendered them native and foreign, desirable and undesirable, threats and saviors. I understand my interdisciplinary location in a Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies (WGSS) department rather than a biology department as a product of the colonial histories of the biological sciences and its legacies that we have scarcely come to reckon with. Projects that engage critically with race, gender, colonialism still occupy the margins of disciplines and WGSS, ethnics studies, and queer studies pro grams continue to remain in the margins of academia. My journeys through dis ciplinary and interdisciplinary work have convinced me that it is critical to liberate ourselves—intellectually and professionally—from the silos of disciplines. It is in the margins, in the interstices that we may find the tools and freedom to imagine knowledge anew. It is these margins that free our senses and our minds, to think, feel, and express the art and science of knowledge–making. In tracing and untan gling the colonial, postcolonial, neocolonial histories of naturecultures, we may open up botanical methodology to glorious new interdisciplinary explorations!

Notes 1 I have sketched out a few examples here. For more detail and other examples see Krishna and Amirthalingam. 2 For a greater discussion of Indian mythological story telling tradition and science, see Subramaniam, 2019. 3 For a more detailed discussion see Subramaniam, 2014. 4 I should note that, unlike me and some urban American counterparts, many Indians grow up around fields and mountains (and not just the privileged). Yet they are less likely to find themselves in a graduate program in biology in the United States. 5 I owe an immense depth of gratitude to my graduate school friends and collaborators in this work, especially Rebecca Dunn, Peggy Schultz, Jim Bever, and Mary Malik. The generous mentorship of Jean O’Barr and Mary Wyer were critical to all of us. 6 The choice of morning glories was a practical decision. I needed an annual plant for my work and the laboratory I worked in used morning glories as its experimental model. Thus, the vast infrastructural know how of using morning glories in experiments were already set up.

References Anthony, Andrew (2011) “Is there life on earth after Attenborough?,” The Guardian, June 12, 2011, www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/12/life on earth after david a ttenborough.

134 Banu Subramaniam

Barkham, Patrick (2019) “The Real David Attenborough,” The Guardian, Oct. 22, 2019, www. theguardian.com/tv and radio/2019/oct/22/david attenborough climate change bbc. Beckert, Sven (2014) Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Vintage Books. Beinart, William and Hughes, Lotte (2007) Environment and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brady, Emily (2013) The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature. Cambridge University Press. Brockway, Lucile (2002) Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chambers, David Wade (1983) “Stereotypic Images of the Scientists: The Draw A Scientist Test,” Science Education 67 (2): 255 265. Costelloe, Timothy (2012) The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge University Press. Cronon, William (1995) “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in William Cronon (ed.) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 69 90. Crosby, Alfred. W. (1986) Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900 1900. New York: Cambridge University Press. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. and Handley, George B. (eds) (2011) Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grove, Richard (1984) Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600 1860. Cambridge University Press. Haraway, Donna (2000) How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. New York: Routledge. Huggan, Graham and Tiffin, Helen (2015) Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge. Keller, Evelyn Fox (1983) A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. Keller, Evelyn Fox (1985) Reflections on Gender and Science. Yale University Press. Kimmerer, Robin (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions. Kincaid, Jamaica (1990) Lucy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 29 Kirkkopelto, Esa (2014) “Farewell to the Sublime? Performance Criticism in the Age of Terrorism,” Forum Modernes Theater Vol. 29, Nos 1 2: 47 55. Krishna, Nanditha and Amirthalingam, N. (2014). Sacred Plants of India. Penguin Books. Marder, Michael(2014)The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. Columbia University Press. Merchant, Carolyn (1980) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Mintz, Sidney (1985) Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking. Noble, David (1992) A World Without Women. Oxford University Press. Noggle, James (2001) The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tony Satirists. Oxford University Press. Schiebinger, Londa and Swan, Claudia (eds) (2007) Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Shaw, Philip (2006) The Sublime: The Critical Idiom. Routledge. Shteir, Ann. B. (1999) Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 1860. The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Affective Ecologies and the Botanical Sublime 135

Stoffle, Richard W., Toupal, Rebecca and Zeneno, Neves (2013) “Landscape, Nature, and Culture: A Diachronic Model of Human Nature Adaptations,” in Nature Across Cultures: Views of Nature and the Environment. Edited by Helaine Selin. Subramaniam, Banu (2014) Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity. University of Illinois Press. Subramaniam, Banu (2019) Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism. University of Washington Press. Subramaniam, Banu, Dunn, Rebecca and Broaddus, Lynn (1992) “‘Sir’vey or ‘Her’vey,” in Engaging Feminism: Students Speak Up and Speak Out. Edited by Jean O’Barr and Mary Wyer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Subramaniam, Banu and Wyer, Mary (1998) “Assimilating the “Culture of No Culture” in Science: Feminist Interventions in (De)Mentoring Graduate Women,” Feminist Teacher Vol. 12, No. 1: 12 28. Thoreau, Henry David (1852) Journal Entry, April 2, 1852, www.walden.org/collection/ journals/. Traweek, Sharon (1988) Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Harvard University Press. Wood, Theodore E.B. (1972) The Word Sublime and its Context, 1650 1760. The Hague: Mouton.

PART III

Blind-spots

9 COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PRESENT Difficult Emotions in Post-Shoah Germany Ina Schaum

Introduction: It Always Comes From a Feeling When asked about her intellectual process in an interview, activist and writer Gloria Anzaldúa (2007 [1987]: 275) answered that her ideas always start with an emotional experience that leaves her angry, conflicted or upset. The starting point of her theorizing “always comes from a feeling.” Two emotionally difficult experiences during my research were also the starting points for this chapter. One took place during a biographical narrative interview with Gudrun1 in Israel in which I asked her tell me her life story. She reversed our roles and asked me questions about my family, which made me feel ashamed because I could not answer them. Several years have passed in which I have not attended to the shame I experienced back then. More recently, after a presentation about my current research project, I learnt that a young Jewish man in the audience had felt I was looking at my Jewish interview partners “like mice.”2 Both instances raised the question how I, a non Jewish woman and descendant of non persecuted Germans, became interested in Jewish life and in conducting interviews with Jews and the ethical questions that arise from my positionality vis á vis my research participants. They also invite the question how to account for the uneasiness in German/Jewish relationships (Kranz, 2021: 14) after the Shoah, which located non Jewish Germans and Jews on diametrically opposite sides of an abyss (Arendt in Arendt and Günter; Diner, 1986; Rapaport, 1997; amongst others). Moreover, everyday encounters between Jews and non Jews in Germany are not common, empirical social research about Jewish life is anything but neutral and many non Jewish researchers steer clear of it (Grünberg, 2006; Kranz, 2009: 29). How does this bear on interactional dynamics in interviews and other encounters in the context of my research? Instead of ignoring or putting aside my uncomfortable experiences, I want to use my discomfort as a resource for a critical inquiry (Davis, 2019) and show how DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 13

140 Ina Schaum

difficult emotions can be productive in at least two ways. First, the careful analysis of difficult emotions such as shame shows how histories (in the context of this chapter the Nazi past) stay alive in the present. The past persists through emotions even when it is not consciously remembered. Difficult emotions can be read as “creative responses to histories that are unfinished” (Ahmed, 2010: 202; 217). Secondly, the attention to and critical analysis of difficult emotional experiences can lay the groundwork for an accountable positioning in face of violent pasts that continues to shape present encounters. I build this chapter on the notion of Critical Nonjewishness 3 first proposed by educator Michal Schwartze (2016) as a means for self reflective social positioning.

Analyzing Difficult Emotions: What Do They Tell Us? How can I document and then analyze my difficult emotions and thus make them accessible and understandable to others? And what can we learn through this process? As a first step, I decided to write about two interactions during my research and focus on my emotional responses. I tried to capture the surfacing of my emotions in order to analyze their meaning instead of supressing or managing them (Hochschild, 2003 [1983]; Ahmed, 2008). In the context of this paper, I refer to difficult emotions in contrast to what Ahmed (2010: 158) describes as the happiness duty: the duty to speak of what is deemed good and not to speak “from or out of unhappiness”. Scientifically accepted pieces of writing exclude—and even erase— hints to the researcher’s emotions, difficulties and failures (sadness, unease, dis comfort, and particularly shame), producing texts that preserve the impression of professionalism and objectivity that could be described as the happiness duty of sociologists. Autoethnographic writing allowed me the space to bring in my “I” (Davis, 2017) and let the reader witness the “vocabulary” of my gut level responses (Petillo, 2020), my difficult emotions and blind spots. In this way, it can contain what is usually silenced in the written account of research practices: the emotional, personal, the difficult and embarrassing. As encouragement to write about it anyway, I could draw on a genealogy of feminist thinkers who criticize and deconstruct the myth of an objective, passionless and disinterested science and stress the important role of emotions in the construction of knowledge (Behar, 1996; Davis, 2014; Hill Collins, 2000; Jaggar, 1989; Lorde, 2007 [1984], amongst others). As second step, I analyzed my difficult emotions in order to understand what they told me about my research, the socio political context and power relations it takes place in, and the politics of location. Instead of viewing difficult, unwanted emotions as a sign of personal failure, I used them as important epistemological resource pointing me to important aspects of my research that needed to be “excavated” (Waterston and Rylko Bauer, 2006). I interpret difficult emotions as symptomatic of “everyday ethical conundrums” (Gazso and Bischoping, 2018) and use them as tool for reflexivity (Hedström, 2018). As sociologist Sara Ahlstedt (2015) puts it, ethnographic work in the context of qualitative research projects

Coming to Terms with the Present 141

involving narrative interviews (often referred to as fieldwork) is in fact also “feelwork” as the researcher’s feelings4 affect situations, encounters and interviews as well as the analysis, the methodology and the way we relate to our research participants. Being attentive and attuned to emotions, particularly difficult and uncomfortable ones, the researcher might “pick up the unspoken, the repressed, the less than fully conscious, the inarticulate” (Gould, 2015: 168). The analysis of my difficult emotions led me pick up two aspects. On the one hand, my own ambivalence, shame and discomfort that surfaced when I was asked about my family history and my relatives’ involvement in Nazi politics let me reflect on the silences of the discourse about the Nazi past, memory and remembrance in Germany. Even though there is a ritualized memory culture in Germany (Jureit and Schneider, 2010), with many official commemoration days and memorials, the Nazi past often is thought of and portrayed as something that does not concern people individually and does not touch upon the present. On the other hand, the difficult emotions I experi enced when someone told me I looked at my Jewish interlocutors like mice let me consider the ethical conundrums of my research project and how they relate to my “place in history” within which as a white woman of non Jewish descent, born and socialized in Germany, “I am created and trying to create” (Rich, 1986: 212). What can I see from this location and where are my blind spots? In which power relations, processes of othering and epistemic violence is my project inevitably embedded that need unravelling? How can I use my emotions as an ethical resource to be accountable for and within these historically emerging structures of violence and power and critically reflect on my nonjewishness and the privileges this entails? In the following, I will first present the autobiographical vignettes I wrote and subsequently lay out what I learned through my attention to and analysis of my difficult emotions. My emotion analysis—treating my difficult emotions as empirical data and source of knowledge—was connected to my search for theoretical concepts that will help me to do so. I found these in the notion of Gegenwartsbewältigung (coming to terms with the present) by Daniel Kahn and Critical Nonjewishness by Michal Schwartze (2016). I will therefore follow the vignettes by developing these concepts and their importance for my research and beyond.

“I am very interested in your stories” In 2013, I conducted interviews in Israel with Jewish women who had to leave Germany in the 1930s and migrate to British Mandate Palestine (now Israel). I sent out a request to several retirement homes for (German speaking) Jewish elderly people if someone would be interested in telling me her or his life story. One of my interview partners was Gudrun who left Germany in 1937 as a 14 year old with her parents. When we met, she was 90 years old and lived in a two room assisted accommodation in which she kept only the most necessary things because, as she put it, she perceived it as “an interstation to the hospital ward or death”. Her husband who had passed away some years earlier had been born in Germany as well. Gudrun offered me ice tea and biscuits, started telling me stories of her life

142 Ina Schaum

and her family, and showed me photographs. After one and a half hours, she interrupted the interview by asking me a question, knowing that I was visiting Israel from Germany and that I am not Jewish: I would now like to know from you what you have heard, as far as you can or want to tell me, what your family has told you about the time. From the time when Hitler ruled there– INA: Hm. GUDRUN: What do you remember? When were you born? GUDRUN:

Trained in qualitative biography research I was used to asking questions and lis tening to others and had not expected to have to answer questions or share details about my own life. Gudrun’s intervention caught me off guard and made me feel insecure, aware of losing the privilege of the comfortable position of “seeing everything from nowhere […] the false vision that promises transcendence of all limits and responsibility” (Haraway, 1988: 583). I told her that I was born in 1990 and my grandparents were small children during the Second World War. The only stories about the time of the war my maternal grandfather told me were about how he sat in bomb shelters and what he and his friends did there to pass the time. Gudrun dug deeper and asked me if his father or the father of my grandmother had been part of the Wehrmacht (armed forces during the Nazi time) and where they had been stationed, where their graves are, and whether I visited them. I started stammering, my face red and hot, because I did not know the answers, which only made her ask more questions. She was sincerely surprised and curious and repeat edly expressed her astonishment that I did not know the answers to her questions. She mentioned that she had read about the silences in families in Germany. I can’t tell you more specific things. Don’t you know? INA: No. GUDRUN: It’s not talked about in the family. INA: Um— GUDRUN: That’s interesting. INA:

GUDRUN:

[…] And your—I mean I don’t want to step on your toes but do you talk in your family about what, uh, a mistake it was that you believed Hitler—Why did people believe Hitler? Because the financial situation was very bad. And he promised everyone a Volkswagen and what not. (pause) That’s why they fell for it, isn’t it? That’s why he had so many followers. INA: Um, so well my grandparents themselves don’t really talk about it. You—I mean I would have to ask them because— GUDRUN:

Coming to Terms with the Present 143

I’m surprised that at your age, when you’re so active in politics [refers to my studies in political science] and everything that you—(pause) Well. Probably you can’t just ask your grandmother: “Were you excited about Hitler?”, right?

GUDRUN:

I mumbled a response, repeating that my grandparents were children and probably did not know a lot about politics, but I left my sentences unfinished because I really did not know. My response was a mix of half remembered dates and confused fragments of stories. Shame and anxiety arose in me as I realized I had never even thought about asking my grandparents questions and, if I was honest, had no desire to know what they might reveal. I had asked Gudrun to pull up her past with all the potential pain attached to it, while I had spared my grandparents and myself. A nagging sense of my hypocrisy took hold of me about how I, a (great)granddaughter of Wehrmacht soldiers, could tell Gudrun that I am “very interested in your stories” as if I had nothing to do with the history that shaped her life story and migration/ flight trajectory. It is as if I am unrelated to National Socialism, because I was born after it (Messerschmidt, 2007: 62). After our interview, Gudrun invited me for lunch in the canteen and introduced me to her friends. When I arrived at my place in the evening, I was exhausted and sad. I cried about what I had learnt from Gudrun and her friends about dis crimination and the persecution and death of their relatives and friends, while also feeling ashamed about my tears. Were they signs of feeling empathy with the women, of feeling unsettled in the face of their suffering (LaCapra, 2001)? Or was crying just a way out, a kind of luxury that prevented a deeper reflection of the processes of witnessing the pain of others (Hoffman, 2004: 153; Sontag, 2003)?

Coming to Terms with the Present: Gegenwartsbewältigung As anthropologist Dani Kranz (2009: 90) observes, “non Jewish Germans more often than not do not know their family history, or do not want to know it.” Above I described how attention to difficult emotions helps the researcher to pick up the silenced and unwanted aspects about her or his research, social location and implicated ness in power relations. My interaction with Gudrun echoes Kranz’s observation. I had not anticipated travelling frequently to and living in Israel for an extended period of time in the 2010s. I found myself in Israel because I happened to fall in love with a Jewish Israeli I met while traveling in Asia. Because I found myself in the situation of wanting to continue my work as a sociologist and particularly as a biographical researcher, albeit lacking Hebrew language skills, I decided to inter view German speaking Yekkes.5 This set in motion a trajectory of change in my life that continued beyond the end of the romantic relationship. Whereas I had hardly had any interactions with Jewish people and contemporary life worlds during my upbringing in Germany (except a keen albeit brief interest in Judaism as a religion at the age of 12), this changed radically when I started living in Israel, being considered part of a family and making friends there, accumulating

144 Ina Schaum

knowledge, learning some Hebrew and conducting biographical narrative interviews. Upon my return to Germany, I had and continued to meet Jewish friends and col leagues both there and in Israel, widened my scholarly interests, started working as a volunteer at a psychosocial facility for Shoah survivors and received a scholarship from the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk.6 This development also caused my growing engagement with memory politics in Germany, the (post)memory of the Shoah, and my own family history. However, when the interview with Gudrun took place, I was still at the beginning of that change. Even though I was willing to engage intellectually with the Nazi past, by conducting interviews, reading books and documents, I avoided the question how generations of my own family were directly involved in the Nazi regime or bystanders to it, or did not want to know about it. I also refused to see the personal connection to the topic I researched: How I myself continue to benefit from the persecution and murder of Jews—emotionally, psychologically as well as materially (my relatives were not deported, uprooted, murdered or dispossessed). The shame and discomfort that surfaced when I could not answer Gudrun’s questions pointed to the workings of denial and silences in my own family, but also in the wider context of families of non persecuted Germans, both in the immediate postwar period as well as today. The massive denial of active involvement in crimes, denunciation and murder, knowledge or indirect support of them, as well as guilt and benefit derived from those (in) actions is still characteristic for families of bystanders, spectators and perpetrators (Grünberg, 1998; Moré, 2013: 54). In contrast to familial concealments and denials, in the public discourse memory of the Nazi past was managed through “incessant insistent chatter, not the silence” (Herzog, 2005: 96). Historian Atina Grossmann (Grossmann, 2000: 89) writes about a constant postwar “swinging between anxious remembrance and resentful denial.” Today, Germany’s memory politics and memory culture is often regarded as particularly rigorous, cumulating in the assertion of historian Christian Maier that Germany is “world champion of remembrance” (Maier in Maier and Kassel, 2015). The term Vergangenheitsbewälti gung is commonly used to describe Germany’s process of coming to terms with its Nazi past through education, official commemoration days and memorials, and statements of politicians. Germany seems to have reached “the happy end of a bad history” (Haselberg et al., 2018: 4) and learnt its lesson. As a critical invention, musician Daniel Kahn (2009: 224) coined the term Gegenwartsbewältigung—coming to terms with the present. He uses the term because he is not interested “in the past, per se”, but instead wants to investigate the ways in which the past is not past, but extends into the present, is intricately interwoven with the present. The editors and authors of the journal Jalta—Positions on the Jewish Present: Gegenwartsbewältigung (Brumlik et al., 2018), one of whom is also Kahn, take up this notion of Gegenwartsbewältigung as analytical tool to criticize dominant memory culture in Germany. The Nazi past is supposedly overcome, yet we are dealing with a present in which the calls for a clean slate become louder and continuities of racist and antisemitic rhetoric, images and violence are disavowed (Haselberg et al., 2018: 4).7 They conclude that “[d]espite or even because of the

Coming to Terms with the Present 145

ritualized politics of remembrance, the practice of remembrance happens at a remarkable distance from the victims of the NS” (ibid.). To sum up, to understand the ambivalences of memory culture in Germany, one has to look behind “Germany’s memory façade” (Misselwitz, 2009: 230). The analysis of my own shame and discomfort helped me realize this and understand the continuing impact of the Nazi past on biographies, interactions and positionalities in the present, mine included. In addition to foregrounding problematic and silenced aspects of memory culture in Germany, analyzing my difficult emotions enabled me to think about accountable positioning myself in a way that takes into account different intersectionalities and responsible research practices. This is closely connected to the concept of Critical Nonjewishness, which I will elaborate after presenting my second autobiographical vignette.

“She looks at us like mice” In 2018, the organizers of a Jewish youth organization contacted me to give a presentation about my research about young Jews’ experiences with love and intimate relationships in Germany. I talked with one organizer, Sonya, on the phone about the details of the presentation and she informed me that about 25 young Jewish adults would attend my talk. She introduced the organization, which organizes educational seminars for young Jewish adults, and recounted the historical development of Reform Judaism in Germany until World War II when—as she put it—“it goes without saying what happened”. She mentioned how most research in Germany tends to focus on “dead Jews”, while she is more interested “what happens among living Jews”. Already in school, where she had been “the only Jew alone amongst Biodeutsche,”8 she had been annoyed how Jews had always been portrayed as victims and “piles of corpses.” I hesitated and then went on to tell her that my research focuses on con temporary Jewish life in Germany. I also added that I am not Jewish. She laughed. It was a short laugh and I could not decipher its meaning. I got the feeling that it had not been necessary to address it or that it had irritated her. However, if I had not said it, I would have felt as if I was hiding, avoiding something, maybe even pretending to be Jewish. Yet, when I said it, I felt embarrassed, as if I am yet another “Biodeutsche” who makes her identity issues other people’s business. Moreover, it almost felt like I had tried to put an emphasis on my difference in relation to her and the other Jewish attendees. The feeling of unease, and uncertainty about how I should have reacted, con tinued to bother me. As the day of the presentation came closer, I became more nervous. I began asking myself: What is my research worth, if I am afraid to present it to the very “subjects” of it? On the day itself, shortly before I was about to start my talk, I noticed David, whom I had met in a Hebrew lan guage course we both attended in Israel in 2015. We had not known much about each other, but had stayed friends on Facebook. He immediately recog nized me, hugged me, and suggested we grab dinner after the talk.

146 Ina Schaum

During my presentation, in which I mentioned that I had been in an intimate relationship with an Israeli man and that this relationship introduced me to many of the questions attached to Jewish identities in intimate relationships,9 several listeners made comments. A woman noted how she observes a special interest of Israeli men in German women. A man asked me why I had not converted to Judaism. Surprised by this question and trying to answer it in a short way, I said that I am not reli gious.10 He retorted by asking if I “felt Jewish,” which made me quite uneasy. Another woman thought my project was highly problematic since the choice of topic already would suggest that intimate relationships of young Jews are “inherently different” and could only feed antisemitic stereotypes. In the current political climate, she perceived my endeavor as quite dangerous. I noticed a man sitting in the back whose look I interpreted to express disparaging amusement and scepticism. To my surprise, he and two other men approached me after the workshop, asked for my contact details, and expressed interest in giving me an interview. During dinner, David told me about the reaction of the group once the presentation was over and I had left. The reactions to your workshop were mixed. Some felt you treat them as “exotics” and were uneasy about the fact that a non belonging person researches their group. Others thought that your project is totally cool, including myself. INA: One man I thought was very sceptical approached me and he told me he is interested in giving me an interview. DAVID: Really? The one who sat in the back? When you were talking, he was leaning over to me and told me: “She looks at us like mice!” DAVID:

I fell silent and a familiar feeling of shame came back—a profuse feeling of doing something wrong, of hurting others. It increased when I happened to re read MAUS (Spiegelman, 2003) a couple of days later. In this two part graphic novel, Art Spie gelman engages with his father’s experiences during the Shoah in an aesthetic—and quite controversial—way that represents Jews as mice and Germans/Nazis as cats. He decided to use “this cat mouse metaphor of oppression” (Spiegelman, 2011) because of the history of antisemitic caricature and Nazi propaganda materials that depict Jews as rats or vermin. In her gender sensitive analysis of both MAUS volumes, literary scholar Marianne Hirsch (Hirsch, 1992–1993: 13) pointed out that Jews and Germans are represented as mice and cats not so much to stress an essential difference between the categories “but only in relation to each other and in relation to the Holocaust and its memory” (emphasis in original). The cat mouse metaphor stresses the “predator/ victim relationship between them”. In which ways does this relation to each other reproduce itself in present encounters, interactions and research practices between my research participants, the attendees of my presentation and myself? How can I research the lives of Jews in Germany without continuing this oppressive relationship, but take its history and influence on the present into account? The literary scholar Sharon P. Holland (Holland, 2012: 55) notes that “we can take history very personally, especially when the players line up so nicely.” How do I line myself up, find an accountable

Coming to Terms with the Present 147

positioning as a researcher in post Shoah Germany?11 Clearly, putting forward a list of identity categories that ends with “an embarrased etc.” (Butler, 1999: 182) is not enough. In the following, I will introduce Schwartze’s concept Critical Nonjewishness and write about its importance for the questions raised above.

Critical Nonjewishness Schwartze (2016) first introduced the notion of Critical Nonjewishness—in reference to Critical Whiteness—to conceptualize a critical practice of self reflection by non Jews in post Shoah Germany. In English speaking research settings, Critical Whiteness Studies have been established since the early 1980s, while in German speaking countries Cri tical Whiteness started to be discussed widely only in the late 2000s (Tißberger, 2017). Critical Whiteness Studies shift the focus of attention from the racialized other to the racializing practices of the white subject who is privileged in terms of its unmarked whiteness. Film scholar Richard Dyer (Dyer, 2005: 12) writes how whiteness is not seen as whiteness, but as normal; studying whiteness is thus important because “white people need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their own particularity.” This includes the realization that it is their denied whiteness that secures white privileges and power in society vis á vis racialized others. In Germany, whiteness is not thematised and rarely acknowledged as a subject posi tion linked to dominance (Tißberger, 2006: 86). Members of the dominant culture/ majority white Germans resist seeing themselves as white, as having anything to do with race, especially because the German term Rasse is associated with National Socialism. This avoidance seems to substitute for an acknowledgment of and working against the racism and antisemitism that are constitutive of contemporary culture in Germany (ibid: 92). However, a dominant notion of germanness often works to position people as either German or not quite German. The everyday understanding of germanness is interwoven with the implicit assumption that to be German means to be white and non Jewish (Dean, 2018: 101). Germanness as dominant, yet unmarked norm (see for example El Tayeb, 2016; Rommelspacher, 1995) against which racialized others are measured and defined, tacitly works to conflate germanness with whiteness, a sedentary lifestyle, no migratory experiences, heterosexuality, being Christian or socially Chris tian (infused with implicit Christian values even though one perceives oneself as secular). Feminist Debora Antmann (2017), retrieving the 1980s works of the Jewish Lesbian Schabbeskreis, uses the term wc German to mark the particular embodied white and christian (socialized) majority in Germany that masquerades as the universal and dominant norm. Educator Michal Schwartze asserts the necessity to attend to the ways in which both the Nazi past and the colonial past continue to have their effects on the present. Teachers must broach the issue that both they and their pupils are never positioned outside of history and ask themselves: “Where do I come from? In which family did I grow up? […] What stories are told about parents or grandparents during the Nazi era?” (Peaceman and Schwartze, 2018: 165). What is needed is therefore a reflection of privileges and white socialization as the basis for both an awareness and critique of

148 Ina Schaum

racism and racist structures of society in postcolonial and post Shoah Germany.12 This also includes the reflection of nonjewishness as a social positioning, for which she proposes the conceptual term Critical Nonjewishness (Schwartze, 2016). Schwartze has put together several crucial questions that support the reflection of nonjewishness and the development of Critical Nonjewishness in school/education contexts, which I can borrow in the context of doing qualitative empirical research: What images do I have of Jews and what do they have to do with my own identity construction? What role did the construction of Jews as racialized other and anti semitism play in the formation of the nation(s), culture(s) and religion(s) I belong to? In which ways have my ancestors benefitted materially, psychologically and emo tionally from antisemitism and the persecution of people designated Jewish before, during, and after the Nazi time? Are my ancestors and I considered to be part of a collective that produces knowledge perceived as objective and universal? Are the history, traditions, and cultural and intellectual accomplishments of that collective seen as more valid and take up more space than those of other groups? Were the voices of my ancestors heard and represented and are they perceived as subjects of history? Am I experiencing situations in which I am threatened by psychic and/or physical violence because of my ethnic/cultural/religious belonging? Can I go to administrative, religious or cultural institutions that do not have to be guarded by security and police? Do I find it necessary to make myself invisible to be let alone, not to be exotisized, nor in danger of attacks? (ibid.). Critical Nonjewishness is not merely a tool for critical self reflection of wc Germans, but also works to decenter the dominant notion of germanness itself. The memory of the Shoah and its effects on the present are not the material for a newly self assured German identity that refigures the Shoah “as cathartic and seminal event in the nation’s history” (Loewy, 2002: 4) and instrumentalizes it as its own field of expertise. Nonjewishness emerges through the interplay of intersecting markers of difference and is differently constituted for differently positioned non Jewish people in postmigratory Germany, for example Muslim Germans, Buddhist Germans, Afro Germans, Russian Germans and so on. While some of Schwartze’s questions are geared to descendants of wc German families of bystanders, perpetrators and beneficiaries (blurry categories in and of themselves) in their relation to Jewish families and individuals, other questions concern the relation to other racialized, minoritized groups and persecuted groups. Critical reflection on nonjewishness also needs to take into account gender, sexuality, age, class and other markers of difference, depending on the context. It is an important tool for an intersectional methodology that takes into account the biographies and experiences of Jews.

Staying with the Trouble In my life and my research, this has meant—next to delving deeper into theoretical and empirical work, commentary and research about memory culture and politics in Germany—that I slowly started to ask questions about my family’s past and conducted biographical narrative interviews with my maternal grandparents.13 This

Coming to Terms with the Present 149

does not mean that I can answer Gudrun’s questions with certainty. I have as much knowledge about my family during the Nazi past as I have collected blind spots, concealments, gaps, argumentations and justifications, continuities of antisemitic images, Deckerinnerungen (screen memories) as well as lingering obliviousness. It has also meant continuing my research projects despite moments of shame, difficulty and doubt, a commitment to rigorous self questioning, and a heightened attention to difficult emotions that are part of my work and the decision to write about them. It has meant realizing that a safe and happy notion of my home and family rests on the oppression and concealment of violent histories. And, finally, it has meant the building of new friendships, communities and “affiliative postmemory” (Grujic´ and Schaum, 2019; Hirsch, 2008; Mohanty and Martin, 2003). This ongoing self questioning does not redeem me or offer some kind of com fort zone in which I am suddenly free from the past and (family) history—questions asked and answered. In fact, the Nazi past is a history that sticks. Consequently, difficult emotions are at the core of critically thinking about one’s social positioning in Post Shoah Germany. Shame, the destabilizing and denaturalization of one’s familiar, taken for granted identities, stories and transmitted narratives are part of the process. This process can be productive and lead to a new kind of knowledge, as shame constitutes “an acute state of sensitivity” (Probyn, 2005: 2). In this chapter, I showed how my discomfort and shame helped me to recognize the silenced aspects of Germany’s memory culture and the silenced past in the present. I came to understand how my research is also a practice of Gegenwartsbe wältigung—of trying to come to terms with how my research and everyone who is involved in it are shaped by the interconnectedness of past and present. They also initiated my engagement with Critical Nonjewishness, which became a central ana lytical and reflective tool in my research. In order to make use of my emotions, I had to document them through autobiographical writing in my research diary. Emotions, particularly unpleasant ones, are easily filtered out in the written pro ducts of research. Therefore, researchers need to pay close attention to their embodied emotional responses and embrace them (see also Davis in this volume) as important part of their work, even if it is uncomfortable. Feminist Donna Haraway (2016: 1) calls on us “to stir up potent responses to devastating events” and to stay with the trouble. Staying with the trouble might be a first step towards Gegen wartsbewältigung, towards “keeping our eyes on the past while entering the future” (Kahn, 2009: 224).

Notes 1 All names have been anonymized. 2 If not otherwise noted, quotes are taken from interview transcripts and my ethnographic notes. 3 Words are written in small print and italics to highlight how the categories such as whiteness, (non)jewishness, germanness etc. are social constructions and/or the effects of racialization. Political and conceptual terms such as Critical Nonjewishness are capitalized and in italics.

150 Ina Schaum

4 While there are controversial debates about the distinctions between “emotion,” “feel ing” and “affect” in the scholarly discourses of the sociology of emotions and affect studies, I agree with feminist writer Sara Ahmed (Ahmed in Ahmed and Schmitz, 2014: 98) that a differentiation between “emotion” and “affect” does not correspond “to a natural distinction that exists in the world.” 5 “In Israel, German Jews forcefully displaced from Germany have been referred to as ‘Yekkes’, which literally means ‘jacket’ in Yiddish and plays on their stiff German behaviour that was allegedly expressed by way of an attire that is unsuitable for the Middle Eastern climate as well as their alleged inability to become part of the Jewish mainstream” (Kranz, 2013: 44). 6 The Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk provides scholarships for gifted Jewish students as well as doctorial candidates with research interests within the field of Jewish studies. See for more information: https://eles studienwerk.de/. 7 The right wing extremist party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) gained electoral success at both regional and federal level. AfD functionaries demand a “180 degree U turn of the politics of memory” (Björn Höcke in Der Tagesspiegel, 2017), and contend that “Hitler and the Nazis are just bird shit in over 1000 years of successful German history” (Alexander Gauland in Der Tagesspiegel, 2018). Even though racist and antisemitic violence is part of everyday life the murders committed by the so called National Socialist Underground (NSU), the terrorist attacks on a synagogue in Halle on Yom Kippur and in Hanau in 2020 come to mind as latest examples Germany continues to act surprised about the con tinuities of this violence in the present (Klingenberg, 2019). 8 Particularly marginalized Germans, to name the invisible norm of dominant germanness, have developed terms such as Biodeutsche, Almans, Kartoffeln (potatoes, with the option of sweet potatoes), weißdeutsche Menschen (whitegermans) or wc Germans. 9 About the details and genesis of the research project and a reflection of my position within it see Schaum (2020). 10 Though conversion is encouraged if a person has familial ties to a halachic Jew (such as children and spouses) and facilitated, the only legitimate route to becoming Jewish is a religious conversion. 11 Educational scientist Astrid Messerschmidt proposes to talk about Germany as a post National Socialist society (Messerschmidt, 2007: 49). The post signals that something is past but not over, that what has been is always unfinished and differently appropriated in the present. The Nazi past has remained present despite or because of all efforts to come to terms with it in two forms: as a collectively remembered history in society and family and in the form of worldviews and images that have been shaped by Nazi ideology (Messerschmidt, 2018: 40). 12 There is a complex debate about and scholarly engagement with jewishness in relation to whiteness and blackness in the US (for example Brettschneider, 2010; Brodkin Sacks, 2017; Bulkin et al., 1988; Gilman, 1991; Schraub, 2019). In Germany, this engagement is still missing or merely beginning (Antmann, 2020; Stögner, 2019; Tißberger, 2006). Due to lack of space, I cannot elaborate on it in the context of this chapter. 13 In April 2017, I asked my maternal grandparents (born 1934 and 1939) if their parents had been members of the NSDAP. My grandfather answered “No, but they were not opposed to Hitler either.” His father, my great grandfather, worked as welder in the arms industry. In his file from the Spruchkammer (civilian court handling denazification), which I ordered from the archive in 2019, he answered every question concerning political involvement with “no.” My grandmother did not know and, in general, let my grandfather talk. Her father was in the Wehrmacht and died in Italy. Her stepfather also served in the Wehrmacht. When I asked them about vanishing Jewish neighbours and if they knew about the persecution of Jews, my grandfather remembered confiscated shops and that he thought Jews were sent to “labor camps.” He was aware of the killing of mentally disabled persons in Hadamar (Hesse). They did not know how many Jews had been murdered in the Shoah. In February 2019, I conducted biographical narrative interviews with them that I recorded.

Coming to Terms with the Present 151

I hardly know anything about my paternal grandparents (born 1910 and 1924 both of them died when I was very young). My grandfather was an airplane painter and served the Wehrmacht. He was in war captivity, but later refused to talk about his combat missions. I do not know anything about my paternal great grandmother’s and maternal grandmother’s involvements.

References Ahlstedt, Sara (2015) “‘Doing ‘Feelwork’: Reflections on Whiteness and Methodological Challenges in Research on Queer Partner Migration,” in Rikke Andreassen and Katherine Vitus (eds) Affectivity and Race: Studies form Nordic Contexts. Farnham: Ashgate, 187 203. Ahmed, Sara (2008) “The Politics of Good Feeling,” ACRAWSA e-journal 4 (1): 1 18. Ahmed, Sara (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ahmed, Sara and Sigrid Schmitz (2014) “Affect/Emotion: Orientation Matters. A Conversation between Sigrid Schmitz and Sara Ahmed,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Geschlechterstudien 22(2): 97 108. Antmann, Debora (2017) “Not Your Goy*Toy,” https://missy magazine.de/blog/2017/ 05/23/not your goytoy/ (accessed 4 December 2019). Antmann, Debora (2020) “Zwischen den Stühlen,” https://missy magazine.de/blog/2020/ 08/18/zwischen den stuehlen/ (accessed 3 September 2020). Anzaldúa, Gloria (2007) [1987] Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Arendt, Hannah and Günter Gaus (2019) “Günter Gaus im Gespräch mit Hannah Arendt: Sendung vom 28.10.1964,” www.rbb online.de/zurperson/interview archiv/arendt ha nnah.html (accessed 6 March 2019). Baldwin, James (1998) Collected Essays. New York: Literary Classics of the United States. Behar, Ruth (1996) The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Brettschneider, Marla (2010) “Critical Attention to Race: Race Segregation and Jewish Feminism,” Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal 15 (2): 20 33. Brodkin Sacks, Karen (2017) “How Jews Became White,” in Michael S. Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber (eds) Privilege: A Reader. Boulder: Westview Press, 115 133. Brumlik, Micha, Marina Chernivsky, Max Czollek, Hannah Peaceman, Anna Schapiro and Lea W. von Haselberg (eds) (2018) Gegenwartsbewältigung: Jalta. Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart No. 4. Berlin: Neofelis Verlag. Bulkin, Elly, Minnie B. Pratt and Barbara Smith (1988) Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books. Butler, Judith (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Davis, Kathy (2014) “Intersectionality as Critical Methodology,” in Nina Lykke (ed.) Writing Academic Texts Differently: Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing. New York and London: Routledge, 17 29. Davis, Kathy (2017) “Auto/Biography Bringing in the ‘I’,” in Helma Lutz, Martina Schiebel and Elisabeth Tuider (eds) Handbuch Biographieforschung. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 637 650. Davis, Kathy (2019) “Facing Uneasiness in Feminist Research: The Case of Female Genital Cutting,” in Gabriele Griffin and Malin Jordal (eds) Body, Migration, Reconstructive Surgeries: Making the Gendered Body in a Globalized World. London and New York: Routledge, 243 255. Dean, Jihan J. (2018) “Verzwickte Verbindungen: Eine postkoloniale Perspektive auf Bündnispolitik nach 1989 und heute,” in Meron Mendel and Astrid Messerschmidt (eds)

152 Ina Schaum

Fragiler Konsens: Antisemitismuskritische Bildung in der Migrationsgesellschaft. Bonn: Bundes zentrale für politische Bildung, 101 129. Der Tagesspiegel (2017) “‘Gemütszustand eines total besiegten Volkes’: Höcke Rede im Wortlaut,” www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/hoecke rede im wortlaut gemuetszustand eines total besiegten volkes/19273518.html (accessed 30 October 2019). Der Tagesspiegel (2018) “‘Vogelschiss’ Äußerung war ‘politisch unklug’,” www.tagesspiegel. de/politik/afd chef gauland vogelschiss aeusserung war politisch unklug/22667294.html (accessed 6 January 2020). Diner, Dan (1986) “Negative Symbiose: Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz,” Babylon. Beiträge zur jüdischen Gegenwart (1): 9 20. Dyer, Richard (2005) “The Matter of Whiteness,” in Paula S. Rothenberg (ed.) White Privilege: Essential Readings of the Other Side of Racism. New York: Worth Publishers, 9 14. El Tayeb, Fatima (2016) Undeutsch: Die Konstruktion des Anderen in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft. Bielefeld: Transcript. Gazso, Amber and Katherine Bischoping (2018) “Feminist Reflections on the Relation of Emotions to Ethics: A Case Study of Two Awkward Interviewing Moments,” FQS 19 (3): Art. 7. Gilman, Sander L. (1991) The Jew’s Body. London and New York: Routledge. Gould, Deborah (2015) “When Your Data Make You Cry,” in Helena Flam and Jochen Kleres (eds) Methods of Exploring Emotions. London and New York: Routledge, 163 171. Grossmann, Atina (2000) “‘The “Goldhagen Effect’: Memory, Repetition, and Responsi bility in the New Germany,” in Geoff Eley (ed.) The “Goldhagen Effect”: History, Memory, Nazism- Facing the German Past. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 89 130. Grujic´, Marija and Ina Schaum (2019) “German Postmemory and Ambivalent Home Desires: A Critical Reading of Nora Krug’s (2018) Graphic Novel ‘Heimat: A German Family Album’,” EthnoScript 21 (1): 196 212. Grünberg, Kurt (1998) “Schweigen und Ver Schweigen: Zur Differenz der Bearbei tungsformen in Opfer und Täterzusammenhängen,” in Christian Staffa and Katherine Klinger (eds) Die Gegenwart der Geschichte des Holocaust: Intergenerationelle Tradierung und Kommunikation der Nachkommen. Berlin: Institut für vergleichende Geschichtswissenschaf ten Berlin e.V, 153 176. Grünberg, Kurt (2006) Love after Auschwitz: The Second Generation in Germany. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Haraway, Donna (1988) “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575. Haraway, Donna J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Haselberg, von, Lea W., Marina Chernivsky and Hannah Peaceman (2018) “Vergegenwärti gungen,” in Micha Brumlik, Marina Chernivsky, Max Czollek, Hannah Peaceman, Anna Schapiro and Lea W. von Haselberg (eds) Gegenwartsbewältigung: Jalta. Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart No. 4. Berlin: Neofelis Verlag, 4 7. Hedström, Jenny (2018) “Confusion, Seduction, Failure: Emotions as Reflexive Knowledge in Conflict Settings,” International Studies Review. Herzog, Dagmar (2005) Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hill Collins, Patricia (2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Hirsch, M. (2008) “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29 (1): 103 128. Hirsch, Marianne (1992 1993) “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post Memory,” Discourse Special Issue: The Emotions, Gender, and the Politics of Subjectivity 15 (2).

Coming to Terms with the Present 153

Hochschild, Arlie R. (2003) [1983] The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Hoffman, Eva (2004) After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: PublicAffairs. Holland, Sharon P. (2012) “Desire, or ‘A Bit of the Other’,” in Sharon P. Holland (ed.) The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 41 64. Jaggar, Alison M. (1989) “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” Inquiry 32 (2): 151 176. Jureit, Ulrike and Christian Schneider (2010) Gefühlte Opfer: Illusionen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Kahn, Daniel (2009) “Gegenwartsbewältigung: Getting Drunk on the Past in Berlin and Sobering up in Yiddishland,” in Charlotte Misselwitz and Cornelia Siebeck (eds) Dissonant Memories Fragmented Present: Exchanging Young Discourses between Israel and Germany. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 217 225. Klingenberg, Darja (2019) Wrest Tradition Away From Conformism: Walking Dnipro with Walter Benjamin in my Head, https://academies.hypotheses.org/6334 (accessed 5 September 2019). Kranz, Daniela (2009) Shades of Jewishness: The Creation and Maintenance of a Liberal Jewish Community in Post- Shoah Germany. Dissertation. University of St. Andrews. Kranz, Dani (2013) “‘Being a Yekke is a really big deal for my mum!’: On the Intergenerational Transmission of Germanness amongst German Jews in Israel,” Austausch 2 (1): 43 66. Kranz, Dani (2021) “Living and Loving Jews in the German Present: Jewish Life Beyond the Past, and Beyond Antisemitism,” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung 22(1): Art. 3. LaCapra, Dominick (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni versity Press. Loewy, Hanno (2002) “A History of Ambivalence: Post Reunification German Identity and the Holocaust,” Patterns of Prejudice 36 (2): 3 13. Lorde, Audre (2007 [1984]) Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Maier, Christian and Dieter Kassel (2015) “Vergangenheitsbewältigung ‘Wir sind Erinner ungsweltmeister’,” www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/vergangenheitsbewaeltigung wir sind er innerungsweltmeister.1008.de.html?dram:article id 318468 (accessed 21 February 2019). Messerschmidt, Astrid (2007) “Repräsentationsverhältnisse in der postnationalsozialistischen Gesellschaft,” in Anne Broden and Paul Mecheril (eds) Re-Präsentationen: Dynamiken der Migrationsgesellschaft. Düsseldorf: IDA NRW, 47 68. Messerschmidt, Astrid (2018) “Selbstbilder in der postnationalsozialistischen Gegenwart,” in Micha Brumlik, Marina Chernivsky, Max Czollek, Hannah Peaceman, Anna Schapiro and Lea W. von Haselberg (eds) Gegenwartsbewältigung: Jalta. Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart No. 4. Berlin: Neofelis Verlag, 38 46. Misselwitz, Charlotte (2009) “Easy Going Uneasiness,” in Charlotte Misselwitz and Cornelia Siebeck (eds) Dissonant Memories Fragmented Present: Exchanging Young Discourses between Israel and Germany. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 229 232. Mohanty, Chandra T. and Biddy Martin (2003) “What’s Home Got to Do With it?,” in Chandra T. Mohanty (ed.) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 85 105. Moré, Angela (2013) “Überantwortete Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Zur Bedeutung trans generationaler Gefühlsvererbung für das Konstrukt und Erleben von Identität,” Psychologie & Gesellschaftskritik 36 (4): 35 59. Peaceman, Hannah and Michal Schwartze (2018) “‘Wir müssen das Ganze in den Blick nehmen’: Interview mit Michal Schwartze zum Thema Antisemitismus und Schule,” in Micha Brumlik, Marina Chernivsky, Max Czollek, Hannah Peaceman, Anna Schapiro

154 Ina Schaum

and Lea W. von Haselberg (eds) Gegenwartsbewältigung: Jalta. Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart No. 4. Berlin: Neofelis Verlag, 161 168. Petillo, April (2020) “Unsettling Ourselves: Notes on Reflective Listening Beyond Dis comfort,” Feminist Anthropology 20 (1): 1 10. Probyn, Elspeth (2005) Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rapaport, Lynn (1997) Jews in Germany after the Holocaust: Memory, Identity, and JewishGerman Relations. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press. Rich, Adrianne (1986) “Notes Towards a Politics of Location,” in Adrianne Rich (ed.) Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979 1985. London: Virago, 210 231. Rommelspacher, Birgit (1995) Dominanzkultur: Texte zu Fremdheit und Macht. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag. Schaum (2020) Being Jewish (and) in Love: Two and a Half Stories about Jews, Germans and Love. Berlin and Leipzig: Hentrich & Hentrich. Schraub, David (2019) “White Jews: An Intersectional Approach,” Jewish Studies Review 43 (2): 379 407. Schwartze, Michal (2016) “Teaching the Holocaust is not possible without teaching Jewish History”: Kritisches Nicht-Jüdisch-Sein und Rassismuskritik als notwendige Bedingungen gelingender Antisemitismusprävention in der schulischen Bildungsarbeit, Unpublished Manuscript. Frankfurt am Main. Sontag, Susan (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farras, Straus and Giroux. Spiegelman, Art (2003) The Complete MAUS. London: Penguin. Spiegelman, Art (2011) “Why Mice?,” www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/10/20/why mice/ (accessed 13 August 2020). Stögner, Karin (2019) “Wie inklusiv ist Intersektionalität?: Neue soziale Bewegungen, Identitätspolitik und Antisemitismus,” in Samuel Salzborn (ed.) Antisemitismus seit 9/11: Ereignisse, Debatten, Kontroversen. Baden Baden: Nomos, 385 402. Tißberger, Martina (2006) “The Project(ions) of ‘Civilization’ and the Counter Transferences of Whiteness: Freud, Psychoanalysis, ‘Gender’ and ‘Race’ (in Germany),” in Martina Tißberger, Gabriele Dietze, Daniela Hrzán and Jana Husmann Kastein (eds) Weiß Weißsein Whiteness: Kritische Studien zu Gender und Rassismus. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 85 101. Tißberger, Martina (2017) Critical Whiteness. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. Waterston, Alisse and Barbara Rylko Bauer (2006) “Out of the Shadows of History and Memory: Personal Family Narratives in Ethnographies of Rediscovery,” American Ethnologist 33 (3): 397 412.

10 “WE WILL SUE YOU IF YOU PUBLISH OUR PICTURES!” Blind-spots in Research on Sex Workers Ida Sabelis and Lorraine Nencel

We will sue you if you dare publish our pictures! we will not agree to have you, and the organization, and the project benefit, and not us. The above quote summarizes the feelings among a group of sex workers, members of a self led sex workers organization (CBO) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. As project leaders of the “Creating Opportunities? Economic Empowerment, Political Positioning and Participation of Sex Workers in Kenya and Ethiopia”,1 we had known the CBO and its members for almost four years. At the end of the project, when we were about to conclude with a photo exhibition, ´all of a sudden´, the participants voiced their reluc tance to continue and presented certain demands if we wanted to be assured of their participation. Until then, we had assumed the project had gone relatively well. The photo workshop leading up to the planned exhibition was a big success: lots of laughter, experimentation, and fast growing quality of expressive pictures representing “everyday life” of the sex workers involved. Based on this experience we were confident that the photo exhibition that would follow would be an achievement both for the women as well as for the research project. It was not until the interviews, an essential component of the photo voice method, after the picture taking, that we realized something was most definitely wrong: via the repetitive demand for “more money” which we did not have available, we realized that perhaps our assumed common interest was not equally shared or valued. What was it we had overlooked? Was it the three way relationship of com munity, CBO collective, and a research consortium in which the principal investigators were white women from a North European university? Was it a coincidental combi nation of context, timing, and close engagement that made this last phase of our research project unsuccessful? Why did we not see the signs of uneasiness; had we underestimated the importance of money? Only in the aftermath of the project, could we see that to a large extent the cause of this situation can be brought down to our myopia grounded in our epistemological and methodological principles as well as our political convictions. Our myopia made it difficult for us to see the broader picture of what was going on. DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 14

156 Ida Sabelis and Lorraine Nencel

Myopia generally refers to the inability to discern or a lack of foresight; it refers to closeness as well as to a lack of overview.2 However, what we learnt from these circumstances is that in research, myopia is not only caused by being too close, but it can also be an outcome of somethings being hyper visible, particularly those events, actions and experiences that support an individual’s principles and convic tions. Our myopic gaze unintentionally rendered invisible those occurrences which could bring our principles into doubt. People may put this down to bias; that is however not the case because making our epistemological and methodological principles as well as our political convictions explicit also made it possible to follow guidelines in order to conduct rigorous research. Thus, this form of hypervisibility only becomes apparent when something goes wrong. After presenting a narrative describing the sequence of events, we embark on an analysis concerning what went “wrong.” This will be done in two steps. In the first, we discuss the merits of our epistemological position more specifically in relation to our political convictions about sex work and participatory research methods. This will give insight into how we were able to miss certain signs which could have prepared us for what actually happened. In the second step, we tackle our near sightedness by bringing to the surface what was ren dered invisible. This step creates a reflexive space in which we hold up our epistemological principles to a mirror in order to assess how these events have affected our principles, bringing us closer to an answer to the question whether our epistemological principles and political convictions can remain standing in this contemporary neo liberal, neo colonial context.

Photo voice in the context of Community Based Participative Research3 “Creating Opportunities? Economic Empowerment, Political Positioning and Participation of Sex Workers in Kenya and Ethiopia” was a four year (2014–2018) project exploring daily life, stigma, and particularly critically scrutinizing the options for economic empowerment of sex workers in Kenya and Ethiopia. Following principles of parti cipative action research (PAR), all partners4 cooperated and together composed the full plan and all stages of execution (cf. Heron and Reason, 2006; Cargo and Mercer, 2008). The consortium thus included sex worker led organizations, local academics and NGOs in both Kenya and Ethiopia plus an international NGO based in the Netherlands. The research teams who implemented the fieldwork, consisting of local researchers (a post doc and temporarily hired academics) fluctuated depending on the project’s stages.5 The first phase consisted on “gaining common ground” by doing a stakeholder analysis accompanied with document studies and collective discussions about the positioning of sex workers in both countries; the second phase entailed vast field work, conducted using a multitude of methods6 that were aimed at looking at sex workers’ lives from an economic perspective without losing sight of the political, cultural and social context in which their work and lives take place; the third and

“We Will Sue You If You Publish Our Pictures” 157

last phase was designed to bring all this together using photo voice, a multi level method with different tools to enable representations of a projects to be shared with a wider (stakeholder) audience (cf. Wang and Burris, 1997; Wang, 2003; Duffy, 2011; Vince and Warren, 2012). Our critical position concerning the buzzword “empowerment” in development and the actual interventions designed for the (economic) empowerment of sex work ers brought us to investigate the ways sex workers earned, spent, saved and invested money, and the different meanings the monies earned had in their lives from their own perspective. In our view, it was not the ways they made their money, nor the amount of money they earned that were an obstacle to their “empowerment,” but rather the stigma and marginalization they experienced daily for selling sex which stood in the way of increasing their autonomy. We realize that the meaning of empowerment has been debated at length, specifically for development work (Liebenberg, 2009)—and while done with good intentions—the neo–colonial undertone in aid projects can hardly ever be dismissed in its entirety. We assumed that we would pay attention to this knowledge and tried to act as collectively as possible throughout the project. The third project phase was designed to bring knowledge from the first two phases together presenting project insights to a wider audience. In this last phase the photo voice method was employed with a group of 10 sex workers in Ethiopia and Kenya. In both countries the results would culminate in a photo exhibition for the general public as well as influential stakeholders in which the photos would illustrate the “everydayness” of their daily lives just like the lives of other citizens who are members of communities, families, and society. Contradictorily, it was also aimed to show that, despite the similarities they share with other citizens, the sex workers did not enjoy the same rights as the others, due to the way they make their money, making them have more in common with each other because of the stig matization and marginalization they experienced daily. The exhibition was aimed to trigger discussion about this contradiction. The exhibition was a big success in Nairobi, but in Ethiopia it never materialized. In Ethiopia, the participating sex workers had already participated in our partner’s activities. Some were involved in the earlier phase of our research as respondents or survey interviewers. Thus, they were no strangers to the organization or the researchers. The photo voice method we used, consisted of a photo workshop in which they learnt to use a camera and how to make photos with meaning, while remaining unrecognizable—a necessary requirement for individuals who keep the way they earn their money secret to the outside world. Afterwards, they were asked to go out to take pictures of their home and work situation, any way they wanted to, using the techniques they learnt in the workshops. This then would be followed by interviews carried out by our local colleague, in which they discussed the pictures, their significance and why they thought it was important to visualize those aspects of their lives. They would also choose the photos that would be used for the photo exhibition during this interview. The women were paid to attend the workshop as well as received transportation money for moving around to complete their activities.

158 Ida Sabelis and Lorraine Nencel

As we assumed that taking pictures was just a fun and non time consuming activity, they were not paid for taking pictures and it was only after some negotiation that they were paid for the interviews that followed. By then we were aware that the message aimed for in the exhibition “presenting the everyday life of sex workers as working women,” which at first glance seems innocuous, was quite radical and politically charged in the Ethiopian context, especially if the story which will be told is not one of “poor victimized women in need to leave the profession.” We had come to realize that sex work and sex workers in Ethiopia may be regarded as morally reproachable, they were also pitied because people are aware that there are very few earning possibilities for the poor (Tadele et. al., 2021). This led us to be even more careful in designing, negotiating and co developing the phase of working with photo voice (Vince and Warren, 2012). We hoped in the process that a reflexive space would develop promoting dialogue and reflection in order to achieve a situation which would encourage the participants to positively recognize their skills, further their awareness of the systems of stigmatization which are in place and strengthen their organizations and their own identities.

On focus and vision The choice to do photo voice is one that seamlessly merges with our feminist research position as well as our conviction to approach sex work from a human rights perspective which, among other things, regards sex work as work. These elements share similar principles regarding the positioning of the research subject in the research. Our understanding of research is aimed at creating spaces where par ticipants can present themselves and tell their stories how they see fit in order to have their voices heard and their positions represented in a context where they are usually not represented (Hergenrather et.al., 2009; Wang, 2003; Vince and Warren, 2012). Years as feminist engaged scholars have taught us that the specific objectives of research are not imposed from above but dependent on the context specific demands and desires of those involved. The intersubjective relationship between researchers and research partners and participants is based on mutual respect for each other’s expertise as well as aimed to minimize asymmetry and recognize and accept when it cannot be minimized (Nencel 2005, 2017). From the outset, we worked together with the sex worker led organization which represented sex workers predominantly in Addis Ababa but also had outreach to other regions of the country. During the time of the research, it was the only sex worker led organization in the country. It is a member of the international sex worker led net works both in the region and globally. This implies that they share a political agenda and ideology with thousands of people throughout the world. The commencement of the sex worker movement in the early 80s brought together sex workers who depart from a human rights perspective, globally fighting for the recognition of sex work as work, its decriminalization, and the improvement of working conditions (Ruiz and Nencel, 2011). These objectives are accompanied with the slogan “nothing for us

“We Will Sue You If You Publish Our Pictures” 159

without us” signifying that to be successful, whether it be (development) interventions or the creation of national laws or research, sex workers need to be included from the outset. Sex worker led organizations in themselves evince to the public, policy makers and academia that they not only have control of their situations, but also know far better what than those working “for them” what they actually need. Consequently, sex workers are generally at first wary of researchers’ initiatives until proven otherwise. Hence, proving otherwise is what our project from the start headed for by working tightly with the sex worker led organization. This was meant to convey recognition that we share the same perspective concerning sex work and that we can be, and are, allies in the struggle. Moreover, it allowed us to assume that the organization was recognized by their constituents as their representative, not only as an authority to external actors, but also that the leaders represent the desires and needs of the women.7 Photo voice has at least two different objectives wrapped in one. It is in the first place one of the clearest forms of self presentation and self representation. This in turn triggers the other objective, namely that the process of (re)presentation together with interviews creates spaces of dialogue, reflexive moments between participants and between participant and researchers, all of which aim to lead to more awareness, whether that be of one’s daily situation, desires, passions or one’s rights or lack of rights as sex workers. This awareness is assumed to contribute to processes of “empower ment,” e.g. contributing to the feeling and capacity of disadvantaged people to develop a say and control about their life and what concerns them in it (Townsend, 1998; Pollack, 2000). In this particular context we saw photo voice as a trajectory in which not only “the photos” are being conceived and processed, but also discussions and explanations serve to alternatively voice / explain why certain images can or cannot be shown and how some pictures prove better expression of daily life situation than others. This is how, in our case, we assumed photo voice to really fit into PAR. Additionally, this implies photos need to be scrutinized (via collective discussion) whether what they represent unintentionally reproduces existing stereotypes and stigma, or whether they (the pictures) have the ability to tell a different story. Although the development of an exhibition was the ultimate goal, learning to express via photos and discussing “daily life” in the process were envisioned to bring about new insights into all participants’ life worlds. In general, we thought the photography workshop was a success. The participating sex workers quickly developed a “photographer’s attitude,” peering through lenses, zooming in and out, and handling frames with curiosity and an instinct for creativeness and opportunity. “Oh, I have never imagined myself doing this” and “never thought that I could see so many interesting things.” The women explored all corners of the premises with fresh eyes, jumping up and down in the street, rehearsing poses from films and advertisements with hilarious bouts of laughter, inspiring each other for the next scene, and the next, and playing around with in/visibilities, as we had intended. During the workshop we gave examples about how one can take pictures of their lives symbolically. We, for instance, chose a symbol which we assumed would be a positive recognition for all. We asked them what would come to mind if you saw a handful of money. Our intention was to portray the earning power sex

160 Ida Sabelis and Lorraine Nencel

workers encountered in their work. One women answered, explaining that it reminded her of when she left her house to do some quick grocery shopping. She would grab some money and did not take a handbag as you normally would do because she wanted to run in and out as quickly as possible so that no one would see her or make any trouble. Her fear was of being discovered, talked about, or getting into trouble in her own neighbourhood and this was caused by the fact she earned her money as a sex worker. The discussions afterwards were an exchange among the participants and the members of the sex workers’ organization (CBO). It proved enlightening for us as researchers to “change perspectives,” e.g. about what the sex workers stressed as important to show from their daily lives, and what not. As the above illustrates, our epistemological and methodological principles along with our political position towards sex work merged effortlessly with our academic beliefs regarding the ethical and engaged way of doing critical research and strengthening our reading of the photo workshop as successful because it appeared to live up to the shared criteria. Although we imagined it to be a success, this does not mean all went harmoniously throughout: both in Kenya and Ethiopia issues surrounding money, e.g. as compensation for working hours and travel and for other less obvious things brought about heated discussions. We took this, however, as part and parcel of the contemporary use of photo voice in the contemporary setting of North South relations. Our interpretation that our workshop was successful was supported by the success of earlier academics who effectively implemented photo voice projects with sex workers by adhering to the same academic beliefs as our own (i.e. Cheng, 2013; Oliveira and Vearey, 2015). Hence, this supported our certainty that photo voice was one of the most powerful ways to do feminist engaged research from a sex workers’ perspective. What went wrong?

How our myopia impeded what we saw The initial quote, “we will sue you if you use our pictures”, was uttered by one of the Ethiopian sex workers after the photo interviews were completed. Unlike our experience in Kenya in which the completion of the photo voice phase was felt by the participants as a gratifying moment and the participants were eager to select their favourite and most telling pictures in the accompanying interviews, in Addis Ababa, our colleague who carried out the interviews related that several of the women had a “let’s get the interview over with attitude,” after which we were met with the ultimate refusal to “participate any further” by all of the women if we didn’t make it financially attractive for them. The quote sums it all up. As concise as it is, it is packed with undertones that gave insight into what we could not see earlier: the sex workers did not experience this phase as beneficial or empowering. They felt disadvantaged and the only way to make up for that was, in their view, additional payment. In this section, we will deal with this in detail.

“We Will Sue You If You Publish Our Pictures” 161

While we were under the impression that participating in a photo voice pro ject was the “grand finale” of four years of cooperation and provided a benefit in itself, we considered the demand for money evidence that this was not the case. This led us to confront our assumptions concerning payment for participation as well as the essence of “participatory visual methods” as a method that potentially empowers and produces reflexive spaces (Wang, 2003; Duffy, 2011; Pauwels, 2015) in which the sex workers’ voices are dominant (Evans Agnew, 2016). And, indeed, the participants’ voices were dominant, just not in the way had envisioned – not through a photo exhibition aimed to sensitize stakeholders and the general public, but rather through the powerfully voiced sentence “we sue you.” One might even say that this was the outcome of the project and not the long term goals we had imagined the project would ultimately produce. With hindsight we would contend that ideas about trust and about the goals of the project were not as thoroughly shared, nor as “participatory” as we had envisioned. Our voices turned out, after all, to have been more dominant than those of the par ticipants in terms of cooperation and providing “direction.” We were too quick to assume that our long standing relationship with the organization’s members, in gen eral, and its leaders, more specifically, served as the required collateral to guarantee that the participants would benefit from the immaterial goals offered by the photo voice project. A mismatch existed between our intentions and the outcomes of this com munity based participatory research (Cargo and Mercer, 2008; Hergenrather et.al., 2009; Wang, 2003). Keeping in mind that the participants were given money for their participation and costs at different moments and thus materially benefitted, they nonetheless did not consider the immaterial gains as a personal benefit. The participants made clear that everyone benefitted from their participation in the project except themselves. For many researchers who use PAR, methodology and payment are a contradiction in terms. However, in sex work research it is quite normal to reimburse for the costs of transport and missing work. In that sense we complied with what is considered “fair return.” But we drew the line when it came to paying for pictures taken (as part of the exhibition part) which is some thing they persistently started to ask for during the photo interviewing phase. In addition to the fact that these discussions created tensions, we did not have the capacity to pay any more. But, most importantly from our point of view, it was a matter of holding on to the PAR principles. Naively or not, at that moment in time, we considered it inappropriate to pay people to be reflexive, which was, after all, one of the sub goals of the project: empowerment via insight into everyday life issues. It was only when the ultimate outcry for “payment or we stop” started that we realized there was an issue relating to ownership and who benefitted from the project. The participating women did not feel they were co owners of the project as we had assumed. In a sense they were proposing a contractual relationship, something, considering the time we shared with them in the four years and our “common” goals, we could not fathom. However, there was another factor that contributed to their persistent demand for more money. Two years earlier, one of the participating sex workers took part

162 Ida Sabelis and Lorraine Nencel

in a documentary commissioned by a filmmaker and a team of feminist academics which aimed to portray the lives of migrant women in Addis Ababa and another capital in the global South. This particular sex worker was paid well, and was not only paid for her participation in the film, but also for her picture on the film poster. The amount she received was far more than we could ever had paid each of our participants. However, she used this as the frame of reference for our project and was one of the kindling forces behind the demand: pictures mean money. Their demand for money also needs to be seen within the context of international development. Payment for members of community based organizations or NGOs has become customary in contemporary development projects. So much so that partici pating in trainings, becoming peer educators, and participating in interviews, are a means to generate additional income (Woensdregt and Nencel, 2020). Simultaneously, as researchers who were granted money from the Dutch Scientific Foundation, we are obliged to collaborate with local organizations as one of the granting conditions, which according to them, is necessary in order to assure the uptake of research outcomes. This makes it, at times, difficult for academics like us to be distinguished from other white individuals representing international NGOs or development agencies. Although we made efforts to explain the difference between, on the one hand, development pro jects, international development funding, and, on the other hand, research, the demands for payment did not cease. Thus, as academics researching in neo liberal times, our research could not escape the neo colonial relations in which payment is used, for example, in development projects, to guarantee a sufficient amount of indi viduals attending a training or event. Presently, money circulates in many different ways reproducing North South power relations and assuring desired outcomes.

For whose benefit? Returning to where we started, it becomes very clear what went wrong and how the demand for payment disrupted what we envisioned to be a successful project, In the aftermath the participants felt that everyone beside themselves benefited from the project except themselves. The analysis of these events revealed our myopia, not only because we never thought in terms of who benefits more as we assumed it was co owned, but also because we had over valued the significance of the sex worker rights organization in the lives of the participating sex workers. They were invited by the organization and thus we anticipated that they were active members who not only receive support from the organization, but contributed to the vision and strug gle towards sex workers’ rights. The leaders of the sex worker organization did share our idea that this project evolved out of collaboration and co ownership and they articulated this in the meetings and other gatherings we had with them. Hence we assumed that the co ownership felt by the organization was synonymous to the participants’ willingness and commitment to engage in the project. We became aware the hard way that this was not necessarily the case. This experience evoked questions concerning power relations between the organization and the constituents and the way these relations influence the outcomes of any project. It also made us

“We Will Sue You If You Publish Our Pictures” 163

realize that co ownership cannot be assumed just because the members of an orga nization agree to participate. It was only through the quote that we got an idea what the sex workers’ position was towards the organization. This in turn enabled us to better comprehend why the photo voice project had failed. Moreover, it made us aware of how our privileged position did not allow us to read the signs along the way. As reflexive as the way we do research may be, our lack of reflexivity regarding our own position in this context shows the difficulty we had to “decolonize existing power relations” (Cruz and Sonn, 2014: 128). Partly this can be attributed to being convinced that our good intentions were derived from our feminist engaged research principles. Thus, the need to be continuously critical felt less urgent. We followed the guidelines without sufficiently scrutinizing whether they fit the context to which we brought them. Already having been successful in Kenya and enjoying the endorsement of the sex worker led organization in Ethiopia, our myopia increased and our ability to see our own contribution to the whole process decreased. Finally, our belief in the power of sex worker led organizations made it difficult for us to discern the effects of stigma in the daily lives of their members. Clarification is needed here. If there is one thing that sex workers share globally, it is the stigmatiza tion they encounter in their societies: economically, politically and socially (Bjøness et. al., 2021). We assumed, based on previous experiences working with sex worker led organizations and our awareness of how sex workers individually and collectively represent themselves—for instance, on social media—that the majority of the mem bers of their organization were fighting for their rights as sex workers. They used their experiences of discrimination and stigmatization as a push factor to obtain these rights. It was thus a painful discovery when we realized that the sex workers who were involved in our project in Ethiopia had internalized the discourses that stigmatized them and questioned their self worth and role in society (cf. Tadele et.al., 2021). This discovery was gradual because talking about stigma is part and parcel of talking about sex work. That is to say that sex workers often talk about stigma in relation to their work and their daily lives, but those who are members of an organization, as stated above, usually do not take being stigmatized sitting down and fight against it through their organizations. The workshop and particularly the example of money in the hand made us gradually aware that their lives remained permeated with feelings about being stigmatized and of self stigma. Reflexively, we realized that much of what the women said during the two day workshop either explicitly expressed stigma or carried an undertone that trans mitted it. This experience made us recognize the constraints and limitations that being stigmatized imposes on their lives. It made us question whether our objec tives of doing photo voice—the idea of “becoming aware”—was actually imposed from above (by us) and perhaps the only thing they wanted to do is get out of the situation they are living in. Thus, experiencing stigma may obstruct the possibilities to create reflexive spaces and hence benefit from the experience of becoming aware of one’s situation in order to “show” them “taking control” e.g. in an exhibition. By not being able to “use” the pictures, we learned even more about the role of stigma and living in vulnerable situations in this specific context. It also

164 Ida Sabelis and Lorraine Nencel

became more comprehensible why the women talked in terms of benefit rather than co ownership.

Conclusion Our myopia made it difficult to see that the relationship between the sex worker led organization and its members did not necessarily live up to the ideal prototype produced in the sex worker rights’ discourse. This had consequences for how we approached the organization as well as how we approached the women sex workers. If our vision had been less blurred, we would have been more cautious in assuming that everything was in place. With this awareness we could have focussed differently on the way we developed the workshop which would include discuss ing more openly the issues around who benefits from what. The discovery that the term “benefit” came to replace the concept “co owner ship” caused an unsettling moment which changed the course of the research. It brought things to an end. The fact that we did not see it coming can be in part be attributed to believing that their reluctance was a typical reaction for individuals involved in PAR research for the first time. When we finally did accept that the objectives of the photo voice project would not be accomplished, we were able to discern the way stigmatization and self stigma contributed to their inability to see the benefit of participating in such a project. The analysis of what went wrong in the photo voice project gives clarity about how our academic beliefs constituted by feminist epistemology, the sex workers’ rights perspective, and principles of participatory methodologies, on the one hand, support us to design and implement critically engaged research. But, on the other hand, it caused myopia regarding the power relations between us and the organization, us and the research participants, the organization and the participants, and between the par ticipants (an issue which we did not touch upon in this chapter). The analysis of this experience made us sensitive to the ways neo liberalism and neo colonialism inform fieldwork particularly regarding the way money has entered into fieldwork relations and the way it can be a determining factor in assuring outcomes. We came to the field with power to give money as a fair return and, in this case, withheld money when we felt that payment went against the grain of shared principles. This in itself is a clear example of how neo colonial relationships manifest in engaged research aimed to collaboratively support change towards gender equity and social justice. This analysis of our myopia gives us more insight into the challenges we face as engaged feminist scholars. And while in each new research context we will most likely have to deal with it differently, this experience as well as the analysis will in the future let the alarm bells ring sooner.

Afternote After the termination of the photo voice project, together with the sex workers’ organization, we decided to use the remaining money to make a documentary that

“We Will Sue You If You Publish Our Pictures” 165

could be used in their work as well as be presented to embassies, influential stakeholders, and the general public. A 17 minute documentary was made called “Working women in Addis Ababa” (2018). Four of the original partici pants took part in the documentary. They were paid well and signed an informed consent form which also gave us the right to “use” their pictures from the photo voice project.8 The documentary was presented to stakeholders and some representatives of Embassies. The discussion that followed made us aware of how political a film was that presented sex workers as working women. In the discussion, a large part of the audience had difficulty accepting that the women earned so much money and were able to keep their head above water decently by doing sex work. It was suggested that if we do another editing of the film, we should leave out how much money they earned. Other comments showed that even though the film was made to represent them as strong autonomous women, the audience had the ability to read their actions in ways that counteracted this image and focussed on stigma. We were advised to think about if we should broadcast it on TV to the gen eral public without changing the way the sex workers were presented. The film was shown on Ethiopian national television and was placed on their website which was visited frequently. The documentary received a warm reception and many positive comments that showed that people were willing to think about sex work a little differently. Unfortunately, the sex worker led organization asked that the film be taken down for fear of repercussions both on a personal and organizational level. While we as researchers were very satisfied with the television reception and used the film in lectures and meetings in the Nether lands when appropriate, we again were confronted with the painful revelation of how deep the stigmatization of sex workers is embedded in the social fabric of Ethiopian society. The fact that the only sex worker led organization in the country felt unsafe if the documentary would continue to be aired is evidence of the difficulties involved in the recognition of sex workers’ rights and adds another layer to our understanding concerning what went wrong in the photo voice project.

Notes 1 Funded by NWO/WOTRO Science for Global Development, INCLUDE, The Netherlands, 2014 2018. 2 https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/10844/what is the meaning of myopia in literature studies. “And myope/myopia,” in Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2011), p. 947: short sightedness, lack of foresight or intellectual insight. 3 We refer to community based participative research with CBPR PAR being participa tory Action Research and PV for Photo Voice. CBPR and PAR we use alternatingly. 4 Authors as project leaders, four academic colleagues from Kenya and Ethiopia, Commu nity Based Organizations from both countries and the Aids Fund from The Netherlands. 5 E.g. collective (at least common) meetings at the beginning, at intervals during the pro ject’s stages, at which everybody’s responsibilities and tasks were collectively decided. As

166 Ida Sabelis and Lorraine Nencel

project leaders we could not, for instance, take part in all data collection. Also, across Kenya and Ethiopia, some activities were performed together and others in parallel task groups. 6 An amalgam of interviews, ethnographic observations, economic diaries, document ana lyses, focus groups, surveys and cross event comparison in consortium meetings. 7 Creating Opportunities was aiming at female and male sex workers. However, this only turned out the be viable in Kenya where we cooperated with a male led CBO. In Ethiopia, male sex workers are even more “invisible” (Tadele, 2011) and not formally organized. 8 Until this day the photos have been left in virtual storage. We cannot use them, but also did not want to destroy them. Who knows how, perhaps in the future, the pictures might be admitted still.

References Bjøness, J., Nencel, L. and Skilbrei, M. (2021) Reconfiguring Stigma in Studies of Sex for Sale. Routledge (forthcoming). Cargo, M. and Mercer, S.L. (2008) “The Value and Challenges of Participatory Research: Strengthening its Practice,” Annual Review of Public Health 29: 325 350. Carlson, E.D., Engebretson, J. and Chamberlain, R.M. (2006) “Photovoice as a Social Process of Critical Consciousness,” Qualitative Health Research 16 (6): 836 852. Cheng, S. (2013) “Private Lives of Public Women: Photos of Sex Workers (Minus the Sex) in South Korea,” Sexualities 16(1 2): 30 42. Chinn, P.W. (2007) “Decolonizing Methodologies and Indigenous Knowledge: The Role of Culture, Place and Personal Experience in Professional Development,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 44 (9): 1247 1268. Clark, A., Prosser, J. and Wiles, R. (2010) “Ethical Issues in Image based Research,” Arts & Health 2 (1): 81 93. Cruz M. and Sonn C. (2014) “(De)colonizing Culture in Community Psychology: Reflections from Critical Social Science,” in Goodman R. and Gorski P. (eds) Decolonizing “Multicultural” Counseling through Social Justice. International and Cultural Psychology. Springer. Duffy, Lynne (2011) “‘Step by Step We are Stronger’: Women’s Empowerment Through Photovoice,” Journal of Community Health Nursing 28 (2): 105 116, doi:10.1080/ 07370016.2011.56407. Evans Agnew, R.A. and Rosemberg, M.A.S. (2016) “Questioning Photovoice Research: Whose Voice?,” Qualitative Health Research 26 (8): 1019 1030. Hearn, J. (2007) “African NGOs: the New Compradors?,” Development and Change 38 (6): 1095 1110. Hergenrather, K.C., Rhodes, S.D., Cowan, C.A., Bardhoshi, G. and Pula, S. (2009) “Photovoice as Community based Participatory Research: A Qualitative Review,” American Journal of Health Behavior 33 (6): 686 698. Heron, J. and Reason, P. (2006) “The Practice of Co operative Inquiry: Research ‘with’ Rather Than ‘on’ People,” Handbook of Action Research: Concise Paperback Edition. London: Sage, 144 154. Kindon, S. (2003) “Participatory Video in Geographic Research: a Feminist Practice of Look ing?,” Area 35 (2): 142 153. Liebenberg, L. (2009) “The Visual Image as Discussion Point: Increasing Validity in Boundary Crossing Research,” Qualitative Research 9 (4): 441 467. McDonnell, B. (2009) “Ethical Considerations in Collaborative Visual Work: Developing the Somali Lenses Photo Exhibition,” Anthropology News 50 (4): 7 12. Nencel, L. (2005) “Feeling Gender Speak: Intersubjectivity and Fieldwork Practice with Women who Prostitute in Lima, Peru,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 12 (3): 345 361.

“We Will Sue You If You Publish Our Pictures” 167

Nencel, L. (2017) “Epistemologically Privileging the Sex Worker. Uncovering the Rehearsed and Presumed in Sex Work Studies,” in M. Spanger and M. Skilbrei (eds) Prostitution Research in Context, Methodological Representation and Power. Routledge. Oliveira, E. and Vearey, J. (2015) “Images of Place: Visuals from Migrant Women Sex Workers in South Africa,” Medical Anthropology 34 (4): 305 318. Pauwels, L. (2015). “‘Participatory’ Visual Research Revisited: A Critical constructive Assess ment of Epistemological, Methodological and Social Activist Tenets,” Ethnography 16 (1): 95 117. Pollack, S. (2000) “Reconceptualizing Women’s Agency and Empowerment,” Women & Criminal Justice 12 (1): 75 89. Ruiz, M.C. and Nencel, L.S. (2011) “Sex Work (er): the Struggles of a Global Concept,” Local Battles, Global Stakes The Globalization of Local Conflicts and the Localization of Global Interests. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 137 153. Smith, L.T. (2013) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books Ltd. Standing, K. (1998) “Writing the Voices of the Less Powerful,” in Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research. Public Knowledge and Private Lives. London: Sage, 186 202. Tadele, G., Nencel, L., Sabelis, I. and Markos, B. (2021) “Sex Work and Stigma in Ethiopia: Moral Discourses, Major Actors and Representations,” in J. Bjøness, L. Nencel and M. Skilbrei Stigma and Sex Work Studies. London: Routledge (forthcoming). Tadele, G. (2011) “Heteronormativity and ‘Troubled’ Masculinities Among Men Who Have Sex with Men in Addis Ababa,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 13 (04): 457 469. Townsend, E.A. (1998) Good Intentions Overruled: A Critique of Empowerment in the Routine Organization of Mental Health Services. University of Toronto Press. Vince, R. and Warren, S. (2012) “Participatory Visual Methods,” in Qualitative Organizational Research: Core Methods and Current Challenges. London: Sage, 275 295. Wang, C. (2003) “Using Photovoice as a Participatory Assessment and Issue Selection Tool,” Community-based Participatory Research for Health. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 179 196. Wang, C. and Burris, M.A. (1997) “Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use for Par ticipatory Needs Assessment,” Health Education & Behavior 24 (3): 369 387. Wiles, R., Prosser, J., Bagnoli, A., Clark, A., Davies, K., Holland, S. and Renold, E. (2008) Visual Ethics: Ethical Issues in Visual Research. eprints.ncrm.ac.uk. Woensdregt, L. and Nencel, L. (2020) “Male Sex Workers’(in) Visible Risky Bodies International Health Development: Now You See Them, Now You Don’t,” Culture, Health & Sexuality, 1 14. Young, L. and Barrett, H. (2001) “Adapting Visual Methods: Action Research with Kam pala Street Children,” Area 33 (2): 141 152.

11 FROM MYOPIA TO CLARITY Biases in International Field Research David A. Cort

Introduction It is now well known that the ways in which we interpret data and ask questions is obscured by blind spots as well as our social locations. Scholars have repeatedly suggested that various types of biases based on the ascribed or achieved status of research informants produce different types of scholarly myopia. Qualitative researchers are trained to own up to these biases and record them in their field notes. However, little work to my knowledge provides an honest and first person account, outside of personal field notes, of how these biases or myopias affect the original questions for a research project, how blind spots were exposed during field research or site visits, and how the focus or research questions changed as a result of this exposure. I begin addressing this gap in the literature using an example from my field research in South Africa. I am a social demographer, not trained in qualitative methods or the intricacies of grounded theory. My research has always been hypothesis driven, with no thought given to how my own biases might color the types of questions I ask or the data I interpret. In short, myopia in research never entered my research consciousness. That all changed when I switched my overall area of research to the study of HIV stigma beliefs and safe sex practices in sub Saharan Africa. After making this switch, I took a sabbatical and went to live in the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa. In South Africa, I hoped to begin a project that, in part, examined how South African Xhosa made sense of their own stigmatizing beliefs about those with HIV/ AIDS and linked those beliefs to their private sexual behaviors. I hoped that the preliminary reading I did and the interviews I would conduct would eventually provide neat answers to the questions I posed at the beginning of the project. I was both correct and incorrect. While the initial questions I posed were reasonable and deserving of an answer, initial conversations with colleagues at my new research DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 15

From Myopia to Clarity 169

site exposed two significant blind spots in how I constructed my original questions, carefully constructed though they were. First, I assumed that in the midst of the HIV pandemic, risky sexual behavior was arguably the most salient behavior contributing to the disease spread. Second, I did not take into account how poverty status could make seemingly “irrational” behavior rational in people’s minds. This initial myopia almost caused me to overlook an entire topic that is as important to the spread of HIV as HIV stigma beliefs and risky sexual behavior. I do not intend this short piece to necessarily provide a new direction to the field. My intentions are much more modest. I hope that my comments provide a first hand description of how myopia can constrain the questions that researchers ask, even before entering the field, and how admitting that myopia exists can be a freeing experience that can uncover interesting questions that were once hidden. In the pages that follow, I accomplish four goals. First, I describe the research project I carried into the field. Second, I discuss how the myopic thinking that undergirded my project was immediately exposed once I entered my research site. Third, I explain why I was initially reluctant to accept new research questions once this myopia was exposed. Finally, I comment on how what I learned once my myopic thinking was revealed and how that revelation will influence what I will do in the future.

The Initial Project Sub Saharan Africa, and Southern Africa in particular, is the epicenter of the largest HIV epidemic in the world, with an estimated 19.4 million people living with HIV and with 800 new infections annually (UNAIDS, 2017). A consequence of having HIV is living with the stigma attached to this virus. Stigma as an ideology or a set of beliefs which suggests that people with HIV are different from others in “normal” society, and that this difference goes beyond merely being infected with the disease (Deacon et al., 2005, 2006; Earnshaw and Chaudoir, 2009; Joffe, 1999; Link and Phelan, 2001; Parker and Aggleton, 2003). Stigmatized individuals often face discrimination and the burden of being ostracized from loved ones and the larger society, leading to and exacerbating poor health outcomes. Research shows that when HIV infected individuals experience stigma, they are less likely to practice protective sexual behaviors such as using condoms and practi cing sexual fidelity (Fortenberry et al., 2002; Hatzenbuehler et al., 2011; 2013). However, we know little about how having stigmatizing beliefs, or participating in stigmatizing discourses, also contributes to safe sex practices in Southern Africa. Fur thermore, we know little about how the meanings Southern Africans attach to HIV stigma beliefs and the boundaries they create between themselves and the infected affect their personal decisions concerning safe sex practices. Given this gap in the literature, the main aim of my project was to explore and explain how having stig matizing beliefs is associated with the private sexual behaviors of HIV infected and uninfected individuals in Southern Africa.

170 David A. Cort

One part of this project involved using quantitative data to examine the degree to which stigma beliefs were associated with safe sex practices. The major finding from this part of the project is that those who express stigmatizing or conservative beliefs toward those infected with HIV/AIDS are less likely to engage in safe sex practices (Cort and Tu, 2018; Billings et al., 2020). This finding may appear counterintuitive because one might expect that holding stigmatizing beliefs would be associated with more vigilance in sexual behaviors, not less. However, it is consistent with studies showing associations between conservative beliefs and permissive sexual behavior (see Paik et al., 2016). Given these findings, we argued that holding stigmatizing beliefs, or placing infected individuals into an “other” category, may make people feel safe in not being part of the outgroup. This feeling of safety may lead to less sexual vigilance because HIV infection is something that happens to “other people, not me.” We also find that this counterintuitive pattern was most pronounced in Southern African countries, where HIV prevalence is highest, suggesting that social context can alter the strength of important biomedical and social relationships. In this work, we were able to expose a problematic assumption that only the uninfected stigmatize, and argue that stigmatization is part of a labeling process that involves HIV infected and uninfected individuals. To uncover the social processes and cultural meanings that provide insight into the mechanisms explaining the relationship between HIV stigma beliefs and safe sex practices, I sought to collect and analyze qualitative in depth interviews from HIV positive and negative Xhosa men and women who live in the rural and urban Eastern Cape of South Africa. I decided to target the Eastern Cape for two reasons. First, while the province is largely rural and poor with very high HIV prevalence rates, its major cities (East London and Port Elizabeth) contain pockets of prosperity where HIV prevalence is relatively low. Second, I was fortunate enough to earn a Fulbright Fellowship that supported the development of research in areas that were underdeveloped during the Apartheid era. My general plan was to collect and analyze 48 semi structured interviews of HIV positive and negative Xhosa men and women who reside in the rural and urban Eastern Cape of South Africa. Specifically, I planned to recruit people into one of four cells, each equally divided between men and women: 12 HIV positive rural respondents, 12 HIV positive urban respondents, 12 HIV negative rural respondents, and 12 HIV negative urban respondents. In all cells, I planned to vary respondents by age. I also planned to separate respondents by rural and urban status, primarily because past scholarship suggests that HIV stigma beliefs and how HIV is perceived differs across these settings. Collectively, this literature suggests that rural urban differences are explained by individual differences in social structure, socio economic status, and levels of literacy (Campbell et al., 2008; French et al., 2014; Mswela, 2009; Naidoo et al., 2007; Rankin et al., 2005). I designed my interview protocol to include questions that encouraged respondents to discuss their beliefs about several different types of HIV stigma beliefs, the meanings they attached to those beliefs, the extent to which they created boundaries between themselves and the stigmatized, their views on safe sex practices, and the connection

From Myopia to Clarity 171

between stigma beliefs and safe sex practices. Using the assistance of a South African co author and his female research assistant, I planned to conduct the in person inter views in Xhosa. The co author and I decided to have the female research assistant conduct all the interviews because female interviewees are often reluctant to discuss sexual topics with male interviewers (Broom et al., 2009). However, men are often open to discussing sexual topics with both men and women.

Entering the Field: Unexpected Research Advice I began my South Africa Fulbright and my research project in January 2018. Prior to arriving in Mthatha—where my host site Walter Sisulu University (WSU) was located—I sent my research proposal to one of the faculty sponsors. He promised to read the proposal closely prior to my arrival. He kept his word. When I arrived and we had our official meeting, he immediately started to discuss my project, but not in the way that I expected. He began by telling me that a lot had changed in South Africa since the government made a concerted effort to get all HIV infected individuals on an antiretroviral (ART) drug regimen. He said that the effort had been widely successful and that the rate of new infections had stabilized. None of this information was particularly surprising, even for a new entrant into the field. However, he continued by saying that at the height of the HIV epidemic, many people were dying from the disease. During that time, the newly established ANC government provided monthly monetary grants to many different types of individuals as a poverty alleviation strategy. One of the things that could qualify people for a monthly grant was having a medically documented disability (about R780 per month or $110). At that time, ART drugs were just becoming widely available; an HIV diagnosis was therefore a death sentence. The government’s logic was that because the disease would eventually cause someone to be disabled and not work, they could qualify for a modest sustenance grant. My colleague then said something surprising. He said that back then, even though people knew that contracting HIV was akin to a death sentence, there were people who would deliberately expose themselves to HIV so that they could qualify for the grant. In fact, people who wanted the monthly sus tenance would say that “we are looking for the disease.” He went on to say that while my project was interesting, I should study why people would have made that decision even though they knew the eventual consequences of the disease. Upon hearing this, I thanked him for his comments and immediately dismissed them. I simply did not believe that people would deliberately expose themselves to HIV for any reason. I thanked him for his insights and returned to my work. Eight months after this conversation, I was preparing to leave South Africa. Part of my departure activities involved giving a research seminar to the Faculty of Health Sciences at WSU. The audience contained mostly physicians who worked at Nelson Mandela Hospital and at the many rural clinics in the surrounding Eastern Cape. I spoke of my work and my plans for the future. In particular, I discussed the anomalous finding that conservative stigma beliefs were associated with lower likelihoods of safe sex practices. I told the audience that I would be back to South

172 David A. Cort

Africa for several years to come exploring this finding that initially appeared anomalous, but was supported by a larger literature in sexuality studies. During the Q&A period, a physician raised her hand and said, “I’ll tell you what’s anomalous. Some of the patients in my rural clinic exposed themselves to HIV so that they could get access to the monthly grant.” I was shocked because I had ignored a similar comment for eight months, and for good reason, I thought. I ignored the initial comment because I believed that since knowledge of the con sequences of HIV and how it is spread were very widespread in South Africa, no rational person would deliberately expose themselves to a disease that was incurable for what appeared to be a negligible amount of money. However, I was now receiving the same message from a doctor who did not know the colleague who first mentioned it to me. I was so shocked, I didn’t know how to respond. I quickly wrapped up my activities in South Africa and returned to the United States.

Coming to Grips with Myopia Global North Myopia In the time since my return, I have been consumed with uncovering the reason for my reluctance to accept the suggestions and information from my colleagues in South Africa. As previously stated, I admitted to myself that I did not believe my colleagues’ comments because of the blind spots I brought into the field concerning rationality, poverty, and what was really important to people during a life threatening pandemic. To understand my initial reluctance, blind spots, and how notions of rationality (which is rooted in Global North or rational choice economic theory) undergirded them, one must consider the social context in South Africa at that time and keep in mind that the phenomenon my colleagues were talking about was occurring at the height of the pandemic at the beginning of the introduction of ART medication. People were dying at high rates, and the South African government had done a good job of educating citizens about the nature of the disease and how it was spread. Nevertheless, people still did not have a lot of information about how well ART medication would work in the future, nor did they know the degree to which it would prolong life and make HIV similar to chronic disease. Knowing that South Africans did not have that type of foreknowledge at the time, I found it irrational that for a modest monthly stipend, people would deliberately expose themselves to a disease they knew was permanent and deadly. Put differently, my assumption was that across cultures, people are “rational” in their beha vior. They would not exchange temporary monthly succor for a permanently debilitat ing, if not fatal disease. In other words, I assumed that people made rational choice decisions. Furthermore, I reasoned that even if they knew that ART medication could prolong their lives indefinitely, they still knew that the drugs could not cure the disease. This reasoning, or what I would call “Global North myopia,” prevented me from con sidering my colleagues’ observations as a possible avenue of research. In short, I ignored contextually important advice and refused to entertain a divergence in research trajectory because of myopic thinking rooted in Global North rational choice theory.

From Myopia to Clarity 173

Rationality is Contextual: System-Gaming and Deliberate Infection After arriving home, I started a personal investigation to see if there was any truth to my colleagues’ statements about deliberate infection. My investigation produced two insights. First, it appears that during the early days of the HIV epidemic, poor South Africans were indeed very rational about the disease, their poverty status, and their reactions to those two realities. Second, although the logic and theoretical foundation for my original project were well thought out, I held deeply ingrained personal biases about people’s social realities and what they might actually do when dealing with poverty and a rapidly spreading epidemic. Evidence concerning the rationality of South Africans’ responses to their poverty status and the rising HIV epidemic can be found in the qualitative and policy literatures from South Africa (Leclerc Madlala, 2006; Nattrass, 2006) literature. This scholarship suggests that in the early days of the epidemic, the South African government provided disability grants to people who were HIV positive. However, the government also stipulated that to receive the funding, a grant candidate had to be sick—or virtually disabled—and unable to work. A sick person’s viral load had to be below a certain point and regularly certified by at least two physicians. If the candidate was not deemed sick enough by physicians, then the patient did not receive the grant. In other words, the South African government instituted a means test to receive the monthly grant funding and stipulated that the means test had to be verified regularly by physicians. Despite the fact that this monthly award appeared modest, it was at the time more than double the median income for black South Africans. Many people who were desperately poor therefore depended on it for sustenance. As such, the means test incentivized HIV positive patients to game the system by encouraging them to appear sick enough to keep qualifying for the grant (Nattrass, 2006). Qualitative evidence suggests that HIV positive people would go to heroic lengths to ensure that they qualified for grant funding (Leclerc Madlala, 2006). Specifically, they would refrain from taking their ART medication, thereby allowing their viral load to drop below the grant qualification cut point. Once they were certified to be eligible for grant funding, they would then take medication to increase their viral load. While engaging in this system gaming likely decreased the efficacy of the ART medication, it ensured access to the monetary rewards of the disability grant. This insight provided strong evidence that poor South Africans who were HIV positive were more rational in their responses to their poverty status and the reality of the expanding HIV epidemic than I ever imagined. They had enough foresight and ingenuity to understand that temporarily sacrificing their health would yield months of monetary support for their families. While the desire of poor South Africans who were HIV positive to game the system and sacrifice their health is conceptually interesting and epidemiologically troubling, Leclerc Madlala (2006) reports an even more chilling report from her field research in Durban, South Africa clinic that directly supported what my

174 David A. Cort

colleagues initially told me. In the following quotation, one of the nurses she interviewed recounts a patient’s adverse reaction to a HIV negative test result: This man….umph….he wouldn’t take no [emphasis mine] for an answer to his test. He said he had arthritis, STIs, since he was a boy, headaches, sores on his legs, many things. I told him that wasn’t HIV, that was his other problems, but he wouldn’t listen. He was so cross. When he came again after a few weeks, I was afraid to talk to him. I asked my colleague to see him. He was just after this grant, that’s all. It is important to stress that the patient was HIV negative, and was upset that his test result supported this diagnosis. He also knew that an HIV positive result car ried monetary value. As such, if he had chosen to do so (and there is no evidence that he did), exchanging his negative diagnosis for a positive one would have been a rational calculation in his own mind. The benefit of being eligible for monthly support may have been worth becoming HIV positive. This would have been true at a time when the introduction of ART medication was new and people did not have extensive information about the extent to which this medication would have made HIV a disease that was entirely manageable. While pondering this evidence as well as my colleagues’ statements provided a clearer understanding of how poor HIV positive and negative South Africans may have reacted to the availability of disability grant funding, my time away from the field exposed a deeply held bias concerning human behavior. Specifically, I entered the field assuming that while people’s behavior was rational, it was universally rational. As such, when I first arrived in South Africa and heard about people “looking for the disease,” I disregarded that information as a possible avenue for research because I assumed that what was rational behavior in a Western context was also rational behavior across all societies, including southern Africa. This myopic assumption prevented me from critically examining my colleagues’ advice and asking a question that was arguably more interesting than the one I brought with me to the field: what are the social processes that spur rational people to make seemingly irrational health decisions? A slightly more concrete phrasing of that question would be the following question: during the height of the HIV epidemic, why would HIV positive and negative South Africans compromise their health for the modest sustenance that disability grants provided?1 This point is worth amplifying. The research questions I took with me to the field were not sophomoric or ill conceived. In fact, I will continue to explore the relationship between stigma beliefs and safe sex practices in a future project. However, my myopic thinking initially led me to assume that the economic and health information that poor South Africans had their disposal at the start of the HIV epidemic would lead them to make health and economic choices that were rational, in a western context. It never occurred to me that permanently compro mising one’s health as a means of gaming the system, or deliberating infecting oneself with HIV could be contextually rational behaviors worthy of scientific

From Myopia to Clarity 175

exploration and explanation. As such, I missed an early opportunity to explore this possibility while still living close to my research site.

Positive Alternative Reasons for Ignoring Initial Advice Aside from my own reluctance—based on Global North notions of rationality—to take my colleagues’ assertions seriously, readers might rightly point to at least two reasons why they might be reluctant to pursue this line of research if presented with this initial evidence. First, if one were to take up this new project, it would require being on “the other side” of interviewees, and understanding their mindset. Especially for HIV negative individuals, deliberate infection might cast inter viewees—especially those with familial responsibilities—in a negative light. Second, although South Africa has one of the most liberal social assistance programs on the continent, there are economically conservative forces who oppose liberal cash transfers like disability grants. As such, research findings showing that South African respondents participate in any sort of system gaming could make it difficult to generate additional support for cash transfer programs in the future.

Conclusion and Future Directions As I mentioned above, I am not using my experiences in South Africa as a means of breaking new ground in the field. I only intend that my experiences will serve as a concrete example of three points that veteran international field researchers may already be aware of. First, when building international research project and con structing preliminary research questions, always assume that myopic thinking is already present. Assume that it has already corrupted the project’s logic and the theoretical foundation of the research questions. Put differently, assume that westernized biases concerning what is good research and what is a carefully constructed research question can determine what a research project looks at the early stages. If scholars admit this to themselves very early on, then they will be less surprised by what they encounter in the field. This is especially true of scholars who are experts in field, but non native to the specific research sites they will enter. Second, do not make assumptions about what is rational and what is irrational in the behavior research subjects. Instead, assume that all human behavior is rational in its context. Thinking in this way allows researchers to admit to his own biases while understanding that the social reality and behavior of research subjects may not make sense to those outside their social contexts. Upholding the universal rationality of human behavior will also allow international field researchers to uncover research questions that were once hidden from them. These hidden research questions may not only shed light on the world in which research subjects live, but may also raise interesting questions about the world that will greet scholars once they return from the field. The final point is personal, and is directed at myself. In my future work in South Africa, I am strongly considering abandoning the terms rational and irrational

176 David A. Cort

altogether, for they expose myopia quite explicitly. Making pre conceived assumptions about whether research subjects’ motives make sense will allow me and other international field researchers to consider research questions that they would not normally think appropriate or consider. In the future, I plan to continue my work on stigma beliefs and safe sex practices in southern Africa. However, I will also design a new project that examines how the social realities HIV infected South Africans faced during the beginning of the HIV epidemic affected their everyday decisions about finding sustenance and managing their health. My long term aim is to understand the social processes that spur rational people to make health decisions that don’t initially appear to be beneficial to them. To do so, I will likely interview government stakeholders who were instrumental in designing the social grant programs, physicians who treated HIV patients, and HIV negative and positive patients and their relatives who lived through that turbulent time. I hope that these interviews will shed light on the behaviors and decisions people made at that time and the context in which they made those decisions.

Note 1 This question addresses why people make the decisions they make as it relates to the gaming process. However, there are far more complicated potential directions for research related to how the gaming process actually works that I could reasonably undertake. For example, I could seek to understand (1) how individuals learn the intricacies of gaming, (2) which types of social networks individuals use to support gaming processes, (3) what types of outcomes result from gaming processes.

References Billings, Katie, Cort, David A., Rozario, Tannuja and Siegel, Derek (2020) “HIV Stigma Beliefs in Context: Country and Regional Variation in the Effects of Instrumental Stigma Beliefs on Protective Sexual Behaviors in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa,” Social Science & Medicine. Broom, Alex, Hand, Kelly and Tovey, Philip (2009) “The Role of Gender, Environment, and Individual Biography in Shaping Qualitative Interview Data,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 12 (1): 51 65. Campbell, Catherine, Nair, Yugi, Maimane, Sbongile and Sibiya, Zweni (2008) “Supporting People with AIDS and their Carers in Rural South Africa: Possibilities and Challenges,” Health and Place 14 (3): 507 518. Cort, David A. and Hsin, Fei Tu (2018) “Safety in Stigmatizing? Instrumental Stigma Beliefs and Protective Sexual Behavior in Sub Saharan Africa,” Social Science & Medicine 197: 144 152. Deacon, Harriet (2005) Understanding HIV/AIDS Stigma: A Theoretical and Methodological Analysis. Pretoria, South Africa: HSRC Press. Deacon, Harriet (2006) “Towards a Sustainable Theory of Health Related Stigma: Lessons from the HIV/AIDS Literature,” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 16 (6): 418 425. Earnshaw, Valerie A. and Chaudoir, Stephenie R. (2009) “From Conceptualizing to Mea suring HIV Stigma: A Review of HIV Stigma Mechanism Measures,” AIDS and Behavior 13 (6): 1160 1177.

From Myopia to Clarity 177

Fortenberry, J. Dennis, McFarlane, Mary, Bleakley, Amy, Bull, Sheana, Fishbein, Martin, Grimley, Diane M., Malotte, C. Kevin and Stoner, Bradley P. (2002) “Relationships of Stigma and Shame to Gonorrhea and HIV Screening,” American Journal of Public Health 92 (3): 378 381. French, Heleen, Greeff, Minrie, Watson, Martha J. and Doak, Coleen M. (2014) “A Com prehensive HIV Stigma Reduction and Wellness Enhancement Community Intervention: A Case Study,” The Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, 26 (1), 81 96. Hatzenbuehler, Mark L., O’cleirigh, Conall, Mayer, Kenneth H., Mimiaga, Matthew J. and Safren, Steven A. (2011) “Prospective Associations Between HIV Related Stigma, Transmission Risk Behaviors, and Adverse Mental Health Outcomes in Men Who Have Sex With Men,” Annals of Behavioral Medicine 42 (2): 227 234. Hatzenbuehler, Mark L., Phelan, Jo C. and Link, Bruce G. (2013) “Stigma as a Fundamental Cause of Population Health Inequalities,” American Journal of Public Health 103 (5): 813 821. Joffe, Helene (1999) Risk and ‘the Other’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leclerc Madlala, Suzanne (2006) “We Will Eat When I Get the Grant: Negotiating AIDS, Poverty, and Antiretroviral Treatment in South Africa,” African Journal of AIDS Research 5 (3): 249 256. Link, Bruce G. and Phelan, Jo C. (2001) “Conceptualizing Stigma,” Annual Review of Sociology 27: 363 385. Mswela, Maureen (2009) “Cultural Practices and HIV in South Africa: A Legal Perspective,” Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal 12 (4): 172 260. Naidoo, Joanne R., Uys, Leana R., Greeff, Minrie, Holzemer, William L., Makoae, Lucy, Dlamini, Pricilla, Phetlhu, Rene D., Chirwa, Maureen and Kohi, Thecla (2007) “Urban and Rural Differences in HIV/AIDS Stigma in Five African Countries,” African Journal of AIDS Research 6 (1): 17 23. Nattrass, Nicoli (2006) “Trading off Income and Health? AIDS and the Disability Grant in South Africa,” Journal of Social Policy 35: 3 19. Paik, Anthony, Sanchagrin, Kenneth J. and Heimer, Karen (2016) “Broken Promises: Abstinence Pledging and Sexual and Reproductive Health,” Journal of Marriage and Family 78: 546 561. Parker, Richard, and Aggleton, Peter (2003) “HIV and AIDS Related Stigma and Dis crimination:A Conceptual Framework and Implications for Action,” Social Science & Medicine 57 (1): 13 24. Rankin, William W., Brennan, Sean, Schell, Ellen, Laviwa, Jones and Rankin, Sally H. (2005) “The Stigma of Being HIV Positive in Africa,” Plos Medicine 2 (8): 702 704.

PART IV

Concluding Conversations

12 STUDYING THOSE WHO HATE US: FEAR, ANXIETY AND BLIND-SPOTS IN RESEARCHING THE RIGHT Janice Irvine and Arlene Stein

During the Clinton years of the 1990s, volatile social and political conflicts raged throughout the United States on national and local levels. Dubbed “the culture wars,” these battles were fought over issues such as sex education, lesbian and gay rights (this was before the now common LGBTQIA2S acronym), sexuality in art and popular culture, pornography, and reproductive rights. Sociologists Janice Irvine and Arlene Stein, living on opposite coasts, launched separate studies on the ways religious conservatives were influencing sexual politics. Janice’s book, Talk About Sex (2002), focused on Christian conservative opposition to comprehensive sex educa tion; in The Stranger Next Door (2001) Arlene analyzed campaigns against lesbian and gay rights. In this dialogue, which took place more than 25 years after those books were published, Irvine and Stein reflect on how historical contexts shape research agendas, the challenges they faced as members of the first cohort of out lesbian sociologists in the academy, and the emotion work involved in interviewing members of conservative religious communities who opposed their very existence. Janice: Hi Arlene! I thought we might start by discussing how we decided to study religious conservatives. By the early 90s, the newspapers were filled with accounts of bitter battles over sex education that were sweeping cities and towns all over the US, including in very liberal communities like Newton, Massachusetts. I had been living in Cambridge, and aware of these escalating conflicts since the mid 80s. I knew one of the ACLU lawyers working on a major lawsuit against the Reagan Administration for its First Amendment violations, for example, sponsoring public school sex education classes rife with religious doctrine. I had just published my book on sex researchers, Disorders of Desire (1990), so it seemed like a small step to study sex educators. Honestly, I think I was initially intrigued by the drama of the public debates, which not infrequently involved shouting matches. So I began doing focused research, including interviews with both advocates and opponents of sex education. Whenever I found out that a conflict had broken out in a city that was within driving distance, I’d hop in my car and go to public debates and school DOI: 10.4324/9781003208563 17

182 Janice Irvine and Arlene Stein

board meetings. In the beginning, I didn’t realize that the project would focus on how religious conservatives built a powerful movement in part through mobilizing cultural anxieties about sex. Arlene: My project began when I moved to Oregon in the early 1990s, which was in the throes of a statewide ballot measure campaign to outlaw gay and lesbian rights. I had spent the previous 15 years in the Bay Area and in the UK, where I was surrounded by those who thought pretty much the same way as I did on matters of gender and sexuality. We took for granted the belief that sexual self expression is a positive thing, and that same sex intimacy was the moral equivalent of heterosexuality. We assumed we were on the cusp of creating a different, more egalitarian society. I was aware of the fact that religious conservatives were making inroads in some parts of the country, but I knew very little about them. The col lege town of Eugene, Oregon, where I was living, was a liberal outpost surrounded by pockets of evangelical Christians who were, in the early 1990s, becoming more politically organized. I traveled to one of the towns where they had mounted a ballot measure campaign to outlaw gay and lesbian rights, and I began to talk with folks. I was curious about who they were, what motivated them, and what they wanted to achieve. Janice: We were both studying religious conservatives in a rapidly changing historical moment, although it was impossible to know that while in the thick of research. We have recently joked, correctly I think, that our books are historical artifacts from an era when it was possible, unlike now, for activist lesbian scholars to conduct research among people adamantly opposed to our rights and, indeed, our very existence. Homophobia was an entrenched norm, even among many progressives. Yet the people we were studying perceived themselves as outsiders too. In the 1980s and 90s, politicized evangelicals believed that they were holding off the onslaught of an increasingly depraved “secular humanist” culture. And they felt that they were unfairly criticized for doing so. Yet many liberals paid little attention to right wing religious activism during those long, Democratic, Clinton years. I think this contributed to conservatives’ openness, even eagerness, to discuss their activist beliefs with sociologists like us. At the same time, since there was little mainstream visibility of lesbians, we didn’t set off alarm bells in the way we would now. It wasn’t until George W. Bush took office as I was finishing my book, bringing new visibility—and political power—to Christian evangelicals, that they became much more cautious about talking to outsiders. Arlene: I agree. When I began to interview Christian conservatives in 1997, I found that they were pleased to speak with me. They wanted to tell their stories: about how they found Jesus, came to be activists, and how they saw themselves as defenders of morality. Their willingness to speak with me was motivated in part by their feeling that they had been misrepresented by liberals as being hateful. They did not see themselves as haters, but as protectors of tradition and “family values.” They often invoked the phrase “love the sinner, hate the sin.” In other words, homosexuality may be immoral, but gay people are not inherently sinful. Some of them really believed that, I think, which helped to insulate them from accusations

Studying Those Who Hate Us: Fear, Anxiety and Blind spots 183

that they were trying to persecute a whole group of people. At the same time, the religious activists I interviewed often had pretty stereotypical understandings of homosexuals: that they were child abusers, and radically gender non conforming— very much the “other.” I was always surprised that they never suspected that I was a lesbian. Perhaps I didn’t conform to their understanding of what a lesbian looks like. Or perhaps my status as a professor at the university was the most salient aspect of my identity for them and that was enough for them to handle at once. Janice: It’s amazing to remember how, in the pre internet era, doing research consisted of making cold telephone calls and mailing actual letters. But the absence of Google meant that the religious activists I wanted to interview couldn’t go online and read about me ahead of time. So this afforded me an anonymity that just doesn’t exist now. At the time, not a single person refused an interview (a friend of mine kept exclaiming, “I can’t believe people just agree to talk to you!”), which they likely would not have done if they had discovered I was a lefty, lesbian activist. It would be impossible for me to do this study now. So the pre Internet silence served me well. But a definite blind spot back then was my failure to think through what it would feel like to conduct research among such vehemently anti gay activists. Arlene: I can relate to your comment about not having fully thought through the implications of doing this work. While I was attracted to the edginess of my project, I don’t think I fully understood what I was taking on personally and professionally. Conducting the research required a great deal of emotional labor, including the kinds of “deep acting,” that Arlie Hochschild (1983) has described so well. I had to actively manage both my internal emotional states and my public persona. I needed to partially closet myself to get my Christian right subjects to talk with me, and to protect myself from being attacked by them. I was also dealing with the persistence of subtle forms of homophobia within the Academy, which sent the message that studying a political campaign against homosexuality was not worthy of my time. Janice: Field researchers are familiar with risk. There’s a handbook called Dangerous Fieldwork (Lee, 1995), which discusses hazards of field research, such as disease, vio lence, or arrest. And I think of sociologist Kathleen Blee’s (1992) harrowing tales of studying women of the Ku Klux Klan, like when she was blindfolded and driven to a remote, anonymous location to conduct her interview. Whew, chilling! Increasingly, we are recognizing the emotional hazards ethnographers face, such as trauma experi enced while conducting research in war zones. Ghassan Moussawi and Jyoti Puri dis cuss these dynamics in Chapter 5 of this volume. But trauma can result from less obviously traumatic field situations. For example, Ruth Pearce (2020) talks about “researching while trans,” detailing the burdens marginalized ethnographers can face. She notes that managing, and surviving, the emotional complexities of conducting research as a marginalized outsider is “a methodological issue.” I’m thinking that you and I faced some specific emotional challenges as a result of our marginal identities, both as lesbians studying anti gay activists, and as lesbian academics in a homophobic university system. Fear, stress, even the shame of stig matization lurked for me. I can see now, how those feelings were research

184 Janice Irvine and Arlene Stein

obstacles. In my project, I often interviewed people in their homes, which paired a disconcerting intimacy with my fear that they might verbally attack me. On one level, I totally neglected these feelings of anxiety, pushing through them and yet also acting on them. Once I wanted to attend a local meeting of sex ed opponents that was held at a church, and I took a gay man friend whom attendees presumed was my husband. I wore a wig over my short hair and a dyke friend applied my make up and lent me a dress. I definitely got some odd looks—I suspect I looked like a survivor of a recent chemotherapy session. At this point in my career, I doubt I would choose to do research in such potentially hostile situations. And I never used any material from that meeting in my book. Back then, however, it definitely would have helped to have recognized these feelings and sought the support of kindred scholars. Of course, that’s easy to say now when sociology is queerer; at that time I was the only gay person in my department, which had a lot of underlying homophobia, and it was still pretty hard being a lesbian researcher. It’s difficult to say in retrospect, but I imagine that these underlying anxieties played a role in my increasing unwillingness to continue interviewing at a certain point in the project. Arlene: There were gays and lesbians in academia before us, of course, some of whom came out during the course of their careers. But we were among the first to apply for academic jobs as out lesbians. That was a point of pride for me—and also, at times, anxiety producing. My first book, after all, was a study of lesbian iden tities. But while I was very out as a lesbian academic I decided not to come out to my interviewees in Oregon because if I had done so, chances are they would not speak with me. I decided that I would tell them if they asked, but they never did. Instead, my Jewishness became a source of intense curiosity to some of them. Frankly, I welcomed that—it distracted from other aspects of myself, which might have been more threatening to them. Like you, I found that people were very willing to talk with me, and they were often flattered that I was interested in hearing about their lives. I was interested in meeting and talking with them. I wanted to try to understand the world from their perspective, which was so dif ferent from mine. But it was also stressful to be watching over one’s shoulder lest others find out. Here I was radically out in my professional life, but I had to manage my identity in the field. Janice: OK, in our focus on silences about sexual identity, let’s not skip over your comment about being a Jewish scholar studying Christian conservatives. How did their “curiosity” manifest itself, and how did they know you were Jewish? Did you feel they were antisemitic? Arlene: My interest in the Christian right was partially motivated by my Jewishness. I am fairly secular, but I grew up in a family of Holocaust survivors for whom Jewishness was absolutely salient. I had never really stepped into a church before doing the research for The Stranger Next Door, let alone a fundamentalist one. I was fascinated, and a little terrified, about this corner of American culture that was so alien to me. I brought sociologist friends along to church services I attended because I felt so exposed—like they were going to figure out I didn’t belong there and throw me out! But actually, the

Studying Those Who Hate Us: Fear, Anxiety and Blind spots 185

opposite was the case. As a Jew, I was a perfect target for conversion, and I quickly learned to come out as Jewish as a way of getting people to talk with me. Few evange lical Christians in the small town I studied had ever met a Jewish person before, and yet Jews play such an important role in their theological universe, obviously. But I kept my agnosticism hidden—that was far more offensive than my Jewishness to my Christian conservative interviewees. In fact, I remember calling one guy on the phone, a leader of the antigay group, and he asked me straight up if I was a “believer.” When I told him that I was Jewish, he said, “I meant are you a believer in God?” He saw religious Jews as engaged in a common struggle with religious Christians—a culture war. The enemy was “secular humanism” and godless homosexuals. I think the fact that I was one of those too never occurred to him—or if it did, he didn’t mention it. So, no I never encoun tered overt antisemitism in my research, though I did encounter philosemitism, its close cousin (“Those Jews, they are very smart, and good with money.”) Disclosing my homosexuality to my interviewees would have been much more difficult, and possibly even dangerous to do, in such a politicized context. Janice: My research focused on sex education conflicts, not lesbian and gay issues specifically. But conservative activists targeted any discussion of homo sexuality in the classroom as dangerous, disgusting, and perverted. Anti gay framing was very much one of their tactics. So the topic always came up in interviews. But sexual identity itself, specifically mine, was an area of deep silence. I always felt nervous showing up for an interview. Partly this was just the usual interviewing jitters. Most of the interviews took place in people’s homes, which established a sort of weird intimacy but also an anxiety of being in “enemy” terri tory. I never disclosed that I was a lesbian, but I never disclosed anything else about myself except that I was a sociologist doing this particular research project. And, none of my interviewees ever asked me anything about myself, which I found pretty surprising. Only one woman ever paused during one of her answers and said, “You’ll have to tell me what you think about this,” but then she never fol lowed up, to my relief. So in some ways I felt concealed and somewhat protected by the silence about myself, but never fully safe in the interviews. Arlene: Like you, I tried to present myself as neutrally as possible—personally, politically, and in every way. I didn’t see this as particularly deceptive; we all per form differently according to the context we’re in. I simply decided to bring my professional identity into the field, rather than my lesbian one. The latter was always there, of course. Context is key, too. The fact that I was interviewing folks in small town Oregon, where people tend to dress casually, worked to my advan tage. I didn’t have to wear a skirt, or dress any differently than I always dressed—to teach, I don my professional drag, which consists of pants and a jacket. But while interviewing conservatives, I was buttoned up, and like you, no one ever asked me about myself. The one exception, other than when that man asked me if I was believer, was when a female leader of a local antigay campaign asked me if I was married, and I told her I was. I had been in a nearly ten year relationship with my partner at the time, which seemed pretty married to me. That comment came back to bite me when the book came out and she learned I was a lesbian.

186 Janice Irvine and Arlene Stein

Janice: My personal appearance always worried me in interviews. I’ve never done femininity well. So even though I performed my version of dressing up for interviews, it never rose to the level of acceptable femininity. I did get a little more mileage out of my UMass interview outfit—an Ann Taylor skirt and jacket that I never wore to work again after my UMass job talk—and once in New York, walking to a particularly scary interview, I impulsively stopped into a cosmetics store and they did a “make over” on me (I bought some of the eyeliner and blush as compensation). The issue of “deception” in research is a complicated one—if a conventionally feminine woman wears make up it isn’t considered deception. Is it deception to wear makeup to make yourself look less stereotypically like a dyke? Arlene: That is so funny, especially since someone, a sociologist in our circles, once told me that I reminded her of you—even though I don’t think we look alike. Janice: All dykes look alike! Arlene: It’s that androgynous style, I suppose, and the fact that we’re both short. But I can relate to your fear of not being a “good enough” female in public. I think that’s probably a residue of the fact that we both grew up in a transitional period, when gay people were forced to look over our shoulders to make sure that we were passing okay in public. That was not an issue in San Francisco, where I spent my formative young adult years, where queerness (though we didn’t call it that) was very much the norm, or at least it was celebrated. Spending my 20s in San Francisco as a budding lesbian was a little bit like growing up Jewish in New York: it felt safe, and emboldened me to claim those aspects of myself. So by the time I moved to Oregon to begin my career as a sociologist, I was no longer willing to compromise very much. I wanted to bring all of who I was into my work. But as you know, in order to research those who disagree with you, espe cially when they disagree about whether or not you even have the right to exist, you must be strategic. Janice: It always surprised me a bit that people didn’t just slam the door shut after they saw me, but queer people were just not on the radar screen of the mainstream back then. They didn’t know the codes and frames by which to recognize us. It never occurred to many people that they knew anyone who was lesbian or gay. And conservative religious activists seemed to just use “the gay agenda” as a political device, and didn’t seem to consider that they might be talk ing to, or somehow encountering, an actual gay person. All this began to change later, in part because of broader media presence, in particular the landmark moment in 1997 when Ellen DeGeneres came out on her television show. By that time, most of my interviews had been conducted. Probably all of my interviewees were openly anti gay when we had our discus sions. And I was glad. It was part of their ideology and political strategy, so, as a researcher, I remember feeling relieved and pleased to hear them unabashedly voicing these homophobic beliefs during the interviews. In those moments, I was detached from my personal emotions, and any anger, shame, or overall discomfort were definitely neglected feelings. I remember these feelings now, but at the time I could almost picture the comments as quotes on a manuscript page.

Studying Those Who Hate Us: Fear, Anxiety and Blind spots 187

This brings me to another feeling, one that I expressed to colleagues at the time of writing—guilt. I worried about betraying my interviewees. I hadn’t come out to them but more importantly, they didn’t know I would be critically analytic of their anti sex edu cation views and political activism. I started feeling guilty when I remembered sit ting at the kitchen table with a woman activist on Staten Island who had made gingerbread for me. Now I was quoting her deeply homophobic comments as evidence. I didn’t name any of the activists in my book, so I wasn’t making her a target or shaming her. But still. I discussed my feelings with Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates and he laughed and said, “Ah yes, the Judas syndrome,” and assured me that mine was a common feeling. I still sometimes think about that woman from Staten Island. Unlike your experience, I doubt any of my inter viewees read my book. Can you talk about what it was like for you to have the people in your town react to your book? Arlene: The fact that I was writing about activists in a small town who knew one another, and in a small state (population wise) where lots of social networks overlap, made my project really different from yours, I think. Your interviewees didn’t know each other, right? I changed the name of the town I did my research in, thinking I was protecting people’s identities by doing so. Little did I know that the state’s newspaper The Oregonian, would review the book and “out” the town. Once that happened, my right wing subjects learned about the book and many of them read it. A copy of the book made the rounds in which someone had written in the actual names of my interviewees, next to their pseudonyms! One of the primary activists I wrote about, the woman who asked me if I was married, then went on a campaign to get the book banned by the local town council. The town knew enough not to try to do that, but in the meantime, my name was dragged through the mud. Earlier, I did feel somewhat ambivalent about exposing them, and shaming them—even if they were targeting innocent people who were just minding their own business. I had some lingering guilt feelings about the fact that I had a good deal more cultural capital than most of them did. I didn’t necessarily have more money, but I was better educated and more worldly, which meant that I could publish a book that exposed their activities that people might read. They didn’t have that power. But when they came after me when the book was pub lished, my guilt dissipated. I lived a half hour away from the town I studied, and I was easy to find. Someone left a note on my car telling me to “go back where I came from.” I knew what that meant. The local television station, which had a Christian evangelical anchorman, did a hit piece on me. I was pretty freaked out, to be honest, and relieved that I was about to move to the East Coast, to take a job at Rutgers. So the person who told me to go back where I came from got their wish, I guess. In retrospect, I think that one of the things that exacerbated their wrath was that I promised them confidentiality and couldn’t deliver it. They were right about that. I’ve written about this elsewhere (Stein, 2010). Janice: As I think back on these silences about sexuality, and my “neglected” feelings during and after the interviews, I realize how important intellectual and

188 Janice Irvine and Arlene Stein

political communities are. It would have been great to have talked this through with you at the time! In the nineties, during the Clinton Administration, no one was really taking the Christian right seriously. That changed with the election of George Bush. But it felt pretty lonely at the time. I’m struck now with how much isolation I was navigating. I’m wondering how you dealt with these issues. Arlene: At the time I was a part of an activist/intellectual community in Oregon that was trying to make sense of the right and organize against it—which made it possible for me to do this work. Still, it’s a pity we didn’t know one another at the time, so that we could’ve supported one another. I knew of you, of course, having reviewed Disorders of Desire, which I loved, but we did not actually meet until much later. It would’ve been really nice to talk about our respective projects, and the challenges of doing research on subjects in which our identities were deeply invested, in difficult ways. As Patricia Hill Collins (1986) asks, “Who has your back and whose back do you have?” As to the question of why we never met, perhaps another one of the “neglected” feelings we shared was ambivalence toward academia. I attended American Sociological Association meetings on a fairly regular basis, and had some close colleagues, but never really enjoyed the con ference scene. I was more of an activist in terms of sensibility, and also a writer, and saw my academic position as something I needed to pay the bills. I feel fortunate to have an academic job, but it has never defined me as completely as it has for many people I know. Janice: My own feelings of marginality and being an outsider inside and outside of academia have definitely influenced my choice of research topics. Most, if not all, of my work has involved marginalized groups and stigmatized forms of knowledge. This, of course, connects to an early history of political activism and ongoing political commitments. Overall, I think my politics have strengthened my research, or certainly made it more interesting. I wonder if you ever had any uncomfortable moments in this regard. I remember when I began the research on sex education, I had imagined that I would be very critical of what I viewed as a conservative approach that sex educators took. In some ways, it would have been similar to my analysis of the sexologists in my first book. But after many interviews and observations at public meetings, I began to sympathize with these (mostly women) educators who were so beleaguered by their opponents as well as facing obstacles from their own school districts. Sex seemed to scare everyone (except the sex educators)! I remember a decisive moment of shifting my level of analysis to focus more on the rise of the Christian Right than on sex education. It was a political decision, and a good one in my opinion. I think it made the project much better, but I can see how someone would think this was political bias. Arlene: As researchers, the topics we study, the questions we ask, and even our writing styles, are profoundly shaped by who we are as people, and by our histories. Every (qualitative) social scientist worth their salt knows that. How could it not be so? Having been influenced by feminism’s claim that the personal is political, I have never subscribed to positivist forms of social science and their claims of value neutrality. I suppose there is a narcissistic element to my research interests as well: I have always

Studying Those Who Hate Us: Fear, Anxiety and Blind spots 189

partially used my scholarly work as a way of making sense of my own life. I’ve inserted myself into my published work at times, particularly in books, as a way of signaling to the reader my own investment in the subjects I write about. Janice: There is the related issue of writing about social identities and categories to which we either do or do not belong. I think academic critiques of this have changed over time. Back in the eighties and early nineties, progressive scholars considered it essential to include diverse perspectives based on race, class, gender, and sexualities. Feminist critiques of canonical disciplinary work shone a harsh light on the exclusion of women from so much scholarship. And if you were white, it was considered racist for your research to only focus on white people. I remember being very careful when writing Disorders of Desire and other work to include material related to race and class. I also had a chapter on the social construction of what was then called transsexualism, and this was well before the rise of a strong trans movement. Arlene: For me, race and class are often tricky. In my book Sex and Sensibility (1997) I think that I could have tried harder to do outreach to populations outside of my friendship networks, particularly among women of color and poor/working class individuals. The injunction to be “intersectional” was not as strong then, though intuitively I think I understood my study to be biased in that respect. It was also biased against transgender subjects. In fact, when one person who responded to my ad soliciting lesbian interviewees showed up, it was clear to me that she was transsexual. It turns out she was a well known transsexual activist who had attrac ted controversy for her attempts to participate in the San Francisco lesbian scene. I conducted the interview but did not include her in the study because I too had bought into the widespread belief that transsexual women were not “real” women, and not therefore lesbians. Over the years I became more educated about trans issues and my views of gender changed accordingly. Trans femininity is real. In retrospect, I really wish I had included that trans lesbian in my earlier study, but at the time I thought about things differently. The recognition of that blind spot was one motivation for eventually pursuing a study of transgender identities, which became my book Unbound (2018). Janice: At some point the academic climate shifted toward disapproval of researching and writing outside of your own identity. While we still condemn research that focuses solely on dominant groups, many also consider it unacceptable to study a marginalized group to which you don’t belong. I tend to write about knowledge production rather than identities, so this dilemma doesn’t come up as much for me (although I think it would be challenging these days to do the trans chapter were I working on Disorders of Desire now). However, you’ve done studies on identity groups both inside and outside your own personal experiences. What issues have you encountered? Arlene: I am uncomfortable with the belief that studying groups that you are not a part of necessarily leads to appropriating that group’s experiences. We sociologists and anthropologists are trained to enter unfamiliar worlds and try to develop rapport with others toward the goal of analyzing their experiences and

190 Janice Irvine and Arlene Stein

translating them to others. While power imbalances are inevitable, most of us try our best to minimize their impact. As a non trans person interviewing transgender men recently, I was both insider and outsider: a queer person who shares some experi ences of marginality and gender nonconformity with trans folks. My interviewees “got” that, and that’s why they cooperated with me and agreed to participate in my project. But some of my readers pushed back against the belief that a self identified lesbian, and an older one at that, should get to represent transmasculine experience. I disagree with that stance, of course. If I were the only one writing about trans experiences, that would be one thing. But there is now a burgeoning trans literature, largely authored by trans folks. There should be room for cisgender people to par ticipate in intellectual debates about trans as long as they do so in respectful ways. By being an outsider who is also an insider in certain respects, my goal in writing my book was to act as a kind of bridge between trans folks and nontrans audiences. During this extremely polarized time, the quest for understanding across differences seems to be in such short supply. Janice: It seems fitting that we’re exploring the influence of neglected feelings in the research process, since Talk About Sex was very much about the role of emotions in politics. It was an early examination of how religious conservatives mobilized collective feelings for political purposes, in this case to smear comprehensive sex education as dangerous and dirty, making people angry and fearful. I remember it took me awhile to grasp those emotional dynamics. I think if I had paid more attention to how those culture wars made me feel, as a researcher—scared, shamed, angry—I might have come to that analysis much sooner. Arlene: Many of the emotional dynamics we wrote about in the 1990s are still evident on the right today—perhaps even more intensely. The antigay activists I studied in Oregon seemed to represent a kind of social conservatism that was on the wane, a “residual” culture in Raymond Williams’ (1977) sense, which enjoyed relatively little political power outside of small rural communities. By the end of the 1990s, many observers even began to declare the culture wars dead. We had, after all, won the right to abortion, attitudes to homosexuality had clearly shifted, especially with the legalization of same sex marriage. These are remarkable achievements in many respects. But we underestimated how easily these rights can be taken away. We had underestimated the enduring power of conservative beliefs in shaping social attitudes in the United States, and the effectiveness of the Republican Party in channeling them into political power. Over the years, con servatives have successfully chipped away at abortion rights at the local level, and may well succeed in overturning Roe v. Wade. Religious and libertarian flanks on the right have succeeded in making common cause, seizing power at the national level. So many of the values we both hold dear are now hanging in the balance. Janice: You’re right, the culture wars have surged back in ways both familiar and new. Many of the targets and tactics of the right wing are the same. But the internet has turbo charged right wing attacks. We said earlier that our research would have been impossible in the age of the internet and social media, and we’re seeing in recent years how scholars who study the right have been viciously

Studying Those Who Hate Us: Fear, Anxiety and Blind spots 191

harassed online. Many have been unsupported by their universities. This seems like a major escalation in the potential risks for academics. Arlene: The attacks have really ramped up since we published our books. Academics who research the right are relentlessly being harassed online, especially if they are women of color who are active on Twitter. Two colleagues of mine at Rutgers, both women of color, require police protection when they speak in public. Clearly, Trump has emboldened these impulses. The Christian right was somewhat more benign 25 years ago. Now sectors of the religious right have made common cause with the far right, which is willing to use violence to squelch opposition. It’s now more important than ever for researchers to support one another, and for our institutions to protect our academic freedoms. Janice: We definitely need our universities, disciplinary associations, faculty unions, and other academic institutions to push back against this chilling effect on research. And our own networks are powerful. This conversation with you— which flows on the page but also took place over several phone conversations and glasses of wine in New York City—forged an important connection that makes me feel we have each other’s back.

References Blee, Kathleen (1992) Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collins, Patricia Hill (1986) “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33 (6): 14 32. Hochschild, Arlie (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Irvine, Janice M. (1990) Disorders of Desire: Sex and Gender in Modern American Sexology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Irvine, Janice M. (2002) Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lee, Raymond (1995) Dangerous Fieldwork. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Pearce, Ruth (2020) “A Methodology for the Marginalized: Surviving Oppression and Traumatic Fieldwork in the Neoliberal Academy,” Sociology, March 9, 2020. Stein, Arlene (1997) Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stein, Arlene (2001) The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community’s Battle Over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights. Boston: Beacon Press. Stein, Arlene (2010) “Sex, Truths, and Audiotape: Anonymity and the Ethics of Exposure in Public Ethnography,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, October 2010. Stein, Arlene (2018) Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity. New York: Pantheon. Williams, Raymond (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

INDEX

Note: Locators followed by “n” refer to endnotes. #IamtooOxford campaign, 41 #Rhodesmustfall campaign, 42 AAA see American Anthropological Association (AAA) academic rigor, 76 affect see emotion(s) Åhäll’s assertion, 32 Ahlstedt, Sara, 140 Ahmed, Sara, 35, 85, 140, 150n4 alienation, 102n6, 119, 125 126 Almans, 150n8 Alternative for Germany (AfD), 150n7 Altman, Dennis, 80 ambivalence, 35, 78, 105, 114, 141, 145, 187, 188 American Anthropological Association (AAA), 30n3 American Journal of Ethnography, 49 Anderson, Elijah, 49 anger, 6, 8, 37 40, 117, 186 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 93 antiretroviral drugs (ART drugs), 171, 172, 173 anti Semitism, 7 anti sodomy law, 80 Antmann, Debora, 147 anxiety, 3, 6, 75, 78, 81, 84, 86, 94, 111, 143, 184, 185 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 139 ART drugs see antiretroviral drugs (ART drugs) art of “doing nothing”, 102n8

Asoka tree, 121 Ataturk, 116n1 Attenborough, Sir David, 123 124 Attenborough, Sir Richard, 123 Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy (Gotham), 53 autoethnographic writing, 140 bad feelings, 75, 76; accountability in relation to “field”, 87 88; affect in research field, 80; as conceptual tool, 89; contextual feelings, 84, 88 89; as cultural and social practices, 85; difficulties to characterize feelings, 86; discomfort in research field, 76, 80 81; discussion about, 83, 84 85; emotions associated with, 76; experiences during research field, 76 77; of fear and anxiety, 81 82, 84; fears of failure, 76; about going back home, 77 79; about intelligibility, 86 88; relational feelings, 83, 88 89; in relation to institutions, 85 86; uncomfortable feeling during field work, 82 83 Baghdadchi, Amir, 92, 97, 102n3 “balanced reciprocity”, 21, 23 “banality of self absorption”, 98 banana tree, 120 banyan tree, 120, 121 Barbalet, Jack M., 84, 98, 101 Bas¸aran, Oyman, 9 see also suspicion in research

Index 193

Bayley, John, 8 Beamtimes and Lifetimes (Traweek), 126 Becker, Howard, 51 Becker, Howie, 57 Behar, Ruth, 49 being bored, feeling of, 3, 91 93, 98 101 Bentham, George, 118 Berlet, Chip, 187 Bessey, Charles Edwin, 118 Betts, Dwayne, 48 Between Good and Ghetto (Jones), 57 Bever, Jim, 133n5 biases: based on research informants, 168; westernized, 175 binary people, 131, 132 Biodeutsche, 145, 150n8 biology, 125; colonial plant, 117; conservation, 131; evolutionary, 124, 132 Black British Feminism: A Reader (Edited by Mirza), 34 “Black feminist thought”, 34 blackness, 150n12 Black women: academics experiencing racial micro aggressions, 39 41; “triply oppressed status” of, 33 34 Blee, Kathleen, 183 blind spots, 1, 10 11, 140; difficult emotions, 139 149; exposed during field research or site visits, 168; photo voice project with sex workers in Ethiopia, 155 165 Blue Chicago (Grazian), 53 Blumer, Herbert, 51 Blush (Probyn), 97 Blyton, Enid, 122 boredom in research, 9, 92; bored researcher, 97; boring informants, 98 99; creating uncomfortable moment, 92; example of, 95 96; making sense of, 96; necessity of being bored, 99 101; theorization of, 93 95; ubiquity of, 92 botany, 117; modern, 118; science of, 131 132 Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer), 128 Braithwaite, John, 62, 66 Brandeis University, 4 British style education, 119 Caesalpinia regia see gulmohur Cajas, Juan, 21 Can Asians Think? (Mahbubani), 82 Can Non Europeans Think? (Dabashi), 82 cartography, 117 CBO see sex worker led organizations (CBO)

CBPR see community based participatory research (CBPR) censorship, 61; issues in publishing articles, 62 63; self censorship, 65 Cheng, Sealing, 7 Chodorow, Nancy, 4 City and Community journal, 55 civil lawsuits, threat of, 63 64, 65 66 class, 5, 58, 126, 189 “classic patriarchy”, 109 Clements, Frederick, 118 Clifford, James, 49 Clough, Patricia, 51 Collins, Patricia Hill, 188 colonial(ism), 118 119, 131 132; histories, 118, 113; plantations, 118 119; plant biology, 117 Combahee River Collective, 34 community based participatory research (CBPR), 161, 156 158 conservation biology, 131 Contexts journal, 6 contextual rationality in HIV stigma beliefs, 173 175 Contreras, Randol, 48 Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry (Braithwaite), 62 corporate crime, research on, 61 64, 67, 68 Cort, David A., 10, 11 see also HIV stigma beliefs and safe sex practices, research studies of Country Music Association Festival, 54 cowboy ethnography, 48 Creating Opportunities? Economic Empowerment, Political Positioning and Participation of Sex “Workers in Kenya and Ethiopia” project, 156 Creating Opportunities, 166n7 Crenshaw, Kimberle, 34 Cressey, Donald, 62 Critical Nonjewishness (Schwartze), 140, 141, 145, 147 149, 149n3 Critical Whiteness Studies, 147 Cronon, William, 130, 131 culture of “no culture”, 124 129 Dabashi, Hamid, 82 Daffodils, The (Wordsworth), 121 Dangerous Fieldwork (Lee), 183 Darwin, Charles, 118, 123, 124 Das, Veena, 19 Davis, Angela Y., 34 Davis, Kathy, 2 4, 75, 85, 86, 102n2 Dealing in Desire (Hoang), 47 Death of Nature (Merchant), 131

194 Index

Deckerinnerungen (screen memories), 149 de Haan, Willem, 7 see also legal harassment of researchers deliberate HIV infection, 173 175 denied feelings see neglected feelings Départements et Territoires d’Outre Mer see les Dom Tom “descendants of immigrants”, 36 “desire for desires”, 93 DeVault, 30n2 difficult emotions, 139 140; ambivalence, 35, 78, 105, 114, 141, 145, 187, 188; analysis of, 140 141; anxiety, 143; Critical Nonjewishness, 147 148, 149; discomfort, 140; embarrassment, 146 147; Gegenwartsbewältigung, 141, 143 145, 149; shame, 139, 140, 141, 143, 146, 149; see also Schaum, Ina dilemma: ideological, 3; around money, 19; shapes building reputations and careers, 55 57; unpacking as feminism of uncertainty, 29 30 Dirty Business: Exploring Corporate Misconduct (Punch), 65 disadvantaged and discriminated groups, 106 disciplines, 1 2 discomfort, 3, 76, 80 81, 86, 92, 98, 102, 113, 120, 139 141, 144 145 discrimination, 35, 39, 94, 110, 144, 163, 169 disgust, 8, 28, 117, 185 Disorders of Desire (Irvine), 181, 188, 189 Disruptive Situations (Moussawi), 75 distance as spatial metaphor, 115 “doing structure” in research process, 20 “draw a scientist” exercise, 125 DuBois, W. E. B., 50 Duneier, Mitchell, 49, 51 Dunn, Rebecca, 133n5 Dutch Scientific Foundation, 162 Dyer, Richard, 147 economic empowerment of sex workers, 156, 157, 159 Eddo Lodge, Reni, 37, 39 Ellington, Duke, 51 embarrassment, 8, 24, 35, 39, 55, 78, 81, 84, 92, 95, 146 147 “Emerging Scholars”, 56 emotion(s), 7 9, 32, 80, 150n4; associated with bad feeling, 76; emotional disconnect, 37; “feminine”, 127; feminist theorizations of, 33 42; intense, 9; tactical use of, 40 41 Encountering Nationalism (Moussawi), 80

Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk, 144, 150n6 Essed, Philomena, 36 Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice, 21 Ethiopia: economic empowerment of sex workers in, 156; endorsement of sex worker led organization in, 163; male sex workers in, 166n7; photo voice method of sex workers in, 157 ethnographic urban sociology, 47 European Association of Social Anthropologists, 30n3 “fair return”, 161; for assistance, 21; for informants, 30n3 Fanon, Frantz, 38 fear, 1, 6, 75, 81, 106, 117, 183 184; of a law suit, 67, 69; of failure, 76; of political attack, 8 feeling(s), 8 9, 75, 150n4; anger, 6, 8, 37 40, 117, 186; boredom, 9; disgust, 8, 28, 117, 185; embarrassment, 8, 24, 35, 39, 55, 78, 81, 84, 92, 95, 146 147; “out of placeness”, 39 40; pursuing issues in research and writing, 76; sexual attraction, 8; shame, 8, 139, 140, 141, 143, 146, 149, 183 184; of unease, 145 146 feelings about money in field relationships: dilemmas around money in relationships, 17 20; limits of reciprocal relationships with research subjects, 22 24; meanings of money in research field, 20 21; paying price for bearing moral good, 26 28; trust and moral responsibility in giving money, 24 26; unpacking dilemmas as feminism of uncertainty, 29 30 “feminine” emotions, 127 feminist(s)/feminism, 3 4, 33, 40, 79, 132; approaches to research methodology, 32; critiques, 34; methodological approaches to research, 38, 39, 41, 42, 84, 85; postcolonial, 75; scholars, 4, 10, 11, 20, 29, 131; scholarship, 126, 127; STS, 126, 133; theory, 32; transnational, 4; of uncertainty, 29 30 feminist theorizations of affect/emotions, 33; being in own feelings, 33 34; efforts to dismantle institutional racism, 41 42; feeling “out of placeness”, 39 40; keeping quiet, 35 37; research journey of feminist approaches, 37 39; tactical use of emotions, 40 41 Fernández, Nuria, 21 Ficus benghalenssi see banyan tree

Index 195

Ficus religiosa see peepal tree fixed sum research payments, 21 Flemons, Dom, 54 Foucault, Michel, 102n2 French education system, 42n1 French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), 35 Fromm, Erich, 93 “fruitful monotony”, boredom as, 99 Gay Community News newspaper, 4 Gegenwartsbewältigung, 141, 143 145, 149 gender, 5, 48, 51, 53, 76, 86, 126, 133, 182, 189; gendered and sexual violence, 79; gendered logic of feminine nature, 131 “generalized reciprocity”, 21, 24 germaness, 147, 148, 149n3, 150n8 Ghost Stories for Darwin (Banu Subramaniam), 132 Giardina, Michael D., 92 gift economy, 20, 21 Gladwell, Malcolm, 48 Global North: myopia, 172; rational choice theory, 172, 175 Goffman, Alice, 48, 50, 57 Goffman, Erving, 51 Gordon, Avery, 88 Gordon, Deborah A., 49 Gotham, Kevin Fox, 53 Gray, Asa, 118 Grazian, David, 51, 53 Grossmann, Atina, 144 guilty feeling, 187 gulmohur, 121 Haraway, Donna, 11 Heat Wave (Klinenberg), 49 Hermitte, Esther, 22 Hill Collins, Patricia, 34 Hindu trinity, gods of, 120 HIV stigma beliefs and safe sex practices, 169; assumptions about rational and irrational thinking, 175 176; conservative stigma beliefs, 171 172; contextual rationality, 173 175; Global North myopia, 172; interviews from HIV positive and negative Xhosa people, 170; myopic thinking, 169, 172, 174, 175; positive alternative reasons for ignoring initial advice, 175; protective sexual behaviors, 169; research studies of, 168 169; stigmatizing or conservative beliefs, 170; types of HIV stigma beliefs, 170 171 Hoang, Kimberly, 47, 48

Hobo, The (Anderson), 50 Hochschild, Arlie, 183 Holland, Sharon P., 146 homophobia, 182 184 homosexuality, 80, 182, 183, 185, 190 Hooker, Sir Joseph, 118 horticultural societies and gardens, 132 Hughes, Everett C., 50 “immigrants”, 36 imperialism, 131 Indian postcolonial education, 119 INED see French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) inequality, 35, 50, 55 informant(s), 7 8, 19 22, 30n1, 96; boring, 98 99; suspicion, 105, 108, 111 114 informed consent, 106, 107, 165 “inhabit” experience of being, 92 INSEE see National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) institutional racism, efforts to dismantle, 41 42 Institutional Review Board, 47 institution of kinship in Turkey, 109 intense feelings, 8 intersectionality, 34 Irvine, Janice, 4 6, 11, 75, 85, 86, 181; feeling of guilty, 187; issue of “deception” in research, 186; issue of writing about social identities and categories, 189; about neglected feelings, 183 184, 187 188, 190; about queerness, 186; research on sex education conflicts, 185; silences about sexual identity, 184; study of religious conservatives, 181 183, 190 191 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), 75 itinerant circumcisers, 109 112 Jack Roller, The (Shaw), 50 Jones, Claudia, 33 Jones, Nikki, 48, 57 ”Jungle Book trope”, 48, 50, 58 Kahn, Daniel, 141, 144 Kalpa vriksha (tree of life), 120 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 109 Kartoffeln, 150n8 Keller, Fox, 127 kennedy macfoy, madeleine, 7 see also feminist theorizations of affect/emotions Kenya: options for economic empowerment of sex workers in, 156; photo voice method of sex workers in, 157

196 Index

Kew Gardens, 132 Kilomba, Grada, 36 Kimmerer, Robin, 122, 128, 129 Kincaid, Jamaica, 122 Klinenberg, Eric, 49 Koobak, Redi, 101 Kotlowitz, Alex, 48 Kranz, Dani, 143 Ku Klux Klan, 183 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 118 Law on the Application of Medicine and its Branches, 108 Leading Routes, 42 Lefebvre, Henri, 93, 98 legal harassment of researchers, 61; avoiding lawsuits for libel or defamation, 69; censorship issues in publishing articles, 62 63; legal threats for libel or defamation, 67, 68; researchers talk, 65 67; risks of lawsuits, 68; silencing researchers, 64 65; threat of civil lawsuits, 63 64 les Dom Tom, 42n3 Lewis, Gail, 38 Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, 20 liberal theory, autonomy in, 25 Life on Earth (David Attenborough), 123 Linnaeus, Carl, 118 lived experiences, 51, 54; of British and French citizenship, 32; of citizenship among marginalized young people, 34; diversity of women’s, 41; of “living while Black” in France, 40; in white dominant societies, 41 Lorde, Audre, 40, 86 Lucy (Kincaid), 122 Mahbubani, Kishore, 82 Maier, Christian, 144 Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves, The (Davis), 3 male circumcision in Turkey, 106; medicalization of, 108 110, 111; pressure of competition in field of, 112 Malik, Mary, 133n5 Marcus, George E., 49 Marder, Michael, 131 Martin, Emily, 20, 29 MAUS (Spiegelman), 146 Mauss, Marcel, 29 McClintock, Barbara, 128 “me research”, 77, 79 meanings of money in research field, 20 21

medicalization of male circumcision, 108 110, 111 Merchant, Carolyn, 131 Messerschmidt, Astrid, 150n11 “migratory origin”, 35 Million, Dian, 87 Mimosa pudica see shameplant mind/body dichotomy in research process, 32, 33 Ministry of Health and Social Aid, 108 Mirza, Heidi Safia, 34, 36 modern botany, 118 119, 131 modern science of botany, 10, 118 “money’s socially (integrating) function”, 20 moral purity in feminist qualitative research, 30n2 Morris, Aldon, 50 Moussawi, Ghassan, 9, 75 76, 183 see also bad feelings Muir, John, 130, 131 Muñoz, Jose Esteban, 75 Murdoch, Iris, 8 mutual feelings of suspicion, 108 myopia, 10, 11; biases based on research informants, 168; experience in photo voice project, 155 156, 160 162, 164; Global North, 172; in research, 168 169 National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), 35 National Science Foundation (NSF), 127 National Socialist Underground (NSU), 150n7 “natural” world, 118 nature, 130, 131 naturecultures, 132 133 Ndiaye, P., 36 neglected feelings, 1, 8 9, 183 184, 187 188, 190; bad feelings, 75 89; boredom in research, 92 101; sublime, 117 133; suspicion in research, 105 115 Nelson Mandela Hospital, 171 Nencel, Lorraine, 10, 11 see also photo voice project with sex workers in Ethiopia “neo romantic” moralists, 49 Newman, Joshua I., 92 Newman, Katherine, 49 “new materialism”, 7 Newport Folk Festival, 53, 54 Newport Jazz Festival, 53 “no go” areas, 7, 10, 11 non binary people, 41, 42 nonjewishness, reflection of, 148, 149n3

Index 197

O’Barr, Jean, 133 “object” of research, 32 Ode to a Nightingale (Keats), 121 Olufemi, Lola, 33 On the Run (Goffman), 48 Oregonian, The newspaper, 187 Origin of Species (Darwin), 123 Othering, 37 Parry, Jonathan, 19 participative action research (PAR), 156 158 participatory visual methods, 161 Parvez, Fareen, 57 passion in research, 9, 93 96, 98 101, 102n9 Pearce, Ruth, 183 peepal tree, 120, 121 Perez, Yolinliztli, 21 Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, 63 Phillips, Richard, 102n1 philo-sophia (love of wisdom), 131 photography workshop, 159, 160 photo voice project with sex workers in Ethiopia, 155 156; commencement of sex worker movement, 158 159; in context of community based CBPR, 156 158; discussion about stigmatization, 163 164; intersubjective relationship between researchers and participants, 158; objectives of photo voice, 159; participant’s demand for payment, 160 162; photographer’s attitude” of sex workers, 159 160; success of photo workshop, 160; working with sex worker led organizations, 158 159, 163, 164 phyto-philia (love of plants), 131 plants, 120, 131; colonial routes of, 132; for western science, 132 Positions on the Jewish Present: Gegenwartsbewältigung (Brumlik), 144 postcolonial education, 121 122 “power of nomination”, 109 “prejudicial language”, 65, 69 Probyn, Elsbeth, 97, 98 professionalism, 76, 40 Professional Thief, The (Sutherland), 50 Punch, Maurice, 65 Punished: Policing the lives of Black and Latino boys (Rios), 48 Puri, Jyoti, 9, 75, 76, 183 see also bad feelings “quaint racism”, 55 queer(ness), 4, 186; formations and strategies, 75; studies programs, 133; theory, 1, 11

Rabinow, Paul, 22 Race Ethnicity Education, 41 race/racial/racism, 35 37, 189; anger about, 35 41; everyday, 36; gaslighting, 37; inequalities, 76; micro aggression, 36, 38, 39 41 Raman, C. V., 119 Ramanujan, Srinivasa, 119 rational choice economic theory see Global North rational choice theory Ray, John, 118 reciprocal relationships, 22 reflexive moments, 159 reflexive space, 156, 158, 161, 163 “reflexive turn”, 2 Reform Judaism in Germany, 145 Republican People’s Party (CHP), 108, 116n1 researcher informant interactions, 105 researcher(s), 110 111; bored, 97; contemporary, 5; intense feelings, 8; qualitative, 7, 51, 58, 92, 105 107, 115, 168; quantitative, 10; silences in, 1; social, 1, 9; talk, 65 67; see also legal harassment of researchers research practices, dilemmas arising in, 48 49; addressing race on fieldwork, 51 55; dilemma shapes building reputations and careers, 55 57; learning from mentorship and navigating graduate school, 49 51; research boundaries of class, sexuality, and gender, 57 58 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The (Coleridge), 121 Rios, Victor, 47, 48, 58 ritualized memory culture in Germany, 141 Roe v. Wade case, 190 Rollock, N., 39 Russell, Bertrand, 99 Sabelis, Ida, 10, 11 see also photo voice project with sex workers in Ethiopia sacred fig see peepal tree Sagan, Carl, 124 Sahlins, Marshall, 22 Saleslady, The (Donovan), 50 same sex intimacy, 182 Saraca indica see Asoka tree Schaum, Ina, 10, 11; feeling of unease, 145 146; self questioning, 148 149; see also difficult emotions Scholar Denied, The (Morris), 50 Schultz, Peggy, 133n5 Schwartze, Michal, 140, 141, 147 science, 117; of botany, 131 132; culture of, 125 127; “doing” of, 128, 129; behind

198 Index

imperial ecological project, 131; joys and passion for, 128; modern, 10, 118; sublime worlds of, 123 124; western, 129, 132 Science and Technology Studies (STS), 117, 126 “scientific” practice, 10 secular humanism, 185 “secular humanist” culture, 182 self censorship, 65 self criticism, 5 self interrogation, 92 self presentation, 159 self reflection, 5, 107, 147, 148 self representation, 159 sex worker led organizations (CBO), 155, 158 160, 163, 165 Sex and Sensibility (Arlene), 189 sexual attraction, 8 sexual behaviors, 168; protective, 169, 170; risky, 169 sexuality, 5, 51, 53, 58, 75, 76, 86, 181 sexual self expression, 182 Sexual States (Puri), 80, 83 sex workers, 18, 166n7; commencement of sex worker movement, 158 159; developing “photographer’s attitude”, 159; empowerment of, 156, 157, 159; “everyday life” of, 155; photo voice projects with, 155 157, 160, 164; stigmatization of, 163 164 shame(fulness), 6, 8, 75, 97, 139, 140, 141, 143 146, 149, 183 184; of boredom, 91 92; as potentially positive emotional experience, 98; of stigmatization, 183 184 Sharpe, Christina, 48 Shaw, Philip, 1129 “shock of the familiar”, 78 silences, 1, 6 8; feelings about money in field relationships, 17 30; feminist theorizations of affect/emotions, 33 42; legal harassment of researchers, 61 69; research practices, dilemmas arising in, 48 58; about sexual identity, 184; about sexuality, 187 188 silencing researchers, 64 65 Simmel, Georg, 20, 49 Simmonds, F. N., 37, 39 “Situated Knowledges” essay (Haraway), 11, 25 Small, Mario, 47 Smith, Dorothy, 2 Snitow, Ann, 29 “socially (disintegrating) function”, 20

social research, 32, 139 sociological/sociology, 4, 184; of boredom, 94; feelings during fieldwork in, 82; methodology, 89; postcolonial, 80; urban, 47, 50, 55 Sojourner newspaper, 4 Sonkin, Daniel, 99 South Africa(n): interviews from HIV positive and negative Xhosa people in, 170; rationality about HIV disease, 173 175; research study of HIV infection in, 172; social assistance programs, 175 South African Xhosa, 168 Spiegelman, Art, 146 Spruchkammer (civilian court handling denazification), 150n13 Stacey, Judith, 4 standard research procedures, 107 Stein, Arlene, 11, 181; about feeling of ambivalence, 187; feeling of anxiety, 184; neglected feelings, 188; about queerness, 186; about race and class, 189; research on sex education conflicts, 185; silences about sexual identity, 184 185; study of religious conservatives, 182 183, 190 191; writing about trans experiences, 189 190 stigma(tization), 156, 158, 169; associated with early pioneers of sexuality research, 5 6; beliefs, 169 170, 174; HIV infected individuals experiencing, 169; of sex work(er), 6, 28, 163 164; shame of, 183 184 Stranger Next Door, The (Arlene), 181, 184 stress, 183 184 “stuck place”, 9, 101 sublime, 117 118, 129; botanical, 117 118; effect of, 129 130; history of, 130; idea of, 131; landscapes, 130 131; of western theories of nature, 132; worlds of science, 123 124; see also Subramaniam, Banu sublimity, 129 130 Subramanian, Banu, 9; deep in culture of “no culture”, 124 129; interdisciplinary work, 132 133; “other” botanical imaginations, 119 123; see also sublime “substantial risk”, 63 suspicion in research, 9, 105 106; beyond (dis)trust, 106 108; competition and mutual suspicion, 111 115; medicalization of male circumcision, 108 110; methodological and theoretical significance of, 106; state, researcher and, 110 111 Sutherland, Edwin, 62, 65 system gaming, 173 175

Index 199

Tababet ve Şuabatı San’atlarının Tarzı I crasına Dair Kanun see Law on the Application of Medicine and its Branches Talk About Sex (Irvine), 181, 190 tamarind tree, 120 territoriality, 36 “thick, suffocating fog of whiteness”, 38 Thoreau, Henry David, 130, 131 Thorne, Barrie, 4 To a Skylark (Shelley), 121 Tolstoy, Leon, 93 Tombs, Steve, 65 Tour Guide, The, 51, 55 Trajectoire et Origines (TeO): Enquête sur la diversité des populations de France, 35 transformation of institutions of higher education, 42 transnational feminist theory, 77 transsexualism, 189 Traweek, Sharon, 126 “triply oppressed status” of Black women, 33 34 trust: in giving money, 24 26; with informants, 105; suspicion beyond (dis) trust, 106 108 “Truth”, 32 Turkish Republic, 108 ubiquity of boredom, 92 uncertainty, 4; on circumcisers, 112; feminism of, 29 30; of life for asylum seekers, 24 universality, 121 University of Chicago, 50 urban ethnographies, 47 48 urban sociology, 47, 50, 55 see also research practices, dilemmas arising in Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 144 “vulnerable populations”, 106

“Wacquant Debate”, 49 Wacquant, Löic, 49 Walter Sisulu University (WSU), 171 West, Cornel, 48 westernized biases, 175 WGSS see Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies (WGSS) White-Collar Crime (Sutherland), 62, 64 white collar crime, research on, 61 64, 67, 68 whiteness, 147, 149n3, 150n12 white socialization, 147 “white space”, 47, 54 Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race (Eddo Lodge), 37 Whyte, David, 65 “wilderness”, idea of, 124, 130 Williams, Raymond, 190 women: of color feminisms, 77; participation of sex workers for photo voice method, 157 158; as “victims of sex trafficking”, 17 Women, Class and Race (Davis), 34 Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies (WGSS), 133 Women Writing Culture (Behar and Gordon), 49 Wordsworth, William, 131 “Working women in Addis Ababa” documentary, 165 World Council of Anthropological Associations, 30n3 Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus), 49 WSU see Walter Sisulu University (WSU) Wyer, Mary, 127, 132, 133 Wynn, Jonathan, 7 see also research practices, dilemmas arising in ‘Yekkes’, 143, 150n5 Zionism, 7