I really enjoyed reading Cushman’s work this week, yet I still have mixed feelings about this type of academic work. I’m certainly not questioning its integrity and usefulness, because the immediate, “real-world” impact is front and center; but then again, maybe that’s part of what bothers me. In my assigned chapter, we go along with Cushman as she follows Raejone’s attempt to get into college, which ultimately fails. Cushman successfully shows through her analysis that transfer can help bridge gaps between social others, and this endeavor is, in my opinion, full of good intentions.
However, the reality comes crashing down in the end, leaving Raejone in no better place. I admire Cushman for revealing that these efforts are sometimes in vain. We are denied a comforting closure to Raejone’s story. It helps build Cushman’s ethos. Nonetheless, I can’t stop wondering if Cushman should have done something more to help Raejone. It may not be her position as a researcher to “save” Raejone from a life of poverty and hard labor, but in a way, Cushman profits from Raejone’s hard life. Is this a bizarre form of exploitation?
During most of my reading, I’m cheering the two of them on, wishing Raejone to get into college and achieve her goals. Cushman builds my sympathy for these real people in a way that pushes forward her political agenda. I see that Raejone’s experience and Cushman’s text might be able to shape policy later on, but what about Raejone the person? On closer inspection, I don’t feel comfortable with Cushman entering Raejone’s life, writing an academic chapter about it, and abandoning Raejone.
Perhaps I’m looking at this the wrong way. This information should be shared with others. The point of transfer is to enter into dialogue with various people—it’s a tool for shaping different communities. Certain relationships just have boundaries. We can’t intervene in everyone’s life. Still, there are living and breathing people who have to face the harsh world that researchers visit temporary before returning to their own lives.
A friend of mine said something along the lines of: “I just feel more comfortable researching dead people.” And maybe that’s why I tend to stick with literary material.
Though I find myself identifying as someone interested and invested(I wouldn't go so far as to say "specialized") in the rhetoric and composition field, and though I find subject-based (aka human-based) research to be very interesting, the ethical problems you mention related to this kind of work has always made me uncomfortable. If you'll indulge a quick tangent, I have found this work pretty messy since I have briefly delved into a case-study project in 7040. Though I was not performing this task to help my classmate in any way, there was definitely a level of reciprocity as I did a mini-case study on one of my fellow classmates and this classmate performed the study on me as well. We both needed things the other had to offer to write a paper in order to receive a grade. The uncomfortable factor came through as we essentially had to make judgment calls about the other person's writing processes. It felt sneaky and suspicious and completely ingenuous.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, again, this was obviously not an example of activist research, but I feel that even through this mini-case study, I can see how much more problematic and uncomfortable it would be to build on this new level of case-studies where the relationship is supposed to be mutually equal, yet the rewards each person receives from the partnership are not really equal. I see that there is definitely a level of good will there, but when the relationship is explicitly built on this give and take, is it really genuine? And like you asked-- is it beneficial to the "subjects"?
I'm essentially just continuing what you've already said, but I have to say that I have some of the same mixed feelings.
(Posting this as my Google account because it won't work with my Wordpress link at the moment.)
-Savory
Todd
ReplyDeleteI share your mixed feelings about this text/methodology. I'm still unsure where it is coming from and it appears to be aloof in defining itself and its intentions. On one hand, I do see the sincerity in how this type of research presents itself, but I do see the contradictions it encounters that can truly tests its validity. I believe, as you noted, that there is a certain level of exploitation occurring. It seems that someone, like Cushman, befriends people and attempts to understand their lives and help them achieve something, but doesn't Cushman just abandon ship when she has gathered enough data to compose a book or article? It seems that the premise of activist research is predicated on the fact that someway, somehow someone is going to get used. It also seems that the dynamic is not very equitable, even though it claims to be. I'm also not sure what the results of this type of methodology can and will yield. It may prove to be a valuable tool and actually achieve the reciprocity it says it intends to, but I'm not sure if it can. The methodology probably needs some trial and error before it will achieve the desired aesthetic, but hopefully some good can and will be made manifest by virtue of activist methodology.
Todd,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you. I, too, had ethical issues concerning Cushman and Raejone. At the end of the chapter when, like you said, Raejone was in no better a place than when Cushman first met her, yet Cushman did make profits off of her story. I struggled with the same things you were struggling with and also came to no better conclusion. I did like how your friend said he/she’d rather research dead people; I feel the same way!
Hi Todd et al,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading through your conversation here. I am most struck by how you each seem to acknowledge that working with living participants is complicated regardless of methodology, researcher agenda, or socio-cultural differences. Difficult but worth the struggles, I'd like to add.
I'm wondering if Cushman's credibility - our collective comfort level as her readers - would have been altered had she actually been less transparent about her goals, her practices, and her ultimate "findings" in terms of her participants and research. In other words - Cushman seems to think she is navigating her materials with great care when she tries to disclose her own positionality (she feels she relates to her participants and their contexts) and be transparent about her interactions with the participants (she entered into what she thought was a reciprocal relationship with them). And yet these disclosures are the grounds upon which we (rightly, I think) challenge her work. This leads me to ask - what are our expectations for researchers when we ask them to be self-reflective as ethical qualitative researchers? Self-reflective in what sense?
It seems that we aren't necessary interested, as a vast audience of teacher-scholars interesting in writing, in transparency of researcher practices and positionality as much as we are interested in their use of ethical theoretical lenses to approach that research to begin with. Their self-reflexivity becomes, then, a way to measure their ethical engagement more than to consider those details as influential and consequential in terms of research findings. Cushman, at this point, seems to confuse these two values/expectations...
TS