Academic Culture and Community Research: Building Respectful Relations

1. Academic Culture andCommunity Research:Building Respectful Relations BUILDING RESPECTFUL RELATIONSHIPS Conducting Community-Based Research 28 May 2007 Brett Fairbairn Centre for the Study of Co-operatives University of Saskatchewan, Canada

2. Issues of interest • The boundaries of the academic self • How academics interact with communities • There are no experts • (So:) Advice from five friends • Self-confidence and humility

3. Academic culture • The detached, rational academic observer • “Critical” perspectives • Objectivity — or just fairness? • The dilemma: impartiality vs. engagement

4. Communities, social movements, and academic knowledge • Definition, vision, and imagination are purposes of social movements • “Critical” perspectives of “detached” academics are often disempowering • Labour studies, feminism, Indigenous studies, and the social economy have developed new ideas of what knowledge is and what role academics play in it • “From research about or for to research by and with”

5. Academic identity (Who am I?) • Expertise is comforting • Disciplines are structures for validation of expertise, professional advancement, and exercise of power, defined by: • A dispersed community of peers; • Particular methods or approaches; • Networking institutions; • Gate-keeping institutions • Going outside these boxes creates discomfort

6. My background • Humanities – history • Centre for the Study of Co-operatives:Co-operative thought and ideas • Interdisciplinary research and teaching – co-operatives, social economy,democracy • Many intellectual and personal debts • Repeat with me: “I am not an expert!”

7. Julia Kristeva • Bulgarian/French feminist,1941- • Psychoanalysis • Professor of linguistics, Paris • Literary criticism • Fiction

8. The mosaic of intertextuality • “This notion … encourages one to read the literary text as an intersection of other texts.” • Meaning is not transmitted from writer to reader, but mediated through pre-existing “codes” established by other texts • Every contribution becomes a part of other conversations

9. Kristeva on intertextuality: “For me, it has always been about introducing history into structuralism… At the same time, by showing how much the inside of the text is indebted to its outside, interpretation reveals the inauthenticity of the writing subject: the writer is a subject in process, a carnival, a polyphony without possible reconciliation, a permanent revolt.”

10. Implications of intertextuality • Your work is not yours • It is impossible to say anything that is entirely your own • Meaning derives from the conversation, not from your contribution to it

11. Edward Said • Palestinian-American, 1935-2003 • Literary theorist, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia • Founding figure in postcolonial theory

12. Humanism vs. Orientalism • Before Said, the term “Orientalist” was not generally pejorative • Western views of the East were subtly biased in ways that Western scholars were unable to perceive • The “East” = irrational, weak, passive, feminized “other” • The “West” = rational, strong, masculine • Antidote: explore non-Western views

13. Implications of Orientalism • How academic knowledge creates Others • The impossibility of critiquing a system of knowledge exclusively from inside it • How do we know when our system of academic assumptions and conclusions is “Orientalizing” an “other”?

14. Said on humanism: “Humanism is not about withdrawal and exclusion. Quite the reverse: its purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny as the product of human labor, human energies for emancipation and enlightenment, and, just as importantly, human misreadings and misinterpretations of the collective past and present. There was never a misinterpretation that could not be revised, improved, or overturned. There was never a history that could not to some degree be recovered and compassionately understood in all its suffering and accomplishment.”

15. Said on democratic criticism: “the new generation of humanist scholars is more attuned than any before it to the non-European, genderized, decolonized, and decentered energies and currents of our time. But, one is entitled to ask, what does that in fact really mean? Principally it means situating critique at the very heart of humanism, critique as a form of democratic freedom and as a continuous practice of questioning and of accumulating knowledge…”

16. Kristeva again:Subject, object, abject • Subject: agency, ability to act • Object: acted upon (objectification) • Abject: excluded, detached, outside the symbolic order • Occasions horror: repulsion from the abject helps define the self • What calls into question borders and threatens identity • (Psychoanalytical basis)

17. Kristeva on “Neither Subject nor Object”: “a threat that seems to emanate from … beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. … a vortex of summons and repulsion… The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I…. From its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master…. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing…. Abject and abjection are my safeguards.”

18. Implications of abjectivity • How the systems we study define themselves by conceptual exclusion — by practising horror and repulsion to prevent themselves from being challenged by things that cannot be known inside their symbolic systems • How academic cultures and academics do the same

19. Antonio Gramsci • Italian writer and political activist,1891-1937 • Communist Party of Italy • Imprisoned 1926-34

20. Hegemony & the organic intellectual • Culture as a mechanism of the dominant system — its principles accepted because alternatives cannot be conceived • “All [people] are intellectuals, … but not all … have in society the social function of intellectuals.” • Traditional intelligentsia of society vs. thinking groups produced “organically” from the ranks of subordinate classes

21. The organic intellectual,cntd. • Organic intellectuals perform a role on behalf of their class, giving it “homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields.” • Organic  organizing • “critical self-consciousness means, historically and politically, the creation of an elite of intellectuals” • “break with the entire past” required

22. Implications: organic intellectuals • Rootedness in and of, connection with a class or group gives intellectuals authority and authenticity to speak on its behalf • Note the tension that intellectuals seem subordinate to a class or group, yet constitute an “elite”

23. Paulo Freire • Brazilian educator and theorist of education, 1921-97 • Unorthodox work with the illiterate poor • Exiled 1964; later with World Council of Churches, Harvard University • 1988 Minister of Education for São Paulo

24. Praxis and liberation • Aversion to teacher-student dichotomy; emphasis on reciprocation • “pedagogy of dialogue” • Class suicide of the middle class (oppressor) teacher prior to his or her “resurrection” through identification with the oppressed? • At a minimum, teachers must identify with students

25. Freire on education: “critical practice and understanding of literacy … respect[s] the levels of understanding that those becoming educated have of their own reality.” By contrast, “naïve” educators see education as neutral

26. Implications of adult education • Freire’s ideas about education apply to us as researchers working in/with communities • Dialogue; respect; identification • Note that there is a permanent problem of the educator/researcher being separate from yet needing to identify with and be part of the community

27. Martin Buber • Austrian-Jewish philosopher, 1878-1965 • Cultural Zionist, publicist; part of Hasidism movement among Jews • Resigned Frankfurt professorship 1933, left Germany 1938 • Social psychology, social philosophy, religious existentialism

28. Dialogue • Existence as encounter and relationship: dialogue • Ich-Du (≈ I and Thou) vs. Ich-Es (I-It) • I-It encounters are not actual meetings: one only meets a conceptualization or mental representation of the other • This is the normal way in which people perceive their environment, including the other people within it

29. Betweenness • I-Thou encounters involve people/beings meeting without any qualification or objectification of one another — rare, meaningful, to be strived for • People are separated from the world. To connect, they then have to create a space between where they can encounter the other on equal terms • “relationship is mutuality”

30. Buber on encountering the world: “Man must not be construed as a subject constituting reality but rather as the articulation itself of the meeting... Man does not meet, he is the meeting. He is something that distances itself ... and in that distancing we can also enter into relations with this alien world.” “Man meets what exists and becomes as what is [opposite] him… Nothing is present for him except this one being, but it implicates the whole world.”

31. Buber on encountering the world, cntd.: “The world which appears to you in this way is unreliable, for it takes on a continually new appearance; you cannot hold it to its word. It has no density, for everything in it penetrates everything else; no duration, for it comes even when it is not summoned, and vanishes even when it is tightly held. It cannot be surveyed, and if you wish to make it capable of survey you lose it. …”

32. Implications of betweenness • Understanding is created in relationships characterized by mutuality • Dialogue is self • Embrace betweenness

33. Conclusion: Self-confidence and humility • Studying community requires that researchers respect and enter into dialogue with what they study; possibly, that they identify with it • There are no secure heights from which academics can cast down judgements • The only truly critical perspective is one that also critiques itself • It’s hard to critique your own critical perspective from inside it

34. Self-confidence and humility, cntd. • For academic researchers of community, the community is the “other” who can provide context and new ideas • Good dialogue requires good listening • The academic self needs to be permeable and, perhaps, somewhat unstable • If you feel comfortable, you’re doing something wrong

35. Comments and Questions Welcome Brett Fairbairn Professor of History and Fellow in Co-operative Thought and Ideas Centre for the Study of Co-operatives University of Saskatchewan 101 Diefenbaker Place Saskatoon SK S7N 5B8 Canada Tel. (306) 966-8505 Fax (306) 966-8517 E-mail brett.fairbairn@usask.ca Check out the centre’s website! http://www.usaskstudies.coop