Academic Culture and Community Research: Building Respectful Relations

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Academic Culture andCommunity ResearchBuilding
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
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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

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Academic culture

• The detached, rational academic observer
• Critical perspectives
• Objectivity or just fairness?
• The dilemma impartiality vs. engagement

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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

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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

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My background

• Humanities history
• Centre for the Study of Co-operativesCo-operativ
  e 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!

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Julia Kristeva

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

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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

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• 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.

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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

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Edward Said

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

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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

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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?

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• 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.

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• 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

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Kristeva againSubject, 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)

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• 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
  objectthat 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.

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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

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Antonio Gramsci

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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• Freire on education
• critical practice and understanding of literacy
  respects the levels of understanding that
  those becoming educated have of their own
  reality.
• By contrast, naïve educators see education as
  neutral

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Implications of adult education

• Freires 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

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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

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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

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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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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Implications of betweenness

• Understanding is created in relationships
  characterized by mutuality
• Dialogue is self
• Embrace betweenness

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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
• Its hard to critique your own critical
  perspective from inside it

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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, youre doing something
  wrong

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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. [phone] Fax (306)
966-8517 E-mail brett.fairbairn_at_usask.ca
Check out the centres website! http//www.usasks
tudies.coop