Inconvenient data and ‘the problem of politics’

1. Inconvenient data and ‘the problem of politics’ ESRC Seminar Series: Activism, Volunteering and Citizenship Seminar 5: Biographies of Activism and Social Change Molly Andrews Centre for Narrative Research www.uel.ac.uk/cnr/index.htm m.andrews@uel.ac.uk

2. Robert Lynd (1939) Knowledge for What? Social scientists are “hiding behind their precocious beards of ‘dispassionate research’ and ‘scientific objectivity’”

3. ‘the word academic is synonymous for ‘irrelevant’ Saul Alinsky (1946) Alinsky described himself as “astounded by all the horse manure [sociologists] were handing out about poverty and slums, playing down the suffering and deprivation, glossing over the misery and despair. I mean, Christ, I’d lived in a slum, I could see through all their complacent academic jargon to the realities.”

4. ‘We can never avoid taking sides’ It is impossible to do research that is uncontaminated by personal and political sympathies’ Howard S. Becker (1967), “Whose side are we on?”

5. We must always look at the matter from someone’s point of view. The scientist who proposes to understand society must… get into the situation enough to have a perspective on it. And it is likely that his [sic] perspective will be greatly affected by whatever positions are taken by any or all of the other participants in that varied situation. Almost all the topics that sociologist study, at least those that have some relation to the real worlds around us, are seen by society as morality plays and we shall find ourselves, will-nilly, taking part in those plays on one side or the other. Howard S. Becker (1967), “Whose side are we on?”

6. Key questions which arise • Who is ‘we’ – forever shifting • A ‘taken-for-grantedness of categories’ • The peculiar dynamics surrounding research that is on overtly political issues • Negotiation of trust • Audience: when people talk to us, who do they feel is their audience? • Our passions/investment in doing certain kinds of research • The ‘myth of empowerment’

7. Getting in the door:2 cautionary tales

8. Importance of positioning oneself • For oneself • For others …but that’s just for starters

9. Political identities: unexpected similarities and differences • Implicit notion that things hang together, ‘the cluster’ approach • Assuming likeness/contrast with ourselves is uniform; we don’t always recognise deviation when we encounter it

10. ‘Women become emotional’ They [the rapes at Molesworth Peace Camp] were made such a lot of. Yes, I thought it was quite, I don't know quite how far they were genuinely issues. It's very difficult because the women become very emotional... This is very cynical of me... I know some of the very best activists are strong feminists, and it's very important that we have them... but I do think they ought not to take over. And some of them go so very, very far afield, that, well, I don't think being a woman ever really bothered me. Think of all those nurses who went to Spain...

11. The bullet and the ballot box Marge: I agreed with Stalin, I agreed with Stalin. We’ll never get socialism through ballot box – do you think we will? MA: Well, I don’t know… Marge: I don’t think so, I don’t think we’ll get socialism through ballot box… ‘he’s killed millions’ they’re only just finding out that he’s killed a million. At time he never killed a million. It’s all a tale. Propaganda is very powerful you know, and the propaganda they’ve against the Soviet Union is very powerful.

12. And what is left unsaid “He was a father and that’s what it was, and I loved him, really…. Some years later in Dresden, he told me … “Son, one thing you must know, I have become a member of the [Nazi] party in a very deeply wrong conviction that it would be useful for my family and what I see now is quite the opposite. Therefore, never do this” and this is one of the most important points of my political philosophy… I learned by my father, and I have seen that he was absolutely right.” Wolfgang Ullmann, architect of East German Truth Commission

13. Taking other points of view seriously • What to do when we come across something which we find objectionable? • Evaluating the purpose of the encounter. Are we trying to: • Persuade • Document • Understand • Give voice to • To engage or not? (And if we do/don’t are we/our research compromised?) • Should we only ever interview those people with whose politics we are in agreement?

14. My assumption from the beginning, in keeping with my twenty-five years of research, was that the best way to learn about Nazi doctors was to talk to them… I never quite got over the sense of strangeness I experienced at sitting face to face with men I considered to be on the opposite site of the victimizing barricade, so to speak. Nor did I cease to feel a certain embarrassment and shame over my efforts to enter their psychological world. These feelings could be compounded when, as in a few cases, I found things to like about a man, and felt myself engaging his humanity. My central conflict, then, had to do with my usual sense of the psychological interview as an essentially friendly procedure, and my considerably less than friendly feelings towards these interviewees….psychological probing, rather than moral confrontation, was required for eliciting the kind of behavioural and motivational information I sought. Rober Jay Lifton (1986) The Nazi Doctors

15. “Colorado Springs is the proud home of five military installations. We are a city that truly appreciates those that wear the uniform and carry the colors.”

16. “America, the Beautiful, God shed his grace on thee.” Katherine Lee Bates

17. MA: what does that mean to say something is for America? Hal: … Let’s give one hour for America, for what we stand for. Let’s try to feel good about ourselves, let’s don’t everybody be negative about what we’ve done here. Let’s try to understand what has really happened here and why we did it, and give one hour for our country and for the people that fought for us.

18. MA: And when you say, sort of ‘to celebrate what we stand for’ what do we stand for? Hal: We stand for freedom. Basically, our flag, when we look at our flag and we had huge flags, I mean 50’ x 50’, hanging off of buildings that people made in that length of time, in just a short time, and hung it off their buildings up there, when you look at that flag what that means to you is freedom. It’s your symbol freedom. For those protesters who were standing on the sidewalk over there with all the signs they’d made up and anti-sayings, the only response we could give to them is ‘say, look at that flag, that’s what gives you the right to stand there and do that.

19. Meanwhile…. The people in Colorado Springs... pelted us with snow balls, bottles, beer cans, tennis balls, you name it... [they] just treated us in a really nasty way, [they] spat on us... tried to run us over, tried to drive up on the median strip where we were sitting... the whole concept of trying to cause us bodily harm to signal that they disagreed with what we were doing really bothered me…. There were a couple of times in which people with huge American flags tried to hit us over the head with the actual flag poles and sort of drape the flags over our heads ... there was another time when this pickup truck with some red necks stopped next to the vigil and they harassed us for a while and then they ran around us with their flag in a circle a few times. Justin, anti-war protester

20. There was so much intense hostility it was incredible ... you could just cut it with a knife... after the rally itself was over [people] lined up and you could see that they wanted to attack us and the police were there and they were kind of forming this barricade between us and the people at the parade... It was one of the most depressing moments I've had in a long time... they just wanted to sing louder and wave their flags faster every time they would look at us and spit... but I think that's patriotism. Where is this diversity, this melting pot?... Everybody gets melted into one mould, there is nothing about tolerance for peers. Mary, anti-war protester

21. Is it always one way or the other?

22. Barbel Bohley – leader of Neus Forum, artist MA: Can you tell us, retrospectively, what would you do the same as you did before? What would you do differently? BB: How, where, when? MA: Well, in your life. BB: I would do many things differently, wouldn’t you?...

23. What I suspect is, honestly, this is neither a question nor an answer… I suspect somehow, that the people in the West have not yet comprehended that the wall is gone. They have not yet comprehended that half of… yes, half of the world… yes, that an empire has collapsed. It has not fully penetrated people’s awareness what this really means… It should really be that, likewise, people in the West are being asked questions.

24. If you come here and ask me questions for two-and-a-half hours, that is meaningless. … it is really I who should put the questions, I mean somebody from the West, somebody from the East. It should be more like a discussion. People from the West come and want to understand, but they do not want to understand themselves. They only ask us. Well, an empire has collapsed… there is something missing, do you understand what I mean?

25. Seeing ourselves from another point of view “Oh wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursel's as others see us “ -Robbie Burns

26. ‘One can no longer assume that ‘we’ know who ‘we’ are. Equally, we can no longer feel so comfortable in knowing who ‘they’ the ‘others’ are either. The queston of partisanship and alignment is ever more pressing, but its social and ethical configuration is ore complex. Social and professional categories are less homogenous and less certain. ...We are no longer free to think simply in terms of the powerful and the powerless. It becomes increasingly difficult to discern ‘sides’ while increasingly acceptable to be committed to taking sides of some sort. The methodological and ethical terrain has become more fragmented. While it has become more overtly politicized, the lines of political commitment and affiliation have become less distinct. Yazir Henri